![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Why Magic?
Since we recently touched on some of David Abram’s work, I wanted to pull in a little more from his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, a chapter of which is available online here, entitled the “Ecology of Magic.” Abram writes:
In keeping with the popular view of shamanism as a tool for personal transcendence, the most sophisticated definition of “magic” that now circulates through the American counterculture is “the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will.” There is no mention made of any reason for altering one’s state of consciousness. Yet in tribal cultures that which we call “magic” takes all of its meaning from the fact that, in an indigenous and oral context, humans experience their own intelligence as simply one form of awareness among many others. The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with other species on their own terms.
This seems like a great subject for people interested in the occult and “magick” that I rarely hear people even approach. I’ve been listening a lot to the excellent podcasts on magic & yoga by Zac of Alchemical Braindamage, as well as the secular magic of people like Steve Pavlina who traffic in “personal development for smart people.” And while I think their techniques are really fascinating (and seem to work - I have been experimenting), I would love to develop a conversation around why in the first place do we want to transcend ourselves? Why do we want to alter our consciousness at will.
I think this ecological concept of doing it in order to find your place within the multiplicity of many worlds and entities may be an especially interesting one. I don’t have a lot of thoughts to flesh this out initially with, but thought I’d go ahead and open the door on something that may turn out to be a helpful way of integrating many different areas we’ve covered here in the past.
- Where do I sign up???
- Human Universals
- Definition of magic that I like
- Magick, a Distraction?
- Alphabet Magic
- Prev: Psychoactive Plants
- Next: Children of a Troubled World
October 4th, 2006 at 10:57 am
According to Shaman Ronald Eppich http://www.shamans-cave.com/
He defines an altered state of consciousness as
http://www.shamans-cave.com/Basic_Shamanism.html
October 4th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Gurdjieff says that we are all a multiplicity of selves. Each in its own way a sort of tyrant that can gain control, remains strong for a while, then becomes weak , and is wrested down by another self.
Self observation was his way to be aware of the different selves , and to gain mastery over them to the extent of not identifying with their multiplicity, and realizing that many of these selves are not so very attractive, or have been brainwashed into us by circumstances.
Gurdjieff had something he called the , Toast to the Idiots. Before a meal he would toast the multiplicity of personalities contained within each person.
The idea being to make people wake up and not identify that they are a current negative personality.
His idea of transcendence was to get the awareness level to to a point that people would become less mechanical and become more the essence of what they actually were.
October 4th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Although the occult has been by its nature at the periphery of, and frequently in opposition to, the mainstream in the West, it’s not been able to avoid reflecting the host culture. Of course! And yes, much Western occultism is individualist, transcendental and disconnected from nature.
Some of the motivation is similar to our motivations for technological development, I think - gaining personal power, wealth, excitement, escapism, and a kind of evolutionary impulse to see where things go. I don’t dismiss any of these as useless or “evil” out of hand, but the social and ecological situation these motivations have brought us to makes them deserving of qualification with some of the longer-standing motivations for altering consciousness, i.e. the ecological ones Abram refers to.
As ever, there’s almost no question of “going back”, except for a few lucky, motivated, or unlucky people. Phil Hine stands out as someone who’s grappled properly with applying an ecological sensitivity to urban occultism. Jan Fries is one of the best modern occult writers who deals with “nature magick”. And Ramsey Dukes has applied various forms of animistic thinking to modern life in really vivid and useful ways. He does address nature per se sometimes, but his focus is our social, political and ideological ecologies. These people are great starting points for grappling with a more ecologically-minded approach to magic in a way that embraces, or at least accepts, the modern world.
October 4th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
So magic’s just a fancy word for changing your consciousness — cool. So what is the general opinion about the type of magic that’s supposed to, like, cure disease and get you a raise at work and stuff? I personally never believed that stuff existed, but I’m curious to know how many people in the magic-practicing community do believe in that kind of magic (which I think Aleister Crowley called “low magic” or “thaumaturgy” as opposed to the consciousness-changing “high magic” or”theurgy”). Any comments?
