You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
This post summarizes my science-focused thinking about magick, written for non-mages.
It comes from a friend who’s a professor of religion, who asks:
I have some science and religion double majors and I wanted them to see the work of an engineer on this question of “magic.” Do you have something that I can give to them to chew on?
Magic vs Magick
Magic and magick aren’t the same thing.
Historically, “magic” means a thing operates without any (known) mechanism:
- Harry Potter magic just does what it does, no underlying mechanism.
- When pre-scientific people saw placebo and hypnosis, they wouldn’t understand the mechanism, and called it magic.
- Same with any sufficiently advanced technology — the mechanism is known to the advanced society (who sees it as technology), but is unknown and unknowable to the less advanced society (who see it as magic).
So that’s magic-with-a-c: Stuff we don’t understand, stuff outside science. Magic takes “X just happens, no cause-and-effect needed” as an acceptable explanation. And if we ever do scientifically explore a phenomenon, it is no longer part of magic-with-a-c.
Magick-with-a-k is simply a set of phenomena: Energy healing, creating luck, and a few others. We could choose to view them as things that just happen, outside cause-and-effect. Or we can view them as part of the natural world, and explore them, understand them, harness them the same way we harness any other natural phenomenon.
Thus, while magic-with-a-c is the opposite of science, magick-with-a-k can (and should) be explored scientifically.
Magick Isn’t Religion
Many religions include magickal practices, just as many religions include specific things you must wear, eat, or say. But that doesn’t make clothing, food, or speaking fundamentally religious. Personally, I’m an atheist, and my practice of magick isn’t connected to any religion.
The history of human knowledge is a steady shift from supernatural explanations to natural / scientific ones. We used to explain the rising of the sun as Ra in a chariot, but now we know it’s planetary rotation. Lightening used to be Zeus, now it’s Maxwell’s equations. Today, neuroscience is tackling consciousness, and we’re seeing that shift from free-floating (supernatural) thoughts to a phenomena that emerges from (natural) nerves. How long until we add psychic phenomena and energy healing to that list?
(Hat tip to Greta Christina for this observation. Also see Richard Carrier on natural vs supernatural.)
Spirits as Artificial Intelligence
I work with spirits. How do those fit into a materialist universe?
(Materialism = Thoughts, ideas, and consciousness aren’t things themselves, but emerge from the interaction of non-mental things like nerves.)
I think of magick as driven by ethereal matter. Like dark matter, ethereal matter interacts in limited ways with ordinary matter. It can be studied. With luck, it will some day be part of standard physics.
Spirits, then, are constructed from the ethereal equivalent of nerves. Or transistors. They’re artificial intelligences, built from ethereal matter instead of silicone.
Random Testing vs Science
Lots of mages experiment. They try a new ritual, a new rune, see what happens.
That’s excellent. The world needs more people testing their ideas, gathering data, ensuring they only believe in things that actually work.
But science is bigger than testing. Science starts with a model — not a story about the world, not a single idea like “belief” or “information” or “spirits,” but a model with moving parts that makes predictions. In magick, those predictions are often new techniques or rituals that you’d only think of because you have that model. Then the testing serves to confirm, refute, or refine the model.
Of course, 90% of the work is coming up with a model worth testing. And, just like drawing an accurate map of a city requires walking its streets, building a worthwhile model of magick requires doing a lot of magick. That’s where to start.
The Start of a Model
If you want to see my full model, read my book-in-progress, An Initiation into Direct Magick.
But I’m hoping you’ll start exploring and pondering your own model. So I want to give you a few ideas to start:
Many systems of magick produce similar results. Mostly that’s energy healing and luck. This suggests a common underlying mechanism that all systems of magick tap into. (If they operated by different mechanisms, it’s unlikely they’d produce the same result.)
That’s the starting point of Chaos Magick, too. It was the fashionable system when I started, and its answer is belief — “belief is the tool.” But “belief” doesn’t explain why everything is similar. In fact, if magick was “whatever you believe, that happens,” I’d expect everyone to produce wildly different results. (Belief can be a tool for driving your mind to perform magick, but it can’t be the underlying mechanism.)
