Thinking about Magic

A new occult post looking at the basic inversion behind magic and how it relates to today's world of socio-cultural collapse. 

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Occult posts like this one - posts on the history and meaning of occult images - have their own menu page above. All  posts are in the archive on the right. 
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry.

Julian Bauer, The Sleeping Green - Öinen-Matkaaja (Nightly Traveler)

Been a while since a good old occult post. Lets jump in with a heavyweight topic in the world of the occult - one that opens onto the heart of beast system inversion itself.

What is magic? It's something that runs through a lot of Band posting. Religion, ancient history, the arts, the occult, fantasy - magic is different in each but turns up in all of them.

This is part of a much bigger project that we are just bringing into focus. We can't say much right now, but it has to do with seriously thinking through inversions around words, semiotics, and ontology. We're just getting started. But pieces of it will appear in different parts of the Band - we run different types of posts for different readers, but they are all connected. And magic is a huge part of this

The purpose of this post is to lay out some basic patterns and see why they are so important. "Magic" as a way of thinking runs even deeper than magic as a thing - but the speculative stuff happens elsewhere. Occult posts can get carried away sometimes, but the point of them is to be more direct and practical. Patterns and traps to look out for, concise historical summaries, common images - this applicability to everyday life is probably why the occult posts are our most popular. 

Start with a definition.

Here's Webster's. The second two are more figurative uses and don't really concern us. The first is what we're looking at. And while it is generally correct, it's too vague to do much more than start things off. 

Two things to hold on to - it involves processes or instruments and it exerts "unnatural" powers over natural things.

Look at an older definition - the 1828 online version of Webster's with some Band comments in color.

It's not completely the same but it reinforces the idea of systematic procedures or rules. Unnatural powers are here, as are natural powers unnaturally applied.

This is significant.

It is significant because it indicates something that has come up before in the occult posts - what you believe determines your opinions of the occult [click for a link].

The modern definition emphasizes the importance of supernatural elements - even if only apparent. The 1828 one allows for "natural" magic - the opposite of supernatural - in some cases. This is because people in 1828 believed differently than the consensus among  today's beast system materialists. They are open to the possibility of the Hermetic magus - the master of natural alchemical or astrological forces who applies them unnaturally to everyday reality.  

Illustration from The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, 1825

Definitions give us a place to start, but when the definition can change, look for the underlying patterns.

Expand by looking at different examples of magic in the areas where the Band has encountered them. 

We mentioned fantasy - the Band just finished a series of three posts on Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant so they're fresh. Magic is a centerpiece of the fantasy genre - how does it work here?

We are no more interested in the fantasy fan community than... 

...

...

... really anything. 

The juvenile tone in this piece is weird and off-putting. And the faux humility clashes with the notion that banal personal details are share-worthy. But it is the source of this graph that captures author Brandon Sanderson's classification of "magic systems". The sort of thing that is useful to writers without really getting at what magic is.

The ultimate example would be D&D - a really complicated system with many types of magic quantified down to the most minute level. It has to be to be playable. 

But no real metaphysical level foundation of where it comes from. It's just part of the game.

We'll stick to the Land rather than get lost in the topic of magic in fantasy and look for large patterns.

The word "magic" doesn't really get used in the Chronicles - the word "lore" refers to the ability to manipulate forces. But the end result is the same. Human activity that results in a power over nature not explicable by naturally-occurring means.

Base patterns. Lore covers a lot of effects from many places. But they're the same underneath. When Mhoram turns a wooden staff into a scythe of sunfire and mows down Foul's creatures by the hundreds, whether it's called "Kevin's Lore" or magic is irrelevant. There isn't a hidden blaster in his staff. And the only other people who could make it do the same thing would use the same lore.

Same with all Donaldson's magic - from the raver and his Stone to lighting a room with the high wood.

"Lore" is consistent with ideas of arcane knowledge that is part of the 1828 definition. Donaldson also includes a place where it is taught systematically - magic schooling is self-evidently necessary if it is a systematic knowledge base.

Observations

Lore / magic is the system of imposing will on reality directly. Mediated by the rules and requirements of the magic system. 

First, there are rules. In this case, Mhoram needs an implement, no matter how powerful he is. The "means" in definition 1. When his staff explodes, he is powerless before the raver. When the krill gives him a weapon that can handle his full might, the raver is killed.

Second, the inversion is built right into the foundation. 

Merry-Joseph Blondel, The Sun or the Fall of Icarus, 1819, mural, Musée du Louvre, Paris

The truth is that we are subject to reality. We are born into it, physically bound by it, die and all die in it. Therefore our desires and wills are bound by it as well. 

