Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization

Magic in History

by Edward Bever (Editor), Randall Styers (Editor)

This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimize their practices through an overt embrace of evolving forms such as esotericism and supernaturalism. Taking a two-track approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of the construction of the modern self and its relation to the modern preoccupation with magic. Essays examine how modern “rational” consciousness is generated and maintained and how proponents of both magical and scientific traditions rationalize evidence to fit accepted orthodoxy. This book also describes how people unsatisfied with the norms of modern subjectivity embrace various forms of magic―and the methods these modern practitioners use to legitimate magic in the modern world. A compelling assessment of magic from the early modern period to today, Magic in the Modern World shows how, despite the dominant culture’s emphatic denial of their validity, older forms of magic persist and develop while new forms of magic continue to emerge. In addition to the editors, contributors include Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Occult

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Mateusz · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the Last Magicians of Rational Thought:

After reading this book with understanding, if you still consider yourself a magician, you are either blinded by your beliefs, you didn’t understand the philosophical apparatus of the book, you are completely dishonest and nihilate incompatible information away OR your are honest with yourself and avoid the pitfall of delusions and cognitive bias, while accepting all possibilities of repression, legitimacy, and possibility of erring, while having enough experience to understand it in the light of the provided framework and fruitfully engaging in your art.

In fact, this books is an excellent litmus paper, disarming the evasive, humbling the all-knowing, and questioning the practitioner of magick. Yet, yet! If you consider yourself a serious magician (beware: humbug!) - read it, it will equip you with tools to ignore the detritus of charlatanry and educate you as to when to lower your head and watch your guard as necessary. Now, some loose ideas, that I generated based on the book:

Compartmentalization of their careers is the most important aspect of anyone who pursues careers in sciences or holds a public post, while engaging in magical activities - i.e. not mixing up different paradigms from his or hers arsenal, and a masterfully learned way to “follow the thread” of a given theme and notion. Mixing it all up is an exponent of psychoses that dwarfs one’s achievements and gives in to “word salad” talk while it eats up the mind with obsessions and first and foremost - a short-circuited communication and misunderstandings with other human beings.

In the words of Austine Osman Spare: “the border between obsession, that is psychosis, and inspiration, that is genius, is thin”. One needs to know the talk (what to say at a given time to which audience), separate the paradigms that are acceptable to a given audience - a masquerade of Rhetorica Ad Herennium - “to speak about the known and acceptable things within a general sense of acumen at leading and influencing people according to need and their cognitive needs and capacity, in order to guide them wisely and benevolently”.

By and large, magical activities don’t like exhibitionism and babbling, wasting words on something that is occult (i.e. hidden) is not an elitism, something requiring focus, mind training and discipline loves solitude, broad-casting it amongst the non-knowledgeable is an enemy to focus, mind training, responsibility and discipline.

On another note, magic is imposing a form or a procedure extracted from the world of near and deep phenomena, and following the variable potentials immanent in those phenomena to produce effects. To the contrary, methodology of science, especially chemistry “in Deleuze and Guattari’s worlds - “follows” the variable potentials immanent in matter, rather than imposing a form or procedure from the outside”.

The dualistic scenario is between matter, mind and phenomena, when potentials in matter, mind and phenomena meet - and they always intersect with differing malleability (speed of change, plasticity), density (the potential for change) and strength of binding (how difficult it is to transform a substance), the division is abolished.

When mind led to the invention of the a-bomb, the mind didn’t produce critical fission directly, but it was a transmitter of destructive magic that resurfaced in the material reality. Yet if subtle magic is capable of binding energy of others’ souls, then with correct fortification it is capable of binding and destroying atomic binding and re-arranging them at will. The world works according to physical objective laws, so if one would disintegrate his body and only the clothes would remain, creation of “whole new worlds” would be only possible according to physical laws, given a massive energy input and mastery at shaping this force in correct substance. So much for theory. Practice of subtlety demands perseverance and fortitude.

Least we forget, the worlds of souls, spirits, temples of dimensional strata is large and also given to their own laws, inclination and nature, teleology of potentials abounds everywhere, when they surface in reality, through subjective-objective or inter-subjective interface - researching and working with them - therein lays wonder and magick.