Recently, someone proposed that the specific definition that Aleister Crowley gave to magic in his work “Magic In Theory and Practice” did more harm than good regarding how magic is worked today. While I have attempted to define magic in my very first book, “Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick,” I saw that it lacked a certain clarity that I now possess. When I saw this statement on Face Book and the resultant conversation, my immediate thoughts were to agree and also disagree. Crowley wrote his thesis and defined magic in his book written in the late 1920's, and that was nearly 100 years ago. Is anything still absolutely relevant after that length of time? While I liked Crowley’s book “Magic In Theory and Practice”, I also found it to be very complex and not particularly easy to read.
My basic opinion is that Crowley was very much a part of the evolution of magic, and brought it from the 19th century to the 20th century. He further clarified and gave an elaborate but consistent definition to the word magic. He also used the spelling “magick” to differentiate it from the common magic of prestidigitation and causing illusion through trickery. I also adopted this spelling for a while, but found that it didn’t lend itself to referring to practitioners of magic as “magickians.” I have also come to believe that stage magic is just as much a form of magic, and that in the previous age that were considered part of the regimen of the art of magic.
Let’s look at what Crowley had to say about magic and how he defined it. This is the quote that has been proposed as the stumbling block for magicians today.
“Magick is the art and science of causing change in conformity with will.”
And also, the corollary definition, which is:
“ANY required Change may be effected by application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object.”
This sounds like a proper scientific theory, although it is so obviously a truth that it probably doesn’t need to be proven empirically. Of course such a set of definitions would not exclude any number of mundane activities and therefore, could not differentiate them from magic. For instance, if I have an objective, such as finding and getting a new job, or looking for a significant other, I could use magic to aid in this work, but I could use regular mundane actions to do it as well. In fact if I were to engage in either of these pursuits and used magic to aid me, I would also need to engage in the associated mundane activities to ensure success. The purpose of combining mundane steps with magical ones is to bend the laws of probability for something to happen. I doubt that such a pursuit of material objects could be achieved by working magic alone.
That being said, it would seem that Crowley’s definition of magic is too general to be useful, but behind it are some very thoughtful clues as to how a successful magical operation could be pursued. This is the methodology of applying some kind of personal force through the correct medium or link to a given object to influence a probable outcome. That would seem to aptly define a basic operation using magic to achieve a material outcome, with the caveat that the proper medium is the all-important magical link. Crowley goes on to define what a magical link is, and I think that this was an important factor in defining magic. It just doesn’t explain all the other forms of magic that are practiced today. In that sense it might be seen as misleading, but I think that it is a useful but incomplete and overly generalized definition of magic.
If we look at the popular definition of magic as found in any dictionary, we come up with the following definitions. This, of course, is how magic is defined by popular consensus despite all of the years that it has been developed, refined and brought into the 21st century by practitioners and social scientists.
“The use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces. An extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source. Incantations or enchantments. The art of producing illusions by sleight of hand.”
Popular consensus about magic requires a belief in the supernatural and that magical power is a supernatural force. Other popular definitions discuss engaging or conjuring of spirits and forcing them to produce supernatural effects and achieve material objectives through their intervention. In fact, in the previous age, before the European Enlightenment, human beings were thought to have no inherent powers and that it was only through the artifice of angels, demons or neutral spirits could a human being cause seemingly miraculous changes in the material world. Also, the public sees little difference between ritual or ceremonial magic and prestidigitation. They are all one thing, and if a person fails to believe in the supernatural, then the whole definition falls completely apart. It becomes, without this belief in the supernatural, a fraudulent activity, trickery and even criminal deceit.
The 19th century produced two individuals who changed the perception of magic in the various occult communities, those who had adhered to various beliefs from the previous age and were backed by the philosophy of late antiquity, which was neoplatonism. This was also the century when much of the Eastern systems of religious philosophy and metaphysics became available, through the efforts of various intellectuals and organizations such as the Theosophical Society, Spiritism, and various quasy Masonic organizations, such as the Golden Dawn. One of the chief proponents of magic in the 19th century was Eliphas Levi, from whom the Golden Dawn got its definition of magic, and where MacGregor Mathers made it into an accessible practice. Levi proposed a down-to-earth definition of what magic was, and detached it from the belief in the supernatural and the theatrics of popular stage magic. Here is how Levi defined magic.
“The three chief components of Levi's magical thesis were: Astral Light, the Will and the Imagination. Levi defined the Astral Light as a blind, amoral, universal force that sweeps all before it in a perpetual and restless search for equilibrium.”
Levi came up with this idea about the Astral Light from the writings of Carl Reichenbach, who conjectured that there was what he called an “odic” force in the universe, which was a hypothetical vital energy or life force believed to exist by many in the mid-19th century. Reichenbach himself was strongly influenced by the writings of Mesmer about animal magnetism. The idea of the existence of the Astral Light was picked up the Theosophical Society since it melded well with Eastern philosophies concerning the life-force or prana.
While Levi and the Golden Dawn brought the practice of magic from out of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the 19th century, the definitions that they used still seemed very nebulous and not very factual. While eliminating the idea of the supernatural was a good step in the right direction, it seemed that adding forms of metaphysics made the definition more confusing. However, when Crowley wrote up his definitions of magic there had not yet been anything succinct or definitive to say about how magic was actually defined. Still, it was an evolving process that continues to this day, and Crowley’s definition was just a step in that process. It is easy to criticize his definition and also to remark that it could easily lead one astray as it could help define what magic is and how it functions. Still, it is also important to see Crowley’s definition from the perspective of the context of the time in which it was presented.
Anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists spent a great deal of time from the 19th century and well into the 20th century studying and remarking on the phenomenon of the practice of magic in so-called primitive societies. While they accepted the idea that magic was deficient and based on superstition, they attempted to explain how these less enlightened societies believed about themselves, their world and how magic fit into that world. Frazer was the first to write volumes on the topic, attempting to universalize the idea of magic and to define its different component beliefs, and many others followed suit, such as Malinowski , Freud, and then later Jung, Marcel Mauss, and Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe.
O’Keefe was interesting because he speculated that magic was the expropriation of religious rites and ceremonies from public and state religions for the selfish purpose of achieving personal gain. He flipped the narrative that Frazer had developed (and Crowley accepted) that magic was the precursor to science. I felt that O’Keefe was quite correct for certain forms of magic as practiced in Europe from antiquity through the Renaissance. However, he did not take into account primitive forms of magic and shamanism that were the bedrock of what early societies defined as magic and did not depend on the expropriation of religious practices.
All of these various academic perspectives about magic were from an etic or external perspective, and they were not emic, or from the standpoint of the magical practitioner. They also did not define either how magic worked or what was happening in nature to allow it to function. I believe that only practitioners can define magic from the inside as long as they don’t seek to postulate some kind of unknown electromagnetic force as its underlying physical basis.
Jung brought up the idea of synchronicity and the powers of cultural and religious symbolism as archetypes of psychic transformation, and Campbell and Eliade discussed the powers and impact of cultural myths and their language that underlie the psychology of the individual and the societies at large. Magic also seems to employ a combination of imagination and metaphor that is a lot like what children do when the play pretend. Eastern religious philosophy talks about a vital force called prana, and this force is integral to life, and especially conscious life. It also functions as a metaphor that proposes that everything is connected to everything else, and that through this web of union, one individual may effect many individuals.
All of these theories seem to saying that the consciousness of the individual and the collective consciousness of the societies that they live in have a great and powerful influence on the social environment and its material basis in the world. They also seem to imply that the imagination as unfettered creativity, combined with the power of symbols and myths can make a phenomenon like magic part of the conscious equation. It can also produce great literature, art, poetry, theater, music, and the various powerful sentiments of human existence. It is the driver for religion and its individual exponent, mysticism. Within this perspective is what we would define as Spirit, and all the collective attributes of the religious and mystical phenomena of Deities, devils, angels, demons, nature spirits, mythical creatures, legendary heros and heroines, ghosts of our ancestors, and the hosts of what had once been defined as supernatural, now defined as the products of the greater mind of humanity. While Carl Sagon despaired over the continued human proclivity for what he defined as superstition, I see it as an integral part of the phenomena of human consciousness.
Science allows us to be rational and empirical when approaching the physical phenomena of the material world, and it has created mathematics, technology, medicine, chemistry, astronomy, astrophysics, engineering and the overall standards for objectivity. Yet science cannot explain the phenomenon of consciousness itself, and it cannot abrogate the necessary human tendency to sentimentalize, imagine, feel through emotions, and express oneself through passion. There is still a place for the Arts in our world, and may the Gods save us if we ever lose that important aspect of being human.
So, based on all of these ideas and theories, how do we define magic from an emic perspective? I will attempt to define magic here, but of course, mine is not the last word.
There are seven basic models of magic, and each explains part of the phenomenon of magic. There is the spirit model, the energy model, the psychological model, the stocastic model, the temporal model, the information model, and the metaphysical or theurgic model. What all of these models have in common is the peculiarity of consciousness. They represent different definitions and viewpoints on the phenomenon of magic, but they also fail to define it from a unified perspective. We can merge them into a single perspective that is relevant to the modern world, since previous ages had very different cultural foundations through which magic typically defined.
Magic is a psychological process that occurs in the mind and has no actual physical representation in the material world, except, perhaps, from the perspective of neurology. It relies on rare altered states of consciousness as its foundation, and it utilizes transformative symbols, religious attributes and belief systems woven into rituals and ceremonies and directed by symbolic tools and artifacts. It can be employed in a singular manner with a single objective, whether material or conceptual. It can also be employed to enhance, instruct, inspire, illuminate, and ultimately, cause its practitioners to ascend into a state of permanent enlightenment and union with the monistic exemplar of consciousness itself. It proposes a form of rapid and contagious spiritual evolution that can be achieved in a single lifetime, although it typically attracts those who initially seek material power over their lives and circumstances.
Magic is protean in its form and function because all models and perspectives can be shown to be correct in some manner, including that magic doesn’t even exist. It can be perceived differently by different people, and everyone who practices magic sustains their belief in it through their perception of its efficacy. There are very few rules that govern magic, and often what breaks the rules is more effective than what complies with them. It is also a phenomenon that seems to have a separate conscious volition and character, and it often behaves as if it were an entity instead of a phenomenon of individual human consciousness.
Magic is also the process whereby individuals build meaning, significance and a sense of purpose or destiny onto their life’s path, pulling them out of the meaninglessness of their trivial secular society, the happenstance of the material world and the seemingly autonomous universe at large. Modern magic is as important to our post modern world as organized religion was to the pre-modern and modern ages. Yet it remains to be seen if this varied process can meet or exceed the objectives of a human system of conscious evolution as religion had functioned in the past.
Frater Barrabbas
