Time and Space
In chapter one we said that magic works, in part, by transcending space and time. Now we’re going to delve into time, and then space, and figure out how we can achieve that transcendence.
Time
One of the things that empowers magical work is the ability to understand time as less fixed, and less linear, than it is normally perceived.
For people interested in the occult and in New Age thought, this isn’t a new concept. Philosophers and thinkers reach into the laws of physics to explain that time isn’t real, although physicists aren’t always thrilled with how laypeople describe their science. My good friend who is both a physicist and an occultist tells me that magicians often mistake the philosophical or spiritual for the scientific if they don’t have a strong understanding of the math behind relativity. And he’s right—I don’t.
In reading up on the subject, I find a variety of scientists disagreeing with one another: time is considered a controversial topic. Physicist Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, says that time is ultimately an illusion, and reality is a series of “Nows” with no linear connection. Physicist Lee Smolin, in his book Time Reborn, argues that time is real, not an illusion, and is vitally important. Barbour says that it is change that creates the illusion of time, while another physicist, Max Tegmark, says that both time and change are illusions—nothing can change, because everything already is.
From the point of view of magical practice, it is very useful to work within the paradigm that time is indeed an illusion. Let’s explore that concept.
In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, the late Oliver Sacks describes “Virgil,” a blind man whose sight was surgically restored when he was about fifty years old. The chapter “To See and Not See” describes Virgil’s tremendous difficulties adapting to sight:
“The real difficulty here is that simultaneous perception of objects is an unaccustomed way to those used to sequential perception through touch.” We, with a full complement of senses, live in space and time; the blind live in a world of time alone. For the blind build their worlds from sequences of impressions … and are not capable … of simultaneous visual perception, the making of an instantaneous visual scene. Indeed, if one can no longer see in space, then the idea of space becomes incomprehensible.
A person who is blind approaches space in a linear way. A room is first the door, next the chair, and next the coffee table. People with sight perceive space all at once. The things in a room have connections and relationships—“things to sit on,” for example, as a logical grouping—but they don’t have a necessary order. The attempt to switch from a linear perception to a simultaneous one was too hard for Virgil. It exhausted him, and he often resorted to touch so that he could perceive as a blind man instead.
Trying to wrap your brain around simultaneous when all you perceive is linear will blow your mind. It’s just barely possible. Reading about Virgil, though, I had an inkling of how time might not be linear either. We perceive linear time; the order is past, present, then future. But I had a sudden insight that maybe moments, “Nows,” were chairs and couches and shelf units that were all, somehow, there, and not linear at all.
You and I are time-blind and can only perceive the linear. But there’s some instant, all-at-once view that we don’t see. Imagining being Virgil was a doorway for me, by which I could understand the notion of time as illusory.
Scientists, philosophers, and occultists will all continue to argue about time, because we’re all blind. We’re trying to perceive past an inability to perceive.
How Does Transcending Time Affect Magic?
Why is it that transcending space and time makes magic work?
Let’s assume that magical power is a form of energy, one currently unrecognized by science. If this is true, then the laws of thermodynamics apply to magic. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is constant in nature. It doesn’t go away; it is just converted from one form into another. This is known as conservation of energy. When we talk about raising power later on, we’re going to talk about converting other forms of energy into magical energy (power), but for now, let’s assume we have the power. Now what?
When we send the power somewhere, through space or time, the journey causes the energy to dissipate. Movement (through space or time) is kinetic energy, so moving our magical power converts some of it into kinetic energy—in other words, burns off some of the power. To me, the image is of a meteor burning up when entering the atmosphere—you can send a powerful, intense magical “meteor,” but if it has too far to go, it’s not going to be much of anything when it finally arrives.
So in order for all (or virtually all) of the magical power we raise to get where it’s going, we have to be able to transcend space and time, obviating the need for all that movement.
