Varieties of Magic

This post was not written using AI.

Unfortunately, I am not a scholar. My existential hunger was always deep enough to keep me from sticking to any academic program; I would always eventually say, Why does this matter? I need prayer, not “theology.” (Yes, I know the maxim of Evagrius!) Consequently I am deeply aware of how inadequate my intellectual foundations are for any discussion, including the one I’m about to have. But still, I have been alive for awhile; I have endured and enjoyed and explored, and on that level, I know that I know something, even if I might be unable to situate it thoroughly or bring out all its implications. With that apologia pro vita mea, here are a few thoughts.

I was struck in the ongoing ferment brought about by the topic of re-enchantment and tradition by a comment of Paul Kingsnorth to the effect that there is a close relationship between Renaissance magic and modern science. I feel the truth of this observation immediately. When I was researching the reception of astrology by Christians a few years ago, I was struck by the fact that astrology found its way to acceptance in the Christian West by the same path that all the natural sciences did: through the Western opening to Greek learning preserved in the Muslim world. (Preserved in the Muslim world, I should add, thanks initially to the work of Syriac Christians — the initial transmission was from Greek to Syriac, and then later to Arabic and Persian.) That is to say — astrology was received as a branch of natural science, and it was under this banner that it ultimately received acceptance (becoming so deeply integrated into the worldview of the medieval West that the greatest representative of the science in the 14th century was a Cardinal of impeccable orthodoxy, Pierre d’Ailly).

There are real scholars doing yeoman’s work on this topic, but it strikes me that modern science and Hermetic magic in all its permutations are twin brothers. The question is, Who was their father? Is it is a situation where one clearly betrayed his paternal inheritance and sold it for a mess of pottage — that is, modern science stripped away the fundamental religious orientation of ancient science and set off down the path that would end in denying the existence of anything not sensually perceptible or mathematically tractable? Or is it a situation where both brothers had the same underlying goal and pursued it differently — one through the sensually manifest, the other through the subtle and occult?

The negative Orthodox reaction to the presence of Thrice-Greatest Hermes in the temples of the Renaissance West indicates a perspective on this question, and in the end, it is one I share. When I studied ancient and medieval astrology, I was eventually overcome by the realization that, once I penetrated beyond the psychologism of modern astrology, I was seeing a strange kind of clockwork, clothed in mythology. There is of course a deep beauty to the harmonic vision that sees the human soul mirrored in the sky; this is a universe in which the human soul is truly at home rather than a strange exile. And yet, the vision is still one of a kind of clockwork.

Here we enter into the realm of eerie historical “coincidences.” The clock was invented by medieval monks.¹ To me it feels that this development is not unrelated to the Scholastic impulse to exhaustively distill the life of faith into rational postulates, the better to convince the mind of rational truths. And this in turn is not unrelated to the gradual overcoming of the Patristic rejection of astrology, in favor of a budding “scientific” worldview that sees the cosmos above all as a transcendently beautiful divine mechanism. Thus our coherence with the rhythm of God’s creation is imposed outwardly by the striking of mechanical bells to bring us to prayer.

Of course, the soul is a living soul (man became a living soul, according to Genesis 2:7). What could be more essentially traditional than to see the living soul’s bond with non-human creation in our common origin from the Creator? Thus the rhythm of prayer, since the early days when Christians first sang a vesperal lucernarium to Jesus,² was conformed to the organic created order. In the application of a rigid mechanical structure to prayer, I cannot help but see the first stone being laid in the construction of the prison (or charnel house) of modernity.

St Thomas’ fundamental proviso regarding astrology was that it must not be interpreted to deny the freedom of the will — making him thus remarkably “modern” as an astrologer, as the science rapidly degenerated into fatalism and only in the 20th century did modern astrologers again assert this reality of free will. But I must say that the way astrology is deployed almost universally in contemporary lay discourse (that is, among astrology enthusiasts, not reflective professionals, of whom there are few enough anyway) suggests that this fatalism is perhaps an ineluctable consequence of the whole field. What could be a beautiful and poetic reading of the symphonic relationship between the soul and the stars — finally explaining the deep harmony of “the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” perhaps? — becomes a way to explain, to excuse, to justify, to preen. An existential mythopoetic conviction of the soul’s belonging-in-the-universe becomes a mere subjection to cycles: cycles that repeat, cycles that imprison.

This sense of the slavery to cosmic elements returns us to the most ancient strata of Christian revelation. These are the principalities and powers, the fates, to which the ancients felt themselves in total subjection. Perhaps this despair was really at the root of Stoicism, so beloved of modern “influencers,” who have perhaps not advanced to the stature of its greatest exemplar:

As it happens to thee in the amphitheatre and such places, that the continual sight of the same things, and the uniformity make the spectacle wearisome, so it is in the whole of life; for all things above, below, are the same and from the same. How long then?

“All things above, below” — are we hearing Marcus Aurelius’ agonized, weary, disillusioned echo of the first words of the Hermetic Emerald Tablet?

All this is perhaps a roundabout way of coming to answer the question posed above: yes, it seems to me that both Hermeticism broadly, and modern science, are in a fundamental sense faithful to their common father, whose image is coming into view; and that view is that they are fundamentally Godless because fundamentally impersonal. Not Person, but Pattern, and thus Mechanism, reign at the heart of the world. I would go so far as to discuss the approaching apotheosis of AI as the coming would-be reign of the Machine in the inmost spaces of the human heart, but that is perhaps a topic for another time.