October 4th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
I recently came across a great parable that told the story of a fisherman who spent his entire lifetime fishing using a 3″ mesh net. At the end of his life, he concluded that there was nothing in the ocean smaller than 3 inches. After all, he had no evidence to support such claims.
Are we to fall victim to the same mistake with our sense of perception? Even when you add the countless other ways we have to “measure” things, who is to say we’re taking in anywhere near the “full amount” of what’s out there? For me, my interest in “all this stuff” is fueled by my fascination, curiosity, and sense of mystery — all of which point me beyond my “base” nature (with its “base” senses).
October 4th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Curiousity? Boredom? A desire to go beyond the ordinary?
October 4th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
A bit of a simplification… but probably more useful than more tangled definitions. I think the missing key is intent and will. Magic is usually distinguished from mysticism because it’s trying to cause change rather than surrender. Though of course, there end up being hidden relationships between these two “opposites”.
Traditionally it’d probably be called “shamanism” if it’s in the service of the community and “sorcery” if it’s in the service of the individual. There’s a school of thought that says the bulk of the “Western Tradition” (Golden Dawn, ceremonial magic, etc.) is largely preserve of well-to-dos who didn’t need the pragmatic will to change of shamanism and sorcery, i.e. that there’s quite a class division behind so-called “high” and “low” magic. I think there’s a lot to this.
Sorcery got a bit boost from “Chaos Magick” in the 1970s. It reacted against the pomp and mysticism of ceremonial magick, and drew inspiration from punk, DIY culture, shamanism and postmodernism. People like Pete Carroll, Phil Hine, Dave Lee, Ray Sherwin and Ramsey Dukes fuelled it, and it had a lot of influence. That influence seemed to degenerate over time (naturally) to the point where it become criticized from within (it had always been criticized from without as “black”, “low”, or just too disrespectful to tradition).
I guess it’s related to that dynamic that Tim was talking about regarding plant psychedelics - the need for “hot shot” results that impress vs. the slow patience of sustained engagement. Chaos has always championed “results magick” as a way of cutting through the pie-in-the-sky bullshit and getting your hands dirty. Obviously that got perverted over time into a shallow quick-fix mentality. If you read the formative authors in the movement, however, you’ll notice that they’re just as withering about shallow half-hearted involvement as they are about spending all your time in the astral plane and not engaging with the real world.
Grant Morrison’s been pushing the pared-down, get results, just do it attitude with his “Pop magic” meme. I think there’ll more of this oscillation between punk-style immediacy and a more considered pulling back and immersing in complex traditions, for culture as well as for individuals.
In any case so-called “low magic” definitely exists, and definitely works. It wasn’t my path - but I stopped because it worked, not because it didn’t. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to be a double-bluff initiator. It looks like a short cut to getting what you want, but if you go at it, you make mistakes, and start to learn that to do it well, it’s as much about learning what you actually want as it is about getting that. So then it becomes more complex than first appearances suggest… Like anything else
October 4th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Magic that your talking about is to manipulate and control people with spells.? That’s no fun.
Magic just means having a good time, being your self , and not caring what people think.
Manipulating people is a dead end. Crowley = ugly human.
October 4th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
To me it’s like this to relate back to magic being all about altering consciousness: what if the reason magic to cure disease/get a raise works is because your alter your conciousness through some ritual (which is what a lot of the stuff I read seems to point at). For example, my back is really screwed up, but in a normal state of conciousness I can’t do much about it other than go to doctors, do yoga, or something like that. However, somewhere my mind knows how to heal my body, it knows what needs to be done, it does it all the time with cuts/broken bones/etc. So I go into an altered state of conciousness (I’ll say downwards to a more animalistic type mindset) which allows my unconscious to not have to fight through my conscious mind to effect some change like that. For gaining money, our minds are bigger than just our bodies, so maybe if you go up a level into an altered state where your consciousness is bigger then your unconscious can see a pattern and be like, alright if I do this then this will happen then this then this….etc. and I’ll make money. In our cause-effect taught way of thinking it doesn’t really make sense to say, ok if I go into work 5 minutes early tomorrow, then I’ll see this person and say this and they’ll do this and this and this, because it’s too hard for us to see the really big pattern. But I believe that our minds can see and understand the pattern if we’re open to it.
