In this series we have traced three themes in the writers surveyed. The first is the existence of a subtle body, a vehicle or chariot of the soul that coexists in and with the animal body but that carries the soul between incarnations (or in the interim period between death and resurrection, however one prefers. This is taken for granted in late antique religion in the Mediterranean, such that the concept appears in the Corpus Hermeticum, nearly all the Neoplatonic writers (with little explicit mention in Plotinus, admittedly), and the philosophical work of Abrahamic Neoplatonists like Ibn Arabi. We did not peruse, though we could have, Jewish and Christian writers that make the same claim at any great length; and we did not peruse the long tradition of speculation about the subtle body in South Asian traditions, which is equally quite strong.
The second theme is the reality of the imagination, or the imaginal realm, as the appropriate space, or time—spacetime?—within which the subtle or astral body moves about. We also saw that, for both Ibn Arabi and for the Neoplatonists that precede him, as well as for South Asian philosophers, the role of imagination in epistemology implies that its ontological status must in some way include the sensible world of our perception. Ordinary sensation via our sense organs and the higher sensation of imaginal visualization—what Synesius of Cyrene calls the “holier” form of knowing the “most perfect appearances of reality”—are all acts of imagination; and so, there must be some sense in which the realm of the imagination, the barzakh, is properly speaking also the realm of spacetime as we know it and more often measure it by the natural and social sciences. It is not the case, that is to say, that in the “real” or “physical” world we are dealing with things we can know fully, in a scientistic, modernist, empiricist sort of way, while in the “unreal” world of the imaginal we are dealing with things we cannot know fully and only with apperances. The res ipsa is always manifest to us only in its apparition: neither the raw ousia nor the concrete hypostasis are available for our dissection, only their manifestation as prosopon or persona. And that implies that our ability to know anything at all must logically be a function of our imaginative faculty: our ability to project and receive the image of the other, and thereby to commune. If we dismiss imagination and, indeed, phantasia, “fantasy,” as lesser-than, all we really trade away is our capacity to come to know anything and to commune with reality at all. Than such a world it is hardly possible to imagine anything more horrific.
The third theme is that this reinvests our dreams and daydreams, our passive and active imaginations, and the artistic endeavors they produce, with new and profound meaning. Whether something comes from the underworld of dreaming into waking consciousness as cherished prophecy by the gate of horn or as a false vision by the ivory gate, whose ornate paneling is our own co-creative or sub-creative (to use Tolkien’s language) activity of bringing those visions to bear in the world as far as we are able, in icons oratorical and ocular. The life of the imagination is in fact crucial to our spiritual development, by which I mean the moral alignment of the soul and the cultivation of the nous. Obviously, no one can be, or should be, judged for those things which cross their imaginal landscape uninvited, anymore than identifying with the foot traffic of thought across the Silk Roads of the universal intellect, whether noble or ignoble, is particularly edifying or useful. Nor is it particularly charitable, merciful, kind, or pedagogically exemplary to chide someone for those things which they find themselves imaginally fixated on. To be frank, the imagination can be a way of siphoning off our worse moral inclinations as much as it is an arena in which to preface our deeds in the body: what we do in the imaginal realm can certainly predispose us to great evil as well as great good, but the one who knows how to make use of the barzakh to explore errant emotional and intellectual concerns that might otherwise ruin a life without identifying with these experiments may well find that they have saved themselves a great deal of earthly pain. Indeed, this is after all what Aristotle tells us that, for example, tragedy is for: tragedy invites us to consider the hamartiai of otherwise profound individuals, fictional and real, so that, seeing their krisis, we can experience katharsis of our own passions. The fantasy can have an addictive affect, but it can also have a purifying one, just as it can also ennoble and inspire. Like any other faculty, fantasy’s possible abuses do not justify its prohibition.
But there are details still in need of clarification about this vision of reality, which I suspect will strike many as a bit of a culture shock from the way we are passively and actively educated to think about our imaginations. Does this view not after all imply that in some sense the things we can behold with the imagination are real—that they really exist somewhere, in some way? How can we account for that metaphysically and epistemologically in a way that makes sense, that preserves the dignity of the imagination, and of our artistic efforts?
