Magic is real (if you know how to look)

The cornerstones of the Enchanted Gaze

We are in the midst of a magical revival. From Witchtok to terms like “Egregores” and “Hyperstition” almost reaching buzzword status, magic is entering the Overton window. Consensus reality is shattering along with the trust in mainstream institutions. Stranger views than strict scientific rationalism are taking hold in a growing number of people, blossoming into internet religions of various flavors. Pepe the frog winning elections, UFOs, a resurgence in parapsychology - it seems that reality itself is weirding. 

What is going on? Are the self-proclaimed witches and wizards actually on to something or are these just the signs of growing collective insanity or regression? 

Magic is deeply rooted in our collective psyche. It’s not just Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, stories of magic are found throughout the ages. That is not an accident, magic to this day is the language of the unconscious. Have you ever wondered why psychoanalysts are so obsessed with dreams and fairy tales? The magic of magic is changing the way we perceive reality, and therefore changing our reality. 

I’m sharing my take on the most common magical ways of viewing, how they are useful and how they generate their power. Join me on this journey into the occult and don’t worry, we’ll take rationality with us (for most of the way). 

Tl;dr: Magic is real. But not in the way you might think.

WARNING: proceed at your own risk, this material can be psychoactive 

A magical world reveals itself to an enchanted gaze

"Of course, it is happening inside your head, Harry,
but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" 

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to listen, it does not actually make a sound. And there is no tree, either. It is our minds that slice the world up into objects and across sense modalities. Separate objects ( “trees”, “sounds”, etc.) are not inherent in reality, they are co-created by our perceptions. And we perceive them as such because of our affordances (thanks, evolution) and concepts (thanks, language). While deep evolutionary programs that we all share account for our generic interface of space-time and self-world, the icons we perceive are much more sensitive to our cultural backgrounds. Try googling how many words for “snow” there are in Iceland. 

This does not mean that it’s all just in our heads. There are real patterns out there (and many more than we can perceive, at that). No, the moon does not disappear if you stop looking at it, but it is only “the moon” through our human vantage point. We are running world simulations but we are not in a (shared) simulation. 

This interactionist view of reality is in line with our current scientific understanding, especially recent insights from cognitive science. From 4E cognition to predictive processing, it seems clear that we operate on a simulation of the world rather than the world itself. This doesn’t just concern perception (i.e. the present) but also the past and the future: Our memory is reconstructed every time we revisit it. Selective attention and unconscious expectations (“priors”) only make certain future actions an option for us. 

We are co-creating reality at the interaction of real patterns with our minds. If Magick is about “causing change in accordance with will”, you can see how it’s much easier to change the mental half of reality, and how that will actually change reality for us. Changing our own minds will also change how we interact with others and in turn, how they react to us. Xiq wrote a good piece on how magic can work as subtle communication. 

That being said, it’s not actually that easy to reprogram how you perceive reality. Merely deciding that you are now going to perceive differently is not going to change any of the unconscious stances that actually do most of the work. I’m going to look at techniques that can accomplish that in the next post. 

For now, let’s dive a bit deeper into the cornerstones of the enchanted gaze, the magical ways of perceiving (co-creating) reality. These perspectives underly any techniques - the fundamental magical act is perception.

Cornerstones of the enchanted gaze

Want to change your life? Change your mind first, and the rest will follow. The enchanted gaze is the magical stance that will enable you to change your mind and successfully apply magical techniques (more on that in the next piece). There are clear patterns in worldview across magical lineages from Hermeticism to Shamanism, from Druidry to Wicca. We’ll walk through the most important ones, in increasing order of “woo”. To the skeptics - keep in mind that these are not truth claims about the “reality out there” but ways of looking that are useful.  

Interdependence 

“Everything is connected, dude” said your stoner bum friend. He is right. Interdependence is probably the most fundamental building block of any magical worldview. Systems theory and Buddhism agree that for any phenomenon to show up the way it does, literally everything else is needed. For you to even exist, the unbroken evolutionary tree from LUCA to you is just as necessary as the air you breathe and the fundamental physical constants that hold the world in place. And conversely, your existence implies LUCA, air, gravity, etc. The metaphor of Indra’s Net is a primordial illustration of this principle.