October 4th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
For me it’s the same reason I like to learn new things, travel to different places, talk to new people, speak new languages, etc. I want to expand my world and by doing so expand my own mind. I’m not satisfied just accepting that humans are the top and what we say is right. My personal experiences sort of constantly push me in the direction that for me personally it’s important to try to open up and understand what the hell is going on rather than just sitting back and being like: oh look, a ghost just walked through the room. Guess people are number one and ghosts don’t exist! I would say originally, in the very very beginning before I knew what any of these terms were, I wanted to alter my consciousness to learn about the after life, but now it’s way beyond that.
October 4th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
That’s pretty much my experience as well.
I like the focus on ecology. Most of my magic(k) at the moment is focused on understanding how to promote ecological thinking in my professional environment.
October 5th, 2006 at 7:08 am
Skip, not sure if you were responding to my post. Anyway, the magic I was talking about can be used to manipulate and control people. Knives can be used to cut veggies or stab people. There’s a lingering, deep suspicion about this magic - usually expressed by called it “black magic” - that is our inheritance from the Christian suppression of all magic.
Yes, projecting your ego trips into other people’s lives is a dead end. But I also think that the total withdrawal from this kind of magic - shamanism or sorcery - leads in the end to a kind of solipsistic “high magic” just concerned with personal transcendence. “Low magic” engages with the real world - which includes other people. Shamans manipulate people to heal them. I wonder if our image of “low magic” as insidious and to be avoided is as much to do with our individualist separation from genuine human community, warts and all, as it has to do with avoidance of its selfish, destructive aspects.
October 5th, 2006 at 9:02 am
Yes. For me, it comes down to what you’re giving back to your community. But this is true whether you’re talking about “effective change technology” or any other type of technology. Technology can always be used for selfish or short-sighted ends; often that’s its raison d’etre. But if you wish to effect some positive change in your world, then you may need to leverage energy in some specific way, which means you need some kind of technology. Now, people can argue about what “positive” means and there are often several right answers, but if your intentions are largely focused on the good of a group of people or beings larger than yourself then you’re probably headed in at least somewhat of a right direction.
October 5th, 2006 at 9:17 am
Yes, Slomo. Right on man.
Gyrus , I was just making a comment about Crowley in particular as a ugly type of human.
The reason I am kinda down on the magic thing is because of people I have run into over a period of many years.
Some of the ones that were so called witch’s , or met in groups like that , or were into the spell stuff , seemed to have people, and sometimes a spouse or other close people around them that they believed they could control.
I just think this is a very negative way to interact with people. Who is controlling who.?
My impression in general is that the Occult offers and promises a lot , but usually deliver little to nothing.
It captures people with claims.
I have also found that people that take a lot of drugs or drink a lot of booze seem to be particularly interested in the Occult. This leads me to think it is tied into a sort of fantasy trip also.
Most people that are drug users think about doing a lot of things , but do not actually do much, and these people also are good at manipulating people, or some would say putting spells on people.
October 5th, 2006 at 9:32 am
While it is true that a lot of great music and literature has come from people in a drug altered state, it also seems that some of these people have turned open the spigot of creativity for a brief , wonderful time , and then gone up in a brilliant fireworks display and then a puff of smoke.
Magic partly is part of the consciousness movement. It tries to reconcile the types of things that Slomo just brought up. Why we feel such great pain at living in an unjust society. How to reconcile the pain and hurt of elements of this society.
