What Is Magic?
Very few people enjoy sitting around and reading the dictionary, but every now and then a definition is a really handy thing. Lots of people talk about magic without asking the basic question “What is it?” Is magic defined by what is done? By how it’s done? By who (magicians?) does it? Is it natural? Supernatural? (And what is “supernatural” anyway?)
We can start with the dictionary, with the understanding that the people who wrote it probably don’t have much experience with real magic. Merriam-Webster gives us this definition:
magic = a power that allows people (such as witches and wizards) to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions.
This is a fictional definition, or at least a definition of fictional magic. It says that people can do impossible things, but impossible things can’t be done. It also emphasizes the “special” words or actions, which, we’ll learn, are so much window dressing.
Let’s try Webster’s Dictionary:
magic = the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.
This definition is a little snooty, with its “presumably,” but it actually is a step in the right direction. I like that it’s open-ended on the techniques, and I like that it addresses both the supernatural and “forces of nature.”
Let’s see what a real magician or two have to say. In his Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley, the famous English occultist, said that magick (he liked the “k”) is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”
“Science and Art” is a great phrase, and many subsequent magicians have retained it. Magic is a science, with a reliable and, often, repeatable structure. It has underlying principles to be studied and understood. Magic is also an art; it often works intuitively and creatively, and the best magic gives practitioners the same sort of visceral feedback as other forms of creative expression. Just as a musician feels it in her gut when creating and again when performing, a magician is often working from a feeling, nonlinear place both when designing a spell and again when doing the magic. The work is both precise (science) and touchy-feely (art).
“Change in conformity with Will” sounds, at first, just like Webster’s “producing a desired effect or result.” There are, however, a couple of crucial differences. First, what Crowley meant by “Will” was “True Will,” an esoteric idea found in his The Book of the Law. The meaning of True Will is core to Thelema, Crowley’s mystical system, and is far more than simply what one desires. The True Will is, perhaps, one’s destiny, or perhaps one’s highest self, or perhaps one’s desires when lived fully in accordance with nature. Like they say on Facebook, it’s complicated.
The second important difference is that Crowley says “Change” and stops there, whereas Webster’s goes on to say “through the use of …” and tries to get descriptive.
If I determine that my True Will is to be in California, and I buy a plane ticket, go to the airport, get on a plane, and fly west, I have effected a change in accordance with Will. Is that magic?
By Crowley’s definition, the answer is yes, and that’s not an oversight. The real work of the Thelemic magician is in uncovering the True Will, and in creating change, however that change occurs. It’s a definition that is meant to draw attention to the impossibility of separating magic from real life.
I’m all in favor of understanding that magic isn’t separate from real life, a topic I’ll return to. However, for a working definition of magic, muddying the waters with philosophy, however profound, doesn’t really help.
Dion Fortune, the wonderful occult author and a contemporary of Crowley’s, offered a definition that’s even worse. She said that magic is “the art of changing consciousness at will.” Once again, this definition omits any mention of how such change occurs, and makes matters worse by confining the change to “consciousness.” Again, this is offering a definition that works better as philosophy than as linguistics. Fortune wants us to understand that, ultimately, “change comes from within.” All change is change in consciousness.
Both Crowley and Fortune were involved with the “Great Work,” which Crowley also called “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” This is the work of transforming the self into its highest, and most godlike, expression, communing with one’s inner divinity. The purpose of magic, both would assure you, is to achieve this.
They would also be adamant that a spell to get a job, change the weather, or win in court has nothing to do with magic as they defined it.
They would be wrong.
We haven’t yet defined magic, but we’re pretty close. We know that change is involved, and we have dictionaries suggesting that there is some kind of goal (“desired result”) based on techniques that may be “impossible” or “supernatural” or something else.
So let’s assume that when we end up with a definition, it’s going to be in the realm of “XYZ techniques used to produce ABC results.” Does it matter, then, if sometimes the results are profoundly spiritual and sometimes they’re quite ordinary?
I’d say no.
In his book Real Magic, author, Druid, and magician Isaac Bonewits talked about “thaumaturgy” and “theurgy.” These are Greek words for two kinds of magic: “wonder working” and “god working,” respectively. What’s important here is that, yes, these are two different kinds of magic, but they’re both magic. As we proceed with this book, we’ll talk about a whole range of techniques and methods, and the truth is, the same sets of techniques and methods apply regardless of the ultimate goal.
In chapter six, we’ll talk about “flavors” of power. You will probably want to vary how you raise power depending on where you intend to send that power—job-flavored power for a job spell, love-flavored power for a love spell. But that’s tweaking the magic, not doing a whole different thing.