In such an interconnected system, small changes can snowball into great effects (see the butterfly effect). As a result, even the smallest action matters. That’s where we place the lever for magical acts to ripple out their effects. If we can feel into the flows of the interlocking complex systems of mind, culture, and nature, a decisive action can move much larger structures than we’d expect.

Resonance

Not only is everything connected, but everything resonates. Reality is a fractal and there is not just horizontal interaction, but patterns also resonate across scales. “As above, so below” is inscribed on the Emerald Tablet. This belief forms the basis for sympathetic magic, where a larger goal is re-enacted on a smaller scale, e.g. as a ritual.

A hermetic magician might tap into this principle of resonance by learning correspondences across different systems like the Tarot and the kabbalistic Tree of Life. Meanwhile, a Chaos Magician just makes correspondences up as they go. Both do this to cultivate a symbolic language that can be used in a ritual context or for divination.

E.g. The Tarot arcanum of the Magician corresponds to Hod on the tree of life, which goes with the planet Mercury and the scent of Lavender, etc. Once one or several symbolic systems have been installed, everything can be seen as a kaleidoscope of meaning, entering a kind of dream logic. 

Whether or not these correspondences have direct causal efficacy (they probably don’t), they certainly help focus the Magician’s intentions. If we saturate our environment with corresponding symbols, the mind always comes back to our goal, whatever chain of associations it goes down. Engaging with this view gets the unconscious on board, which definitely does take symbolism and correspondences seriously. Remember, we are changing reality by changing our minds. And the unconscious is the bulk of the iceberg of the mind, as Uncle Sigmund first noticed. This symbolic language is a two-way bridge - we can use it to communicate a certain focus to the unconscious mind or to listen to what it has to say to the conscious mind (the Tarot and other divination systems tap into that).      

Participation 

There is no meaning crisis from a magical point of view. You participate in the interconnected network of reality and in its inherent meaning. Even more so, there is a higher-level order to it all, a mysterious directionality and emergent intelligence. Some might call this the logos, the Tao, the Universe, or simply God. In attuning to that order of the Cosmos, magical results can be achieved. The question is not “What do I want?” but “What does the universe want?”. At its limit, the magician might even take that higher-level logic as the basis of identity, transcending the confines of the person. That’s the “Thou” in “Do what Thou Wilt” - the true will is the will of God.

Synchronicities, seeming external coincidences overflowing with personal meaning can be read as signposts that one is in tune with that force. When held correctly, this view functions not just as an empowerment but also as an ethical guardrail by steering away from personal desires. It is also a powerhouse for generating personal meaning in life. There is no Meaning Crisis if you deeply experience yourself as part larger patterns. However, the dangers of ego inflation and megalomania are also present - it’s easy for the ego to latch on to an identity of the “chosen one” in this view. By the way, no belief in a personal/traditional God is required, any process that is larger than your individual agency will do. More on that here. 

Animism/Panpsychism 

From a magical perspective, there are many larger intelligences than humans at work. There are more or less “out-there” ways of holding this view: From the emergent intelligence of natural systems (e.g. a forest) or egregores arising from collective processes (like the infamous rulers of late capitalism, Moloch and Mammon), all the way to literal interdimensional beings (angels and demons, DMT elves and alien visitors). We can either attribute agency (animism) and/or consciousness (panpsychism) to these entities. For many people, Animism resonates on an embodied level, it feels right. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view since our ancestors spent most time as hunter-gatherers in animist cultures. 

Animism opens up possibilities for interaction with these entities for the magician - whether invoking, supplicating, or banishing. Taking on this view also instantly re-enchants the world. The universe is alive! This can engender a profound sense of possibility and wonder. There are many variations on the ecosystem of entities out there, as well as the degree of agency/consciousness that is attributed. Central to the view is that much more powerful agents are all around us and that we can interact with them. Even if you only want to go as far as granting quasi-agency to shared ideas or incentive structures, try actually relating to them as entities.   

Subtle layers of reality

Where do these entities live? Is there a deeper (or higher) hidden reality? Plato’s theory of forms, positing a realm of pure ideas/abstractions, is one answer. Related ideas like the Collective Unconscious and the Noosphere have a similar function. From platonic forms, there soon emerged more structured, emanationist frameworks that posit multiple different layers of reality. Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and the Buddhist Trikaya all describe a hierarchy of different layers emanating from the absolute to our material existence. In many of these theories, human beings are structured similarly across multiple layers, e.g. have a causal and subtle body in addition to the gross (physical body). Just like when it comes to the different layers of reality, there are many proposed structures from Chakras to Gurdjeff’s centers.

