Magic and Meaning

(19 September 2011)

As James Wood says, “[Max] Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means ‘the elimination of magic’.”  Weber lamented what we in the Anglo-West refer to as the loss of enchantment as a result of our increasingly utilitarian and bureaucratic society. Wood’s point is that “it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic.” [1] A common complaint from religionists of many kinds is that the ethical is dependent on ‘God’. But Wood is equally critical of ‘Darwinian atheists’ and claims that to use “secularism to fill the enchantment void runs the risk of making it at best religiose and at worst merely upbeat and vacuously ‘positive’.” [2]

The question of meaning is one thing, and the meaning of magic is another. With regard to the latter, the German Zauber is variously translated as ‘spell, charm; magic, enchantment, glamour, fascination’. To distinguish magic from enchantment may be etymologically correct but appears with Wood on this occasion more simply pedantic and like a circus magician’s flurry. Whilst throughout the contemporary pagan world, the most common and ubiquitous understanding of magic is that of Dion Fortune who considered it to be “the art of changing consciousness at will,” magic may nonetheless be seen as an attempt to produce a shortcut to a desired end. Conceivably and much more painstakingly slow, scientific technology may be able to do the same thing, but the snap of a witch’s fingers might reputedly reduce the handsome prince to a toad in an instant rather than through a labourious Dr. Frankenstein undertaking. In whatever manner or form the shortening process occurs, it is a violation of the law of equal exchange that is the intent.

This breach of the conservation of energy may occur with the offering of a few words by the magician (a spell) for a much more substantial result – e.g., the curing of an illness, the finding of something lost, the production of rain, the attainment of world peace, or even a hex of misfortune. Traditionally, the spell is ‘an incantational word or phrase’, that is, something said aloud or recited. In its original formulation, the charm was something sung (Latin canēre ‘to sing’ > cantăre > incantăre ‘to chant [magic words]’ > enchant). The enchanter is one who casts others under a spell; one who bewitches another. In pre-Christian times, it was the pagan culture itself that served in the role of enchanter. In a word, pagans lived under a spell of enchantment and animistic wonder. Within this mindset, the thaumaturges in the form of the wise woman, the wise man, the sorcerer, witch or magician were those with superior insight and acute abilities who could manipulate the miraculous for the benefit or detriment of others.

But there are two further, though related, understandings of magic beside that of the song, charm or spell of enchantment. Both, while discussing spellcraft, I have touched on already, namely, soul-like substance and mysterious power.  The one is the intrinsic wonder belonging to an object or process – the numinous quality, the presence of divinity, the preternatural energy; in each case, something that is quasi-present as a substance or force – its mana or divine power. The other is the power of the magical. In fact, the very word magic derives from the Persian maguš ‘sorcerer’ or ‘mighty one’ and refers to one who has ability and power. A cognate derivative in English is our word might.

Consequently, the bevy of ideas behind our word magic includes the use of charms and ritual spells to manipulate resident energies for controlling events in nature and/or forecasting them.  In other words, magic is concerned in its origins with the preternatural/supernatural/co-natural to shortcut the empirical realm of nature for a demonstrable effect. It is predicated on the co-existence of the paranormal miraculous. With the advent of Christianity, however, the animistic world of pagandom was reduced. A further stage of disenchantment occurred with the Protestant Reformation and the break from Catholicism. A friend and Roman Catholic priest explained to me once in Rome that the Church was lamentably 90% pagan, but this was the price that had to be paid for the enormous institutional success it had achieved. With Luther and other reformers, Christianity became even increasingly secularised and much of the paganism of Catholicism was abandoned. The final nail in the coffin begins with the Age of Enlightenment and the subsequent advent of rational and scientific thought as increasingly the shared lingua franca belonging to a world ‘emancipated’ from miraculous agency.

In the face of this religious vacuum, whilst the New Ager appeals to ‘spiritual fullness’ within herself, within her own mind, the contemporary pagan looks once again more to the old spirits and daemons to be found largely beyond the self – primarily those who appear in and through nature; secondarily in and through the remnants and revivals of cultic practices. While religion may be what binds some of us together, it is simultaneously what separates one binding from another. Consequently, the universalism of science may need to be the default and bottom line for progressive negotiation from beneath religious division. Darwinian atheism may be only one aspect of scientific hegemony. Another is caught by Erik Davis who claims the Greek techne – the base of our word for and concept of technology – as the art of craft. “With such Hermetic ambiguity in mind,” he says, “we might say that technology too is a spell and a trick, a device that crafts the real by exploiting the hidden laws of nature and human perception alike.” [3] Consequently, even for our more modern secular societies, scientific technology offers another form of magic and attempts to make life more compatible and pleasant as religions traditionally have tried to do in their own way.

But if paganism is the increasing offer of preternatural solace between the barrenness of the disenchanted world of science, on the one hand, and the questionable enchantment and even disenchantment of religions like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism that seek “to undermine the very idea of the sovereign, unified self,” [4] on the other, then we might be able to understand the need and role of a growing pagan avalanche in our spiritually kenotic times. If there is, á la Weber, an increasing hunger for enchantment, let alone a social and personal need for it, the pagan rebirth of our times may be the natural consequence and a commensurate vehicle for a viable understanding of meaning. As John Gray has argued on Radio Four in Britain, “Religion is … not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world.” [5] For paganism, there appears to be no inherent conflict with science to begin with, but, as a re-emerging spirituality in the 20th and 21st centuries, it counters James Frazer’s evolutionist theory that argued for civilisation as an unmitigated progress from a primitive magical understanding to a religious one and finally to the age of science.

It is, however, the search and need for meaning in our lives that becomes the ultimate question. Resisting the implications of cosmic irrelevance that appears for many to be the result of a life without ‘God’ or for those who see no further than a mechanistic atheism, paganism finds meaningful value in the ongoing unfolding of nature. As Todd May put it on the 11th of September 2011, “why would the existence of God guarantee the meaningfulness of each of our lives?” [6] In fact, “must the meaningfulness of our lives depend on the existence of God?” [7] Instead, a worthwhile life is what is imperative for a meaningful one, and, according to May, along with moral values there are also such narrative values as adventure, intensity, steadfastness and subtlety. Any of these, as lived, can generate meaningfulness for any of us. With the pagan in particular, it is her/his participation in the evolution of nature, however ephemeral our individual parts may be, that becomes an interconnection with the divine and its trajectory and provides significance over the purely hedonistic. Meaning for the pagan, therefore, stems from the immanence of divine nature to which we and all life belong and not from some postulation of an external and wholly independent supreme being reified as a transcendental ‘God’. For the pagan as well as some others, value is located in the here-and-now of life and in each step and turn of our individual narratives. For some of us, there is still an animistic panoply as well – one that augments the awesomeness of nature. If we become disturbed by the senseless and selfish bullying of a superpower, by the arrogance of greed that disgracefully grabs all of what it can regardless of the damage and pain to others, by the pollutions and wreckage inflicted on our environment, and by the dictates of a ‘my way only is the right way’ mentality (e.g, campaigns for the Defense of Marriage Act, to stop a woman’s right to choose, to deny equal rights, to avoid medical security for the indigent, etc.), we need to develop what Bron Taylor refers to as a more macroscopic perspective – looking at things from a distance or from a more elevated view such as that from outer space to where the beauty of our world can be seen, appreciated and encouraged to flourish. When we need to, we can retreat to the margins to regain a point of view and the art of enhanced, meaningful narrative. Our legacies of mythology are resources from which we might draw for assistance, but it is our quest to share with the pagan narrative in which we locate the significance that trumps the meaningless.