The Practice of Magic

 

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.

~LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

The essence of magic boils down to the application of two ordinary mental skills: attention and intention. The strength of the magical outcome is modulated by four factors: belief, imagination, emotion, and clarity. That’s basically it. The ceremonial robes, somber settings, black candles, secret handshakes, chanting in ancient languages, sex, and drugs—all are good theater, which may help in withdrawing the mind from the distractions of the mundane world. But ultimately, they’re unnecessary.

GNOSIS

The single most important aide to developing magical skills is to learn how to enter the state of consciousness known as gnosis. The time-honored and safest way to do this is through meditation.

As recently as the 1960s, meditation in the Western world was regarded as so exotically alien that it was difficult to find a meditation teacher or training materials. Now any moderate-sized town will have at least one meditation class offered at a school, library, or community center. Meditation instruction can certainly benefit from a wise teacher, but there are hundreds of books, audio programs, and smartphone apps that provide excellent introductions to meditation. Some apps now work along with relatively inexpensive neuro-feedback hardware that is supposed to accelerate the learning process.

The effectiveness of these programs varies a great deal, so the only way to tell if a particular method works for you is to try it. If you manage to read only one book about meditation, I recommend The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works, by Shinzen Young, published in 2016. It’s also available as an audiobook. It’s an exceptionally clear exposition written for the Western mindset, covering what meditation is, how to do it, and how it works.

The basic practice of meditation is straightforward. Sit in a comfortable position. Relax your body. Close your eyes. Then quiet your mind and stop thinking. That’s all there is to it. Simple.

Well, not so simple. If you’re a novice, three seconds after beginning this practice your mind will start to wander and you’ll enjoy one enticing fantasy after another. After dreaming about tasty cheeseburgers for ten minutes, you’ll suddenly realize that your mind was wandering. So you start again. Relax your body. Drop your jaw a bit and relax the muscles around your eyes. Let it go. Empty your mind. No thoughts.

This time, after a whole six seconds of calm silence, your mind will wander again. Progress! So you do it again, and again. It may take months or years of practice to achieve extended periods when the mind remains still. While engaged in this practice, you’re essentially reprogramming your nervous system, even if you don’t notice it. You’ll start to feel better physically and mentally. You’ll see the world more clearly. As Shinzen Young puts it, as a result of this practice “clarity and equanimity are slowly but surely trickling down into the subconscious. They rewire us at the most fundamental levels.”

Some meditation techniques involve mentally repeating sounds, words, or phrases to help keep your mind focused. Others train you to visualize complex patterns. Still others just involve watching your breath. There are scores of variations. One of the more popular methods today is called mindfulness. This is a secular version of the Buddhist practice called Vipassana, which literally translated means “to see in various ways.” The goal is to see things as they actually are, not as they may appear to be.

It wasn’t always so easy to find information about meditation. The cover story of an issue of Time magazine in 1975, “The TM Craze,” reported on the rising popularity of the Transcendental Meditation movement. A dozen years later, the cover featured actress Shirley MacLaine holding a quartz crystal. The photo caption read, “A strange mix of spirituality and superstition is sweeping across the country.” In 1996, a cover story asked, “Can prayer, faith and spirituality really improve your physical health? A growing and surprising body of scientific evidence says they can.” In 2001, the “power of yoga” was on the cover. In 2003, we learned about “the science of meditation.” By 2014, the cover story was on “the mindful revolution: The science of finding focus in a stressed-out, multi-tasking culture.”

Over a mere four decades, the cultural pulse in the United States evolved from a worried befuddlement at what those crazy hippies were doing to an appreciation of a widespread beneficial practice with obvious value that’s covered by medical insurance. Given this shift in opinion, what else may we expect to become self-evident about meditation? One likelihood is that science will rediscover what has been known for millennia but, like magic, was denigrated as a superstitious belief. This involves the original purpose of meditation and some of the less well-known but exceptional consequences of engaging in a disciplined practice. As I discussed in my book Supernormal, the goal of meditation across many traditions is to achieve a state of awareness where one gains the realization that the personal self and the Universal Self are one (in my shorthand, [c] = [C]).