Accessing and acting within more subtle layers of reality is part and parcel of many magical practices, and they tend to include methods for developing that capacity: Tantric and Daoist practices manipulate subtle energy within the body, whereas lucid dreaming and astral projection work with the “astral body”. It’s easy to get lost in the details of comparative analysis here - the point is that there is more out there (and in here) than meets the eye. The facility to access subtle layers increases the dimensionality of perception by opening up more information channels, as well as the degrees of freedom for action at our disposal.

Even these ideas can be aligned with a rationalist worldview: The idea realm is an emergent property of all of the cultural content (text, art, artifacts). The astral body is an exaptation of the self-model active in dreams and imagination. Subtle energy is electric flows within the nervous system and/or oxygenation patterns in the blood. While rationalization of these views is beside the point (since we are looking for useful not true ways of looking), it can enable us to take them on. 

Taking views on and off like sunglasses

So, at which view did you check out? If your skepticism alarm bells didn’t go off at some of these views, that’s just as bad as not having a mind open enough to consider them. You definitely don’t want to gulp down the new-age Crystal Kool-Aid unreflectively. On the other hand, you should also be skeptical about your skepticism - what if there is some merit to these views after all? The goal is to be able to take beliefs and worldviews as objects, taking these lenses on and off like sunglasses, depending on what seems more adaptive to the specific circumstances. There are several moves that allow us to get into the right both/and stance. 

Open-ended naturalism & limits of knowledge

A strategy to calm the neurotic rational mind is to situate the enchanted view not as believing in the supernatural, but as opening to natural phenomena not yet understood by science. This is where tentative rationalizations can help (e.g. explaining auras as electromagnetic fields). It also helps to recognize that our models will always only cover a small fragment of what’s actually going on (as implied by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, for instance). At best, you’re making trade-offs between completeness and consistency. If none of our lenses are TRUE anyway, it makes sense to also be interested in which way of looking is more useful at the moment. Chapman’s Meta-rationality describes a similar stance even if more focused on toggling different technical views of rationality (as opposed to magical views).   

Acting as if

Another key move that doesn’t require integrating a way of looking with the rational mind is not requiring belief in the first place. One can just act as if something was true, without actually believing it. Chaos magicians found themselves surprised that their workings based on Harry Potter and Lovecraft achieved as good or better results than invoking archaic Gods and spirits from dusty Grimoires. Belief only concerns one form of knowing, the prepositional in Vervaeke’s language. However, it’s the perspectival and participatory knowledge (situated in low-level unconscious processes) that moves the needle in magic. Acting as if allows you to put on a magical view without actually believing it (and still getting its benefits). 

Dissolving in emptiness

Even more important than being able to take on different views is TAKING THEM OFF again. Without this ability, you are in danger of becoming mad. Seriously. You might get stuck with ludicrous superstitions that only make sense in a very specific context and are dysfunctional for the rest of your life. 

The most reliable solvent I’ve encountered is Insight ways of looking (“Vipassana”) in the Buddhist tradition. These techniques deconstruct experience no matter what worldview is active. All views of the world and of self are constructed, and seeing that from first-hand experience breaks their spell. A meditation practice and/or facility with psychedelics are highly recommended for anyone seriously playing with taking on magical views.  

Beware of Chapel Perilous 

Engaging earnestly with these perspectives carries profound psychoactive effects. Given that our prior beliefs mold our perception, it becomes challenging to discern the extent to which reality is constructed by the perspectives versus perceived (actually "out there"). Robert Anton Wilson called this state “Chapel Perilous” and asserted that one can only come out of it either paranoid or agnostic. Trying on multiple views subsequently is key to avoiding paranoia and entering the meta-rational agnosticism of the Magician. The realization that a view is just a map and not the territory frees us up to use these maps more liberally and without obsessing about scale accuracy.  There is no complete, “true” view, just more or less useful maps. So let’s try them on, throw them away, and make new ones. To get into the interesting territory, we might need to make use of some weird maps.

Here be dragons.