Physical events seem to take place within a generalized economy of cause and effect. Mental events, or thoughts, can also be conceived in terms of cause and effect, but my thoughts don't seem able to have effects on anything besides other thoughts of mine. For my thoughts to influence yours, they have to pass through a physical medium. Thus, it easy to understand why thoughts are often seen as epiphenomena or side-effects of physical events.
Magic (or "Magick", not sleight of hand but ritual folderol), then, is not the affirmation of the rule of mind over matter, or the domination of thoughts over physical events. Rituals are rarely done to directly cause physical events to happen. Rather, magic is predicated on the belief that thoughts, just like physical events, inhabit a general economy. Most of us--those of us who are not magicians--simply do not know how to make our thoughts cause anything. What thoughts do cause is other thoughts (or, more accurately, unconscious mental events) which in turn have physical efficacy. In other words, if I am a magician and need a piano moved, I wouldn't do a ritual to cause the piano itself to move; I'd do one to get someone to come and move my piano.
Thus, ritual magic is not irrationalism, but another sort of mechanistic rationalism.
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2 comments:
Why do we think mechanistic rationalism is more believable than irrationalism?
I didn't mean to imply that it was. But if it is more believable, I think it would be because people want to think there is an explanation or a mechanism that renders things coherent; chaos is scary. Also, there's sort of a Kantian point about the extendability, in principle, of scientific inquiry. Science couldn't operate in good faith if it thought that explanation would break down a some point.
The post is sort of a caricature of magic, too. I was mostly thinking of Crowley, or even maybe just one side of Crowley...anyway a blog is sort of a temporary medium, you get my thoughts of the day...
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