One way we do that was discussed in chapter two. Sympathetic magic tells us that whatever is like a thing is the thing. So when we have a sympathetic object in our ritual space, we have no need to send our energy over a distance—the subject of the magical work is present with us.
Transcending time means that the “future” is not distant; it’s another “Now,” and can be reached and affected from the present “Now” without having to travel in a linear fashion.
Let’s go back to the living room furniture—I like that analogy, because I find it easier to visualize time as simultaneous when I compare it to simultaneous space, like my living room. In this analogy, “yesterday” and “next year” and so on are all components of a room: the couch, the floor lamp, the coffee table, the TV stand. They can be perceived in any order, so they can be reached in any order. It is as easy to touch today/the couch as it is to touch yesterday/the floor lamp or tomorrow/the coffee table.
If it’s all simultaneous, then I can send my magic to the future without sending it along a linear path. It doesn’t have to go through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in order to affect an outcome on Thursday.
Here’s an interesting thing: If we can use our understanding of time as simultaneous to affect the future, we can also use it to affect the past.
There are things about the past that seem quite fixed. Our memories are pretty solid. If your best friend died when you were ten and you were never the same after that, her death seems like something that can’t be changed. And I’d tend to agree: it can’t be changed—not because time is objectively real (the jury is still out) but because the memories and experiences of a whole lot of people reinforce the solidity of what happened in the past. Real life isn’t a science fiction movie where you can go back in time and stop a car accident from happening and everyone’s memories of the accident instantly disappear. Remember that magic can’t do the impossible!
While the past can be touched, physical reality is a lot harder to change. Memories are physical—they are stored as groups of neurons—and many things that happened in the past have a physical reality that cannot be changed. The more solid and established something is, the harder it is to change magically (or non-magically, for that matter).
This means that most of what can be changed about the past is psychological in nature. We can heal the “inner child.” We can bring present-day perceptions to the past, and allow that to heal us. You know that old saying “If only I could talk to myself twenty years ago, I’d tell myself …”? Well, you can.
Here’s another interesting thing about perceiving time as nonlinear: it completely alters how we can think about reincarnation. Instead of having “past” and “future” lives, we have many lives, many selves, living in different time periods, living now. Instead of thinking, “I once lived in the 1600s, and today I live in the twenty-first century, and someday I’ll live in the thirtieth century,” you can think, “I have multiple selves, including one in the twenty-first century, one in the 1600s, and one in the thirtieth century.” While we normally think of the passage of time as insurmountable, simultaneous selves are no more (and no less) disconnected through time than they are through location (as if I had multiple “today” selves in Africa, the US, and Sweden).
The Final Frontier
The more we talk about transcending time in order to improve our magic, the more it seems we’re describing space as genuinely insurmountable. The things that allow us to transcend time don’t seem to apply to transcending space. With space, as opposed to time, we naturally understand that we can travel in any direction. It takes no special meditative or imaginative exercise to figure out that we can move our magic from one part of space—one place—to another. But that travel uses kinetic energy, burning off some of our magical power. How can we transcend this limitation, leaving our magic intact?
We can again look to physics, which postulates that space, although it seems to be invariable, actually has variation based on how it is observed. The problem is, not only is the math used to calculate this variation even more complex and hard to follow, but physicality affects perception. Without the scientific details, it’s enough for now to know that those who measure space have recorded this variation—the world around us is not quite as solid as it seems.
As discussed when considering changing the past, a physical thing, which is agreed-upon to exist by many people, is hard to change magically. That pushes to the edge of impossible, and as defined in chapter one, magic can’t do the impossible.
How, then, can we do things like distant healing, which requires our energies to be sent a long distance? If my friend in California is sick, how can I do magic on her behalf from New Jersey, three thousand miles away? People do these sorts of spells all the time, but they rarely stop to consider how to transcend distance effectively. Often magicians just intuit the method without realizing it, and sometimes magicians figure out this is a problem, and analyze how best to solve it. But without some approach to this problem, your spells will dissipate without reaching their target, despite your best efforts.