Wouldn’t it be nice to put a love spell on someone sometime.? Very tempting, and a nice fantasy. Reality is you can not make anyone like you, or love you. It is a mistake to think you can. This is probably the essence of where the occult is wrong.
October 6th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Yeah, when I talked about “ecology” above, I don’t so much simply mean “nature” so much as I mean finding your place within a complex system - optimizing your role and functionality
October 6th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
It’s not so much a matter of believing it. Try it yourself and see if it works. That’s the whole point. Also, why isn’t healing and getting a raise a matter of changing your consciousness?
October 6th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Wow, very well put! I have been thinking about this whole complex of issues a lot lately. I know for an indisputable fact that I can get what I want. Problem is now, what the hell do I want?
October 6th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
As I said, my experience is that if you apply yourself to occultism diligently, this way of opening yourself up to and interacting with the world will impel you to either shed your illusions or come a cropper.
The mistake seems to me to be our own cultural mindset, that of separation from nature, the belief that we are granted ultimate power over nature (by “God” or “evolution and technology”), and the illusion that humans, as lords of this realm, can be fully in control. Inevitably these delusions seep into our culture’s approach to magic, as they seep into everything else. I don’t see them manifest significantly in any other culture’s approach to magic.
You’re right that magic’s to do with fantasy; but the point is, surely, that fantasy and imagination can be used or abused; you can find your way or you can get lost in it. Again, as a culture we’ve lost our bearings in that realm, so any technique for exploring it is going to be, for us, littered with cautionary tales. I find it useful to bear in mind that it’s the adherence to rationalist positivism that leaves us so much at the mercy of the slippier aspects of fantasy and imagination. It’s like fencing off a vital part of the landscape, trying to ignore it, and wondering why the people who go there to mine essential resources (for their own or other’s benefit) often get lost and stuck in forgotten swamps.
There’s loads of bollocks in the occult, though. Sometimes part of the fun, sometimes a reason to steer clear…
October 6th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
I had a dream last night that I met a beautiful girl in a room full of people. We talked a few word, and then glommed on to each other. We were strangers that clicked. Then we made a plan to leave together to another place. We kissed.
It was a great dream. I loved it . I woke up from it and it was morning. I was happy. I thought to myself that that is what magic and happiness is. Freedom of action.
October 6th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Tim,
Is this a place where I can write what I have written, or is this unrelated? If so, I will not talk about my ideas about “rewilding” versus “domestication,” or about specialization.
October 6th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Peaknickster, the comments to each post should be considered a topical discussion centered around the concepts and questions raised in that post. In this instance, I would like to see comments relating to the topics of magic, spirituality, personal development, consciousness, shamanism, David Abram, ecology, etc. I am, in particular, most interested in developing a conversation in this specific post about the role of ecological thinking within the topic of personal spiritual development.
Hope that clarifies what I am looking for and helps you focus your responses!
October 6th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Thanks. I just wanted to know. I won’t post anything here about those topics!
October 6th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
No problem, happy to help!
October 6th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
I wouldn’t trust myself with that kind of power even if I did believe it existed.
October 8th, 2006 at 1:12 am
uh here we go back to free will vs. god’s will - I think that’s what it comes down to with AC … he seemed to phrase it as ‘mysticism’ vs. ‘magick’… except for sufism… anyway.
you should view ac through the lens of ’sweating out the pneuma’ in the context of the set and setting and the limits of the day’s pseudoscience, definitely.
I don’t think we have anything on AC going ‘native’ except for something about a 33 degree masonic ritual in mexico and somehow I think they left the peyote out of that one.
you know you people are going to get me in trouble one day, saying shit i am not supposed to…
personally, i think you should not be wandering the rain forest without the full backing of samuel colt and there is a real dichotomy there, that shit is never going to get resolved in my day
-tc
October 8th, 2006 at 1:13 am
why magic{k}? hells ya it is free will baby