January 7, 2022
Do you believe in magic? asked the Lovin’ Spoonful back in 1965. Two years later, the magical mystery tour was waiting to take us away. Nowadays, when many of us perhaps feel that the tour is long departed and we were left at the station, we may ask whether anyone seriously believes in magic beyond the age of about ten. Magic is associated with childhood, with childhood’s sense of possibility, the sense that the world is a wondrous place where anything can happen. When we speak of a period of time that is “magical”—like the Sixties, like the time we were romantically in love--we mean that a numinous energy animated the world and everything in it. In such a time, “God is alive, magic is afoot,” as Leonard Cohen put it, also in the Sixties.
This newsletter will appear one day after Twelfth Night, marking the end of the most magical of all holidays. It is a children’s holiday even in a religious sense, the birth of a miraculous child under a star, as if he were a gift to the world, lying gift-wrapped with “swaddling clothes” in his manger at the base of the axis mundi or world tree. In fact, in the greatest Christmas poem ever written, Milton’s Nativity Ode, the miraculous redeeming power does indeed descend the vertical axis from heaven to earth and incarnate itself in a baby born in lowly circumstances.
It may seem too clever by half to see Santa Claus as what Northrop Frye would call a displacement of the same mythical descent pattern, but after all what does account for the curious imagery of an old man with a God-the-father beard flying down from the North Pole, the top of the world’s axis, bringing gifts to children? When you think about it, the popularity of Santa Claus seems highly unlikely, especially given the credulity demanded to believe in it. Not just flying reindeer, but coming down the chimney, including in houses such as the one I grew up in that had an artificial chimney with no real opening. I remember looking up the chimney at the bricks that blocked it about a foot out of sight and wondering. But that is the whole point of magic: something good is possible that shouldn’t be possible. There are openings in life where no opening can realistically be, including the back of a wardrobe or a wall in a railway station. Granted that I was an exceptionally naïve child, but I believed in that magic until the age of nine, when Santa was finally blown in by an older neighbor girl.
In world mythology, the figure who moves between upper and lower worlds, and by doing so wins gifts for his people, is the shaman, the prototype from which descends the later figure of the magician. The shaman, associated with northern hunting peoples, is one of the oldest religious figures. If some of the images in the Paleolithic caves are indeed shamans or proto-shamans, he may be the oldest. The magician is a secularized or partly secularized shaman, moving between realities, right down to a contemporary example like Dr. Strange, even if the dimensions Dr. Strange traverses are about to be updated in terms of the popular notion of a multiverse. Both for the shaman and his descendent the magician, the journey to other realities is not mere sight-seeing but a quest for power. Magic can in fact be defined as the ability to draw upon a hidden source of power. This source precedes or lies beneath what we call ordinary reality, in which conscious subjects are divided from a world of objects external to them. Subjects may affect objects by various means subject to the laws of causality, but those means are indirect and limited. That is what we mean by the reality principle: the objective world is to a large degree independent of consciousness, independent of our desires and fears. Magic reaches down to a level where subject and object are two aspects of the same thing, so that the subject may affect or transform the object by thinking, or, to be more precise, by force of will, the instrument of human desire.
That is an enormously dangerous thing to do, and the magician is a highly ambiguous archetype. There are good magicians, most prominently in “children’s literature,” meaning literature for readers of all ages whose imaginations have not become overly cramped by the reality principle. The good magicians tend to be either Wise Old Men like Gandalf, Dumbledore, and Yoda (the science-fictional trappings notwithstanding) or young aspirants like Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, and Ged in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, which are among the greatest fantasies in the magical tradition. An earlier example, and one of the greatest, is Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest.
But magic is power, and power corrupts. The black magicians outnumber the white magicians by a wide margin, and they are driven by the will to power. An eccentric but useful historical survey of the labyrinthine magical tradition, Colin Wilson’s The Occult (1971), quotes E.M. Butler as saying that “The fundamental aim of all magic is to impose the human will on nature, on man and the supersensual world in order to master them” (46-47). One way of characterizing the limitation of Wilson’s study, for all its amiable readability, is to say that he is insufficiently horrified by the ominous sound of that sentence. In fact, he quotes it with apparent approval because he is looking for an inward power that humanity can learn to employ in order to transform life for the better. Part of it may be that he is simply tone deaf: he insists on calling this power by the clunky name of Faculty X. I call it the imagination, following the Romantic tradition. But the real problem is not the name but the emphasis on imposing and mastering. This is imagination as it is conceived by an ego in the grip of what Jung calls inflation. The ego thinks the will doing the mastering is its own, but in fact it is taken over by a much greater will, demonically possessed by a power coming out of the unconscious. It has gone over to the dark side of the Force.