I might try to work my way towards an answer to those questions indirectly by thinking about the place where most ancient people felt that the spirit, the imagination, and the real world were most directly intersected: magic. I have written on magic a few times in the history of the dispatch, but it is worth perusing at length some of our knowledge of magic in antiquity. By way of preface: “magic” is an unhelpful word. Indeed, it and its cognates were adopted in Greek in response to the perceived exoticism of the Persian maguš, and carry an ambivalence of Greek distrust for things foreign, barbarian, and illusory, as well as connoting arcane arts and ritual sciences.1 It seems to have been weaponized by the ancients largely to describe religion, philosophy, and science that were disliked or distrusted by various groups (which is why Christian authors can lob “magic” as an accusation against, basically, all of pagan religion and score effective rhetorical points with their Greco-Roman audiences).2 A few general observations: first, “magic anticipated modern science and technology. It was dreaming of something that could not be realized for millennia. The dream of flying through the air by magic has now become reality through machines. The dream of healing disease and prolonging life through magical rituals has become true thanks to modern chemistry and pharmacology. Ancient magic and modern science have some of the same goals. They also formulate laws…[and] both magic and scientific technology promise to give us powers that we, as individuals, do not possess.”3 So, hard distinctions between “magic” and “science” are overdone, even if by modern standards the empirical, natural sciences as we have them now “work” and ancient magic “didn’t work.” (But, to be clear, I’ve known a handful of magicians and occultists who would insist otherwise.) The same is true elsewhere: “It is difficult to say what distinguishes religion form magic. For one thing, ancient magic seems to have borrowed extensively from religion, possibly from cults and rituals that are no longer attested and therefore only survive as a form of magic. It could be said that magic tends to grow on a substratum of religion, like a fungus, and that it is able to adopt religious ceremonies and divine names. Magic is the great master of disguises. It operates in a twilight zone and deliberately exploits traditions outside its area while claiming that it achieves better results.”4 In this liminal space, magic “operates with symbols rather than with concepts,” though the concept of “cosmic sympathy, [which] was formulated by the Stoic philosopher Posidonius of Apamea (ca. 135-ca. 50 BCE)” was a pivotal one, that “implies that anything that happens in any part of the universe can affect something else in the universe, no matter how distant or unrelated it may seem. The idea itself must be very old and predates the concept of causality. It is fundamental for magic, astrology, and alchemy.”5 Sympathetic magic works by “three principles: similarity (like acts on like); contact (things that touch each other influence each other and may exchange their properties); and contrariety (antipathy works like sympathy). Together, these principles, though they seem partly contradictory, offer explanations to the magus, the astrologer, and the alchemist.”6 These principles are often expressed in magical traditions by a series of representative concepts, like “Inside is like outside” and “What is above is like what is below.” Hence, “The whole idea involves a constant exchange of energies between the outside world (the macrocosm, the universe) and the inside world (the microcosm, the psyche). Everything around us can be used to our advantage, if we just know how to ‘plug’ into the potential that is there.”7 That potential is the special domain of the magus, particularly the Egyptian or Jewish magus for the ancient world, which regarded these cultures as repositories of magical knowledge somewhat closer to home than the more distant Persian Magi themselves (thought to have invented magic). The magus is the special patient and conduit of divine energies in the ancient imagination: “The magus may not assume the identity of a god or daemon in a calculating, manipulative manner: he may, in trance, become that higher power. There is an element of madness in magic as well as in certain religions. It is the ‘divine madness’ of the shaman. Looking at the evidence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that trance, ecstasy, enthusiasm, possession—whatever we wish to call an altered state of consciousness—are part of the sorcerer’s world, and if it was not always the real thing, it may have been a good facsimile.”8 This objective in magic—“synaphe, ‘contact’, synapheia, ‘conjunction’, koinonia, ‘communion’, henosis ‘union’, homoiosis ‘assimilation’ (to the deity), theiosis ‘deification’”9—is brought about by intention, ritual activity, fasting and prayer, etc. just the same way as in strictly “religious” contexts or in the “scientific,” empirical contexts of various experiments one can undertake in brain and bodily chemistry. “In trance,” writes Georg Luck, “the magus, just like the shaman, may have all kinds of visions—for instance, a trip to heaven or to another world, an experience also attested in the Nag-Hammadi texts and for Apollonius of Tyana.”10 This language is also applied to holy men, prophets, and other divine humans. Josephus, for example, says of the one who would lead a holy life, worthy of the legislator (Grk: νομοθέτης), that he “must in the mind observe the works of God” (Ant. I.19); Nectanebo, in the Alexander Romance, is both Pharaoh and magus, who communes with the divine through lekanomanteia, a technique of divination, actually an aid of achieving trance through looking into a bowl filled with a liquid. In a trance, he sees his deities and, becoming like them, the whole world.”11
In the ancient world, direct and indirect magic, private and official magic, natural and ritual magic all proliferated, the last including “(1) rites that reinforce the mana (or the dynamis) of an individual or a community, promising success in hunting, fishing, and war; (2) rites that reduce the mana of an enemy (black magic); (3) apotropaic measures (protection from the evil eye, from daemons, e.g., by means of amulets); (4) purification rites; and (5) healing rites.”12 The people who perform these various kinds of magic are theoi andres, “divine men,” who
