Magick

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I do not practice or believe in magic/k.
I was wondering if anyone on this forum did and what type, where their magic/k comes from and how does it work (or in theory). Thanks

Quantum superposition -- the idea that something can be true and false at the same time, 1 and 0 at the same time, dead and alive at the same time --- is magic to most people.

Yet, scientists theorize this is the nature of our reality.

Yes, I practice magic. Folk magic, occasionally called 'low' magic. Candle magic, knot magic, jar spells, that kind of thing.

As I see it, magic is the manipulation of energy to achieve a desired result. Anyone can do it, if they want to.

I have no idea how it works, it just does.

I don't think you'll find many people having a full agreement on this.

What's given - how you think and how you craft the software that's going on in your brain, ie. your thoughts from day to day and your reactions to things, has an impact on whether your body is functioning at peak performance and in good harmony with itself vs. poisoning itself and by and large at that point your immune system is more often than not cleaning up messes that you yourself have made out of anger, resentment, nihilism, etc..

To the above extent I do believe that people can hack their own thought structures to form better and better heuristics for better living, better health, etc.. and I do also believe that esoteric paradigms the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Sephir Yetzirah and the 32 Intelligences, meditating on the tarot, etc. can all be very helpful for building increased harmony and also building certain kinds of competencies that help you cut through your problems. I like to refer to that as internal or spiritual alchemy, albeit a much less controversial way of saying it is just calling it a self enrichment or value-adding activity. I know that AMORC likes to list a whole slew of geniuses from the renaissance up through the enlightenment whether Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, etc.. as members of the order and while I think some of that might be gimmicky I do think that esotericism did provide a lot of famous people through history with the sort of 'brain games' that may have given them the capacity to be the big achievers that the were.


As for actual 'spooky action at a distance' - the problem with that is it's something most people won't believe in until or unless it happens to them. Even when it does happen to them it's such a departure that, despite all odds, they'll be still questioning themselves because they won't be able to put wild syncrhonicities into context with the world they know or understand. I've found that the times I have seemingly caused something really wild to happen, like manifesting a certain person in my life for example, it was by accident and it took a form that was striking in resemblance and also not the same in terms of age, but that person was very catalystic to my environment. It seems like when one does break plane with reality as we know it, ie. what intuitively passes itself off the way most reductive materialist would tell it, the breaks are generally not predictable and if you did try putting a spell out there to the universe for a better job, or the protection of another person, etc.. it could either not work, work in a way you didn't want it to, work in a way that's utterly bizarre, and for the most part - unless there's some really bold signature on what happens there's no reason to believe that any of what just happened had anything to do with that spell.

In end analysis, IMHO, this stuff is really just best served for geeky people, John Michael Greer being a wonderful example of this, who have an overwhelming curiosity about how the world actually works, who are bored to death with the common, and have no qualms sifting through the discarded knowledge heap to see what's pure bollocks vs. what's perhaps only partially bollocks, what of that only partial-bollocks conflicts with the current public state of knowledge and really shouldn't be in the discard heap, and of those partials making attempts to see if they can find new ways to reincorporate that part of the knowledge in a modern context to aid the world around them - ie. its a knowledge scavenging mission and it's one that people are best suited to do just because they want to do it or be aware of more options as to how they can perceive the world and perceive themselves.

I find that to be intriguing. It would be interesting to spend a day with someone like you and observe some demonstrations and such.

Interesting historical lecture on Greco-Egyptian theurgy:

No. It means that each of two possible super positions has a 50 percent chance of being realized in a given interaction.

I won't argue that it's 'magic' but I would add that we can quantum compute with that so it's more than just a head-asplode idea; it's something actionable and technologically applicable. I think she was going down that Arthur C Clark line of thought that sufficiently advanced or complex technology can seem indistinguishable from magic to the lay observer. Then again I'd suppose a house can seem more metaphysically loaded between the walls to the lay person than it is to a general construction contractor.

All well and good. But I keep having this small stumbling point with "re-producing results" that seems to be a sticking point with such studies. Can't reproduce???? Then supply reasons that can be confirmed.

Perhaps better instrumentation might help to record results such as was accomplished during the main event of two black holes colliding recently ; lasted mere milliseconds, but was reliably recorded and helps us confirm the existence of gravity waves.