Within the [C] state, abilities naturally arise that allow the meditator to manipulate or to transcend the world. Within the path of yoga, the goal of meditation is transcendence, or personal liberation. In that tradition the siddhis, or powers, that are gained are strongly deemphasized. In the magical tradition, gaining those powers is the goal.

It’s worth mentioning that the Yoga Sutras, the classical book of yoga written by the Indian sage Patanjali about two thousand years ago, assures us that these powers have nothing to do with faith, religious doctrine, divine intervention, spirituality, or the supernatural. These powers are just another aspect of the natural world. As Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace put it:

In Buddhism, these [abilities] are not miracles in the sense of being supernatural events, any more than the discovery and amazing uses of lasers are miraculous….What may appear supernatural to a scientist or a layperson may seem perfectly natural to an advanced contemplative, much as certain technological advances may appear miraculous to a contemplative.

Many variations of the super powers are described in the yogic tradition. They range from vanilla psi to super magic such as levitation. Levitation may be regarded as a high-level magical skill that involves hanging in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t. For most people, most of the time, psi experiences are spontaneous and tend to occur mainly during periods of crisis or extreme motivation. By contrast, the siddhis are regarded as reliable and under full conscious control. Some magicians are said to have developed that level of ability as well, but as with the siddhis, achieving conscious, robust control of super abilities is rare.

One way to investigate if meditation really does amplify natural psi and magical skills is to ask meditators about their experiences. At the Institute of Noetic Sciences, my colleagues conducted a survey of more than a thousand meditators to ask about their experiences. They found that three out of four reported increases in meaningful synchronicities as a result of their practice. Nearly half reported sensing “nonphysical entities,” and a third reported experiences such as clairvoyance or telepathy. This suggests that meditation works as the yogic and other traditions claim it does, at least when it comes to subjective reports.

The bottom line: If you want to perform magic effectively, maintain a disciplined meditation practice. Learn to quiet your mind. See the world as it is, not as it appears to be when viewed through multiple layers of cultural conditioning.

FORCE OF WILL

It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll become the legendary Merlin after lighting a candle and practicing meditation for five minutes. Throwing “battle magic” lightning bolts from your fingertips looks great in the movies, but for the majority of us magic is expressed in subtle ways. Performing potent magic, like any refined skill, requires talent and disciplined practice.

Perhaps you are the one in a million who’s gifted with strong natural talent. If so, you’ll be able to achieve dramatic effects fairly quickly. But the rest of us have to work at it. Fortunately, nearly anyone who’s able to follow instructions and is serious about practicing can perform some degree of magic because — according to the esoteric worldview — whether you know it or not, within you there’s a spark of the same source that manifests the entire universe. With that as a brief introduction, here then are two variations for exercising your force of will: affirmations and sigils.

Affirmations

Force-of-will magic involves the application of focused attention, intention, imagination, and belief. It’s preposterously simple, but many claim that it works. We’ll use a slightly elaborated example from the appropriately entitled book It Works! This book provides a prime example of “writing magic,” one of the earliest forms of magical practice. The four steps are as follows:

1. Know what you want. The clearer the intended goal, the more likely it will manifest. Believe that the goal will be achieved. Imagine that it has already been achieved in the future and it is inexorably headed your way. Write the goal on a piece of paper to focus your attention. Use a pen and paper exclusively reserved for this purpose. While writing, imagine that the surface of the paper represents Universal Consciousness and the ink represents your unconscious. As you write your goal, imagine that you are casting your unconscious intentions onto the medium that creates and sustains reality itself.

2. Review what you want. Review your goal daily. Between reviews do not dwell on it. You want to strengthen your intention and keep it clear, but you also want to allow the goal to seep into your unconscious, because that’s where magic is catalyzed. You may want to secure the writing paper with a special ribbon or place it in a box set aside specifically for this purpose.

3. Maintain secrecy. Don’t share your goal with others; they may inject doubt, and you need to maintain strong belief.

4. When it works, accept the outcome with gratitude and use it to strengthen your belief.

This method, like any form of magical manifestation, is neutral with respect to morals or ethics. However, virtue is its own reward, and it’s useful to keep in mind Spider-Man’s motto: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This means it would be morally questionable to use this technique to influence someone else, even in a way that you would consider to be positive, without that person’s permission.

