The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Hello there!
Firstly, I want to say I'm not here to bash on anyone's practices or beliefs, but I want to talk about some of my thoughts and ask general questions about magical practices.

I decided long ago that I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in a higher consciousness, although I think it's fun to imagine a world like that when playing RPGs and studying ancient civilizations. However, I'm very fond of nature and the harmony of planet Earth, especially where there is lack of human tampering. I don't see nature as a conscious, living force, but rather as a primal one. After all, animals and plants adapt as time passes, and something has to drive their instinct to live, eat and multiply.

That said, I've always been interested in magic and where it falls in all things 'natural.' I mean, without humans there might not be any magic at all; no living thing knew anything about magic when dinosaurs still lived, surely?
Thanks to some of my nerdier interests; RPGs, fantasy books, history and so on, I'm fascinated by the idea of people practicing what they call magic (although I'm very aware theatrical fireballs and hocus pocus jabber are different from modern magic entirely).
Even though I like to fantasize when I lose myself in a book or in a campaign, deep down, I'm a skeptic and defer to science to explain phenomenons that might be covered under magic. Drawing cards, runes, etc. comes down to probability and random shuffling. Ouija boards were a commercial game introduced in 1890, without occult connotations until spiritualist Pearl Curran sent the spirit fuss rolling, and are explainable with the ideomotor effect.
Already, it seems like a few hallmark practices I wave off as mundane. Out of respect, I'd never refute a mother up-front if she wants to commune with her dead son, but inside, I know she's not hearing his voice, but fragments of audio hiss, with an active and hopeful imagination filling in the blanks.

I suppose that leads me to why I should be interested in magic at all, if I find most practices, supernatural phenomena and occultism to be nothing more than imaginations? Well, I'm infatuated with the idea that practitioners believe they can divinate or change something of the world around them - that they feel strongly about their craft and the effects they intend it to have.
So I raise a question: when some traditions might be explainable by science and probability, do people really believe in magic as a supernatural force, or is it more like a personal ritual to cope with the real world? For example, if it helps me to turn on a good music album and lay down to put a day's worries behind me, is the act of performing a spell (with or without concrete belief in the supernatural) just another way to relax and carry on?
So an X color candle and a Y sigil with the Z tarot might not be anything more than mundane pieces of matter, but if putting them all together in one's mind helps them sleep at night, I guess who am I to judge?

What might be your thoughts? And what might be some good resources to read about from this perspective?

What might be your thoughts? And what might be some good resources to read about from this perspective?

 
I agree with a lot of Sefiru's comments, but another take if that helps:

1) I think a lot of magic - not all of it, but more than half - is psychology. I think using symbols, ritual, etc. to name what you want, and then shape yourself toward it is pretty powerful stuff, and it's something that society often tries to train out of us.

A lot of magical work I do is in this category: I will do ritual work to help me find a better job, or find an apartment, but a good three-quarters of the work is figuring out how to define and name what I want (which makes it a *lot* easier to focus on!) and the rest is helping me be open to possibilities I might not have considered, but turn out to work out really well.

(So. Not *all* practical steps: there's an element of chance / openess to the numinousness of the universe / magic in here.)

2) I think there's a lot of stuff in the universe we don't understand yet.

This is not contrary to science, in fact science tells us, very loudly, there is a lot of stuff in the universe we don't understand yet. Most of the ocean, for starters!

I think some of that stuff is about beings who don't exist on the physical plane that we interact with (but then, on some levels, the physical plane is a figment of our imaginations, and what we've got is collections of atoms that sort of stick together and seem to be solid sometimes.)

3) I have had experiences I cannot explain except by going "There's something outside my brain going on here."

One of my early ritual experiences in my tradition was being in a ritual, and hearing the last paragraph of a letter my father wrote me before he died told back to me. It was not quite word for word, but it was phrase for phrase, and it included several statements that random people would not strike on immediately about me.

The priestess who did it had known me for under six months: she knew my father had died, but I had not mentioned the letter, never mind the contents, to him. (And while it's something I often read at that time of year - the anniverary of my father's death is right after Samhain - I was not thinking of it at the time.

Now, I could take that experience and scoff at it, or I could take that experience and go "There's a thing here I don't understand, but it is real, and meaningful and precious to me." and treat it like the amazing thing that it was.

I have never been disappointed in my life by choosing to seek magic, by choosing to seek the numinous, by having a wonder about the world and its possibilities.

There have been times it's been hard, there have been times when ruthless logical practicality has also been called for. There have been times when people have manipulated that magic, that sense of potential, in ways that have hurt people I care about. (But humans manipulate humans in all sorts of ways.) There have been times when finding the magic, the spark of potential, has  been very hard.

