My motivations for believing in magic might seem contradictory, but I don't think they are.
A few weeks ago, someone asked me what my beliefs about magic were and what my motivation was for studying it, pointing out that the reasons I offered were contradictory. When people ask, I usually say that I study occultism because it’s fun, and my post on The Egypt Game talked about ritual in the context of LARPing. A lot of my other answers, like this one, emphasize the importance of mystical experience, which is a big part of my practice. And then in some of my posts, I treat magic as if it’s a real supernatural force. So, which is it? It’s actually all three. I study occultism because I think it’s fun, because I enjoy connecting to the divine and seek secret knowledge, and because I think magic is real.
It’s actually all three. I study occultism because I think it’s fun, because I enjoy connecting to the divine and seek secret knowledge, and because I think magic is real.
On Fun
“LARPing” is often used as a pejorative in the occult and pagan communities for people who allegedly don’t take their practice seriously. “LARPers” are people who like the idea of performing spooky rituals in robes, or like the idea of worshipping old gods, but don’t put in the work to approach either discipline properly.
One of the things I like about The Egypt Game, which I pointed out in that answer, is that the kids take their game dead seriously even while knowing it’s a game. They’re literally LARPing, but LARPing is treated like a weighty and borderline-mystical activity in and of itself. That is to say, LARPing and seriousness do not contradict each other. They’re not mutually exclusive, and they don’t cancel each other out. “LARPing” should not be used dismissively. The gods are not real in the book — I believe that my gods are real, but I still aim to approach them the way the children in the book do.
Here’s how Thorn Mooney puts it in The Witch’s Path (which mentioned The Egypt Game and prompted me to reread it):
There’s been plenty written in the fields of psychology and education about the role that play fills in the development of children. Aside from encouraging creativity, autonomy, and dexterity, it actually helps with brain development itself. Play is no less important as we age. When I worked as a teacher, my seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds also required periods of play in the classroom to retain new knowledge, to regulate their moods, and to build relationships and cognitive connections. Play, it turns out, is serious business. Adults are often discouraged from engaging in play, unless it’s channeled into sanctioned sports and games. Dressing up and playing pretend becomes acceptable in theater, at Renaissance festivals, in cosplay, and in live-action role-playing (but even these things often draw derision from onlookers who think participants are questionable). But whether it’s Halloween costumes or football, video games or tabletop games, we all need to play in order to be healthy and happy. Ritual — as serious as it is — is also a form of play. It might involve costumes, special tools, the use of special names, unique rules, and skills that are equally at home on stage or film. Reciting memorized lines, altering the character of your voice, adopting a new persona, imagining new songs and poems, and plenty more besides are all strategies we use equally in pretend and in magic and ritual. The skills of Witchcraft are the skills of healthy, well-adjusted children, encouraged to play as they grow up. I believe this is one of the reasons why Witchcraft feels like “coming home” for so many of us. It’s either a return to a lost childhood, or else it’s the opportunity to experience the joy our childhood should have been. If you begin to think of your magical practice as play and you accept that play is healthy and necessary at all stages of life, then much of the anxiety surrounding respectability melts away. It becomes enough just to enjoy whatever you’re doing, be it dancing in your living room to celebrate May Day or wearing dramatic makeup to lead your coven in a full moon rite. Yes, invoking gods and summoning spirits is absolutely serious work, but it’s also fun. It’s cathartic and stimulating and empowering — exactly what play is for children. Sneaking into the woods at night, keeping secrets, waving a blade in the air, and lightning candles in the dark is fun, no matter how many exclusive initiations you’ve had or how old you get. Ask any ten-year-old. Allowing your Craft to be fun — to consciously be a form of play — will build your confidence, which in turn will make it more effective." —Thorn Mooney, The Witch’s Path
So you see, practicing magic for fun does not preclude taking it seriously, and vice-versa.
I have realized that fun is ultimately the reason why I practice occultism. It’s essentially an elaborate hobby — I don’t have to do it, I’m not getting paid, and it’s a ton of work. It requires about as much research as a dissertation, months of preparation, years of practice. It’s so much work that sometimes I have to pull back and remind myself that the reason I do it is because I enjoy it. When I find myself overcomplicating my approach, or getting really worked up about the theology of the gods I worship (damn those Neoplatonists), or feeling awkward or ashamed… I remind myself that I do this because it’s fun.
I default to this explanation when talking about occultism and paganism to non-occultists/pagans because it is the simplest explanation, and it does three things:
It’s hard to argue with. You can’t really tell someone to not find joy in something.
It makes me seem harmless. If fun is my ultimate motivation, then I’m not going to go around trying to convince others of my beliefs or use my beliefs to attack people.
It requires no convincing or further explanation. I embrace the idea of “LARPing” outside the occult and pagan communities because I know that I will not be taken seriously. Why should I bother to say that I believe that magic works, or that I believe the Greek gods literally exist, when I’ll just be laughed at? If someone wants to walk away from the conversation assuming that I don’t take any of it seriously, fine. I’d rather that, then be attacked or derided for believing in magic.
