For me, magic is much more to do with quality of attention than with superstition or illusion.
That we’re surrounded by an invisible life-sustaining substance is a kind of magic, especially when we remember that it’s been around longer than any human being, is co-created every moment through the respiration of all life forms, and that it carries all the songs, stories, and scientific insights ever spoken into its mysterious body.
The fact that most people in the ‘developed’ world habitually forget that we are immersed in this invisible life-sustaining substance is also a kind of magic, a much darker one, a magic of amnesia which we might explore in a later essay.
Magic can be as simple as sweeping the hearth or as unknowable as the birth of the cosmos. It moves in the gaze between animals, in the sound of the wind rushing over stones, and in the transformations of sunlight and breath into apricots and apples.
Our literal, materialist minds have trouble with the word magic. That’s because the rationalist mind has a pathological need for precision, but the New Age folks have a pathological need for crystals and incense. Precision is optional. Mystery is the drug.
I like those keen minds who enjoy both, and know that precision and mystery can feed each other, like a physicist playing the piano after some hardcore mathematics.
Renaissance magicians like Marsillio Ficino were deeply interested in the relationship between the stars and music. For them, the night sky was a living process, more animal than void. ‘As above, so below’, they said, feeling the movements of planets and the resplendence of the stars reflected in their own bodies - their emotions, moods, and ideas.
That was before we emptied out the meaning and vitality from the world. We were more animistic then, in the 1400s, open to the unique ways that the world presences itself to us. There are promising signs that science is getting less embarrassed about reaching for the sacred. This sonification of our home galaxy is a small step in the right direction. There are many others.
Einstein said:
“Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.”
We can embellish this quote into a pretentious magical equation:
Magic = science x religion ÷ the quality of your attention
It’s just an idea.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Magic lives in poetry, music, in the living myths of oral cultures, and in equations that are beautiful.
Magic is homecoming - the moment your animal body remembers its continuity with the flesh of the world - that living mystery from which we grew and into which we all return. (Give it to me, give it to me. Inject that mystery into my veins).
Magicians like to think that magic favours old things, including archaic speech. It wants you to remember that words have roots, and they go as deep as Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
Magicians, like David Abram, want you to remember that these little assemblages of glyphs we call ‘words’ all have ancestors of their own - their own dead - who they carry as etymologies, revealing hidden kinships with other words and other phenomena in nature.
“Our English term “psyche”—together with all its modern offspring like “psychology”, “psychiatry,” and “psychotherapy”—is derived from the ancient Greek word psychê, which signified not merely the “soul”, or the “mind,” but also a “breath,” or a “gust of wind". The Greek noun was itself derived from the verb psychein, which meant “to breathe.””
- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous - P. 237
Some magic thrives in dark places, preferring to avoid direct sunlight. These magics like to hide under oaks roots and in the hollows of hills, like a skulk of foxes growing fat not on rabbits drawn from hats, but from the nutrition of their own hiddenness. Magic feeds on its obscure nature. Like the cosmos, it is the secret source of itself.
But all this is far too abstract. Let’s correct for that with something we can all get behind: a nice bowl of acorns.
What is magic to you?
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
My favourite R Dahl quote pinned to my university desk . That silver branched perception is needed . Attention , attention, attention . 💚
Loved this Ben and the Rima Staines interview: sending much love up North x