I have never regretted keeping that door open.

I don't think my answers have to be the answers for everyone. (Except the part about the universe having a lot of things we don't understand yet. That's a fact.) But I don't think they're at odds with thinking critically about things, or applying practical approaches to my magic, or to asking questions about my experiences, either.

What might be your thoughts? And what might be some good resources to read about from this perspective?

 
I agree with Jennett and Sefiru. I find that Psychology informs a majority of my practices, and in a way, Psychology/counseling/therapy itself is a kind of magic to me. In Academia, Psychology is an art, not a science. We know surprisingly little about how the human brain works, all things considered. Many soft polytheists/non theistic witches read C.G.Jung's work. I'm definitely a fan.

I guess if I want to answer if I believe in magic, I have to define it. And magic to me is science we do not understand yet/we may never understand. There are studies that suggest talking to plants helps them grow. A baby's heart beats before his brain is formed, a mother knows her child is awake without hearing him-that is magic to me. Like Jennett, there are things that have occurred in my life that I cannot explain outside of some kind of connectivity of it all, and that is my magic.

Scientific belief and magical/spiritual belief are not mutually exclusive to me. I feel that one takes just as much faith for me as the other. One asks me to trust my mind, the other asks me to trust my instincts. If a migratory bird trusted only his mind, he would never fly south. He would freeze and die. Likewise, if a fox did not use his mind, he would die as well. Where do we hairless apes fall into this?

3) I have had experiences I cannot explain except by going "There's something outside my brain going on here."



Now, I could take that experience and scoff at it, or I could take that experience and go "There's a thing here I don't understand, but it is real, and meaningful and precious to me." and treat it like the amazing thing that it was.

This too -- I wanted to mention it in my post, but I couldn't come up with a good phrasing.

I'm infatuated with the idea that practitioners believe they can divinate or change something of the world around them - that they feel strongly about their craft and the effects they intend it to have. So I raise a question: when some traditions might be explainable by science and probability, do people really believe in magic as a supernatural force, or is it more like a personal ritual to cope with the real world?

The thing is, from my experience, whenever I've outright told myself 'this is a symbolic performance to cope' it becomes less effective. To explain it to others, fair enough: let the performance be (link goes to a YouTube video, if you can access it, try thinking of "routine" as "ritual" and extrapolate from there.) However, that's like going through your day aware that the materials we take to be solid, liquid, or gaseous is really all mostly vacuum and quantum superstrings/membranes. If you keep it at that level only, you might forget to put your coffee down on the table and trust that both are solid.

If you're going to read the book of life, you can't keep correcting the punctuation. Sometimes there are dangling participles to pay attention to. Sometimes there are themes, characters, and plot developments. Punctuation is still going to be there, but if you're reading for the information contained in a written work then of course the mindset is different. Literacy is broader than carefully-detailed-but-really-meaningless-if-you're-not-taught-what-others-want-you-to-see marks of ink on paper. I consider magic closer to literacy than...umm? uninterpreted phenomena? Skepticism, I understand, as refraining from imposing an interpretation; but science has its method of approach and application that isn't strictly skeptical (and doesn't, as I'm about to argue, apply everywhere to the human experience or to shared societal realities.)

I'm very fond of nature and the harmony of planet Earth, especially where there is lack of human tampering. I don't see nature as a conscious, living force, but rather as a primal one. After all, animals and plants adapt as time passes, and something has to drive their instinct to live, eat and multiply.

It might interest you to find out that urban magic is a thing, and from what I'd read, such practices do seem to shake up a bit the role of humans in the harmony of planet earth, and the magic of the natural world. Because humans adapt, humans have instincts and drives, humans do live and eat and multiply like natural creatures...and tampering is a part of all that. (It's a part that's driving to extinction the same insects that pollinate our blossoms into fruits, and predictably going to leave a lot of now-populated places under a risen ocean, but "pristine natural" versus "tampered by humans" is not a natural category born of observation; categorization in and of itself isn't a natural phenomenon, it's one imposed for a specific purpose in a specific societal context...if not arbitrarily.) (Disclaimer: ...to my understanding.)

That said, I've always been interested in magic and where it falls in all things 'natural.' I mean, without humans there might not be any magic at all; no living thing knew anything about magic when dinosaurs still lived, surely?

Not surely, hypothetically. That's not a hypothesis that can be tested, either. :p It's a bit like asking living people what happens after we die.

Drawing cards, runes, etc. comes down to probability and random shuffling.

Logic, memory, linguistic understanding comes down to neurology. That doesn't mean that poetry doesn't exist.