You can probably understand why I lead with this, and not with why yes, I believe in curses. Again, it’s not a lie. But I think it might be more accurate to say that fun is my motivation rather than my reason for belief.
On Mystical Experience
Mystical experience is one of the major draws towards occultism for me, because secrets about the spiritual world and how it works are enticing. And unlike many occultists, I don’t intend to keep those secrets under wraps. I haven’t sworn any oaths, so I’m not obligated to keep any secrets. I post pretty much everything I learn or experience on the internet (unless it’s intensely personal), because I want other people to have this information too. I don’t proselytize — I don’t want to convince people of my perspective — but I do want my perspective to be out there, because it’s frequently so different from what’s familiar to most people.
It’s my opinion that religion should be experiential. If I were designing a perfect world, then everyone in it would have their own personal avenue to God and, while they might come away with different ideas about what God is and how it works, they would also all have answers to those questions that personally suit them. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work like this. Not everyone is capable of mystical experiences. Some people can become capable with years of dedication and study, often including isolation from the rest of the world so that they’re not distracted by “mundane” things, but then they’re too detached from everyone else to share what they’ve learned. Then you have the people who have mystical experiences but don’t know how to interpret them, so they use the experience to reinforce their established frameworks, instead of breaking them down and learning to think beyond them. In the worst cases, you have the people who have mystical experiences but never come down again — these people are insane, and cannot relate to the mundane world anymore. There’s plenty of people who claim to literally be gods (or whatnot) on the internet, but these people exist in real life as well, so they’re not all trolls. (I’ve written other posts about how to distinguish between UPG, insanity, and filters, so I won’t go into that here.)
Mystical experience can be a double-edged sword. One of the bits of UPG that I’ve gotten is that it’s my personal gift to be able to have mystical experiences with very little formal training, interpret them, and then communicate them in ways that other people can understand. Most people are not like me in this regard. To borrow a phrase from Lovecraft, I can have mystical experiences and correlate all of their contents, without going crazy.
This actually ties into the “fun” explanation: Mystical experiences are fantastic. At their best, they’re comparable to orgasm. Think about why people use psychedelic drugs. I can have those kinds of experiences without the drugs. I’ve never used drugs in my life.
So, how do theater/LARPing/children’s games and mystical experience relate to each other? Honestly, that requires a full dissertation, but I want to take a moment to elaborate on the intersect between “playing pretend” and mystical experience. In brief, the former leads to the latter. Emotionally, the brain cannot tell the difference between a fake experience and a real one, which is why people get so immersed and emotionally invested in fiction despite knowing it’s not real. It’s why children treat the games they’re playing as if they’re real while they’re in them. It’s why BDSM can literally alter your state of consciousness and your way of relating to your partner (i.e. “subspace” or “Domspace”), even though the power dynamic is feigned. “Playing pretend” is an extremely powerful thing, and occultists take advantage of that. The reason that rituals have all the costumes, props, specific actions, etc. is because these things trick the mind into having a fake experience that, if it’s intense enough, becomes a real one. Occultists call this “psychodrama.” The psychodrama creates the conditions of an intense psychological experience through which the participants can be led straight into a mystical experience.
Theater is actually a great example of this. The tradition of Western theater began as a literal Dionysian rite. Dionysus is the god associated with altered states of consciousness. Masks, which all actors wore in Greek theater, allow for a kind of figurative shapeshifting into another being, and that is a mystical experience. You’re in an altered state of consciousness when you play a character as an actor. You express a hidden aspect of your own identity through playing a character, and you’re given permission to do so through the anonymity granted by the (literal or figurative) mask. Theater grants the audience a new perspective on their own social dynamics through exploring taboos (tragedy) and speaking truth to power (comedy), which plays into the themes of social subversion that underlie all Dionysian experiences:
Masks express liminality in two ways. Modern interpreters tend to focus upon the mask's synchronic ambiguities: that a mask presents and conceals at once, combining an outward fixed personality and a mysterious hidden voluble one. The power of the masked personality resides in the possibility of difference, even polar opposition between the outside and the inside. On this interpretation, the masked icon is a representation of Dionysus' doubleness and duplicity. Indeed the Greeks also called him the "god of two forms," and this doubleness of the mask might also find expression in the fact that the icon of Dionysus is frequently a double mask — a pillar with two masks affixed to either side and gazing in opposite directions. The uncanny combination of something presented to view and something hidden suggests the portrait of Dionysus we find in myth, with its paradoxical combination of the familiar and the strange. Dionysus is a thoroughly Greek god, yet he is always presented as a foreigner arriving over land or over sea: from India, Lydia, or Thrace. The story of Dionysus at Thebes best brings out this opposition of familiarity and strangeness: Dionysus comes as a stranger from Lydia to his own birthplace to visit his own family. But the liminality of the mask may also be interpreted diachronically in terms of transition between states and identities. When you put on a mask you allow your own personality to be submerged in that of another. It is a form of possession and at least a partial expulsion of the familiar self. Frontisi-Ducroux argues that it is this, and not concealment, which the mask signified to the Greek mind: "When put on, the mask served not to hide the face it covered, but to abolish and replace it."l? If the logic of the mask's doubleness has to do with possession, there is also a certain doubleness in the manner in which the mask seizes its victims. The mask-wearer is invaded by the persona of the mask, but so is the mask-viewer. The mask is a source of fascination, even in the etymological sense of casting a spell (Lat. fascinare)." —Eric Csapo, “Riding the Phallus for Dionysus: Iconology, Ritual, and Gender-Role De/Construction
Deconstruction and reconstruction of identity recurs again and again in initiation rituals and other kinds of mystical experiences. Mystical experiences force you to ask yourself who you are once you’ve stripped away everything that you think makes you, you — your public persona, your cultural identity, your gender identity, your age, your race, your species even. Those are all just masks that you wear. Who are you, when there is nothing left of you but the divine spark? And once you answer that question, once you become aware that all the other stuff about you is just various masks… you can start to change those masks at will. That gives you a great deal of power over how you’re perceived and how you interact with the world. But in order to use that power, you have to know who you really are without all the masks, or you risk letting the masks usurp your real self.