That phrase has become convenient shorthand for a phenomenon we see everywhere in the magical tradition. In Tolkien, it is what has produced Sauron, Saruman, and Gollum in descending order of magnitude—all of them once human beings but taken over by a dark will to power and turned into monsters. Likewise, Voldemort was once Tom Riddle, and in the third Earthsea book a renegade sorcerer named Cob nearly undoes the fabric of reality itself in his quest for the ultimate power, that of immortality—the same power sought by Voldemort. The cover of The Occult describes it as “The ultimate book for those who would walk with the gods.” Writers are not always responsible for what publishers plaster on their books, but that phrase is telling.
Yet that is only one side of the story. Power that is sought is nearly always sought for the wrong reasons. But benevolent power comes unsought as a gift—a gift and a responsibility. For the world is in desperate need of being transformed, and the only way to transform it is through the liberating rather than the dominating use of power. As Peter Parker tragically learns, not to use the power you have been given can be just as selfish as seeking power for self-gratification. The parable of the talents hangs over all good magicians, and, as we shall see, over all the types of gifted human being for which the magician is a kind of prototype. The saints have powers like any magician, and use them: indeed, no one can be canonized without “proof” of miracles. When St. Peter goes up against the magician Simon Magus in Acts 8, it is a contest of attitudes, “Thy will be done” versus the puffed-up megalomania typical of the black magician.
The good magician feels power as on the one hand a terrible burden, on the other a temptation resisted only through constant examination of conscience. It does not make for a mellow personality: Gandalf and Prospero are difficult and testy. Prospero uses his magic quite coercively, putting the people on his desert island through ordeals designed to rehabilitate and better them. Students never like him, but, first of all, these are people who marooned him on the desert island a dozen years ago, left him to die, along with a three year-old daughter. He struggles to detach himself from the spirit of revenge, but he knows that, left to their own devices, corruption and neurosis will lead these people to bad ends, and he has the power to change them. Second, he is also driven by guilt, because the reason his people are such a mess is that he had abdicated his responsibilities as Duke of Milan and allowed his evil brother Antonio to rule, so that he could spend all his time studying his books. We have learned all too well in the United States how a corrupt ruler can infect an entire society with his corruption. I agree with Wilson that there is a need for a transforming power coming from within. But I do wish he were a lot more wary of the dangers of such a position. Wilson himself is not a megalomaniac, but the rather sordid history of magic outside of literature is filled with self-styled magicians such as Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), men with enormous pretentions and egos to match, basically cult leaders whose power resided in their charisma.
Crowley first came to prominence as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in England in the late 1880’s, a magical guild whose membership included, at one time or other, a remarkable number of literary figures—most famously W.B. Yeats. There were many people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were looking for something beyond scientific materialism on the one hand and an ossified and reactionary institutional Christianity on the other. They were seekers, willing to join an organization like the Golden Dawn in order to investigate its claims, despite the fairly obvious charlatanism.
This points to a distinction between two types of magic. On a more superficial level, the magician is an illusionist, no different than a stage magician except that he attempts to convince people that his magic is more than merely sleight of hand. Often the first person he convinces is himself. Shakespeare captures the type hilariously in I Henry IV in the character of the Welsh rebel Owen Glendower, who clearly believes in his own grandiose claims. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” he warns his fellow rebel Hotspur—who is unimpressed, and responds, “Why so can I, or so can any man, / But will they come when you do call for them?” I think that may be the Shakespearean line I have laughed out loud over more than any other, and it’s not even in a comedy. A more sinister example is the evil magician Archimago in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, whose illusions are designed to lead people from the path of truth, which to Spenser was a Christian truth. Magic as illusion is a con job, even when it dupes the magician himself. Wilson quotes John Symonds, biographer of Aleister Crowley, as saying, “The only trouble with magic is that it doesn’t work” (47).
