Outgrowing Models of Magic

When I was 19 I began writing a comprehensive cosmological structure for considering magic. Many people thought it was a really good and thorough explanation...but several asked "how is this different from models of magic, it accounts for energy, spirits, psychology and everything else?" My answer was that it was the opposite. Instead of saying none of these are true, but we can behave as if they are when convenient I approached things from the perspective that all of these things are true consistently. Rather than our beliefs determining the language by which we approach things, the reality of our circumstances determines the nature of the phenomena we are experiencing.

 

The specifics of the worldview I outlined there aren't really important for this discussion. I have - as is probably evident to anyone who has read much of what I've written or interacted with me online - continued to hold the view that reality is real and our perceptions and experiences are based on the interaction of our personal histories with the objective influences of that reality.

 

As such, in the last few years, I have frequently suggested that we've hit a point in our collective development of occultists where we have outgrown models of magic. I do very much feel that when people try to seat discussion of phenomena in that framework...it often no longer fits how they are actually approaching magic, and it mostly leaves us stuck in something that was really useful 20 to 30 years ago but is significantly less so now.

 

I made a couple comments in a forum today and I felt like they really addressed my thinking on this matter, so I felt I would share them as a short post.

 

Someone asked, what is your preferred model of magic?

 

I answered:

"My favorite model of magic is 'We've grown out of models of magic and the universe is vast and nuanced and full of real things that are more interesting than trying to focus on just our imaginations'"

 

The beautiful, vast, living world teaming with spirits, stirring with energies, experienced through our minds, organized with information and language experiencing the dynamism of motion as it moves through the exchanges of construction and destruction, order and entropy is after all the concept which is central and dear to everything I advocate. A complicated, nuanced universe of multitudinous elements which would probably be simple if we were vast enough to comprehend it...and which is more than anything, beauty itself...is my Platonist cosmological safe space. (It is also a space which allows for stars deep in the darkness of the earth birthed from its rich sorcerous bounty...before anyone is put off by my Platonism.)

 

My brief answer, might be a little sassy. It addresses the idea that models of magic fail us when they put pragmatism over engagement to the point that we compartmentalize and shrink the world strictly to the space of our imaginations rather than grabbing hold of what it is. It didn't address the idea that models of magic might be intended as a language for understanding phenomena. I think it fails as that because it is usually fixed on negating the real in favor of belief and perception, or even negating perception in favor of intention.

 

The person who asked the original question responded asking about how phenomena we experience may relate in their presentations to our expectations and assumptions. This is a really important question in understanding the role our minds play in everything we experience, not just the ephemeral. It does play into models of magic, do we experience spirits because we expect spirits or because spirits are there? Do we feel energy because energy is moving or because we were taught the energy model?

 

I think some of that can break apart as we break apart the idea of models. I think the trap inherent there is part of the issue with getting stuck in models...and it's a trap we see people in European Traditional Magic communities fall into when they reject "modern" models of magic and assert only this one "traditional" model is ever true in all instances.

 

My answer to how the language of our expectations guides our experience of phenomena was the part which I felt really summed up my issue with models and was what led me to wanting to share more broadly than a comment on a forum thread.

 

"Generally the language of imagery through which our minds interpret non-physical phenomena (whether we're talking magical, spiritual, mystical, psychological, or neurochemical) by necessity takes the form of our own experiences, expectations and internal semiotic vocabulary.

 

Regardless of that, each thing can be itself and the universe can have room for all of them without us needing to try and parse them into disconnected models and incomplete paradigmatic structures.

 

I think the idea of models of magic was useful for a little while in getting people thinking about how just because we can use a hammer doesn't mean everything is a nail.

 

I think it holds us back by telling us everything can be a nail if we believe in the hammer enough but nails can be screws if we really want them to be and sometimes if we just imagine glue hard enough maybe things will behave like we have glue, or at least we'll feel like we had glue and that feeling is enough.

 

I think we can build bigger better richer more interesting things when we learn to navigate actual nails, screws and glue and figure out how to get the one we need and how to use it in the right scenario and address what is as what is rather than fixing on how we perceive it and whether the language by which we discuss it fits to what we'd like to believe.

 

Too often that latter approach devolves all the models into a psychological one which tends to bypass most effective action for reflective experience."