That’s just one example. Most mystical rituals have some kind of symbol or play-acted situation that acts as a baseline for whatever abstraction the experience actually focuses on. In that example, masks are the go-to metaphor for figuring out one’s identity. Dionysus’ other symbols, like wine and phalloi, have similar mystical significance. Understanding the abstraction through the symbol is usually easier than understanding it on its own, so the rituals are built around the symbol. The fake situation (the symbol/psychodrama) becomes the real situation (the abstraction/mystical experience).
On Magic
Magic was the reason I got into occultism in the first place, though ironically, it’s aspect of occultism that I have the least experience with. I know the theory of how it works, and all the different methods of performing it, and all the different philosophical approaches toward it. But I don’t do very much magic. It’s only recently that I’ve remembered to do any magic, like, “oh yeah, magic is an option in this situation.” When I remember to do it, I have to override the feelings of self-doubt and self-consciousness that interfere with it. Working through those psychological blocks has been a challenge, and one possible tool to help me get through them is the psychodrama. That brings me back to The Egypt Game — approaching magic the same way I approached my imaginary games as a child will help me to switch off the rational-adult part of my mind that makes me second-guess myself. I have to believe that I’m powerful, which I have no trouble with when I’m LARPing or acting! And here’s the thing — when magic works, it works. It’s produced results enough times to convince me that something about it works, and while I know perfectly well that anecdotes are not data, and prove nothing, it’s enough to keep me invested in the practice of magic.
Is magic supernatural? I don’t know, and I don’t claim to know. I frequently go back-and-forth on whether I believe in magic as a supernatural force or not. I’d really like it to be, but it’s also okay with me if magic is all a psychological trick and nothing more, because ultimately, it’s fun. It’s fun to believe in, fun to practice, fun to research. Likewise with gods — I’d like to believe that the gods are real, and I have reason to believe that they exist independently from me on some level. But the last thing I want is to get into arguments about what it means to be “real”, or about mythic literalism. If the gods exist only in my head, that does nothing to change the nature of my relationship with them, and it doesn’t take away from the benefits I get from my relationships with them, so what difference does it make?
Magic as a concept is so important to me that I will accept anything as “magic,” even if it’s as simple as visualization. (However, my bar for magic is not quite as low as Crowley’s “a man blowing his nose is an act of magic.”) Through my studies, I discovered that magic is real in some sense, though exactly how I define it changes depending on the context and who my audience is. Sometimes I use the anthropological definition of magic, “non-normative ritual behavior.” Sometimes I use the occult definition of magic, which is usually some variant of “causing change in accordance with one’s will,” though exactly how broad of a scope that definition covers is a matter of debate. Some occultists believe that magic is purely psychological, while others believe that it’s genuinely supernatural, and there’s a lot of in-between. I’m not going to discuss every facet of that debate here, but I will say that I’m not all that invested in the conclusion. My solution has been to just not care. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Magic could be real, or it might not be, but either way, it’s fun. What all of this ultimately amounts to is self-improvement on multiple levels. Obtaining mystical knowledge requires self-awareness and the ability to work through your crap, which improves you psychologically. That knowledge can then be applied to improve yourself on a spiritual level and a mundane level. You can gain a more sophisticated understanding of and connection to the Divine, or you can do simple spells to improve your health, wealth, relationships, and other aspects of your life. Or both! And then, of course, fun is healthy and a source of happiness, as Thorn so eloquently put it. All of that makes the study of occultism worth it.
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