When you practice magick, you will find that nothing can be nailed down. We will recommend that you practice your magick as though you were a scientist. Despite this, you will be unable to prove anything. Everything will be open to interpretation. Everything will be muddy and hard to confirm.
Was that magick? Or was it a coincidence? Yes. Was that magick? Or was it confirmation bias? Yes. Was that magick? Or was it apophenia? You get the idea.
The question here is whether or not you are getting results.
Everything is Interpretation
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
Hassan-I Sabbah
Everything is interpretation. Nothing you know is true. Nothing you know is real. The closest you can get to real facts are measured observations. But even those are subject to error. A measurement is only as accurate as the instrument used. And if you’re relying on your very human eyes, then the instrument used is very much a blunt instrument. And a measurement only matters if the instrument is pointed at the right things. You can’t film the sunrise if you point your camera to the west. Your world is subjective, filtered through your fallible senses. Your world is distorted, twisted by assumptions you accumulated without ever noticing. Nothing you see is the definitive truth. Nothing you here is absolutely true. To steal from John C Maxwell: You don’t know what you don’t know, and what you think you know just ain’t so.
How does this apply to magick? Your world is the world of your mind. And your mind is mutable. It is not necessary to believe in fireballs or love potions to practice magick. It is not necessary to accept the idea of the supernatural to practice magick, although I won’t hold it against you if you do. Magick requires you to accept that you do not know what the world you live in is actually like. Magick requires you to choose to affect the world your live in by turning inward and affecting your mind, the thing that makes it. You decide to take command and write the story that results from your mind.
Everything is Magick
It’s not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways.
“Life” plus “significance” = magic.”
Grant Morrison
So what is magick? Magick is when story is applied to reality. As mentioned, we humans don’t interact with reality. We interact with our own idea of reality, filtered through our limited senses and colored by our assumptions. And when humans interact with their illusory version of reality, the make sense of it by imposing a narrative on it. That is to say, they take the illusion they see and they twist it until it makes sense to them. And in doing so, humans make stories. And stories are magick.
And since everything we interact with is part of that illusory world, everything we interact with is story. And if everything we interact with is story, then everything we interact with is magick. History is magick- because history is story and not fact. Politics is magick because politics is ideology imposed awkwardly onto reality. It’s all story, because that’s how we communicate. It’s all story because that’s how we communicate with ourselves.
Now, an important caveat. Reality still exists. It sits under the illusory world in which we swim in our daily lives. And we can run afoul of that reality, especially because we can’t ever see it clearly. So bear that in mind. Magic is a contrived system of knowledge. Contrived knowledge is a system or story applied on top of reality in order to simplify and clarify it. Contrived knowledge is incredibly useful, because humans are not equipped to understand reality in all its complexity. And so simplifications are necessary. But all simplifications remove information, and that can be dangerous. Contrived knowledge is useful because it sorts things into discreet categories, making interacting with those things easier. But contrived categories remove the muddiness of reality, and thus inevitably creates inaccurate sorting. We can’t help but use contrived systems of knowledge, and they are incredibly helpful, but we must remember their limitations if we are to avoid running afoul of them.
So, reality is not magick. But everything with which humans interact is magick. Maqick is unavoidable if you are human. And if you are not human, please let me know.
Is Magick Real?
Is magick Real?
Yes obviously.
Convinced? I wouldn’t be. But to reiterate, magick is real. But based on the above definition of magick in the previous section, magick is obviously not real in the way that people typically mean when they say magick. Magick isn’t Doctor Strange. Magic isn’t Aladdin’s lamp or the curse from Beauty and the Beast. Magick is the air you breathe. Magick is your dreams and goals and five year plans. Magick is the lies you tell that convince you to get out of bed each morning. Magick is the foolish optimism that convinces people to try again after they fail. Magick is more subtle and more broadly encompassing that video games and fairy tales would have you believe. Magick is hope. Magick is love. Magick is wonder and beauty and awe. But magick is not fireballs or levitation. And I suspect that this answer is unsatisfying.
So is magick real?
No, of course not.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Magic is a series of contrived knowledge, which is to say: a bunch of lies we tell ourselves so we don’t go mad. Magick is the lies that we use to cope with the infinite scope of the universe and our tiny place within it. Magick is the art of lying to ourselves, using confirmation basis and logical fallacies to convince ourselves that life is under our control. Magick is the opiate of the human race. Magick is a psychic pain killer. Magick is a fairy tale told to help children deal with nightmares. Magic isn’t real. Magick is story, and all stories are lies. Magick isn’t real. But if you apply a rigorous scientific method to your practice, magick can be a powerful tool despite not being real.
Don’t those two things contradict each other?
Yes. Deal with it.
Delirium: His madness… His madness keeps him sane.
The Sandman (1989) #31
Dream: And do you think he is the only one, my sister?
Scientific Magick
As we said, when it comes to magick, nothing is nailed down. Systems of magick contradict each other. Practitioners hold mutually exclusive and contradictory concepts in a single framework. Practitioners hold to frameworks of magick that do not align with the magick they are practicing. And none of this matters as long as one thing is true. Are they getting what they want out of their practice. If they are, who cares if it doesn’t hold together logically?