Not our imaginations - that's why fantasy is always popular. But in the actual world. We exert a degree of control over our circumstances, but there are hard limits. No matter how badly we want to to surpass these limits, we can't.

And if our desires are limited and constrained by the nature of our existence in material reality, magic is the reversal. 

The inversion.

Magical combat is question of whose ability to assert will over reality is stronger. With a rugged enough channel, Mhoram can bend reality harder than the raver and Stone can. When they push against each other, the weaker gives.  In some cases the difference is power is an innate limit rather than test of willpower. It still boils down to who had a greater capacity to impose desire over reality. 

Test this elsewhere. We're also looking at Renaissance paintings right now, and there's a lot of Renaissance in the occult posts. Does Renaissance magic share patterns with the Land's?

Hermes Trismegistos Teaching Ptolemy the World System, ca. 500–600. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,

Magic in the Renaissance is a lot bigger topic than magic in the Land, so look at the branch we spent a lot of time investigating - Hermeticism. It's a set of fake late antique writings credited to an imaginary sage.

This relief carving shows a common tactic in making up fake sages. Including real figures in the fake biography to add "credibility" and jack importance.

 

Renaissance Hermetic magic is still broad. It flows seamlessly into alchemy and speculative Freemasonry and has roots in the same humanism the timelines tell us begins the path to modernism. So we'll use it as a representative.

Hermeticism itself is based on the belief that ancient formulas can allow us to overcome our finite fallen natures and ascend in some way to realms of spirit. There are also more practical cantrips like animating statues - probably connected to statue use in Egyptian, Greek, and other ancient religions. In northern Europe it became the basis of alchemy.

Raphael Custos, Conjunction, 1633, in Steffan Michelspacher's Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia . . . [Cabala, The Mirror of Art and Nature in Alchemy], Augsburg, 1663, plate 3

It's all here - the secret knowledge and power over natural processes leading to cosmic awareness. It's not just that it's false, it's inherently impossible.

Renaissance magic and it's offshoot fit the same pattern. The will of the individual determines or alters the nature of the reality that the individual is objectively a part of. Physically and metaphysically. It just relies more on old books, mumbled incantations, and pointless mixing of liquids in expectation of things that won't happen. This is because it exists in the real world and not in fantasybooks. Any claim to perform feats like those in the Land would have quickly ended in embarrassment. 

A quick word on will. Starting with the Land and magical combat makes us think of will as force of will or will power. Who's will is stronger - Mhoram or the raver? But the verb "will" in 'do what thou wilt' - basic satanic inversion that will determines reality - doesn't have to be an act of intense effort. Think of the will in 'as you will' or a will and testament - it is just a choice, desire, or preference. it is willed.

This caption is blatantly and patently false. As much a lie as claiming to be able to teleport or time travel. The picture is true - in real life a cheap illusion or deception is the closest you'll come to changing your nature.

With magic, the goldfish becomes an actual shark because it wanted to. Magical thinking happens when we think magical process are materially real.

 

This general will over reality or 'do what thou wilt' is really just desire over reality. The insistence that what we want will be indulged regardless of the mounting costs. Personal and societal. In fact, modern society is failing because of the runaway pretense that falsehoods become true if people really, really wish for them.

Obviously, they don't. The only difference is if the consequences are borne right away or can be delayed for a while. Icarus vs. the civilizational abandonment of Logos. Keep in mind - the same boomers who declared 20th-century greed and magical thinking to be True! are still trying to rear-guard their crumbling empire of lies. Pretending you have a logos-built society while actively rejecting logos is brand new in historical terms. 

They're literally failing their preliminary tests tight now.

So Renaissance magic reinforces and elaborates the patterns we found in the Land. At the root is that old familiar pattern of satanic inversion (click for a POST) - of placing will over reality - that defines evil in general. 

Hermeticism is also full of rules. The whole malignant ball is based on mastery of arcane texts - often in obscure languages.  Spells, formulas and rituals must be just right. It's the intricate but useless minutiae that makes this kind of occultism gamma catnip. No one cares about it because it's not real, so anyone who masters any of it can claim secret knowledge of secret powers... So there's that. 

Goofy magic infrastructure as in Harry Potter is an unfortunate consequence of people writing "fantasy" that don't appreciate fantasy. 

Any real magic system would have been fully leveraged since discovery as the - or at least one of the - most important strategic human asset. It would be dominated by the most formidable practitioners and subsequent civilization would have developed around it.

 

Combat doesn't really apply to Renaissance magic since it's fake. A Paracelsian could have a slap fight with a Rosicrucian, but that's pretty much the opposite of magical.