In addition, from a pragmatic perspective it is useful to begin with simple, easily measurable outcomes, like finding a small amount of money or achieving a modest goal. Avoid jumping straight away into grandiose schemes like world peace, not because it wouldn’t work (at least in principle) but because gaining crystal clarity on what an accomplishment of that type of goal would mean, and how one would know if it happened, isn’t as simple as it may seem.

Sigils

Before considering how to create a sigil (pronounced “SIDG-ul”), a bit of background is in order. First, a sigil is simply a symbol for a desired goal. It has an advantage over writing because crafting a sigil requires more focused attention than just writing it, and because use of a symbolic goal reduces the grasp of the analytical mind. In addition, after the sigil is created, the magician traditionally “charges” and then “releases” it. The charging is meant to forcefully concentrate emotion, intention, and belief on the goal; the releasing is intended to push the goal from the conscious mind into the unconscious.

There’s another reason a sigil is useful as a magical tool. Consider the word spell. As a verb, spell means an action where symbols are combined to form larger symbols, which in turn refer to objects, actions, or concepts. That is, letters a words a sentences. The magical meaning of the noun spell is similar to the meaning of the verb, except it assumes a worldview where everything is interconnected beyond spacetime; this is the meaning of the magical Law of Correspondences. Now consider the word draw. One meaning of the verb draw is to devise a picture or a symbol; the other is to pull together.

From the magical perspective, a symbol is more than something that points to a relationship. It’s also an integral part of the structure of reality itself. By drawing a symbol, you pull the meaning of that symbol into existence. If the word-symbol Fido corresponds to a real dog named Fido, then operations on the symbol will also influence the actual Fido. This is the concept underlying homeopathy, the wearing of good-luck charms, and voodoo. Comb the hair of a doll made in the likeness of your distant friend, and your friend may thank you later about the wonderful new hairdo that she spontaneously decided to adopt. (Note: This example is on the razor’s edge of black magic, so don’t try this at home.)

The idea that signs and symbols reflect, or literally are, the relational structure that holds the universe together was famously explored in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The main character in that story, Valentine Michael Smith, was raised on Mars. In learning the Martian language, Smith gained powers that looked like magic. He taught others Martian words, and they too were able to gain these exceptional powers. A similar idea, of an alien language evoking special powers, was the leitmotif of the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival. In that story the scientist who figures out how to interpret an alien language based on circular time begins to literally experience time differently.

This notion jibes with informational interpretations of quantum theory. Perhaps the most famous of those interpretations was proposed by Princeton University physicist John Wheeler who described it as the physics of “it from bit,” which means that an object in the physical world (an “it”) is derived from pure information (a “bit,” a digital representation of information). As Wheeler put it: Every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the… answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.

MIT physicist Max Tegmark generalized Wheeler’s “it from bit” by proposing that physical reality literally is a mathematical structure, an abstract set of relationships. From that viewpoint, if one manipulates those abstract relationships, then one manipulates the physical world. That’s the idea of a sigil (and of force-of-will magic in general).

Making and Using a Sigil

1. Write your desire. Example: “I find a ten-dollar bill.”

2. List the first letters of words in the sentence, ignoring words that begin with a vowel. You’ll end up with FTDB.

3. Fit the letters together into an abstract symbol, as in Figure 1.

4. Focus on the symbol, projecting either intense calm or intense emotion through the symbol to “charge” it and amplify your desire. Magicians provoke this charge within the state of gnosis through deep meditation, by firing up a fierce concentration, by engaging in strong physical activity, by evoking anger, or by using the moment of sexual orgasm to provide an explosive point of focus.

5. After the sigil is charged, release your attention by putting the sigil away. Some magicians will go as far as to burn it; others will momentarily glance at the sigil every so often or place the symbol in a location where they’ll see it now and then. The idea is to deflect the intention of the sigil from the conscious mind to the deep unconscious, where it will simmer and draw the desired outcome into being.

6. As with writing magic, maintaining strong belief is an important factor, as is secrecy. So keep the meaning of the sigil private, and heed the age-old wisdom about using magic for benign purposes only.

Does This Really Work?

