Strange Magic: How art, language, and the imagination conspire to make magic

Also: the porous boundary between imagination and reality, why "magical thinking" happens, and how to sensibly use a Tarot deck.

This is part of an ongoing series on the ideas of Alan Moore. Read the rest of the series here. Also, I took the paywall down from last week’s article, as it makes up the basis of a lot of the philosophical stuff I’m gonna be talking about on here. Read it here.

Among adults, magic is a degraded art. Most of us loved magic when we were kids — we saw a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or guess our card, and, little dummies that we were, we weren’t able to see through the trick and wondered if perhaps the magic was real. But sometime in our teenage years, the tricks behind the illusions were revealed to us, and we left magic in the past, along with Sesame Street and bedwetting.

Within our modern lexicon, even the term magic is usually employed in a vaguely derogatory manner: consider the term “magical thinking,” which refers to the modern superstition that our thoughts and feelings can exert unnatural influence on the world around us, that they can perhaps curve the ball through the goal posts if we want it badly enough and are wearing the right pair of socks. Our other primary understanding of “magic” exists within the context of modern New Age belief systems. It’s the magic of burned sage and star charts, and smacks of the desperate adult desire to force order upon the overwhelming chaos.

This is unfortunate — even though our rational brain may scoff at magic’s illusions and thinly-veiled con artistry, the feeling we got when we were kids and the rabbit appeared out of the hat is something that we are left desperately wanting in adulthood. Wonder is in short supply for grown-ups.

But it doesn’t need to be. Last week, we discussed Alan Moore’s insight that Gods do not need to exist anywhere outside the human mind for them to still retain all their power, terror, and majesty (read that article for free below). From this epiphany, Moore developed a system for thinking about and navigating human consciousness. He calls this system “magic,” and while it has its roots in the same occult practices as much of the New Age movement, there is nothing inherently pseudoscientific about it. We can dip our feet in its waters and still keep our “rational adult” cards.

The Art of Magic

Put at its simplest, Moore’s understanding of magic is that it is basically the same thing as art. He explains in The Mindscape of Alan Moore:

Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.

When asked, Moore puts forward a theory as to how art and magic began as a human activity: he suspects that the earliest artists were, in fact, shamans or holy people. They were the keepers of their societies stories and rituals, and when performing these rituals, they would have learned tricks to pull their audience in and hold their attention.

These tricks — mnemomic devices, rhyme, rhythm, repetition, etc. — are the same tricks used by talented storytellers and rhetoricians today. He believes that over time, the broad field of magic got split into separate disciplines: early alchemy morphed into what would now be recognized as “science,”; storytelling, painting, singing, and performing all were categorized as “art”; the spiritual aspects of magic were consigned to “religion”; the use of stories to influence the organization and goals of the tribe were developed into “politics.”

In the modern age, we are inured to the magic of storytelling because we consume so much of it that we forget just how strange it is. A viral meme that has been making the rounds lately puts it nicely:

ancientcringe

A post shared by @ancientcringe

But consider the effect, thousands of years ago, of a shaman telling a tale around a fire: perhaps they have some understanding of pyrotechnics, and can make the fire rise and fall, seemingly at their command, as they speak. Imagine they pull you into a tale where you can see it, you can see the story in your minds eye, or perhaps dancing among the flames, to the point that you feel like you are in the story yourself. Imagine if in that story you feel as if you can fly, that you can slay a dragon, or build something immense.

What could you call the experience of becoming totally immersed in a story, if not magic?

While storytelling and art’s magical trappings have been siphoned off and picked apart in modern society, Moore suggests that the connections between the two are still apparent in the words we use to describe them. From The Mindscape of Alan Moore:

The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimoire, for example, the book of spells, is simply a fancy way of saying grammar.

Likewise, we “curse” people we wish to hurt in both language and magic. Stories that are particularly immersive are called “enchanting.” People or characters who are charismatic¹ or appealing are “charming.” When that charm is illusory and there is something darker underneath, we might call it “glamor.” Moore again:

Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness.

This ability to change people’s consciousness, to influence them, to put images and ideas in their mind, is an immense power, perhaps the most immense power. Because of this, Moore views writing and art as a far more elevated craft than most. From Mindscape:

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society.

Is it perhaps unsurprising that a writer would come up with a theory that puts writers at the center of society? Sure. But the tricks of art and magic are available to all: we can all learn these techniques, both in order to not be manipulated, or to use them towards our own ends².

Francisco Goya’s Witches Sabbath. Public Domain.

Where science and imagination meet

The curious thing about humans is that when we truly believe a story, it changes our behavior: a soldier or athlete heading into a hopeless situation can be steeled by a rousing speech, and can then go out and turn hopelessness into victory. Conversely, if we believe stories that tell us we are worthless, we begin to act like we are worthless. The stories we tell ourselves are our primary motivating factors, they are what guide our actions and give our lives meaning.

