More About Magic…
My friend Liadan writes to me:
I’ve read your article ("Do You Believe in Magic?"), but I don’t think it really says why you don’t believe magic is "necessary."
She goes on to describe two instances where she used magic and found it "very useful," describing two dire situations — one involving her mother’s experience of a serious illness, the other concerning a threatening natural disaster — both of which ended happily after a spell was cast. She concludes,
If magic is unnecessary, what else could have been done? Prayer didn’t work here. And I am Christian. I don’t think I did anything wrong, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I prayed in advance for advice if God didn’t want me to do this.
Once again, I go back to what Lon Duquette says: "I can only change one thing with magick — myself." Liadan, I am so happy that you experienced two wonderful miracles, first with your mother’s healing and the second with the averted firestorm. I hope and trust that you will understand that I have no desire to criticize you or attack your experience, even while in all honesty I can only say this: that I believe the spells had no influence on the force which manifested those miracles.
You admit that you "prayed in advance for advice" and yet you claim that "prayer didn’t work here." Says who? How can we know that the miracles are not the result of the prayers, rather than the magic? Of course, I could just as easily play the skeptic and say, why should we believe that either prayer or magic has any influence on the physical world? After all, somebody else in the same situation as yours may have said prayers and cast spells, only to experience the loss of their loved one or the natural disaster. Why does your prayer/magic work while theirs didn’t? Is God capricious? Or, perhaps, is there a deeper force at work here, a force that no human effort (magical or otherwise) can control or even influence?
Does prayer only "work" if the results are exactly what we expect or demand? That’s a mighty small God, who is merely a puppet whose strings we pull to manifest our desires. What happens when God answers our prayers, only not as fast as we would like (which is what appears to have happened in both your scenarios)? Or, more difficult still, what happens when God’s answer to our prayers may not be what we had hoped? Some people pray — or do their magic — and the disaster happens anyways. Christianity teaches that this is an opportunity to trust in the sovereign goodness of God that extends far beyond our own finite hopes and desires. But magical philosophies seem to say that if a spell doesn’t "work," then the person who cast it did something wrong. Frankly, I think that’s a terrible worldview. That means if your mother had died — or your house had gone up in flames — it would have been all your fault, since you didn’t do the magic right.
I’m sorry, but I can’t worship a God (or Goddess) who is so petty.
It’s a plain fact of reality: with all the prayers and all the spells in the world, we don’t always get what we want. So either we have to trust that the Divine has everything under control (which is what I understand mysticism to advocate), or we have to keep trying to learn a better or more effective spell, which is what magical systems seem to be saying.
To me, when I can approach impending loss or disaster from a place of trust, I find that prayer is more than sufficient. I can say to God, "Hey, this is what I REALLY want…." But once I speak my mind in my prayer, then I can release my wanting into a deeper trusting. And in that depth of trust, sometimes a miracle happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. I know I can’t control the outcome.
Magic, by contrast, seems to be a continual effort to attempt to control what we just can’t control. It’s a direct violation of the serenity prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I believe that when we live according to the principles of this prayer, we do not have to rely on magic to make things happen. Instead, we can relax into the serenity (trust) that allows us to face those things which are too big for us to control; and we can find empowerment to take on those things which are within our ability to influence; with a deep wisdom to help us discern the distinctions between those two spheres. All of this creates a deep psychic space where true freedom and real love can flourish.
And in that space, I maintain, magic — at least of the cast-a-spell variety — is unnecessary.
Once again, please know that I am so happy for you that miracles happened in your life. As a person who seeks to live by faith, I take great comfort in knowing that the miracles I’ve experienced come from a source that is far, far bigger than I am.
Do You Believe In Magic?
N.B.: This post is a follow up to last night’s entry, The Sinner’s Prayer. If you haven’t read that one, you might want to go back and check it out first.
What’s fascinating about magic is the subtle interplay between three ingredients: the will/heart of the magician, the form of the magic/spell that is performed, and the changes (or lack thereof) that occur in either the physical or spiritual environment.
In all fairness to evangelicals, I suspect few if any really believe that reciting the Sinner’s Prayer actually "changes" God. Theologically speaking, evangelical Christianity would assert that God has freely offered salvation to all people because it is in God’s pleasure to do so. Reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, therefore, amounts to saying "Yes" to this grand offer.
What the Sinner’s Prayer changes, therefore, is not so much God, but the sinner. Yes, it opens up the doors of heaven (at least, as evangelicals see it). But ontologically speaking, the doors of heaven were already opened — that happened with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. So, from the viewpoint of orthodox evangelical theology, it’s more correct to say that the Sinner’s Prayer opens up one’s heart to the ability to walk through those always-open doors.
Frankly, approaching evangelical theology from this perspective makes it far more less objectionable, to my mind. I’m still catholic enough to insist that salvation is more of a communal than individual event, but I’ll save that for another day.
Now, compare all this to this wonderful little saying found at the website of Lon Milo DuQuette, who is a leading Thelemitte magician (and a truly lovely and funny man): "I can change only one thing with Magick — myself."
So I still think the Sinner’s Prayer functions like a spell, but like DuQuette’s magic, it’s a spell that only changes one thing: the person who’s working the juju. God, the universe, everything else remains as before.