One thing that does come up from our starting definitions is the role of spirits or other supernatural entities. The 1823 definition makes them out to be very important, while the newer one less so. If we look at historical magic, we can see a difference between manipulating impersonal "forces" and invoking creatures. The same holds in fantasy.

This corresponds to what we call the active and passive evils of the fallen world and its beast system.

Mages Guild Conjurer

Passive evil being the tendency towards death and entropy - moral and physical - in everything material.

Active evil being the Prince of this World - Satan or whatever he's called -and his demonic servants.

The counter-bleating argument would be that magic isn't necessarily evil. Which is why we laid out the satanic inversion first.

The Christian perspective is that it is all evil. One may attempt to treat with a demon directly or believe he or she is tapping into "natural" forces, but all are inversions of the order of Creation. There is a difference between magic and miracle - the second is a benevolent supernatural event caused by God. The rest comes from... elsewhere.

And there are no good elsewheres in Christian metaphysics. 

We can see distinction between magic and miracle in the Bible. We can go New or Old Testaments - Peter and Simon Magus make the same point as Moses and Pharaoh's magicians.

Both show the difference between God working though material agents - human ones in these cases. Their magicians opponents can interrupt and change normal processes of reality through their own devices to a point. But when they oppose God's will directly, the difference is clear.

Fall of Simon Magus, 12th century capital from the church of Saint-Lazare, Autun

The story of Simon Magus appears in Acts 8:9–24 with the longer account, including the fall in the apocryphal Acts of Peter [click for link to translation]

Note how the falling magician inverts the position of Peter with his key. And the devil who is the real cause of Simon's power.

Miracle looks like magic because it seems to break what we perceive as the natural order. But all Creation - including what we see as the natural order - is ontologically downstream from the Creator. Should God's hand appear directly to us, it is by definition "natural" You could say supernatural in the literal sense - as in more natural than natural - but that word has been corrupted to mean generic sorcery. 

The point is that the power is coming from Him and not the will or manipulations of the person. It's the same thing for a saintly miracle - a healing, or even a normal person gifted a vision. You can't command or impel it. You are a conduit. And nothing God wills can be contra the nature of reality because the nature of reality as we can apprehend it is merely a temporal extension of His incomprehensible-in-itself Will. 

Gustave Doré, Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh, 1866, engraving for the Bible.

Simon Magus fails the same test as Pharaoh's magicians in Exodus. Their presumably diabolical power can exert desire over the ordinary function of reality to a point. But when they collide with someone miraculously enacting God's will, it is no contest at all.

What general patterns or lessons from biblical magic? The usual - it's probably rule-based, and combat seems related to strength of will or knowledge but it doesn't natter because God blows it out. The big one though is that it is totally inverted in the satanic way of putting will or desire over reality. Either real or fake.

We do have the ability to physically manipulate material forces subject to material laws. And there is the old saying about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. 

Magnetism probably seemed magical when it first appeared. Likewise explosives.

But magnetism required a lodestone and eventually was explicable in a way that is at least repeatable and predictive. And it works for anyone - no lore or secrets required. Likewise explosives. Magical manipulations happen without or in spite of natural processes - from making an improbability a sure thing to changing the nature of reality itself.

So magic is a reality-manipulation that is not explicable technologically - "forces" are either generated within or manipulated directly by the mage by force of will. It's the projection of will - at some point in the process - that distinguishes the magical from the scientifically or mechanically marvelous. Fantasy and sci-fi. 

What reality there is to magical powers is coming from dark supernatural forces. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes-level powers of deduction to notice that morality doesn't correlate to success in the modern globalist system. And it's no secret that Satan is the will over reality archetype. It's all coming from the same place. Those not-good elsewheres...

But this hasn't stopped generations from fantasizing that somehow there is a special non-existent power that is benevolent or neutral they can access for power over reality. If there is one thing we've learned, something doesn't have to be real to be believed. 

Not being sorcerers, we can't say 100%. But we would say that the fantasy/delusion of self-generated mastery of reality - whether as simple as transmuting a mineral or as grand as divine ascent - sounds like the same crap lie about being your own god.

Sophia from Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer (Secret Figures of the Rosicrucians), manuscript, around 1760

Hermetic ascent with Gnostic flavor from a Rosicrucian manuscript. If you think about it, becoming god is the ultimate extremity of will over reality.

Basic inversion also explains the link between sexual perversion and magic. It goes back to the binary nature man as body and soul - fallen material and immortal spirit. That which draws us into the animal material draws away from God. Perverse carnality inverts propriety just as magic inverts metaphysics. They're comparable.

Whether or not the hypersexuality is "dark" or more ambivalent would appear to depend on how the writer or artist feels about the moral utility of hypersexuality. There's a reason why the fantasy community isn't a source of insight.