Let’s use a food analogy. There are lots of different kinds of food with lots of different flavors. The food you prepare is geared toward a specific goal. My relaxing midnight snack of nachos is not my carbo-load before a marathon, is not my body-building protein shake, is not my celebratory birthday cake. But all of these are food, they’re all prepared in a kitchen, and they’re all digested. At a base level, they have more in common than not. Yes, they seem very different, but if you played “one of these things is not like the other,” like they do on Sesame Street, and your choices were (1) nachos, (2) a plate of pasta, (3) a protein shake, (4) birthday cake, or (5) a shoe, you would not struggle to figure out which one doesn’t belong.
In other words, magic is magic. Theurgy and thaumaturgy have also been called “high magic” and “low magic,” respectively, and there is a centuries-long tradition of practitioners of one sneering at those who use the other. But the truth is, they’re both doing the same things, albeit in different ways and for different purposes.
You can divide magic into all sorts of categories, of course. It’s the old “there are two kinds of people in the world” game. There are zillions of kinds of people, which can be divided in a wide variety of ways. Magic can be divided into thaumaturgy and theurgy, into elemental attributes (as I did in The Way of Four Spellbook), into colors (as Bonewits did in Real Magic), into passive and active, or into any number of other groupings; and while these groupings are interesting and useful, creating groups like this never means that one or some aren’t actually magic.
Let’s go back to Real Magic. I learned a lot about magic from Isaac Bonewits, and was married to him for ten years, so it isn’t surprising that I really like his definition of magic:
… an art and a science for dealing with particular types of knowledge, the manipulation of which will produce results that will astound and amaze the uninformed. 1
Bonewits then asks how magic differs from science, and concludes:
The science and art of magic deals with a body of knowledge that … has not yet been fully investigated or confirmed by the other arts and sciences. 2
I like this definition a lot, because it is the first one that tries to define the occult or supernatural aspect without going completely off the rails. Something is “occult” when it is hidden (the origin of the word) or unknown, or not fully known. Something is supernatural when it is outside of our understanding of how nature works. That understanding can, of course, change.
What I don’t like about this definition, though, is the roundabout way it addresses the actual doing part of magic. It “deals with” knowledge, “the manipulation of which … .” Why don’t you just use the magic?
In The Way of Four Spellbook, I defined magic as “the science and art of using occult and/or mystical and/or spiritual forces to cause change in accordance with will.”
We’re sticking with that. It’s an active definition, emphasizing the “using” part; it references the occult and mystical while still leaving the definition of those things open, which is needed; and it makes clear that the purpose of magic is to produce a result. (“High magic” produces spiritual or psychological results. “Low magic” produces real-world results. In either case, we have results.)
In the following pages, we’ll talk about all of this: the science and the art, the occult, mystical, and spiritual forces, the use of will, and causing change.
What Does Magic Do?
One of the useful things about defining magic is it tells us both what magic can do and what it can’t do. We’ve gotten to a definition that says that magic uses certain forces—spiritual, occult, and mystical. It doesn’t just happen; it uses something real, yet currently ill-defined, to make things happen. Bonewits says the occult is not “fully investigated” but leaves the door open for deeper understanding in the future.
When I first started teaching about magic, I lived in New York City (Queens, to be precise). I had a little spell I liked to do while waiting for the subway late at night. In those days, the subway ran every twenty minutes on its after-hours schedule. During the three years I lived in the city, using my spell, I waited more than ten minutes only two or three times—a statistically impressive feat!
But, I’d tell my students, doing the very same spell in the middle of a Kansas cornfield was really not going to work. Here’s the rule:
Magic doesn’t turn the impossible into the possible. Magic turns the improbable into the probable.
Because we’re dealing with a whole lot of areas that aren’t fully known, because all the knowledge in the universe isn’t always at our fingertips, because medical science, physics, neuroscience, and other disciplines are still fraught with mystery, we can’t always tell the difference between the impossible and the possible. (If we’re not sure, it does no harm to do a spell that may be impossible!) Despite that caveat, this rule gives us a good idea of what magic can and cannot do.
Magic Can’t
• Physically raise the dead
• Make people fly
• Make subways appear in the middle of Kansas
• Turn lead into gold
• Turn water into wine
• Etc.
Magic Can
• Heal the very sick, including those for whom medical science gives little or no hope
• Protect (a person, a home) from harm
• Make subways appear on subway tracks where they would have appeared eventually anyway
• Bring fertility
• Find missing things/people
• Get a job for an unemployed person
• Attract a mate
• Sell a house
• Etc.
How Does Magic Work?
Our definition gives us this very loose amalgam of forces that empower magic: occult, mystical, and spiritual. Can we get more specific? What is it exactly that makes magic work?