• • •
Lon DuQuette can get away with his rather bold statement because he is an acknowledged authority of ceremonial magic, i.e. magic-with-a-k. If just about anyone else asserted that their magical ability only enabled them to change themselves, they would be dismissed as weak, inefffectual magicians. But for someone of DuQuette’s stature to make this statement, is to shine a light on all of the pompous and overblown language that characterizes so much of the ceremonial, neopagan, and Wiccan communities: that despite all of magic(k)’s grandiose claims to change things, at the end of the day the only "thing" magic really changes is one’s self, or perhaps one’s consciousness. Now, just as the change of heart that the Sinner’s Prayer signifies is believed by evangelicals to "change everything" in the sense that it facilitates a new life in Christ (i.e., being born again), so too the practitioners of magic will insist that the self-change or consciousness-change that magic effects literally changes the world — often tied into metaphysical beliefs such as that the self is one with the world, or creates the world, or the world is merely a projection of the self, and so forth. For simplicity’s sake, I’d like to distinguish between two understandings of magic: "primitive" and "high" (these are arbitrary terms I’m using, and may or may not correlate with other usages of these terms in the world of magic/magick).
- Primitive magic is the idea that casting a spell effects real, observable, and perhaps even measurable changes in the physical environment: I cast this spell, and a gorgeous someone falls in love with me, something s/he never would have done if I hadn’t cast the spell.
- By contrast, high magic is the idea that casting a spell effects real, observable, and perhaps even measurable changes only in the self/consciousness of the magician, which might have subsequent impact upon the environment: I cast this spell, and I become more self-confident around members of the opposite sex, and that enables me to make friends and eventually experience a romance with someone special — something I never would have done if I hadn’t cast the spell.
Now, apply this to the Sinner’s Prayer:
- A primitive magic approach to the Sinner’s Prayer would hold that reciting the prayer (with the correct heart intention, of course) literally gets God to stop condemning the soul to hell, and instead save the soul, as evidenced by Christ’s and the Holy Spirit’s presence in that person’s life.
- A high magic approach to the Sinner’s Prayer would maintain that God is not changed by the reciting of the prayer, but the sinner is; this change results in the sinner opening his or her heart to the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit, thereby accepting God’s freely given gift that had been offered, but left unopened, as it were, until the moment the sinner recited the prayer.
So, where am I going with all this? I’d like to contrast both primitive and high magic with mysticism.
• • •
Mysticism is sacramental, rather than magical, in nature. As I see it, both sacramental theology and magical theory celebrate the presence of wonders in the world. But whereas magic places the emphasis on the actions of the mortal self, sacramental theology keeps the focus on the mighty acts of God. Sacramental theology makes no sense in those forms of Wicca, neopaganism, or ceremonial magic where there is no belief in a transcendent God distinct from the universe (or the self). But to those who do acknowledge such a transcendent reality, the difference between sacramental mysticism and magic might be seen this way (again, using the Sinner’s Prayer as my example):
- Primitive magic: I recite the Sinner’s Prayer (with the correct heart intention, of course) to get God to save me.
- High magic: I recite the Sinner’s Prayer to open my heart to Christ’s/the Holy Spirit’s presence and to accept God’s freely given gift of salvation.
- Sacramental mysticism: God loves me. Whatever I do (or don’t do) in response to that love simply pales in comparison.
It’s a fine line indeed that separates mysticism from magic. Most mystics would still insist that, no matter how insignificent our response may be in relation to Divine Love, a response is necessary nevertheless, to complete the circle as it were. The gift of the Eucharist is not complete until the wafer and wine are consumed. The proper response to mysticism is not total, infantile passivity! So in this way, mysticism dances with high magic. But even if it’s fuzzy logic that disinguishes the mystical from the (high) magical, nevertheless both approaches to the spiritual world have their distinct centers of gravity. Mystical spirituality endeavors to keep its center firmly focussed on the love and action of God, while acknowledging that in this physical world of ours, some sort of response is necessary, and that response will look like a magical act, even though it is an action taken in the cascading light of a love over which we mortals have absolutely no control.
This helps to explain infant baptism: many evangelicals reject infant baptism because they think you gotta understand it and assent to it in order for it to have meaning (i.e., in order for the magic to work). But in sacramental terms, since the focus is on God’s love rather than on human response, baptising infants makes perfect sense. After all, God loves babies just as much as God loves adults!
Now, to finish this post I’ll answer the question found in its title: do I believe in magic? Well of course! But that’s like asking me if I believe in loving my self. Well, I think it’s a good thing to love one’s self, even if Christian theology has often been rather unhelpful in this regard. But I also believe that self-love is only possible in a world where love radiates out from a higher source. Christian theology has historically been so hard on self-love because it tries to get people to unhinge egotism and hold the self in the higher light of Divine Love. And so it is with mysticism and magic. If magic can be compared to the art of self-love, then mysticism celebrates the love of the wholly other, transcendent God, whom we nonetheless can experience immanently since the wholly transcendent God is also wholly present. To immerse our lives in the mystical light renders magic both possible but also unnecessary.
Deification on the Web
Last night I wrote about an article on contemporary writings on deification published in the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. I said if you’re interested in mysticism, you ought to be interested in deification. Well, it occurred to me that some folks might want to know a bit more about this obscure theological topic, so I did some poking around online, and found these resources:
- Our True Final Hope: The Theosis / Divinization / Deification Web Page by Jon Zuck
- Theosis at Wikipedia
- Reclaiming Deification in the Latin West by Matthew Tsakanikas
I’ve only had a chance to skim over these articles, so read at your own risk. But they look pretty good.
Deification on the Web
Last night I wrote about an article on contemporary writings on deification published in the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. I said if you’re interested in mysticism, you ought to be interested in deification. Well, it occurred to me that some folks might want to know a bit more about this obscure theological topic, so I did some poking around online, and found these resources:
- Our True Final Hope: The Theosis / Divinization / Deification Web Page by Jon Zuck
- Theosis at Wikipedia
- Reclaiming Deification in the Latin West by Matthew Tsakanikas
I’ve only had a chance to skim over these articles, so read at your own risk. But they look pretty good.