In my experience in both life and the lab, yes, it does. Not every time, and not always with great fanfare. But it works often enough to raise an eyebrow. In life, the desired outcome usually manifests in the form of a meaningful synchronicity. In a laboratory study, it manifests as a statistically significant test of a hypothesis. The key elements in both cases are focused intention, an openness to the idea that the desired outcome has already been achieved, and very clear goals.

Of course, there’s a big difference between magic in everyday life and magic in the lab. With the latter, we know by design what is a chance versus a non-chance outcome. But with the former, there’s no way to know for sure why a desired outcome occurred. Coincidences do occur. But occasionally a synchronicity seems so unlikely that chance is no longer a viable explanation. I’ll give an example of a four-part synchronicity.

Synchronicity #1

Early in the year 2000 I was searching for office space for a research institute that a colleague, Richard Shoup, and I were establishing. We called it the Boundary Institute because its mission was to scientifically explore the boundaries between mind and matter using the disciplines of physics, mathematics, and computer science. This organization would continue a program of psi research that I had been in charge of at a Silicon Valley technology company called Interval Research Corporation, funded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.

The dot-com craze was at its peak at the time, with new Internet start-ups popping up all over Silicon Valley. As a result, office rental rates, already at astronomical levels, were continuing to rise. We looked at four potential locations and ended up rejecting the first three because they were too expensive. That left only one clear choice, in the town of Los Altos, a suburb of Silicon Valley. It was a nice space with four offices, a common area, and a conference room, and it was located in a complex that housed accountants, therapists, real estate agents, dentists, and so on. The plan was that I would move in first and get things set up.

After moving furniture into a room that would become my office, I became curious about our neighbors. I found a directory sign listing the office suites. Most were ordinary businesses, but one was named PsiQuest, Inc. I took this as a delightful coincidence, because our new institute was also a sort of psi quest, namely, psi research of the parapsychological kind. There are only a handful of psi research facilities in the world, and we are all well aware of each other. So I was certain that the “psi” in PsiQuest must have meant “Personnel Service Investigations,” or something like that. The “psi” similarity was surely just an amusing coincidence.

Synchronicity #2

About a month later, I took a new route to walk to our office and noticed that the sign on the suite next door to ours, which I hadn’t noticed before, was “PsiQuest Research Labs.” Now this was suddenly more interesting, because what in the world was Personnel Service Investigations, as I imagined PsiQuest to be, doing with a research lab? The miniblinds on the PsiQuest Research Labs window were closed, and what little I could see through the blinds revealed only a well-appointed reception space. No one was visible.

I checked every day for the next two weeks. Finally someone was in the PsiQuest Labs office. I knocked and tried the door. It was unlocked, so I entered and prepared to say hello to a man behind a desk. He looked up and his eyes widened as though he saw a ghost. I thought maybe he was startled, so I extended my hand and said, “Hello, I wanted to introduce myself. I’m your neighbor next door. My name is….” But before I could finish he managed to croak: “Dean Radin?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I replied cautiously, wondering how he knew who I was, and if he was feeling okay. He said nothing. He just continued to stare at me. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, “I’m your neighbor next door. I just wanted to introduce myself and see what kind of work you do here.”

After a moment the man replied, “I’m doing what you’re doing.”

Confused, I asked, “What do you think I’m doing?”

He replied, “Psi research…parapsychology.”

Now it was my turn to stare, dumbfounded. Unbeknownst to me or to any of my colleagues around the world, here was another group engaged in the same kind of research that we were, and they were located next door to our new offices.

Synchronicity #3

It turned out that the president of PsiQuest, Jon K., not only was thoroughly familiar with psi research but was specifically engaging in a magical practice to manifest me! Jon was using a Tibetan dream yoga technique, which involves alternating three-hour periods of sleeping and waking over the course of twenty four hours. During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track, and one of those signs would be for me to show up, somehow, so I could join his board of directors. But he had no idea where I was or how to contact me. Hardly anyone at the time knew that I was living in Silicon Valley, and even fewer knew where our new institute was located.

That’s why when I opened the door to Jon’s lab that day he was speechless. He couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming. From his perspective, my appearance on his doorstep was literally an act of magic based on his clear, repeated affirmations. When he was finally able to tell me what was going on, I too felt seriously disoriented. We both had to sit down.

