Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe

by Dean Radin

Real magic falls into three categories: mental influence of the physical world, perception of events distant in space or time, and interactions with nonphysical entities.

While science as a practice has primarily concentrated on the objective world, scientific methods are extremely powerful, so if we wish we can redirect our lens to look inward and explore what consciousness is capable of. When we do that, we are startled to find whole new realms of knowledge.

repeated attempts to cross a river and “a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful…responsible for the government of the universe.” Ayer retained his atheism, but declared that the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be the end of me.”

AJ Ayer NDE

His experience with Father Amorth did not overcome his prior agnosticism. But after showing a video of a terrifying exorcism to three prominent neuroscientists and three psychiatrists and not getting the blithe dismissal that he expected from those experts, it “scare[d] the Hades out of him.”3

Carroll concluded that the laws of physics “rule out the possibility of true psychic powers.” Why? Because, Shermer continued, “the particles and forces of nature don’t allow us to bend spoons, levitate or read minds.”

we know that there aren’t new particles or forces out there yet to be discovered that would support them. Not simply because we haven’t found them yet, but because we definitely would have found them if they had the right characteristics to give us the requisite powers.

As magician Peter Carroll once put it, “When people are presented with real magical events they somehow manage not to notice. If they are forced to notice something uncontrovertibly magical they may become terrified, nauseated, and ill.”

The word magic comes from the Greek word magos, referring to a member of a learned and priestly class, which in turn derives from the Old Persian word magush, meaning to “be able” or “to have power.”

The power itself, like any fundamental force of the universe, is morally neutral. Atomic fission and fusion are just aspects of the way the physical world works. Questions of morality arise when we use such natural phenomena to create weapons.

Magical power intended to manipulate or exploit others is called black magic.

Within the magical worldview everything is deeply interconnected, so if you intend to harm others, you are likely to end up harming yourself. This is not just because of a guilty conscience but more like Newton’s third law: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

To believe that magic will eventually disappear is mere wishful thinking. —OWEN DAVIES

There are three conventional approaches to studying consciousness. Philosophers analyze the concepts, logic, and assumptions used to describe consciousness. Scientists study consciousness from the outside in, typically by measuring the activity of the brain and body, or by asking people to report their experiences. Meditators study consciousness from the inside out, by introspection.

I’ve used all of those methods, but I’ve concentrated on a fourth, less conventional approach. I investigate phenomena that challenge commonly held assumptions about the brain-mind relationship.

Psi experiences have been labeled telepathy (images or emotions shared between minds separated by distance), clairvoyance (perception of distant events or images), precognition (perception of distant events or images through time), and psychokinesis (influence of distant systems via mental intention). These topics are studied within the discipline known as parapsychology.

This is a pity, because parapsychology involves the application of orthodox scientific and scholarly methods to a class of commonly reported but as yet poorly understood human experiences.6 That’s all it is. The topics studied might give some people allergic fits, but the methods used are transparent and completely orthodox.

After decades of conducting psi experiments, publishing many journal articles describing the results, and reviewing thousands of other experiments in my popular books (The Conscious Universe, Entangled Minds, and Supernormal), I’ve come to accept that psi is a real phenomenon.

For most active psi researchers today, the existential question is no longer interesting, because the data are clear. Those whose knowledge of this field is limited to polemics written by hardened skeptics are, as one might guess, plagued with uncertainties.

if anthropologists can safely study the magical beliefs of what they used to call “savages,” if psychologists are allowed to investigate why modern citizens still believe in magic, and if historians can survey the words used in ancient magical spells, then surely we’re mature enough in the twenty-first century to use the lens of science to examine the possibility of real magic without causing the world, or ourselves, to go berserk.

Every time you find in our books a tale the reality of which seems impossible, a story which is repugnant both to reason and common sense, then be sure that tale contains a profound allegory veiling a deeply mysterious truth…and

the greater the absurdity of the letter the deeper the wisdom of the spirit.

The first stage is when you totally believe in witchcraft. The second is when you realize that it’s a complete lot of rubbish. The third is when you realize that it’s a complete lot of rubbish; but somehow it also seems to work. —RONALD HUTTON

Outside of academia, there are hundreds of grimoires (books of spells) by ancient, medieval, and modern magicians. There are thousands of articles and books on theatrical magic, sleight-of-hand conjuring, and illusory magic.

Interesting. books

There are peer-reviewed print and online scholarly journals devoted to the study of magic. For example, the journal Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The Society for the Academic Study of Magic publishes the journal Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural. There is Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal. An online journal, Esoterica, is published by Michigan State University.

Books

One of the academic disciplines most entranced by magic is called esotericism, the study of hidden, suppressed, secret, or occult knowledge.

Among the secular population, real magic radically challenges basic assumptions about reality. Concepts such as personal and state sovereignty, privacy, and secrecy are regarded as essential features in modern politics and the law.