Ouija boards were a commercial game introduced in 1890, without occult connotations until spiritualist Pearl Curran sent the spirit fuss rolling, and are explainable with the ideomotor effect.

I've argued the same thing, because the accretion of belief around this item has become "it's a scary bad portal to evil misfortune, objectively" which I consider unnecessary fear-mongering that could easily be turned against...really, any random thing (or even, person. For no real good cause. That's my worry, more than a harmless belief being factually untrue.)

Out of respect, I'd never refute a mother up-front if she wants to commune with her dead son, but inside, I know she's not hearing his voice, but fragments of audio hiss, with an active and hopeful imagination filling in the blanks.

Ever read Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark? I was sad to read there how close Sagan had been with his parents, that when they'd died, he would still hear their voices. Sadly, a lot of would-be spiritworkers became very disrespectful about that, insisting that Sagan truly was receiving communication from beyond the grave.

I think it's too bad that Sagan didn't feel comfortable with processing that grief through that experience. It would be appallingly rude of me to say, "...because those really are your parents, Carl!" because that's his relationship with his personal experience and his parents.

But I know (as smugly as you know, in the case of the hypothetical grieving mother) that if someone has an experience such as that, it's probably worth exploring beyond the dismissal of "fragments of audio hiss, with an active and hopeful imagination filling in the blanks"; grieving doesn't happen through repression, and I'd consider the dismissal every bit as bad as the insistence upon an individual processing grief in the language of a pervasive (if not dominant) spiritual culture.

To me, at least, this is cultural and personal, much much more than it is an issue of consistent empirical evidence...in which case, frankly, we (specifically thread participants we) don't need more facts so much as I think we (general we) need to discuss mutually-respected boundaries. Hopefully in a less finite way than "agree to disagree and may we never speak of this again", although sometimes that's really the best marker to move on rather than live within a relationship of perpetual disagreement.

I'm infatuated with the idea that practitioners believe they can divinate or change something of the world around them - that they feel strongly about their craft and the effects they intend it to have.

Going back to this for a moment, but: why? What's it to you? I promise I'm genuinely curious.

So an X color candle and a Y sigil with the Z tarot might not be anything more than mundane pieces of matter, but if putting them all together in one's mind helps them sleep at night, I guess who am I to judge?

Eh, everyone's got to make decisions, and hopefully those decisions involve judgment. If X color candle, Y sigil, and Z tarot is something All The Cool Kids are doing, and you don't get it, so you don't follow what they say should be done or not done, and it doesn't hurt anybody but everybody else, absolutely everybody else, just doesn't like seeing that you're different, then...that can become a dangerous situation, at which point it would be good (or disastrous, depending on how savvy you are with people; I am not) to speak out against X color candle, Y sigil, and Z tarot being anything more than mundane pieces of matter.

What might be your thoughts? And what might be some good resources to read about from this perspective?

Sagan's book I mentioned above which remains very humane, Stan Gooch's Origins of Psychic Phenomena which does not (not to say it's an inherently cruel text, just that it satisfied my interests in the psychological dimension of the paranormal because that's how I approached it; if you come into that book smug, then you'll probably just come out of it an outright jerk), on the spiritual end you might be interested in Sam Harris' Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, or on the more political/financial end Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare At Goats (though I wasn't interested in it at all, I only thought I would be), and I haven't read John Halstead's Godless Paganism but I liked this article by that author. Less on the magic, more on the psyche-poetic-cultural stuff.

If you would kindly note, my recommendations look awfully like a boys' club, which I know is a problem.

I strongly recommend the books of Karen Armstrong on this topic, particularly A History of God and The Battle for God. She goes into some depth regarding  reason, imagination and their relationship to religious practice. She doesn't address magic per se, but the same ideas apply.

Ooh! Definitely going to check that out, thanks

Hello there!
Firstly, I want to say I'm not here to bash on anyone's practices or beliefs, but I want to talk about some of my thoughts and ask general questions about magical practices. .............
...........................
So an X color candle and a Y sigil with the Z tarot might not be anything more than mundane pieces of matter, but if putting them all together in one's mind helps them sleep at night, I guess who am I to judge?

What might be your thoughts? And what might be some good resources to read about from this perspective?

First of all is magic a very wide field. It is a spiritual discipline  and many physical things are the only a means of support. I recomend you, if you are interested, older magick texts.
According spiritual teachings is not only this physical world, but there are a finer spiritual plains too. Like astral, mental, causal... etc. And magick powers comes from those finer plains. Candles, tarot.... etc are only support resources for comunication with those plains. The important thing is concentration of mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(esotericism))