Magic as illusionism relies upon what in fact is called “magical thinking,” believing in something on the basis of desire rather than fact. Like quack medicine, it depends on suckers, people willing to believe that ingesting bleach or horse de-wormer will cure them of Covid. As such, it seems pathetic. When the neighbor girl told me there was no Santa Claus, I went to my mother, who told me, “He’s real if you believe he is.” A disillusioned rational skeptic at the age of nine, I wanted no part of this. But rationalism judges too quickly. To take the claim that imagination is the home of human life seriously is to accept that all versions of reality whatsoever are imaginative constructs. “Reality” and “truth” are terms we apply to a version of reality that we are committed to on the basis of empirical evidence and logical consistency—but the very fact that scientists will revise their version of reality in the face of new evidence betrays an understanding that even scientific truth is an imaginative construct, and a tentative one. We are never outside of the imagination. Blake says, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? All poets believe it does & in ages of imagination this perswasion moved mountains.” At first, this seems an uncomfortable assertion: it appears to give free rein to every kind of magical thinking. That is not true: a version of reality that fulfills the criteria of logic and evidence is better than arbitrary wish fulfilment or denialism. But it remains true that logic and evidence are in the end constructs: we create them.
The emergence of depth psychology in the 20th century made magical illusionism seem less trivial by showing that the stronger forms of illusion are not mere rational mistakes but occur when the unconscious overrules the reality principle. Mandrake the Magician was a famous comic strip created by Lee Falk back in 1934. Mandrake had no “real” magical power: his magic was illusions created by hypnotic suggestion. But such “suggestions” are not optional: they retain their grip on people even when the people “know” rationally that they are illusions. Hypnosis is a special instance of the conscious mind being under the control of the unconscious. C.G. Jung had some success with psychotic patients because he took their delusions seriously. Marie-Louise von Franz recounts how, during her first meeting with Jung, he spoke of a psychotic patient who believed she had flown to the moon, and, to von Franz’s consternation, Jung spoke as if she really had.
The magician, in both life and literature, is sometimes a composite figure, combining the features of philosopher, early scientist, physician, and artist when these roles were not always fully distinguished and specialized. This is the historical reality behind the popular notion of the “Renaissance man.” Sometimes such a composite figure was known as a Magus, studied by E.M. Butler in The Myth of the Magus (1948). From the prototypical figure of the magician, then, descend a number of more specialized figures, including the physician or doctor. The most famous historical magician-as-healer was Paracelsus, whom Jung, himself a doctor, credited with some understanding of how many physical illnesses are what we now call psychosomatic—they are in effect caused by the imagination, and therefore, Paracelsus said, had to be cured by the imagination as well. The connection between the healer and the magician survives in vestigial form even today: it is no accident that Dr. Strange was originally Dr. Stephen Strange, an arrogant surgeon who had to be cured of his vanity in order to become a “sorcerer supreme.”
An obvious descendent of the magician as illusionist is the artist. In Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero constantly refers to his magic as “my art.” He claims to have many powers, even at one point the power to raise the dead, but his power over the other characters consists entirely in creating illusions, through which he puts them in various ordeals designed to work on their imaginations and thus change their hearts. Prospero’s illusions are theatrical—he summons up an entire wedding masque for the sake of his daughter and the prince she is about to marry—and it is commonly accepted that there is an autobiographical identification lurking in the background. The magic of the theatre is that of putting both characters and audience through an imaginative experience conjured “out of air, out of thin air.”
Art as magic leads to the subject of the role of language as the instrument of summoning and directing magical powers—in short, to the idea of the casting of magical spells, treated semi-humorously in Harry Potter, sublimely in LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, in which the language of magic is not ordinary language but the “old language” spoken fluently only by dragons. Such a language does not consist of mere signifiers but of what Northrop Frye called “words with power.” It is essentially an unfallen language, dating from a time when subjects, words, and objects shared a common identity, so that words retain the world-shaping power of the divine Word that created the world “in the beginning.” Written words supply a visual component to magic: the fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics, especially before they were translated, lay in the suggestion that they were perhaps words with power and not mere signifiers. Diagrams, mandalas, pentagrams (which are a form of mandala) are also agents of magical instrumentality. Beyond language, there is the magical power of music to “transport” the listener. Although Orpheus was not said to be a magician, his music had the power to make the very trees uproot themselves and follow him. As the singer puts it in “Do You Believe in Magic?”, “the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me.” Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, however, gives us the figure of the demonic artist in the form of the taboo-breaking composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose art embodies the spirit of nihilism, at least to the humanist who is writing his biography.
