Anyone who watches fantasy films or so much as dabbles in most role playing games knows how magic is portrayed.
It’s flashy stuff. Fireballs. Magic Missiles. Shape shifting. All sorts of spectacular things.
And then there’s the big-deal illusionists that we all grew up with–David Copperfield, Blackstone, Doug Henning and their more contemporary counterparts like Kris Angel–who bring some of that flashy “magic” to life on the stage.
With all of that, is it any wonder that many who try to perform real magick are often disappointed? There’s rarely any flash or bang, rarely any obvious results. Some people make big claims about what they can do, but how many have you ever seen come through and prove it in a pinch?
Most real magick is a subtle and internal thing. It is not meant to impress the world at large, it is not even meant to be known about by the world at large. Because of that, one can suspect that all teaching and practice of the art (or science) of metaphysics is flawed in some way. After all, my internal resources are different from yours and we all skew things in different subtle ways.
But what if… what if once upon a time there were somewhat flashier examples of real magick? More importantly, what if the things that inspired all that magickal thinking and writing way back when was a misinterpretation of something that would be familiar to us now?
Aurthur C. Clarke has his three laws. One of them states quite bluntly (and famously): Any significantly advance science is indistinguishable from magic. We’ve kind of seen that in cargo cults that sprung up in the last century. Is it that much of a stretch, especially as we learn every few months that the ancient world was a little more advanced than we originally thought, that a similar situation could have happened to our ancestors?
There are anecdotal tales of alchemists and wizards slinging lightning and conjuring images. I’ve seen some of them quite rationally and thoroughly explained by early electrical experiments and lens-based projection techniques. There’s one story in particular of a Rosicrucian in a medieval Germanic town who was eventually run out because of the strange noises and odd lights that came from his home. According to a few sources, he was performing experiments that would make Thomas Edison feel in familiar territory–a few hundred years before Ben Franklin tied a key to a kite.
Strange? Maybe. Impossible? Most definitely not. Especially considering there is evidence of electrical usage going much further back. For example, there’s the Baghdad Battery which is more than 2000 years old.
Far too often we underestimate our own ancestor’s ingenuity. We blame their great achievements on improper dating techniques or alien intervention. Even worse, we allow our stodgiest of scientists to gloss over anachronistic findings, no matter how often they may pop up.
Amazing things are and always have been possible. Or, at least, possible for the elite few who worked hard at understanding the mysterious ways the world works. For those outside of that tight-lipped group, the results would seem like magick–magick as flashy and awe-inspiring as what shows up in our fiction today.
Does that make the modern practice of magick outdated and useless? Not by a long shot! The nature of magickal practice has come into its own over the centuries. It is a different way of understanding how things may work, a way of keeping our minds open to the infinite possibilities we are offered by the mere fact of being alive.
And maybe, some day, some parts of our science will reach a tipping point and it will all seem like magick to all but the most learned. Or, perhaps, our magickal practices will tap into some as yet undiscovered by modern science way to work with the world around us.
If the latter happens, we would most certainly run into things referenced by Niven’s reaction to Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advance magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Regardless of which way things may go, there is space enough in the Universe for both schools of thought. The two may not be as mutually exclusive as some may want us to think.
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