09/12/2020
What is magic?
The (in)famous magician and rascal guru Aleister Crowley once recounted a joke which, he claimed, explained how magic works. I shall paraphrase it here:
There were two men sharing a train carriage. One of them had on his lap a box with holes punched in the top. The other wondered what could be inside and, after a while, could no longer contain his curiosity and spoke up. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I hope you will forgive me for prying, but might I ask what it is you have in that box? Is it, perhaps, some sort of animal?’
The other man replied ‘Indeed it is. It is, in fact, a mongoose.’
‘How extraordinary,’ remarked the first man. ‘Might I pry further and inquire why you have such an exotic creature?’
‘Well you see,’ said the man with the box, ‘I am going to visit my brother. He is an excessive drinker, and is in the grip of delirium tremens. He sees serpents everywhere. So I am bringing him this mongoose to help him keep the serpents away.’
The first man was puzzled. ‘But what good will a mongoose be for him? Are the serpents he sees not, as you said, imaginary?’
‘Ahhh yes, indeed they are,’ replied the second. ‘But this’, he patted the box on his lap, ‘is an imaginary mongoose.’
The fact is, magic really is just all in our heads. However, what we often fail to appreciate is exactly how big the inside of our heads actually are, and the impact that what goes in in there actually has.
For me, magic is essentially a form of tactical psychology. It is the conscious manipulation of potent symbolism in order to bring the mind into certain states of consciousness.
We can look at this in two ways. On the one hand, we can see this practice as a way of effecting change in yourself such that, when whatever it is you are seeking comes by, you are in the right state to seize the opportunity and make the best use of it. Another axiom of Crowley was that in order to gain what we seek, we must first make ourselves a fit receptacle for it.
On the other hand, if we accept that we are each of us a manifestation of the Supreme Reality, The All, and that as such we are each of us the creators of our world, then we can take this one step further. We can propose that, by effecting change in ourselves, we can create a ripple effect which results in corresponding changes to the world in which we live. ‘As above, so below’, as the old saying goes.
The kicker is that we don’t have to choose between these two viewpoints. They are not mutually exclusive. To put it another way, the Universe doesn’t seem to care what we think about how this all works. We do the work, and things happen. It’s that simple.