Perhaps you would know of such modern techniques which can/would help dispel the Gothic image of "Magick" and help confirm it's existence? I'd appreciate it.

Unfortunately I'm a lot less optimistic about that.

You could say I had a barrage of things happen to me in 2013 that have barely happened since or that they've happened in such a slow trickle since then that it's almost been enough for me to relapse into a sort of semi-materialism and a sort of confused agnosticism that can start heading toward agnostic-atheist materialism unless I really make myself recount my experiences and the potency of them. It's extremely difficult to maintain a faith in this stuff, even after ineffible experiences and seeing radical departures of normal causality, because once they're over life-as-usual swallows things back up again and the difference is significant enough that you're left to wonder if you just hallucinated the whole thing; deep down and from your vivid clarity on everything else that was happening you're quite certain that you didn't lose your lucidity, that things happened as you remember them, just that the type of causality that brought such an experience around is almost nowhere to be found until perhaps the next time a goddess decides to pick you up in her arms or an angel decides to have a word with you. One thing I did find remarkably interesting was MP Hall talking about people having such experiences, swearing up and down that they were awake when actually they were asleep, people being with them when they swore they were awake and that they didn't get up, grab a pen or pencil, or jump out of bed because they were just too captivated/commanded by the experience but then again a person who they knew was in the room, whom he spoke with as well and confirmed as much, swore just as adamantly that the experiencer had their eyes closed. In my own case I have a 50/50 split - some of these episodes I remember happening on brief awakenings in sleep, other episodes I either was waking up, the contiguity between hitting my alarm, these experiences happening, and standing beside my bed is too convincing or I might have been laying down but sunk into a semi-dream state without actually falling asleep. I think liminal states in general are where it happens, that's about all I can pin down for certain.

Whatever's going on, if anything is going on beyond the unknown depths of human neurology, the dynamics themselves are either non-sentient (even if they beings involved are sentient) or if the dynamic itself is sentient it could in the most absolute sense give to ishts whether we ever have concrete proof that it exists and it would almost seem to even deliberately work against our ever having concrete proof. Either our politics are utterly unimportant to the universe, or, we're dealing with a dynamic that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but happens to be a dog or cat instead - ie. some fissure between consciousness and physicality that we just don't understand yet and tend to personify as beings when our personifications of it are illusory but the the thing being personified may not be illusory at its core.

All of that is part of why I'd never want to argue for the value of esotericism, magic, or mysticism on the level of it being objectively or externally 'real' - ie. it's so convoluted from what I said above that it's just not credible to try arguing in favor of that because everything I just said would seem to any reasonable person like proof that these things aren't objective and any invocation of conspiracy in nature is unquestionably the sign of logic failing. What does make sense for me to argue for, and I really don't think this is hypocritical in any way, are the effects that can be gained by better psychology and internal resource which make equal amounts of sense and are equally forward thinking whether we're consciousness reincarnating into imaginary vessels or whether we're material that accidentally became conscious by means of nerves in an unconscious universe, didn't exist before birth and won't exist after death. There's a lot in this territory that is equally beneficial regardless of what the ultimate metaphysics are - whether idealist, reductive materialist, or anything along these lines.

I posted that Stephen Skinner video because I found his research interesting, and I similarly enjoy reading and listening to John Michael Greer and Mark Stavish because of their degree of professionalism, attention to detail, and earnest quest for truth. At the same time though I have to make the disclaimer that all of my own experiences have been unpredictable and I can't say that I've ever done anything to call them out firmly (partly due to my own residual skepticism - I don't want to shatter my exploration by making ultimatums) so while I find people like Mark Stavish, Jean Dubuis, John Michael Greer, Nick Farrell, Israel Regardie, William Ernest Butler, and William G Gray highly competent within their specialized areas I'd have to also say that I haven't personally achieved the kinds of results they speak of and while they all seem like very straight-faced and academic guys who've achieved a lot on this I'd feel uncomfortable staking the verity of their results on their honor, ie. the topic is too hot and controversial and the results, by most people's theories, should be very easily performed if there's anything to them - like what Sam Harris said in a recent Joe Rogan podcast that all it would take is one person going into a laboratory with an unbiased set of researchers - and walking the talk. There's too many layers here for me to want to flush it all down the toilet based on whether or not that's possible and, for better or worse, my own experiences tend to reinforce that at a minimum - whether or not there's more significant things to be had from this than just neuron-angling - there's too much of cultural and archetypal value to be farmed from this field of human inquiry either way to be quite as binary true/false in my thinking as most people are about this stuff. At the same time I completely understand the desire of most people to hold rigid categories of either 'it's real' or 'it's bunk' and largely out of respect to that I prefer to stick with what's universally relevant.