There are, it turns out, four specific things. Magic works because of the following components:
1. Interconnection
2. Transcending space and time
3. Intention
4. Power
Here is a short explanation of how magic works. We’ll spend the next several chapters expanding upon it.
Magic works by (a) focusing your intention, (b) creating a direct path to the target of your work by using interconnection and by transcending space and time, (c) raising power, and (d) sending power toward the target.
Power
Power is the easiest of the four components to discuss, because we all pretty much know what it is. It may be hard to define in words, but it’s easy to recognize. Whether we call it oomph, energy, or pizzazz, power is that buzzing, thrilling force that animates the inert, enlivens the blah, and brings a kind of wakefulness. When you’re there and you feel it, you know it. We’ve all had those moments in life—maybe at a great concert, or during sex, or even in a quiet moment out in nature—when we’ve thought, “If only I could bottle this!” You feel the power coursing through the moment, and you know that if you could plug into it, you could keep a city’s lights on!
Raising power and sending power are all about plugging into the source of that power; “raising” is generating the power and “sending” is directing it in such a way as to make it useful. After all, a thunderstorm is full of power, but it doesn’t keep the lights on, because it isn’t plugged in—the “sending” is missing.
The next chapters will be about intention, interconnection, and time and space. Once we’ve thoroughly explored these other components that make magic work, we’ll return to the subject of how to raise and send power.
What Is a Spell?
It may strike you as curious that we’ve discussed magic for several pages now without ever discussing spells. Perhaps this is why the Real Magic definition of magic was a little indirect. Magic is a force, a principle, an understanding, a philosophy: a science and an art, as several definitions we looked at agree. But spells are the things that use magic.
A spell is a series of steps taken to achieve a magical goal.
Chapters eight and nine are where we are going to define those steps in detail and dig into how to construct and perform a spell, how to fine-tune your magical work, what the specific components of a spell are, and more. But it would be odd to enter into chapter after chapter of how magic works without at least mentioning spells.
Earlier we used a food analogy, comparing magic to food. I prefer a slightly different analogy, still food-related: if magic is cooking, a spell is a recipe. I love this comparison because cooking, too, is both a science and an art. As a science, cooking uses chemical changes triggered by variations in temperature, by combining ingredients, by friction, and so on. The science part requires precise timing, exact temperatures, and controlled conditions in the kitchen. The art, though, requires creativity above all, a feel for what might work, an openness to experimentation, and a certain joie de vivre.
In cooking, we sometimes use recipes from books, or the Internet, or memory, and we sometimes make it up as we go along. In truth, making it up is also a recipe—one that’s being written on the fly. In theory, you could certainly write down your spontaneous steps as you invent them, and then you’d have a recorded recipe for future use. Of course, you could also use a written recipe and change it—with substitutions, with different proportions, and so on.
Let’s go back to the science and art of magic. In the analogy, spells are recipes. Indeed, there are many spellbooks on the market, just as there are many cookbooks. There are also “cookbooks” that are really in the business of teaching you how to cook and use specific recipes as lessons or examples, and there are spellbooks like that as well (The Way of Four Spellbook is one).
Fictional magic places a great deal of emphasis on spellbooks; we often “learn” in fiction that all you need to perform magic is the right spell from the right book, or that you need some additional gift or skill, but the spell is a necessary precursor. In reality, just as some people do fine in the kitchen without a cookbook, a magician can work without a spellbook. Raising and sending power, focusing intention, and establishing connection are absolutely necessary; opening the magic scroll and reciting the words will never be enough, and will never be strictly necessary either.
Why, then, use a spell? Well, as I’ve said, when you organize your magic into a series of steps, that is a spell, whether you used one from a book or made it up on the spot. Using a pre-written spell from an outside source can be inspiring and helpful, but anytime you put your steps together, anytime you figure out how you’re going to do magic in any kind of linear way, you’re creating a spell.
A spell is a series of steps taken to achieve a magical goal. Those steps, in their most basic form, are (1) focus your intention, (2) create your connection, (3) raise power, (4) send power, and (5) finish the spell.
Why are spell “recipes” so much more intricate than this? First of all, they aren’t, or they don’t have to be. Creating the connection can be complex, and generally, most of the steps of a spell are working toward that goal. The connection, though, really helps with the focus quite a lot, so it serves multiple purposes. Additionally, multiple steps add different sources of power to a spell, as we’ll learn.
When you’ve finished reading this book, pull a spellbook off your shelf (or off a bookstore shelf, if you don’t have one) and see if you can determine, for any spell, which of these five steps correspond to the steps of that spell. Sometimes a spell may assume a step—the text may never tell you to focus, or when to send power. But having read Magical Power For Beginners, you should be able to fill in the blanks.