Inspired by a recent letter by David Bentley Hart summarizing his articles on Gnosticism.
But when he raised his head, I saw in my mind the light of powers beyond number and a boundless cosmos that had come to be.—Corpus Hermeticum I.7, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2.
Perennialists and Digressers All,
October is one of the few remaining times a year that our culture really, seriously considers a world beyond the mundane. By “seriously,” I do not mean to say that most people really believe in the wyrd, otherworldly, magical, fay, ghoulish, orcish, daimonic, and generalized infernalia that fills our attention this time of year; sadly, even many a contemporary magical practitioner cannot wholly commit themselves to real belief in the independent or even derivative reality of such beings. I mean more that we make a real, concerted effort to think about the world through the admittedly darker lens of the autumnal themes of sin, death, and dark powers, which vies in our experience with the overwhelming beauty of the season, with its archetypes of harvest and joviality and festivity as well as of huddling in the protected warmth of home and hearth against the encroaching cold of longer nights.
But we should believe in such things, at least, if we are classical monotheists, and if we are Christians, specifically. The first philosophical commitment would encourage us to believe that there is no finite participation in God’s infinite being—of which there are an infinite number—that is left unfulfilled in God’s creative energies; that, for him, an infinite number of worlds exist in which the countless myriads of forms to which he can donate his being live and move and have theirs, and therefore that the imaginal realm of our waking and dreaming consciousness is far more frightfully real than we typically care to admit. That is to say that it is the infinite God in se—what Vedanta calls brahman nirguna—who is the selfsame God that infinitely gives himself in a quantitatively infinite number of forms—brahman saguna, the lila or “play” of brahman, through which we know God qua God. And if we are Christians in particular, we should realize that the cosmological landscape of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean worlds, which is so inscribed in biblical literature that, even if we will re-receive it in a new cultural setting, we cannot fully discard it without also discarding the essence of the Christian gospel itself. That is to say, contemporary people are not obliged to believe in the literal contours of a pre-Copernican kosmos, of a geocentric universe encircled by seven crystalline spheres of heavens ruled by erring gods who cast their influence on the terrestrial world, at the center of which is enchained that dark intelligence by which the sublunary realm is enthralled, the universe of Ptolemy and Dante.
But they are obliged, at least if they are going to be Christians, to keep the denizens and spirituality of the universe alive even as their cosmography shifts: the Gospel still requires that there be angelic archons, and daimons, and God is just as much God as classical monotheism understands God in an observably Epicurean universe of trillions of galaxies as he is in the relatively limited Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic world of the pre-Copernicans. This was Epicurus’ mistaken reductionism, but it is also that of contemporary culture. Carl Sagan may well have been convinced that the sciences exorcise the material universe, but Christians need not disregard Sagan’s science to dissent from him: knowing that a star is a flaming ball of gas, as Lewis would have told us in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, does not tell me whether or not a star is also a god or an angel, possessed of an indwelling intelligence that intentionally orders its physical effects upon the world as much as it is subject to them. Reductionism is a philosophical choice as much as it is an enchantment or disenchantment that infects modern thinking: we are habitually trying to set limits on a contingent order that repeatedly bucks against our expectations at every level. The universe, in other words, is quite big; certainly big enough to be haunted as well as ordered.
Cosmology, especially done in a religious or spiritual mode, may well seem a speculative discipline, but how we think about the world strongly influences the way that we relate to it. Conversely, we construct our belief about the universe perhaps most deeply in the context of religion or its palliative replacements. Perhaps for this reason we talk often of devils and rarely of angels. We live in a time where enchantment would seem to have an easier time gaining credibility in our eyes through darkness than through light; that is to say, that it might be an easier positive development for a person to come to believe in ghosts than for a person to believe in gods or God. Culturally, we may not actually believe in monsters—some of us do, of ocurse—but we also cannot stop talking about them: the monstrum as an epiphany, as contemporary occultist John Michael Greer would put it, as a revelation of the secret order of reality, the paranormal as a reflection of our consciousness and of the strangeness which creeps in upon our epistemic limits, as Jeffrey Kripal describes, these are everywhere present to us. Yet as would-be magicians, both in our fiction and in our speculation, we continually want to reduce such things to manipulable status: we are comfortable with them as fully explicable parts of the world or of our psyche, but not as contingent revelations of transcendence. The archetype of the magician—the cosmic mechanist in the extreme—stands out to us as a metaphysical ideal much more relatable than the priest or even the wizard, as true students of wisdom; the magician is, like us, fully convinced of the mechanical philosophy, simply at a higher degree of control than we are capable of. The wizard’s mechanical tendencies are subdued, at least, to his self-awareness as a conduit of powers superior to himself; the cleric is wholly servant to those gods and/or God as one who offers the world in reverence and hopes to receive it renewed in the hieratic exchange of sacrifice. The magician’s knowledge is pragmatic and utilitarian; he is a sophist, not a sophiologist.