The one aspect of Prospero’s magic that goes beyond illusionism is his command of the elemental spirits Ariel and Caliban, Ariel being associated with air and fire and Caliban with water and earth in the imagery of the play. The magician can command the spirits of the elements because all things in the cosmos are animated and interconnected through participation in an Anima Mundi or World Soul.
This kind of “natural magic” has a pedigree going back to the works of Marsilio Ficino, scholar-in-residence at the court of Lorenzo de Medici, who argued that it was innocent and allowable, not the trafficking with demons characteristic of the black arts. In our day, the scientist has sometimes become a displaced version of the magician practicing “natural magic.” Not any scientist, perhaps, but the genius-inventor type: Thomas Edison is the American type, mythologized in popular culture in figures like Tom Swift. A mythological aura clings to such contemporary inventors as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. The heroes of early, naïve science fiction of the pulp era were genius-inventor types, including the title character of Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+ and Richard Seaton of Doc Smith’s early “space operas.” The antagonists of these early heroes were often of the “mad scientist” type, complete with the requisite megalomania. Superman’s arch-enemy is mad scientist Lex Luthor. In passing, we may note that the magician may be fused with the figure of the warrior whenever the latter has special powers, as is true of all the superheroes. An often-quoted remark of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The curious tendency to mix advanced technology with swordplay and what amounts to magic, even if it is given a pseudo-scientific explanation, from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels to Star Wars and Dune, becomes more comprehensible if we realize the magical lineage of such stories’ science.
There is, finally, erotic magic. After all, everyone knows that when we fall romantically in love, the whole world is magically transformed. Love as a magically-recreative power is the theme of the literary tradition, sometimes acted out in real life, known as Courtly Love, because it grew up in the courts of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Most versions of Courtly Love are chastely sublimated, but the kind of struck-by-lightning experience they describe does not respect the proprieties of marriage, family, and property. Love is dangerous: it can wreck innocent people’s lives. Yet it offers a kind of recreative experience beyond the safety and comfort of companionate marriage.
The erotic component of such “romantic” love is often minimized, but it is there, and, like all magic, is a reservoir of a power with deep roots in the unconscious. Sexual liberation scares people not merely because it flouts social norms but because sexuality goes down deep into unconscious roots. Hence uninhibited sexuality is more often encountered in association with black magic, and is linked to the more tabooed forms of desire. Simon Magus went about with a prostitute who was alleged to be the reincarnation of Helen of Troy. Goethe’s Faust first seduces and abandons an innocent girl named Gretchen, and later has his own abortive union with Helen of Troy. Because magic is about power and control, erotic magic may have distinctly BDSM overtones, as it does in Spenser’s Faerie Queene when Britomart, the knight of chastity, enters the magical castle of Busirane, whose goings on are vague but distinctly kinky. Less vague are the dungeon entertainments of Fifty Shades of Grey, in which the male lead, the ironically-named Christian, can magically transform a woman’s life by means of his fabulous wealth in exchange for a thrilling surrender to his power. But, as always with black magicians, Christian finds it hard to resist the temptation to impose his will, to slip over the line from consensual fantasy to abuse, and the heroine, Anastasia, whose name means “resurrection,” finally breaks off with him. Jeffrey Epstein followed a similar trajectory in real life. An important if obscure book on erotic magic is Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987), an influence on one of the great modern fantasies, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, whose hero, or anti-hero, drifts into BDSM games for a time.
Magic is the extraordinary breaking in upon the ordinary. It is one symbol of the imagination itself, both in its ideal and in its demonic, shadow forms. The magician is the “figure of capable imagination,” in the words of Wallace Stevens. Magicians are the mysteriously gifted, the set apart. But their greatest gift would be to awaken the magical potential of ordinary people. Would to God all the lord’s people were prophets, says Moses in the Old Testament (Numbers 11:29). Would to God that all the people, trapped in the various forms of necessity, would realize that the kingdom of magic is asleep within them, but might be awakened. Should that happen, the rule of tyrants, elites, and tyrannical systems would be overthrown. It is something out of a children’s book, and perhaps only a child is wise enough to hope that it might happen.