have some common characteristics: they practice an ascetic lifestyle, travel widely (necessary to learn and to reach people), are able to heal (through exorcisms), perform miracles, and spread a message. Some are poets, musicians, creators of myths, philosophers. But their god-given ability to transcend the laws of nature is, so to speak, their passport. It is more than likely that the archaic shaman was also able to communicate with the dead. The myth of Orpheus certainly points in this direction, and the various techniques of approaching the dead have a long history in Greece, as in Egypt.13
In other words, the magus is simply one manifestation of the selfsame role in early human societies that, as spiritual specialist and humanization of the divine forces of nature, also becomes the role of king, priest, and so forth in other social settings. Hans Dieter Betz was by no means wrong when he suggested that “Magicians are those who have long ago explored these dimensions of the human mind….magic is nothing but the art of making people believe that something is being done about those things in life about which we all know that we ourselves can do nothing.”14 Of course, Betz means this negatively, and he makes these comments in the context of calling magic so much charlatanry; but there’s a positive spin one can put on his words, which sees magic precisely as a kind of technē if not of the physical world (magic’s functions in this regard have been transferred to what we now think of as the natural sciences), then at least of the noetic and psychic realms of the human imagination, Ibn Arabi’s barzakh, etc. We might say, then, that at its most fundamental, magic involves a.) something taking place in the imagination of the magician which is b.) given some kind of physical manifestation in the form of ritual and its artefacts which then c.) is thought to have some kind of effect on the imaginative world around the magician including d.) the imaginations of the clientele, patients, or adversaries of the magician. But is this much different than other kinds of “religious” ritual or, for that matter, art? Sure, the things that the magician engages with are engaged in the imaginal realm, and their primary effect in the sensible world is in the way that the imagination impacts the psyche and bodies of the magician and the magician’s others; but I am not terribly certain how prayer or art are much different, especially if we admit (as we have tried to argue to this point) that the imagination is not, per se, unreal but simply a different kind of reality.
The reader may be disappointed that I would not straightforwardly say that magicians exercise powers like they do in books or movies—what John Michael Greer, practicing magician himself, calls “fantasy magic.”15 If we’re going to have wizards, don’t we want them to be able to conjure fire out of thin air, or summon great entities to do their will, or wield the powers of Shakespeare’s Prospero or Lewis’s Merlin? Isn’t the point of our fixation on fantasy magic at least in part that we collectively dream of wielding such powers ourselves, and aren’t these real goals that ancient magicians had in mind for their spellcraft? I think we cannot rule out the possibility of the authentic thaumaturge: the theios anēr whose mastery of the human psyche comes with a preternatural mastery of the physical world which that psyche contains and projects. At least, the phenomenon of paranormalcy, including paranormalcy in human activity, is widely reported, across cultures, religions, and by the advocates of a post-materialist science. But the avatar or prophet endowed with such powers is exceedingly rare, and the systematic democratization of such knowledge through education to society is the stuff of our dreams, which is to say, that which we behold in another world or another time and may now only summon through the ivory door as art or prophecy or, yes, magic. Think through the magical society you like best—Hogwarts from Harry Potter, the Istari and the Elves from The Lord of the Rings, the Aes Sedai from The Wheel of Time, Khamer Taj and Strange Academy from Doctor Strange, Altea from Voltron, the world of Dune, the Jedi from Star Wars, whoever—and two things will become apparent. First, no matter how ancient the imagined society of mages is, their institutions reflect modern problems and futurist ideals; second, they realize the Arthur C. Clarke principle, that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, and therefore ideally can assist us in looking at our own sciences in new light. If you have ever wished to scry on events halfway around the world, ask yourself sincerely: what else is a live feed or streaming? If you have ever wished to animate inanimate objects in order to make them serve your bidding—Hat der alte Hexenmeister / Sich doch einmal wegbegeben! / Und nun sollen seine Geister / Auch nach meinem Willen leben—what else does electricity do? Sure, our current version of this is rather crude, and involves no direct and telepathic chain of command from the mind through the ether to the object in question: we have not yet perfected such divine powers, such that Seine Wort und Werke / Merkt ich und den Brauch, / Und mit Geistesstärke / Tu ich Wunder auch. But there are projects afoot that don’t seem far off from this. Not all of these are strictly “technological,” either. Supposing that we learn to harvest and implement more of the power of our evolving brains in the near future, and put them to ends telepathic, perhaps even telekinetic? It is far from my intention to give anyone hope for pseudoscience, nor still to ruin my own argument by entertaining those things which are pseudoscientific in character; but my point is instead that things deemed impossible by past and present generations are always becoming possible through dreaming them to be, such that to our eyes the world of decades and centuries still to come may well look to us like a society of witches and wizards if not, as Lewis put it, of possible gods. This is also surely the point of our mythological stories about heroes, demigods, and other divinized humans, from antiquity to the present, which is why scholars have pointed out the occult origins of the current superhero craze (by which I have been shaped my whole life) as well as the ways that such literature reflect contemporary experiences of the paranormal or, to borrow Jeffrey Kripal’s phrase, the “super-natural.”16 It’s also a not small part of the historical origins of ufology as a social/religious phenomenon, whatever the reality of some unidentified aerial phenomena turns out to be.