Magick is complex, and complexity isn’t free. Whatever that mechanism is, it has to understand details of altering the world. It has to be able to predict which events will lead to your desired outcome, and make those events happen, in real time. Einstein said, “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler” — I see many models that make things much too simple.
Scientific Miracles — My Faith
I want to leave you with the source of my faith.
Every time we’ve understood a new part of science, it’s lead to amazing things. Miracles, if you will.
Newton plus 300 years lead to human flight.
Chemistry plus thermodynamics let us land on the moon.
Relativity plus lenses let us gaze into space, seeing light from the first seconds of the formation of the universe.
Quantum physics lead to transistors, and the computer you’re reading this on right now.
Evolution plus germ theory lead to vaccines and antibiotics.
DNA lead to stem cells and new medical treatments, and may one day lead to human immortality.
Science is the source of tangible miracles you and I experience every day.
I don’t know where the study of ethereal matter leads, but I have faith it leads somewhere miraculous.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: ExplainingMagick, Science
Fantastic post! Not only do you do an excellent job of summarizing the theory behind your work with Magick, the way you conclude it is pretty damned inspiring for any aspiring mage. Hopefully your friend the professor can let you know what their students think (if he/she decides to use it).
Thanks! I’ve been working on being more inspiring when I write, it feels great to know it’s working. Thanks for writing!
On the science-magick boundary cross-over, the work of Norman Doidge is quite interesting. There was an article over at The Observer this weekend which is worth a read: here.
Probably the broadest model for magick is: “restructuring the mind = restructuring the apparent world” or “the world (including the brain) is an image of the mind”. It’s interesting that his ideas on neuroplasticity seem to implicitly take that approach.
Thank you for taking magick seriously and applying the scientific method to its phenomena.
Kindly,
Francesca
Religion professor here:
I find your definitions to be not as satisfying as I thought. Perhaps there is a limitation in the language, but the “magic” you describe with the first examples seems to be no different from your magick with a k phenomena, as I understand. Furthermore, most anthropologists would say that magic and religion are related, because as one 19th century theorist said, they form a continuum in a chain of human mentalities, according to an evolutionary scheme with magic at the bottom (primitive modes of explanation), then religion, then science (advanced) that utilizes different theories of explanation and understanding of human manipulation of energies for control. By the way, what is an atheist? Can an atheist adopt the idioms of religion (e.g. spirits, supernatural beings, invisible intelligences, by other names) and still be called an atheist? What is the line between “religion” and “science” anyhow? For my students, the line has something to do with the Sacred, but even that is still vague. We are all still chewing on magick, magic, or that thing that is still being defined. It’s a good conversation.
Hi Yvonne,
As a friend of mine would say, we’re “violently agreeing.”
I agree that magic-with-a-c is the opposite end of a continuum with science. Magic says, “It’s perfectly OK to say that things just work the way they do because they do, no need to understand.” Science says, “Understanding is important, and relies on breaking a phenomenon down into its constituent parts.” They are pretty thoroughly at odds.
That’s exactly why I say that magick-with-a-k is a set of phenomena. Because sure, you could choose to use a magic worldview and view them as happening without proper cause-and-effect. Or you can choose to explore those same phenomena through science, and build models that let you understand, explain, and harness them. The point of magick-with-a-k is that it’s just a set of phenomena that we can study.
The phenomena associated with magic-with-a-c happen to overlap heavily with the magick-with-a-k phenomena. (That’s intentional — I like my terms to map to the layman’s versions reasonably well.) But the essence of the terms are far apart: Magic says “cause-and-effect aren’t important,” while magick says “healing and luck creation are real phenomena, worthy of study.”
I’ve added a little to the post to explain that.
I consider myself an atheist because I don’t believe in deities. I do believe in spirits more skilled with magick than humans, but only because I work with them, because collaborating with them points me toward healings that are effective. In other words, believing in these spirits has predictive value, and practical value to boot. Also, I view them as people to collaborate with, rather than deities to worship — feels like there’s more there, something about relationship with spirits, but I’ll just note it for now.
Yes, it is a good conversation. Thanks for having it with me, and for chewing on these ideas.