A principal role of the criminal justice system is to expose hidden secrets, and the massive apparatus of the world’s intelligence agencies is devoted to that task. Yet magic threatens sovereignty and transcends secrecy.

Besides death and taxes, the one other universal truth is that bureaucracies never respond kindly to challenges to their authority. So there’s enormous societa...

Nor would most individuals embrace magic as real the moment they realize that through the application of magic it would be possible, at least in principle, for others to know their private thoughts, manipulate their health, or influence their finances. The ...

The first professor of anthropology at Oxford University was Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor supported the new, scientifically proper way to think about magic, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his opinion.

20 For Tylor, magic was solely a matter of theatrics, superstitions, illusions, and preposterous fantasies. Belief in magic was due to the psychological need to cope with the uncertainties of life by gaining an illusory control over nonexistent supernatural forces.

Half a century later, Hans Dieter Betz, of the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, edited a large volume on the Greek magical papyri. This is a collection of translated magical spells and formulas, hymns, and rituals from ancient Greco-Roman Egyptian scrolls.

Book

Winkelman reviewed articles in the anthropological literature from the late 1800s through the 1940s. He showed, based on firsthand anecdotal reports from military officers, physicians, clergymen, and colonial officers, that anthropologists had long noted that some aspects of magic practiced by indigenous peoples appeared to be real.

those magical practices seemed to be consistent with conditions found to enhance psi effects in laboratory studies, including a reliance on altered states of consciousness, concentrated visualization, goal-oriented imagery, positive expectations, strong belief, and intense emotions.

We know academia currently treats magic as the result of “primitive superstition” or “magical thinking.”…So how did it come to pass that despite throughout all of human history a belief in magic appears in every recorded culture on the planet, in the last 150 years scientists have come to treat it as not real? The simple answer is: magic did not fit our mechanistic view of reality so it needed to be abandoned.30

In 2014 more than a thousand women in Tanzania, all believed to be witches by frightened neighbors, were lynched, stoned, or hacked to death.

2014

Initially, everything was considered to be supernatural because our earliest ancestors had no idea about how anything worked. So they naturally attributed everything to invisible, supernatural causes, meaning above or beyond the natural world—the divine, or one or more gods.

Then someone noticed that there were aspects of nature that were predictable—the movements of the sun and stars, healing qualities of certain muds and plants—and that realization sparked interest in visible, here-and-now, human-centric natural magic.

Supernatural magic was eventually adopted by religion, and natural magic split into two branches, the exoteric (outer, physical world) and the esoteric (inner, mental world). The exoteric branch evolved into today’s s...

in the early twenty-first century it’s probably fair to say that most people have no idea how computing or communication technologies work. I don’t mean “work” in the sense of knowing how to operate a computer or a smartphone, but rather in the sense of knowing how to build these devices from scratch, or even understanding the main principles underlying these devices.

These technologies aren’t considered magic because their easy availability gives us faith that someone, somewhere (or, more likely, teams of specialists distributed around the globe) knows how they work.

first, that esoteric ideas have been vigorously suppressed in the Western world for at least a thousand years, and second, that the esoteric worldview provides hints for why magic works.

Some of those early souls may have gained mystical glimpses of reality through the discovery and use of entheogenic (psychedelic) compounds.1 A persuasive case for this possibility is made by the esteemed religious scholar Huston Smith in his book Cleansing the Doors of Perception.

book. psychedelic

Individuals who were especially adept at entering these rarefied states of awareness, which afforded visions of reality beyond the here and now, were the first magicians and shamans. Religions developed as the mystical cosmologies were elaborated.

Shamans didn’t enter these states because all the cool kids were doing it; rather, they did it because their tribe’s survival depended on it. They were healers, oracles, and warriors wrapped into one, and they were charged with sustaining their tribe and defending it against rival groups through whatever means necessary, including magical techniques.

One of the sparks that energized the axial age may have emerged from personal experiences within the various mystery schools, which flourished throughout the ancient world. These schools had similar goals: initiation into the mysteries sought “to ‘open the immortal eyes of man inwards’: exalt his powers of perception until they could receive the messages of a higher degree of reality.”

this consisted of experiencing a ritual death of the physical body and subsequent resurrection into a new body, with new capabilities of intuiting secret wisdom, often regarding the functioning of the body itself.7

Kykeon might have been similar to soma, the potion mentioned in the Hindu Vedas that some scholars now believe was an entheogenic compound.

Great rite

Common sense provides a poor facsimile of what is really “out there,” so to grasp the true nature of reality—Plato imagined that this consisted of what he called eternal Forms or Ideas—requires a special form of knowing, called gnosis. Knowledge gained through gnosis is different from intellectual or rational knowing.

American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) provided a definition for a similar word, noetic, in his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).