Hmmm. What am I afraid to tell you about myself that might make some of you self-select out and say "nope, that's not for me" right from the jump?
I thought about it and after a bit of mild cheek-gnawing, thought-- ok, I’ll tell you: I believe in magic ….yes, I do. But I’m going to skirt any labels because it’s a bit more complicated.
[…deep breath…]
I’ll admit to you that I don’t believe in the gods of organized religion and that rather, I tend to pay attention to the seasons, the weather, what the trees and plants are doing, when the geese migrate, the peripatetics of the bees and possums, the movement of the stars and planets, and the cyclical rhythms of my body. I care about human rights and our sacred responsibility to care and protect the Earth and each other. And the more I learn about Nature and our investigations of it, the more in awe I become; the more I know, the less I really understand which, strangely, deepens my spirituality.
Would you call me a pagan? A witch? A wiccan? A Unitarian? LOL. /shrugging\ I dunno…. I’m not someone who does spells or makes potions like "flying ointment" with tropane alkaloids (not that there’s anything wrong with that if you know what you’re doing). I’m not one to regularly dance naked in the moonlight to worship horned deities (though, if offerered such an adventure, my curiosity might be piqued enough to join). The old gods are interesting and so are the new gods but I really just play with the idea of them in my mind as representatives of human thought. If I believed in one of them for real, I’d have to believe in all 4000 of them which would eat up all of my time and brain bandwidth.
Spells are interesting though. There really is something about saying a thing out loud and having intentions behind it. I’m more careful with words. Words have real power.
As do images. Are they a kind of spell that’s cast over the viewer? If a spell is an intention, then perhaps a painting, sculpture, drawing, is really a kind of spell.
We’ve all seen depictions of the cultural ideas we’ve absorbed about what magic might look like— eg. DnD art of a being with a glowing aura, electric arcing from a wand, the shimmery sparkle of something emerging from thin air, etc.— but what’s more surprising and exciting is to see is an object that embodies the magic. Magic needs more than just an illustration. It needs something that signifies anima.
For some time now I’ve been reading and thinking about how we humans have conceptualized magic from the dawn of human art-making. Pre-science and pre-religion, I like to think of Magic as a wild ancient spore that can’t be abolished by Science or snuffed out by Religion. Anyone can “do” magic. And anyone can practice conceptualizing it any way they want to. Magic is the desire to possess agency over one’s life by harnessing some essence of the power that exists in the world. It’s an acknowledgement (or maybe more closely, a supplication) that we are not separate from its forces. Practitioners have often devised physical items or sigils— tattoos, ceremonial objects, tokens, talismans, apotropaic objects, voodoo dolls, etc— objects which are believed to actually hold magic. Perhaps paintings and drawings are sheer magic given the illusion of space they create. I’ve been thinking more and more about this and what it might mean to want to break that illusion (ie contemporary art movement) or to deepen it. What does it mean for a secular artist like me to make an art object / story / movie overtly magical? (Not just art “about” magic.) How do we cast a spell that honors magic while maintaining a secular worldview? Can this be done?
Hey— I'm over here trying to make keys to all the portals and I can't be the only one who needs one. Oh-- you want one too? Here, use it and be well.
*****
Many thanks to UCLA Prof. Courtenay Raia for deepening my understanding of magic and how it’s understood culturally in relation to science and religion. Watch her excellent and entertaining lecture series here.