 

I don't think we're at a point where we should say "everything is spirits" or "we don't do the psychological model," we're at a point where we should say, "it's bigger than models, we've outgrown those little boxes."

 

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Be Post Modern

So yesterday I got to thinking about the idea of the new generation of magicians who have focused on exploring the grimoires, and ancient magical systems, actual tantra and Buddhism as opposed to Western appropriations, and actual Afro-Caribbean systems as a means of getting back to authentic vibrant living magic as opposed to magic as a psychological or social endeavor as being more authentically Post Modern than Chaos Magic.

I wrote down my thoughts and posted them to the Book of Faces and it occurred to me that this particular FB note was really basically just a blog post, and I should probably just start a blog...so...here we are.

Anyway, it could easily be interpreted that I am intending to insult the groups and movements which I suggest to fall into the "Modern" period of magic. I am not. I'm part of at least two organizations that fall within what I'm referring to as Modern. I think there is a lot of benefit to material from the Late Pre-Modern, Early Modern, and Modern phases of magic, but I don't think that it's an example of Post-Modernism, and I think the ideologies and approaches which I'm viewing as Post-Modern have a significant benefit.

Anyway, I don't really go much into what is Post Modern, but here are my thoughts on what's not.
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Chaos Magic attempted to position itself within the realm of the Post-Modern as a way of suggesting that it is a sleek cutting edge reality bending meta-modality. It has elements associated with the post modern in its attempts at pastiche and satirical aesthetics. I would posit however that Chaos Magic is part of the subcultural development of Modernism within magic.

The transition to Modernism is characterized by a dialectic relationship between the traditional and the new which culturally represented in questions regarding the family, urbanization and industrialization, morality, the community as an organism, and other related topics. In magic we can see this development but several decades later than in cultural studies examining more general western culture. The advent of orders like the Golden Dawn, the OTO, the various Theosophical groups, and the other masonry and Rosicrucian based orders of the time were largely a continuation of the traditions stemming out of the Enlightenment era. Nothing about these organization represented a particular modernizing current in the magical community. Temple magic was still largely for the educated and leisure classes and it was largely a fraternal and social endeavor. Views or ideas about the workings of magic or its place in society were not experiencing dramatic upheaval, although there were changes in the terminology used, and publication increased largely because of changes in society at large. 

We begin to see a shift more like that of Modernism with the rebirth of these organizations after their stagnation. A more commercial approach to occult publication tied to city centers, and mass market exposure develops, and the rebirth of both the Golden Dawn and the OTO were connected to these shifts in publication. Magic expands to embrace a less class conscious approach as it seeks to pick up young people looking to explore their minds. The shift towards a discussion of psychology that was beginning to the end of the Late Pre-Modern incarnation of magic in the writings of Fortune and Regardie now dominates magical thinking and discourse regarding the exact interrelation of the mind and external phenomena becomes central with the embrace of the more modern psychological model holding sway.

The development of Chaos Magic and the IOT occurs within this phase. The appearance of cultural rebellion didn't rebel against the rest of the magical community of its time; it was generally coherent with society at that time. The metamodel approach, while novel, seemed focused on psychological underpinnings which were part of the general modern proposition of magic and were being largely accepted even outside of Chaos magic. The discourse that birthed Chaos Magic was the same discourse that shaped the modern incarnations of the turn of the century magical movement.

To put it more simply, Tradition poses a statement, Modernism recognizes that statement and realizes that it poses the question, “can tradition survive in a more technologically advanced world?” and it provides an answer that embraces technological advancement, (the survival of tradition is less relevant to this relationship, but Modernity asserts the subversion of surviving elements of tradition relative to the primacy of the Modern context).

Post-Modernism sees the answer provided by Modernism and determines that it was a failure. Modernity is rejected and the structure is broken. There is no dialectic discourse. Post Modernism embraces the schizophrenic pastiche of hyper-existence, or the inter-textuality of ideas and phenomena as expressed by the structure presented in hypermedia. The result of this rather than dialectic should be synthesis. The answer in a Post Modern world is that the summation of phenomena and information while apparently discordant clearly coexist, subverting the concept that the cacophony of existence is fundamentally discordant and implying that the summation while experienced as a constant stream of pieces creates an expression in which the juxtapositions inform one another. In such a model the traditional and the technological modalities exist as a shifting dynamism as opposed to a one sided solution to a dialectic problem.