In a strange turn, too, it would seem that mainstream religious communities experience an influx of magicians in this generalized sense through their exorcism of the natural world of its spiritual qualities and denizens. Evangelical Christians are largely more interested in securing a kind of magical access to salvation through the “sinner’s prayer” or through an inner gnosis of certainty about one’s ultimate destiny achieved on technicality and without effort than are Christians whose traditions ostensibly teach them to believe in realities our culture deems “magical.” Catholics, Orthodox, higher-church Anglicans, and so forth are all at once more likely to believe in the presence of the divine in the natural order and simultaneously to believe that their final union with God can only be attained through ascetic effort in the midst of that order, while evangelicals are more generally likely to be modernists and all-but-materialists in their ontology and yet to shun gospels that make moral demands of them in order to be saved.
Anyway, we should pause for a moment to take note that “magic” is a fairly problematic term in scholarship of religion, at least insofar as it is almost entirely a catch-all category for religion that one either does not like or does not understand or does not find useful or licit or some combination of these.1 “Magic” comes from the Greek mageia, “what the magoi know,” the magoi in question being Iranian priests who struck the Greek mind as exotic astrologers and wizards and the originators of magical knowledge in the Western world. But in Greek culture the older, and later once more predominant, term for the magician is goes, and goeteia the mainstream word for esoteric religious, philosophical, and scientific knowledge and practice. The Greek word feared, revered, reviled, mocked, and marveled at the practice of magic: while some may complain that magic is a distinctively modern taboo, reflecting both a repressed tendency as well as an existential liminality, magic has always functioned this way for wider society, as an expression of some of our deepest curiosities and instinctual revulsions. Arguably, most of what we deem publicly acceptable religion—sacrifice, prayer, invocation, sacrament, inspired texts, inspired commentary on those texts, congress with holy spirits, repulsion of evil spirits, intercession for the living and the dead, ritual space and purity and logic, symbolism, etc.—is itself magical, at least if by “magical,” we mean some kind of conscious, techne-based economy of interaction with the spiritual dimension of the creaturely universe. It’s not not magic when Jews summon God at Hoshana Rabbah, or when Christians confect the eucharist, or when Sufi Muslims whirl in prayer; it’s not not magic when adept Hindu sadhus use yoga to achieve samadhi, or when Buddhists do the same through whatever meditative praxis they happen to embody. Or perhaps we should say, it is not something other than religion when Medea in Metamorphoses VII.234-293, unbound of tress and dress, invokes the nocturn gods of chaos to help her reinvigorate the aged Aeson; the numerous bowls of incantation and enchantment devoted to famed exorcists David and Solomon are not examples of something other than religion; the papyri invoking angels in prayer are not something other than religion; etc.
It would be incorrect to do what we frequently do by way of apologetics for this sort of thing: that is, to differentiate between “religion” and “magic” on the basis of expertise and control. It is sometimes suggested that magicians wish to control the gods, while the pious seek to serve them. This may be true of “magicians” as I use the term above, but it is unlikely to be wholly true of magi themselves, who correspond more to what I above call the archetype of the “wizard”; all such people are well aware that the task of controlling a being so much higher than one’s self in the hierarchy of reality would stretch one’s being beyond its ontic capacities. Rather, all instances of religion involve some degree of magic insofar as they involve some degree of spiritual or ritual techne, and all instances of magic are religious insofar as they involve orientations and protocols for interacting with the divine world, even in its darker aspects. It is true that, on the one hand, the biblical god, YHWH, avoids the magical manipulation that a personal name would afford his followers (Exod 3:14), but not entirely, given that the Temple cult is effectively a licit means of attracting and maintaining the Divine Presence in hamaqom; and it is of interest that while Jesus underlines heavily that he performs his miracles by holy pneuma, and not by daimons, he at no point feels the need to explicitly differentiate what he does from magic as though the miraculous and the magical were in fact fully isolable categories (Matt 12:31, in context). We use the vocabulary of “magic” by way of convention to name methods of engagement we deem unfit for use, but religion we do like is no less intrinsically magical.
Indeed, perhaps the first entirely non-magical religions are those of modernity and postmodernity:2 in which all ritual symbolism, drama, and efficacy have been left behind in favor of a purely subjective and emotional or, somewhat better, purely rationalist and moralist set of symbolic activities, but from which the memory and practices of magic have never been wholly effaced, nor can they be. The most intensely individual-focused evangelical worship set is still a collective act of psychagogia, conducting souls to a state of emotional vulnerability and frenzy in the divine presence that in antiquity would likely have categorized some forms of pagan worship but was equally unlikely to be the exact brand of ekstasia experienced in the charismata displayed at eucharistic assemblies among Christ-followers. Such charming (thelgesthai) is still the work of magicians, and not quite that of wizards or clerics; it is still a manipulation of cosmic law to achieve some finite desired end, and is neither born from nor grows true wisdom.
So what does the wizard or the cleric do, by way of contrast, then? How do we identify the good magic from the bad, the magic of ancient and medieval religion still capable of being enacted in the modern world from the distinctively modern magic of disenchantment and dilution of the primal spirituality of the world?