I think that the resort to Hermeticism per se is thus not the answer to modernity that it is advertised to be, because it is simply an alternate modernity. Within themselves, the magical apparatuses of the medieval and Renaissance worlds, whether theoretical or practical, tend in the same direction to which the “wonders” of modern science tend. We may think we can “moderate” the use of digital technology, but it turns out that digital technology has its own telos that is inimical to our simple human plans. The Machine has a “logic” of its own; we think we are its master, and we end by becoming its servant, and then finally by remaking ourselves in its image — that is to say, by unmaking ourselves. The perennial response of traditional Christian wisdom regarding such “technologies” is visible in its response to magic conceived as this willful manipulation of occult forces of “nature” (whatever that might mean): that is, it condemns it. And this for the cogent and utterly practical reason that the exemplars of this tradition saw and knew where this willful manipulation would end: in death.

Those of us who can see this death impending in mainstream modernity’s embrace of the Machine, and those of us who can see this death impending in an enslavement to the elements of the world conceived in the alternate “modernity” of the Renaissance re-appropriation of ancient magic, need to join our minds.

But all of this leaves the hunger for re-enchantment painfully unresolved. If the door is closed to Hermeticism as an occult technology, as the apotheosis of the Machine in a different garb, what is the way forward to a living cosmos? What is the way forward to the childlike delight in our presence in God’s creation?

I would say that it is personalism, in the sense of an identification of the existential heart of reality in persons and the communion of persons, rather in any thing or the interactions of any things or the laws that govern the interactions of things, whether those discerned by modern exoteric or ancient occult sciences. But that is not enough, because at best, the modern expression of personalism leads people into a deeper experience and valorization of the depth and holiness of human hearts and human souls. Needless to say, this should not be gainsaid! All the great 20th century personalists, from Emmanuel Mounier to Dietrich von Hildebrand to Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) to Pope St John Paul II himself, helped provide a personalist key to many of our great social and cultural ills. But all that is “mere” philosophy. I believe we need a praxis of personalism that goes deeper: and I believe the praxis of re-enchantment is the praxis of personalism extended to the entire cosmos.

Thus my inspiration is not Hermeticism, but folk magic. And I say very explicitly inspiration rather than source, because there is a great deal of darkness here as well. There is darkness anywhere we seek to exist as if we were among things that we manipulate, whether more successfully or less, rather than among persons with whom we are in communion, and whom we must radically respect — each as an ineffable abyss revealed ultimately in freedom and love.

The genius of folk magic is that it is softer, and I think much more naturally and easily brought into the sphere of faith, where we recognize that in any relation between Two, there is a Third always present: the Lord.

Between me and the mountain, the Lord is also there. If I stop feeling toward that mountain that it is a mere thing — if I become a practical hylozoist and a practical panpsychist — then I relate to it as a brother or sister, with a fundamental posture of listening and of respect. Isn’t this the very ethos of St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures? And I do not need to project any kind of human consciousness onto these non-human persons. The more I sit and attempt to make myself present to plants and to animals, the more I feel that after so much speaking, it is time for humans to be quiet and listen, perhaps for a very long time. Listen not to their words, because perhaps they have none, but to their being.

Folk magic thus also attends to the hidden realities of the world, but the gravitational attraction to power is less than in exoteric or esoteric technologism, because it is more fundamentally rooted in the acknowledgement of irreducible persons as the central participants in a dance or chorus of creation. Folk magic is more like prayer and sacrament than is either Hermetic magic or modern technology: it does not demand; it asks. It understands that in the end, there is no mechanism. There is freedom, there are souls, and there is God.

This is the truism of re-enchantment: when the Gospel arrived to ancient peoples, they were never asked to give up this personal relationship to the living, personal cosmos or their sensitivity to this communion of beings. They were asked to radically reorient themselves to the Will of the One Who made it, and to walk in it in obedience to Him, that is to say, in obedience to Life. To “preach the Gospel to all creatures” in the language they can hear and understand: which is a profound and subtle skill to learn. I have been struck, especially in America, by the sense that the Gospel has never been preached to the creatures here. Once in a moment of ecstasy swimming in Lake Tahoe, I felt how much the mountains of California need hermits living in them to do this work. Of course, we do have our father among the Saints, John (Muir) of Yosemite, and we have the monks of Platina and many others. (Blessed Seraphim Rose required his novices to read Ishi Between Two Worlds so that they would know something of the peoples who lived in that God-blessed wilderness before them.)

At the risk of saying something too personal, I will say what the Lord laid upon my heart: that the old wisdom of our “dual-faith” ancestors is acceptable to Him, provided that we work all the works of simple magic with the intention of serving His love, and never imagine that we have any power all our own. He gave the herbs to heal. He gave the Earth her holy places where inspiration comes more freely and abundantly. He drew the leys on the land, as he drew the sinews and blood vessels in our bodies. He gave us the stars and the sky for wonder, He gave us the mountains and forests for joy. And He gave us healing in all these things, if we come together with them in the consciousness of His Presence. And above all, He gave us His Son and His Awen.

“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

1. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn blames Calvinists for the imposition of mechanical time, but I suspect the earlier genesis is the more accurate one.

2. In the fourth century, St Basil the Great said that the evening hymn to the light, still sung in Orthodox vespers, was so old that no one knew who composed it.