Modeling Reality: A New Magickal Paradigm

A Short Case For Magick

Abstract:

Since the dawn of time cunning men and women, druids, priests, wizards, and even many of the founders of a modern scientific theory have used, studied, and practiced magick(1). Though written off by modern adherents of the reductionist-fundamentalist science as the product of mass hysteria, hallucinogenic plants, superstition, or fantasy, the practice of magick has continued unabated until the present day. I hope to show in short form, as a full dissertation on this subject would fill many volumes, that modern magickal theory and practice are as realized a science and understandable by current scientific knowledge, as the disciplines of Chemistry, Psychology, and Physics. It is the opinion of this author that magickal thinking offers many avenues of scientific research that has been ignored by most for fear of ridicule by the reductionist, fundamentalist, and dogmatic attitude of many modern scientists.

Before we begin, I feel that I must begin by defining the terms which I am using and enter a small portion of the background, so that the layperson may better follow the work herein. Magick, as defined by Dion Fortune, is "the art of changing consciousness at will." On the surface this statement in itself makes very little sense to the uninitiated. To understand Fortune's statement, one must first understand is the firm belief, in magickal thought, that the world around us is a complicated illusion created partially by how our brains interpret data received from sensory organs and the rest by our beliefs and unconscious thoughts. The practitioner of magick uses visualization and symbol focusing techniques to force his or her will upon their local reality to alter circumstance to their advantage or towards their goal. Since the magician's local or close reality is heavily influenced by perception, one could understand this forcing of will upon reality as actually forcing changes in perception and not sensation. This is the basis for what is called chaos magick, which is in the opinion of this author a more scientific approach to magick than through the teachings of the Golden Dawn, Abramelin, or Dee. 

As we will see, according to Quantum Mechanics, all particles exist in superposition(2), until we attempt to measure them. This change from all possibilities to a clear particle position, speed, direction, and spin is called "collapsing the wave function." It is reasonable to associate this collapse with the act of measurement, and as well as with the bias of the measurer. It is a very small leap to the hypotheses that a person could use this collapsing wave function to make small alterations of their local reality and this is the position I intend to defend in this essay.

Reality as an Illusion.

"By convention there is color, By convention sweetness, By convention bitterness, But in reality, there are atoms and space."(3)(Russel 1972)

First, let us begin with the first of many magickal "truths" about the material world that can be confirmed by modern reductionist science. There is a great difference between the world in which we, as human beings, perceive and the world which our senses derive raw data from. Take for example the perception of color in the eye, according to Charles Stroh written in Art Education July 1997, "when light is incident to at surface, some wavelengths are reflected from that surface and some are absorbed (subtracted). The absorbed wavelengths are subtracted from the incident array and the subtracted energy is taken into the surface from which the light was reflected. A colored surface reflects its own wavelength and absorbs its opposite. A red surface will reflect red and absorb some or all of the green, blue, and cyan which is incident to it A green surface will reflect green and absorb red and some or all of the blue. A yellow surface will reflect yellow, red, green, and will absorb blue." (p. 18)

Therefore, color is a material property of the surface of an object.

"Human beings see color because there is light. We see color and hear sound only because our sensory apparatus is "tuned" that way. If our ears were tuned to receive light, we would hear color. If our eyes were able to receive sound, we would see music. Our sensory receptors receive signals from only that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to which they are physically and chemically attuned." (Stroh 1997. p. 17)