As in all things, Wisdom—Chokmah or Sophia—is our criterion: good religion (or magic; pick your term) and bad religion (or magic; again, pick your term) are separable solely on the basis of to what extent each evokes and effects the genuine character of the world as the ikon of Divine Wisdom. One way of talking and thinking about religion in contemporary scholarship is to treat it as a kind of technology—a logos of skill, that is, skill in relationship to the world in its divine aspect, specifically. We need to find religions that are sophianic technologies; the ubiquity of mere magicians in the secular order as well as in our religious communities means not that we must abandon all pretenses to having some form of centering and summative truth in our religions, but rather that we must treat these concerns as secondary to the more existential threat: smart, but unwise magic. It is for this reason—and the Internet, it seems to me, has been a great catalyst for this kind of community, which would have puzzled older generations—that there is common cause today between religious people across traditional divides in the face of secular postmodernity, whatever their other differences and indeed whatever their affiliations to the secular world. There are, at the end of the day, those of us who believe in magic—those of us who believe in the world beyond the sensible and the mechanical, who believe in the spiritual and noetic orders, the great hordes of gods and ghouls that appear to the mind, the very reality of Mind itself—and those that do not. Those that do have infinitely more in common than any of them do with those who do not, even when sectarian identities ought to suggest otherwise; I have more in common with a Norse neopagan who believes that a thunderstorm is best thought of as Thor beating his hammer than I do with an evangelical Christian who believes that animals do not have souls.
Those of us who believe in magic may well still acknowledge the importance of our doctrinal distinctives, as well as the human element of our religions; may otherwise find many things the magicians do useful and important and worthy of our praise and support; may well hold close the importance of critical discernment and the moral significance of uncritical credulity. We may believe in monsters, but not, therefore, that every claimed sighting of one is legitimate, nor even that nearly any of them are; we may likewise believe in angels and in God without thinking that most people interact with them consciously the majority of the time. We may believe in miracles without welcoming every report of them. The wisdom of the wizard that differentiates him from the magician may well be the acknowledgement, however, that that very critical discernment is itself a participation in the eternal Wisdom of all things, and that the “ordinary” course of things which we sometimes mistake by maya for the extraordinary is in fact more enchanted than is typically accredited. We want fairies with bodies that we can see, phenomena that we can quantify: perhaps, had we eyes to see, such might be around, but we are unlikely to see them until we can appreciate the fay as it comes to us in the spice of the October winds. We want real ghouls, at least from a distance; such there might be, but the point of encountering them is that we might better identify the ghoulish in our ordinary lives and learn to rebuke it there. Relatively few of us are called to, and no one should want to, trade ordinary human life for that of the exorcist; those who do are possessed, so most traditional Christian spiritual direction would suggest, of a sickness, whether of attraction to darkness or of a myopic vision preventing the flood of theophanic light from the ordinary world.
Admittedly, the mundane world as we typically encounter can be very boring, partially because it is mechanized and resistant to mystification. It is also, for the vast majority of us, relatively soul-crushing, which is why the wyrd appeals to us, whether it is light or dark: the oppression and suffocation of the mundane world, especially if we are not particularly privileged, can be enough to drive us, if not into the arms of the unseen realm, then at least into our phantasia of it. My generation has experienced this trend at its apex: the flood of popular culture over the last twenty to thirty years in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, across media and across artistic traditions, both “high” and “low” brow has been a true deluge, and the commitment that many my age—including myself—feel to many of these franchises is quite deep. No small part of that attachment is born from the way that these things have offered a kind of cosmological and ethical hope to many in terrifically bleak circumstances: victims of the Machine, calling not for a deus ex, but a deus contra.
Two quick notes: first, I plan for this to be the first in a series of articles on general spookiness in honor of October.
Second: I have notionally structured the payment on this newsletter to revolve around translations of Greek and Latin texts that are reserved for subscribers, and I have failed to produce one of those for the month of September. Mea maxima culpa. My goal is to produce two this month by way of apology at least—one on Augustine’s De Dialectica, the other on Origen’s commentary on the Flood—and if I can get around to it, a third on Phlegon’s Historiarum mirabilium. However, in the future, I may make some public announcement transitioning the payment system to either a free-will offering—every bit I make producing these articles justifies the time spent in doing so, in the mercantile calculus that afflicts young marriage, fatherhood, and new householder life—or, further on, transitioning what I write here behind the paywall. I am wanting to stall that last move as long as possible, because I prefer to enjoy a wider readership, but I want to make sure that those who pay for my words (which, bless you—be sure to be checked by a confessor or magical rinpoche as soon as possible) are getting something worthwhile out of it.
Εἰρήνη πᾶσι,
David
For sources on ancient magic, see Georg Luck, trans. and ed., Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Collection of Ancient Texts (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006); David J. Collins, SJ, The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
For the death of magic in modernity, see Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019).
Escendimus in mysterium.
So important to get on board with magic and not oppose it to religion (same with myth and revelation). That's why I truck out to Michael Martin's farm several times a year. Pico did nothing wrong.