We'll end by tying back to a post on glamour - fake media illusionism that replaces reality in the minds of the beholders and becomes sort of real when they act it out as if it was. Of course it isn't - which is why the long-term predictions never come true. 

It's the flying car problem. Technological progress is material and constrained by the limits of the material world we inhabit. There's low-hanging fruit, a range of subsequent refinements, then a limit. 

Anything past that - cars running on cosmic rays or neutrinos, for example, or controlled matter-energy conversion - isn't the far end of a development continuum. It's beyond the limits of the potential of the technology that was used to make the projection.

So the West spent much of the 20th century believing in a fake endless Progress! that actually crapped out really quickly. Then the rest of it printing money to extend a simpleminded illusion that it hadn't. The point here is that the unreality didn't stop them from acting as if it was real.  And acting as if it's real doesn't stop the real consequences of it not being.

An underlying problem is prosperity. The 20th century West was so productive, so prosperous, that enormous numbers of individuals who can't sustain themselves flourish on collective largess. We are in a state now where the system no longer has the capacity to sustain the current degree of corruption and bloat.

Micro-homes and bug protein weren't part of the 20th-century Progress! package. Though obvious with a rudimentary understanding of infinite growth and finite spaces.

 

But the herd moronically chose self-fluffing magic over what's real and acted as if the infinite growth were possible. 

The glamour impelled the action, but the illusion was only possible with vast resources to squander.

It's a given that the dreams of Progress! were obviously false from a glance. Anyone studying physics knew that the internal combustion engine had a hard ceiling for starters, even if the infinite water in a finite bucket is a bridge too far for the average mindless consumer. Just compare relative generational living standards - like housing costs. Or entertainment quality. Or education. Public discourse. The arts. It goes on and on. 

The take-home message is that the same system that keeps promising improvements of one kind or another has presided over degeneration and cultural evacuation. So why have generations of people failed to recognize the slow decline and start taking the steps in their own lives to disconnect from the dancing lights and lies?

1. Glamour

The whole beast media globalist consumerism monstrosity is built on and transmits manufactured desire, atomization and cultural degradation. It's like the Matrix, or a huge collective enchantment. A glamour.

and 2. hedonism.

Aleksandr Nikolayev (Usto Mumin), Bacha bazi Dutar Player, 1924, oil on canvas

Despite al the high-minded proclamations, the various manifestations of "do what thou wilt" invariably come down to base appetites. Orifices. Pounding the "reward" button in the Skinner Box until health collapses, but on a civilizational level. 

The hedonism goes hand in hand with the prosperity. It's that cycle of empire that appears to be a consequence of human nature - build up, get fat, greedy and craven, fall into ruin. Because without the prosperity you can't afford the time for hedonism. The problem is that the hedonism makes dopamine triggers ends in themselves. And dopamine triggers alone dull with repetition. Chasing the dragon is a pattern that runs well beyond substance abuse. 

And if there's enough prosperity to go generations without a reset and there's no commitment to Logos as a counterweight,

this...

becomes this...

in the blink of an historical eye.

It's magic.

People fixate on their own weaknesses or vices when diagnosing "the main problem". It isn't drugs, or promiscuity, or porn, or fast fashion, or social media, or the divorce and abortion industries, or conspicuous consumption... It's all of it and more. It's replacing external moral standards and alignment with reality with dopamine. Like the rat at the button.

But the truth is that as all-pervasive as it is, even hedonism is a subset of do what you wilt. And it involves internalizing messages that reality imposes no constraints. That morality is controlling or prudish. And that the more dopamine you can generate, the more food, shelter, and energy are produced... oh wait. 

Reality does impose constraints. Like this amazing graph showing the correlation between the declining intelligence of officers and college enrolment bloat. 

When you change something, it no longer is what it was.

Doing what you want comes at a cost. Human nature is pleasure seeking, but it is also good at productively exploiting its environment. So why lotus eater into cultural suicide?

Because the glowing glass said we should.

Glamour.

Lying signs over reality.

But pretend for a moment that the lies were true. That will and wishes really could change reality. That checking boxes and handing out commendations moves bell curves hones skills. That everyone desires exactly the same outcomes because a dotard said they should. Would this be any different than spraying fire from a staff or turning rods into snakes? Those are instantly verifiable, but otherwise they're the same inverted process of putting representations before the things that they represent. Pretending that the symbols and words that we devise to feebly describe tiny portions of reality somehow make the reality that they feebly represent. That the painting creates the artist or that the train is laying the tracks. 

Let's finish with a definition. 

Magic inverts the priority relationship between 

representations and reality

And this lets us answer that increasingly-panicked civnat cry of what would be needed to "fix the system". It's easy.

Magic.