But if you are just starting your magickal practice, you will not be getting any results yet. And if you are looking to this book despite already having a practice, then presumably you are not getting the results you would like. And so we need to adjust how we look at those results. We have suggested before, and we will suggest again, that you approach your practice like a scientist. We recommend using the Scientific Method as much as it can be applied to something as unscientific as magick. Magick is not science, but approaching magick with a skeptical point of view and a scientific method to your practice can allow you to systemize your practice. Using a scientific method to your practice can help you obtain more consistent results.
To do this, maintaining a journal is essential. Write it down! Keep a journal. Write down your magick. write down what you hoped would happen. Then write down what did happen. Start with a hypothesis. Write down what you intend should happen. Perform your magick. And then write down what happened as a result. If the results differ from the intended results, consider the possible reasons why. If you intend to perform the magick again, modify your magick and do it all over again. When you start getting the results you want, look at the common elements. What did you do or not do to get the results you intended? And if you did not write anything down, you will have to rely upon your shifting memory as you do this. So write it down.
Magick relies a great deal upon the subjective properties of the practitioner. So when you approach your magick, take note of yourself. Are you happy? Are you angry? Are you using conscious altering substances? Have your fasted? Have you meditated? have you subjected yourself to sleep deprivation or physical hardship? What works for you? What doesn’t? You must be as systematic as you can. Magick is like a liquid or a gas, it will seep through your fingers if you don’t contain it. That is what the scientific method does for you. If nails your magick to the wall so you can observe it.
When to are not getting the results you intend, and decide to alter your magick, be scientific and alter only one variable if you can manage it. If you intend to enact a ritual on the new moon rather than the full moon, don’t change anything else. Especially with regards to yourself. Do you best to approach the ritual in the same way you did last time. Don’t change two things at once if you can help it. Don’t do a ritual after an all night meditation after eating edibles, and then do it again midday after a good night’s sleep with a shot of rum. How will you nail down what worked? You shoot yourself in the foot with this process.
Now obviously its hard to avoid changing variables. Astrological variables are every shifting for instance. Even if you wait until the same time next year, you won’t be back to the exact same astrological conditions. So some variables may be impossible to restrict. But do your best.
And don’t lie to yourself. Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Now magick is essentially the art of fooling yourself so well that you fool the world as well. But don’t lie to yourself about results. Don’t lie to yourself about what you did. If you don’t keep accurate records, you can use them later.
And keep an eye out for delayed effects. Magick has a tendency to accumulate results in subtle ways that build up. Like the shifting of light at dusk, it feels like nothing is happening and suddenly it’s too dark to play badminton. So keep notes, look for strange events and synchronicities. Look for little things adding up to your intended effect. This part isn’t scientific, per say, because we are looking for positive confirmation. But this is still systematic in the way that magick requires. So accept this as a necessary difference between science and magick. Using the scientific method is helpful for your practice, but that doesn’t mean magick is science. It is not. it is something utterly alien to science. That is why it is useful.
Does it Get Results?
The key with all magick is simple. Are you getting results? Are you getting the results you want? If yes, then your practice is successful. If not, then you need to reevaluate. You may be thinking that I am daft. I said Magick isn’t real. And magic isn’t real? How can you get results. And you are not wrong. This is a perfectly valid question.
Rather than answer you directly, I am going to talk about a thought experiment I learned in a college first year philosophy course. It is a thought experiment courtesy of Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s example of the two wives. Now both their husbands work late. One wife thinks that her husband is working hard out of devotion to her. The other wife thinks the husband is cheating on her. Regardless of what their husbands are actually doing, one wife experiences her husband’s devotion and the other experiences her husband’s infidelity.
To put it bluntly, in many situations what is actually happening doesn’t affect us as much as what we believe is happening. When I was quite young, my mother gave me a book about emotions and depression. The title and author escape me, but an example from the book stuck with me. You visit your friend, riding there on your bicycle. You are playing with your friend, when their father comes home. And as he parks his car, he crushes your bicycle. You do not yet know that your bicycle has been crushed. And so you are still enjoying yourself. When you go to leave, you discover your crushed bicycle. You become sad, and may even be convinced that you are sad because your bicycle is broken. But you were happy when your bicycle was broken and you didn’t yet know it was broken. And so it was not the breaking of the bicycle which caused you to be sad. You became sad because of your decisions in reaction to learning that your bicycle was broken. The change came from within you, not from the world without.
How you look at the world shapes how you interact with it. There is a famous apocryphal story about a rich man who had two sons: one a constant pessimist and one perennially happy. The man decided to test the limits of this. He bought the unhappy son his favorite classic car, fully restored and even in the teen’s favorite color. And he bought the happy son several tons of manure. After the gifts had been delivered, the man went to check on the unhappy son. The teen was sitting alone in a sour mood, muttering about the cost of gas and car insurance. The man checked on the happy son. He found the teen knee deep in the manure digging with a shovel and laughing wildly. The man asked his son why the teen was so happy. The boy responded, “Well dad, I figure that with all this shit there must be a pony here somewhere.”
Now you may be thinking that this isn’t magick, this is self delusion. I’m not going to argue with you. I will clarify that I am not suggesting that you lie to yourself about what is so. I am suggesting that you practice viewing what is so in the best light possible. Magick occurs first in the mind, first through intent. So focus your intent on what you do want, not what you don’t want. See the best in what is for the purpose of making what is even better.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 