All of that said I probably should share a particular experience I even had a couple months ago, to muddy the waters a bit more:

I've been temp-to-hire at a job where I sit in finance and script macros in Excel for accounts receivable, general accounting, and other finance departments. I've enjoyed a lot of success in this way but I also had an experience of trying to work in their accounts receivable department and found it utterly psychotic - ie. the company is completely disconnected, people won't respond to emails requesting info unless they've either worked with you before or if you've asserted your authority over them somehow (with no organizational authority or leverage of your own), and most of the customers have really convoluted ways of blocking communication into invoices not received or paid yet. The human element of that was sheer anguish and, after about five or six months of scripting macros they were going to set me to task with contacting some of the worst of these vendors and being charged with results, and I really felt like I'd be left to hang because there were unresolvable conflicts (in one case the customer rejects any invoice inquiry stating that we're self-billed and at the same time our IT department has no log kept of rejected EDI's).

I ate my lunch, went out on my lunch break really distressed about my being set to a task that I really wanted to leave - ie. in my heart of hearts I want to permanently leave accounting and finance and go into programming. When I went to a local recreation park and set in my car to cool out I closed my eyes, imagined two lines of force going at each other at something like a 150 degree angle and getting maybe 20% productivity and 80% cannibalization of each other's energy and efficiency (ie. the psychotic refusal of internal communication and all the corporate departmental fiefdoms that make the job feel like beating yourself in the face with a brick for a paycheck). I imagined the anguish of being thrown into the broad-side of that intersection as if my soul was being thrown into a wood-chipper/shredder. At that point I instantly felt the Mary-like figure I'm used to sensing on occasion behind me, she instantly perceived my mental state, gave me a consoling hug, and then showed me sailing through the vertex of the broad side of the 150 degree intersecting line but rather than grinding myself down between them I was sailing through as if it were thin air, protected by a force that truly and deeply loved me. That later feeling was intense enough to bring me to tears.

Either that day or the next morning (I can verify which it was on Tuesday if anyone really wants to hold me to it) I received an email from my supervisor stating that the other four or five people in the department had the experience, the repetition, and the contacts already lined up to take care of researching and following up on all the customer reports that I'd generated and - since she saw that my heart was in IT - she'd rather let me do what I'd rather do.


Now, I will admit the possibility that I could instantly write all of this off as me being a unobjective dumbarse to believe that there's any connection whatsoever between my internal hallucination of contact with some nurturing maternal force (probably me grabbing at creature comfort like an intellectual/emotional weakling) and that that this is a big collage displaying my lack of personal integrity. Chance is chance and statistical anomalies happen all the time. Just that, well... I've had tight little clusters like these occur a few too many times too often for me to really buy pure coincidence as the most parsimonious explanation and while it's the most culturally gratifying interpretation it makes the least statistical sense, thus my experience seem to be in sharp contrast with conventional wisdom at this point. I mean, I could force myself to just go the reductive materialist route on this but I worry about two things a) would I squash the phenomena and remove it from my field of study? b) wouldn't I be doing something like watching my alarm clock jump off my nightstand, carve several perfect figure-eight's in the air, set it self right back down, and instantly crafting a reductive materialist explanation for what happened? IMHO false negatives and false positives are equally erroneous and particularly here where the observables are so rarefied there's no more virtue in a false positive or a false negative - you have to have the courage to at least partially accept the unbelievable but seen/experienced on its merits for a while until you really run into something that helps you solidly confirm or deny it; otherwise you're just taking up a belief and doing that is really a dead-end to inquiry.

