On paper, I probably seem like an unlikely person to get into magick - a technologist from a secular family with socialist leanings. The truth is that I’ve always had an interest in the esoteric, the occult, the arcane, though my relation to it has changed enormously over time. In recent years I’ve been drawn to it through the works and thinking of Alan Moore, and reminded of my love for it via such evocative fictional works as Cultist Simulator that draw heavily on traditions like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as cosmic horror fiction (a personal favourite genre) to create an original cosmology. Put simply, I just think it’s neat.
That said, I think my current interest is tied to a broad question of our future, and a kind of search for a way forward both personally and collectively. It seems to me that, as Zizek suggests, what we need is more theory, more ideology. My answer to that provocation is magickal in nature.
Magick exists in the mind, but that alone is a huge space. If all society, all civilisation, culture, technology, art, first emerges from the human will and imagination, then that process is related to magick, even when we call it “art” or “creativity”. Which is to say, if I envision a result, and then perform actions to enable the result, the only difference between a materialistic outlook on what happened or a magickal one is how closely one eschews to strict causality as an acceptable explanation of how the result was achieved.
[pictured: Wands representing material circumstances (fire) progress to Cups (water) driving immaterial desire, progressing to Swords (air), logical thought and planning, and finally Disks (earth), material execution. cf. OODA loop]
I’ve also become acutely aware of how all our structures are arbitrarily invented by someone. Any area of technology (in the broad sense) comes from some one or ones grouping physical reality into Malkuthian or abstract arrangements. If Science can be thought of as a constrained or methodical way to create knowledge that closely corresponds to reality, modern magick represents a well of the negative space around that. Historically magick was everything, and we have formalised disciplines and systems from it, and what remains is interstitial, liminal, and postmodern.
We can recognise that churches and religions are an answer to how to persist and develop a set of beliefs and values, embodied in practices and ritual. Pure materialism is unable to empower this organisation, and the socialist visions of the 20th century have been bleached and bled dry of their energy.
I want to “enchant” my life and my thinking, not to reject my existing knowledge and beliefs but to widen them as a way to escape the hill of rationalism that we seem to be stuck upon. The (intellectual) tools we’ve built brought us here, and so to go on to an elsewhere, there has to be a laying aside of our most powerful tools, not to discard them but to open the space for the development of new tools, or the reconfiguration of our workspaces.
This is mystical drivel
You're cool and this is cool