But our imaginations don’t just give us the stories we tell. We get everything we’ve ever created or built from them. Every single piece of manmade technology that you use every single day had to exist inside someone’s imagination before it could exist in the real world. The chair you are sitting in, the phone you are holding, the burrito you’re shoving into your mouth, all of these things had to be conceptualized before they could exist.

This puts “magical thinking” into a new light: sure, turning our cap around backwards won’t necessarily change the momentum of the basketball game we are watching. But it’s an understandable fallacy, because we regularly take stuff that’s in our brains and make it into real stuff in the real world, whenever we write a letter or draw a picture or make a meal or knit a scarf or do a funny little dance. The boundary between imagination and reality is, in a very real sense, porous³.

So it’s unsurprising that we sometimes overestimate how much our internal state affects the external world. But we do not need magic to explain the laws of nature — science does that just fine. It just needn’t not be our only exploratory tool. From Magic Words:

Moore is committed to the scientific worldview. He believes that magicians and occultists have tended to make a fundamental mistake in seeing magic as a rival scientific system with strict ‘laws’. Magic, for Moore, is an art, albeit a ‘meta-art’ akin to psychology or linguistics, and in his view, virtually all great art has been created by artists with magical beliefs of one kind or another. Science, however, has at least one serious limitation: it ‘cannot discuss or explore consciousness itself, since scientific reality is based entirely upon empirical phenomena.’

For exploring the realm of consciousness, Moore turns to magic.

How do you explore the magical realm?

Of course, since magic is an art rather than a science, the methods of exploring it are a lot more fast and loose than the scientific method is. Any time you make art, any time you engage in any act of creation, you are in effect exploring the contours of your interior world, and are engaging in what Moore would call “magic.”

Most people who work as “creatives”⁴ don’t spend too much time examining their creative process. The worry among many creative people is if you look at your processes too closely, they’ll lose their magic and won’t work anymore. This, obviously, is not the case for Moore, who was heavily inspired by the musician Brian Eno. Eno’s approach to art is curious and experimental — in the 70s, he created a widely-used deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies” which was designed to help jar you out of a creative block by offering aphorisms that could be pulled at random, like:

• “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”

• “Work at a different speed.”

• “Try faking it!!”

Creativity and art, in this sense, is basically a playground. We play with ideas, experiment with new methods, and just generally fuck about until something cool happens.

Moore took Eno’s ethos and ran with it, swiping occult tools like Tarot and Kabbalah as creative tools that can be used to explore the imagination and come up with solutions to creative problems. Occultists have long used Tarot cards as a method of divining the future, and this, scientifically speaking, is nonsense⁵. But the Tarot is a set of heavily symbolic images, and this sort of tool is really useful if you’re trying to turn off your rational brain and access your intuition.

Say you’ve got to make a tough choice. You’re considering taking a new job, or getting engaged, or having kids. You’ve thought it all through, you’ve made lists of pros and cons for each of your choices, but you find that there’s no clear rational answer. The only thing left to do is go with your gut instinct, but this is hard to do because you’ve been all rational and reasonable, so your brain is in problem-solving mode, not “trust your intuition” mode. So what do you do? You pull out a Tarot deck and ask it what you should do.

The answer the Tarot deck gives is not the universe communicating with you — it is you communicating with you. Because in trying to decode all of the symbols, you may find yourself drawn to a specific interpretation, born of seemingly nonsensical associations and vague feelings, that nonetheless feels right. This is your correct answer, arrived at through magical, irrational processes. This doesn’t mean that rationality is a bad tool — much of the time, it gives us the right answer — it’s just a tool that, like literally all tools, is not useful in every situation.

This is, of course, just scratching the surface of what Moore calls “magic.” Moore’s biographer Lance Parkin wrote that “it is possible to break Moore’s [magical belief system] down into three components: psychogeography, snake worship, and ideaspace.” We’ve already covered the worship of snakes, and followers of this newsletter will likely already be familiar with psychogeography (though we will certainly come back to it). But next week, we will explore the third component, which attempts to map out the imagination: ideaspace.

1. “Charisma” is also interesting for our purpose, having its roots in the Greek word kharisma, meaning “favor” or “grace.” In its early usage, charisma meant a talent that was gifted to someone by God. In Moore’s magical cosmology, where Gods can be accessed through our imaginations, a god-given power would be extremely useful in the creation of good art.

2. Our own ends, of course, are totally benign.

3. Moore has recounted several jarring experiences in which stuff that started in his brain has entered the real world in strange ways. He, along with the artist David Lloyd, is the creator of the character V in V for Vendetta. V wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask that has since been adopted as a symbol by the Anonymous and later the Occupy movements. Moore, a lifelong anarchist, was pleased with the politics of these groups, but noted that it was a bit jarring to see an ocean of V’s at protests when it once only existed in the mind of himself and Lloyd.

4. I’ve never heard Moore use the term “creatives,” but I have to imagine he’d fucking hate it, along with its partner “content.”

5. Though to be fair, it’s pretty fun nonsense as long as you aren’t taking it seriously.