This is part of why I really stay away from trying to convince people that this stuff is real but also stay fiercely noncommittal to pinning myself down to calling it either purely psychological or real kabbalistic magic that has an effect in the external world. The later seems 60-70% likely to me at this point but again, every crackpot alive likes saying things like that and it's zero proof of anything. So at the end of the day my subjective evidence remains my subjective evidence and if anyone wants any sort of evidence for or against this stuff the only advice I can give to a person is to take up a rigorous mystic/magical discipline, commit to it for at least three or four years, and see what happens in the interim. It's the only thing I can offer with confidence.

This quote from Aleister Crowley pretty much nails it for me:

The word "Magic" descends from a Greek word "Magos" describing members of Persian scholar/priest caste and deriving from the Old Persian "Magush." The word was similar in meaning to Drycraeft and "Druid" among the Celts of the West.

Part of what these people did was religious ritual, but a huge part of it was what later evolved into science. The Persian Magi were certainly astrologers, like the three "wise men" of biblical legend and the wood and stone henges left all over Western Europe have been shown to mark alignments of astronomical events, making it clear that seasonal astronomy was somehow (unsurprisingly given their agrarian society) central to the practices of the Druids.

A large part of the magic of the ancients has descended to us in the form of science. Astrology became Astronomy. Alchemy became Chemistry. The ancient keen observation of animals and plants became Biology and the medical sciences.

We live in a world suffused with technology based in what would once have been magic. Pretty much anything that involves electromagnetic manipulation, like the digital devices and networks we communicate through, for example, are descended from the earliest observation of invisible forces that permeated all things, elaborated through millenia of hard work and careful experimentation.

In some sense we all practice "magick" every time we use a phone, start a car, use a microwave, computer or electric light.

In some sense, our technologists and engineers are all practical magicians.

Another part of that ancient wisdom falls more in the area of psychology.

We don't understand the workings of consciousness very well, or know how ideas and emotions take root and evolve within human minds, but their is undoubtedly wisdom in the myths and archetypes that have come down to us from those ancient times. Jung explored this in his divergent travels from Freudian psychology, and various psychological pioneers like Maslow have had related insights about the relationship between the old myths and inner realities. There are dangerous forces there, too.

People who want to believe that there is something "real" beyond myth in that material run the risk of opening themselves up to abuse at a very deep level by skilled manipulators and con artists, who may be seen as another kind of practical magician.

This is really oddly popular in England and I have no idea why. I think it's an aesthetic thing for some, it's also really popular on tumblr.

It's definitely interesting but I don't believe in any of it but a lot of the wiccan kinda goths that hang around are usually just really kind and nice people and their community is very caring of each other, it could just well be a community aesthetic thing for some. The entire belief thing is a bit daunting though when you're an atheist.

I've walked by this place before and thought it looked rather interesting. I can see the appeal at least.

That's true up to a point, but I don't think the manipulators and con artists are as common as the rational materialist crowd would have us believe. The few magical/spiritualist people I have met have all been genuine and trustworthy. To add a bit of context, Christianity and Islam also have their share of manipulative preachers and clergy, but most Christian or Muslim people are decent.


England is where most of the "modern" (i.e. 19th/20th century) magical tradition comes from. Wicca was *made* in England. You've also got chaos magic, Thelema, the Golden Dawn and its various offshoots. All created by English magicians. The place is like Jerusalem for wizards.

To add something on some of the above concepts:

I think a lot of people are starting to understand that to have any shot at enjoying life or being well-adjusted in as competitive and challenging a culture as we have they're on their own to figure themselves out. Modern esotericism, particularly the orders and the various books written by students of the modern orders, aims at self-cultivation and it's a collection of private systems which take aim at positive psychology, hacking one's mind with a wealth of mnemonic systems, and it really tries to get at the injunction of "Man - Know thyself".

There clearly are some dangers, like Adamantium said some people might have more brewing under the surface than they realize. Israel Regardie actually recommended that people see a psychotherapist for at least a year or so if possible to get a head-start at self discovery so they aren't too shaken up when the kinds of things that, in his case the Hermetic Golden Dawn system, start actually working and taking some of the shielding down that exists between conscious and subconscious regions of the brain. That said, ideally speaking you're looking at more knowledge, a more integrated sense of self, far fewer surprises or drives that you don't understand, and quite possibly significant payoff in how you function and can orient yourself to your own life for your efforts.