All of this should suffice to make the following point: art and magic do effectively the same thing, such that to deny epistemically or ontologically the “reality” of the one can only afflict the other with the same demotion. In both we travel into the depths of the imagination and bring back up what we find there—whether we go there as willing or unwilling participants, seasoned psychonauts or entranced by rapture, like Europa on the back of Zeus Taurios, whisked away across the wine-dark sea of dreams—with the intention of giving it a beachhead in the “real” world of the senses, in some sense to give it birth in the world of our experience. Our success or failure consists in the degree to which we effectively transmit our imaginal experiences to our audience, which is also why art and magic intersect at many points with oratory, and the skills of rhetorical wizardry by which the trained psychagogue is able to get an audience to agree with him or her (which is the danger Plato’s Socrates recognizes in the sophists: masters of language, they simply don’t care about whether language is weaponized for the one needful thing that we posses the faculty for, to tell the truth). Sometimes our spells prove ineffective, countered by individuals or movements in the imagination of a cultural moment, a zeitgeist, or some intervening mind reaching across the astral plane into our world (we hope with benevolence). But sometimes we may find that we weave enchantments that define the world for generations. “Modernism” is one such enchantment, just as “Christendom” once was. That such things emerged into the world through the imaginations and minds of men does not mean they are any less “real” than the world that we measure in quarks and gravity. Their effects have certainly been real, measurable, sensible, insofar as they shape what we now consider real, measurable, and sensible. Lewis was surely right to say, as he did, that one can fascinate by magic or break enchantments with spells as well, in “The Weight of Glory.” That we now live in a world that seems to the minds of many to have been shorn of magic is itself a product of magic, defined here as an imaginal exercise.17 And so what appears is that in this world where minds and souls are wrapped in spirit and spirit is wrapped in dream, we each of us have a magical vocation for how we both dream about what the world might be and how we summon that dream to be. It is thither that I turn next.
See Kimberly B. Stratton, “Early Greco-Roman Antiquity,” 83-114 in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins, S.J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and for Roman perspectives, see in the same volume Kyle A. Fraser, “Roman Antiquity: The Imperial Period,” 115-157.
See Maijastina Kahlos, “The Early Church,” 148-182 in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West from Antiquity to the Present.
Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Collection of Ancient Texts 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 1.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 3.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 5.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 5.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 5.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 7.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 8.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 8.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 8. Luck also notes that Genesis 44:5 read in this context implies that Joseph was trained in lekanomancy.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 8-9.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 11.
Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), xlviii.
See, with the relevant cautions your tradition recommends, John Michael Greer, A Magical Education: Talks on Magic and Occultism (London: Aeon, 2019), particularly 1-24. To be clear, I do not advocate that one read for the purpose of praxis: only that one read if one wishes to hear from a modern practitioner their own perspective on what they do. Anyway, Greer distinguishes a genuine magical education from “the many-headed monster of fantasy fiction and media magic” (2), by observing that “magic in novels and movies is not the same thing as the magic that actually works here and now, in the only world we actually inhabit,” where the goal is to “bend the universe of human experience to your will more effectively than others” (3). The paragons of fantasy magic—“Gandalf, or Harry Potter, or whoever”—are “exactly what we can never be” (3). My only rejoinder here to Greer, not a magician myself, is that I’m not sure ancient magicians were anywhere near so circumspect about their craft.
See Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); see also Christopher Knowles, Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes (New York: Weiser, 2007); Kennet Granholm, “The Occult and Comics,” 500-508 in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (London: Routledge, 2015). The occult roots of comics and the reality of the imagination are premises of the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, on which I’ve written here, and of Alan Moore’s Promethea.
This is Paul Tyson’s point. See Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019).
Greer certainly wields the "No True Scotsman" fallacy a great deal in his promotion of his own brand.
Wow, the treasures never cease to pour forth from you. Thanks. There are several things in this series now that I hope to circle back upon and pondered further. This read got me wondering about some false realm that could be further delineated as related to both types of magic and to fantasy in some sense or by some accounts.