A friend of mine asked me the other day what definition of magick I’m running with. He suggested I list three books that influenced my magickal practice the most.
That request isn’t answered quite as easily as one would think.
My path to where I am now was a long and twisted one. My interest in the paranormal came from a very scientific direction. Growing up in the 80s, I regularly saw bits on various television shows about ghosts, aliens and strange abilities. That decade wasn’t too far removed from the New Age movement of the 60s and 70s. I had a lot of time to browse books, but not a lot of places to get books about more esoteric subjects.
Luckily, around the house there some copies of random books to be found with some thought-provoking sections in them (like The World’s Last Mysteries and The People’s Almanac). There were also a few books by Erich von Daniken dealing with gods from outer space. Those books and others like them piqued my interest in strange science and anomalous events. That interest was fed by columns in Omni and Discover magazines that touched on those fringe areas.
Exploring those trains of thought brought me in touch with the concepts of ESP and ghosts and the science of parapsychology. The idea that these strange things could be looked at in a scientific manner–even if the bulk of the “normal” scientists out there scoffed at such things–was eye opening and mind-blowing.
If people could actually see the future or move things with their minds (even if it doesn’t work very well at all under laboratory conditions), at leas there those out there willing to give the events themselves the benefit of a doubt and explore them as rigorously as possible. Doing so without the fluffy trappings of the New Age movement made that exploration even better.
From psi it is not a far leap to magick. Both involve individuals doing things that general knowledge says are impossible. Both involve the manipulation or use of something outside of regular science’s current understanding. Both appear to have been much more commonly accepted in less “enlightened” times. And both, it seems, are here to stay in the popular vernacular no matter what science has to say about it.
And so, my search jumped tracks.
I was raised Catholic. As I grew and studied more in preparation for my Confirmation sacrament, I truly got the sense that there was something out there larger than any of us individually. At that time in my life, that realization hit me very hard and very deeply. It was immediately followed by the realization that, of all the people in my Confirmation class, I was taking the entire experience the most seriously. It was one of the reasons I parted ways with the Church (along with their insistence on sticking their fingers deeply into the temporal world where they have no real business being).
That feeling and realization would happen again a few years later during my Order of the Arrow initiation. Sitting alone in silence in the wilderness at night, with all the modern world faded into a flickering memory, I felt connected. Connected to something bigger. Something more real than the flash and bang of normal living. Something… more important.
Those two experiences, of course, were quickly lost to the noise of every day life as an agsty teenager living during the media explosion and consumer crush of the late 1980s and early 90s. I had my own problems to deal with and those thoughts of things bigger than my own (low) social standing were few and far between.
But there were things that would crop up every now and then.
I told my friend, when he asked about the three books that were most influential, that I know what answers I’d like to give. The answers that would make me sound well-read and methodical in my study. The ones that would make may people scratch their heads and question that such books would even exist–and if they did that anyone could take them seriously. I own books like that. I’ve even read some of them. But they came long after my own beliefs were set.
I told him that the books that influenced me the most were A Wrinkle in Time (and the other books in that series) by Madeline L’Engle, a truly magical work of fiction that blended science and fantasy in a way I had never seen it done before. It put things in perspective. It showed that the fantastical and the mundane could exist and impact one another without one really believing the other existed.
Esp, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook by Loyd Auerbach was another influential book. I think it may have been the first book I owned that specifically looked at the attempts made to understand the strange and unusual through the lens of science. It laid out technique and told stories of investigations and experiences that, while fantastical in their own right, were believable and verifiable, if not explainable.
Celtic Magic by D.J. Conway served as my major jumping off point from psi to magick. While I now look back and chuckle a bit at the simplicity and generic nature of the book as a whole, the seeds within it still call to me. Western Europe is where my spiritual lineage seems to come from, this book spoke to that and opened doors within my mind that have never ceased to lead to learning.
Over the years there have been many, many other books. And prior influences can be traced to everything from the classic horror films I grew up watching to more recent role playing games and sci-fi television. There are also a handful of books on spiritual subjects that, when I read them, echoes nicely and gave names to the things I had been feeling, knowing and thinking about. I’ll explore some of them in more detail at a later time.
I have been seriously slack in recent years in keeping up with my actual study of things magickal. My personal beliefs are integrated solidly into my way of life and I don’t expect most of them to be what other people. I haven’t had to throw about actual definitions a lot in the past decade. When i do, I often fall back to things I’ve read from Aleister Crowley. While I can’t claim to like the way the man lived his life, I can not question the fact that he was a genious when it came to metaphysical matters.
And so I borrow from definitions often used by Thelemic practitioners, even though I am not one.
Magick is making things happen through intent. In my view, I differentiate it a little bit more by usually only using it to refer to things we make happen through definite action that lacks a scientifically proven casual component. In my deeper theory, it differentiates from psi in what that paranormal component it.
The bottom line is, we all have power. And because we are all connected to everything, we share that power. It is as dynamic and unpredictable and creative and wonderful as it is dangerous and corrupting and destructive. Just like us.
It simply is.
How we understand it is up to us. How we work with it is up to us.
What we do with it is up to us.
The Universe provides, but we must choose.
I’ve made my choices and I am still learning.
That’s really what this journal is about.
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