One way to overcome space is, again, through sympathy. Julian Barbour talks about “Nows” being related in nonlinear ways. I mentioned this idea when I said that furnishings in a room could be related—“things to sit on” or “things that are blue” or “wood things,” for example. Barbour, being a scientist, prefers mathematical examples. We can easily see, for instance, that prime numbers are a related mathematical group regardless of the order they’re in. These nonlinear relations are a form of connection, as described in chapter two, and sympathy helps to overcome space just as it helps to overcome time. If the target of your working is in your ritual space (because a sympathetic representation of your target is in your ritual space), then there is no distance.
So in order to do distance healing, I bring my friend in California to me—by making a poppet or having a photo of her, or what have you.
Ritual Transcendence
The space you are in can also, paradoxically, transcend space. When studying various forms of Witchcraft or magic, you’ll find several explanations for why a ritual space is established prior to doing any magical work. Usually (but not always) the ritual space is a “magic circle.”Author and poet Doreen Valiente, who is often called the “mother of modern Witchcraft,” says:
The circle is drawn to protect the operator from potentially dangerous or hostile forces without, and to concentrate the power which is raised within. The latter, arising from the magic circle, is called the Cone of Power. 3
Gerald Gardner, truly the father of the modern Witchcraft movement, provides further insight:
[Witches] are taught that the circle is “between the worlds”, that is, between this world and the next, the dominions of the gods. …
It is necessary to distinguish this clearly from the work of the magician or sorcerer, who draws a circle … and summons … spirits and demons to do his bidding, the circle being to prevent them from doing him harm …
The Witches’ Circle, on the other hand, is to keep in the power which they believe they can raise from their own bodies and to prevent it from being dissipated before they can mould it to their own will. 4
In these two quotes, a number of concepts are introduced, all of which are used by magical practitioners of a variety of traditions when creating ritual space.
First is the idea that the magic circle is protective. If the practitioner is in the business of raising demons (as Gardner asserts), then the circle keeps the demons on the outside of the circle and the magician safely on the inside. Valiente is less specific about what the dangers are.
Second is the idea that the circle functions as a magical container, concentrating the power until its eventual release. Both of these are very utilitarian concepts—keep the danger out, keep the power in—but there’s a third concept: that the circle is “between the worlds.” This has become a widespread idea. There are even a couple of Pagan conferences that use the phrase as a name.
What does “between the worlds” mean? Gardner suggests it is between the worlds of the living and the dead, between this life “and the next.” If the circle is between the worlds, it’s not in this world—which means it’s not a part of normal space or time.
Well, that’s neat, isn’t it? If you can create a ritual circle that is not a part of space and time, then your ritual circle can be anywhere and anywhen. There is no space except the defined space (generally the four quarters, corresponding to the cardinal directions, plus the center), and there is no time. In my own circles, I ban the presence of any timepieces and even any discussion of time. Clocks are covered, wristwatches are removed, cellphones are turned off. By keeping time well away from the circle, we can leverage the place between the worlds to do powerful magic that transcends space and time.
We can look at the circle’s relationship to space in two ways. First, we can perceive that there is no such thing as location in the circle, that the difference between California and New Jersey is meaningless because I am not in a place, I am in the circle. The other way to look at it is that the circle can be anywhere. In this sense, it’s like astral travel: the circle moves through space while being outside it, without expending kinetic energy.
In either case, we can use sympathetic connections to connect to my friend in California. If we view the circle as “non-place,” then the picture of her brings her to this non-place. If we view the circle as moving astrally, then the picture—the connection—brings us to her West Coast location.
Ritual creates its own sympathetic connection. All magic circles are like all other magic circles, so if rituals are being done in other places or have been done at other times, then your magic circle has a resonant sympathy with them. Coordinated magic, worked by many individuals in different locations, leverages this sympathy. My altar is like your altar, and we can connect through them.
Through the creation of ritual spaces such as the magic circle, we transcend space and time.