Synchronicity #4

The month before all this unfolded, I was focused on visualizing what our new offices and laboratory space would look like. I was drawing sketches of my ideal lab configuration on the whiteboard in my office and imagining a certain kind of reclining leather chair, a shielded room, and other types of equipment that would be useful to have in the lab. I knew all this would be expensive, and our budget was limited, so I figured we wouldn’t be able to afford it in the short term. But that didn’t stop me from visualizing what I wanted.

Returning to the story, after recovering from the shock of our meeting, Jon invited me to tour the rest of his facility. As we moved from one room to the next, I could hardly believe my eyes. Jon had the reclining leather chair, the shielded chamber, and all the other pieces of laboratory equipment I had been actively imagining. And all of it was located on the other side of the wall from my desk, no more than six feet from where I had been sketching what our lab would look like. I literally drew what I wanted into being.

A Half-Baked Speculation

After discussing that series of synchronicities with the other members of our institute, we agreed that this couldn’t be a case of dumb luck. It’s as though sustained intention on the part of Jon and myself had acted as a sort of force that drew PsiQuest and the Boundary Institute together, analogous to gravity drawing a moon and a planet together. In Einstein’s general relativistic concept of gravity, the planet doesn’t reach out with “gravity beams” to pull on the moon.

Rather, the fabric of spacetime is distorted by the planet’s mass, and the warped geometry naturally guides the moon and the planet to drift toward each other. (Later I’ll describe an experiment we did that more formally explored this idea.) With this analogy in mind, we thought that perhaps intense intention also warps or distorts aspects of reality. Events that might otherwise be completely separate and never meet are naturally drawn (incorporating both meanings of the verb to draw) together by the resulting warp in spacetime. Like magic.

DIVINATION

Divination involves perceiving beyond the ordinary boundaries of space and time. In the early nineteenth century this ability was called clairvoyance (French for “clear-seeing”). Later it was called extra-sensory perception, or ESP. Today the euphemism remote viewing is more commonly used.

Training techniques to help develop remote viewing abilities were designed by artist Ingo Swann as part of a classified program of psi research funded by the U.S. government from 1972 to 1995. Swann based his picture-drawing technique on methods used in the 1880s by British researchers Frederic W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, in the 1920s by the American social activist Upton Sinclair, and in the 1940s by British psychologist Whately Carington and French researcher René Warcollier.

The method involves making fast, abstract sketches of impressions gained when asked to mentally perceive a distant target image or location. This is intended to capture not only fleeting visual images but impressions from the other senses as well. The reason Swann’s technique focused on fast sketching, at least in the initial stages of remote viewing, is that the single greatest inhibitor of remote viewing ability is the analytic mind, which gets in the way. In the jargon used in this type of training, this problem is called an “analytical overlay.”

To explain, let’s say our task is to use remote viewing to describe a hidden or distant target. A taskmaster assigns the target a randomly assigned label, say “X2395,” which is associated with the real target. This association can be accomplished by simply placing the label on an envelope containing a photo of the target. Now let’s say the target is a person wearing a yellow raincoat. When a remote viewer directs her attention toward that target she might instantly perceive a vague flash of something yellow. But then, within a fraction of a second, the analytical portion of her mind will jump in and associate that bit of information with typically yellow things. Before she’s even consciously aware of it, she’ll start thinking that the target is a banana. And once that thought enters her mind, it’s extremely difficult to let it go.

Other than using meditation to achieve a state where these flashes of information are not overwhelmed by the buzz of everyday thoughts, learning to not name the target is the primary challenge one faces in remote viewing training. For reasons that make sense in evolutionary terms, over millions of years our brains have been hardwired to take a pinch of information and instantly fill in the blanks with the most likely description. The reason is simple: If you see a glimmer of black and orange stripes out of the corner of your eye, your brain will instantly assume it’s a tiger and your legs will start running before you realize it. If your assumption is wrong, you’ll get a momentary scare and it won’t matter much. But if you’re right, it could save your life. In the wild you survive by acting first and thinking later.

But for more subtle types of perception like remote viewing, that same tendency has to be unlearned. This is what Swann’s method taught. One of his earliest techniques, designed to baffle the analytical mind, was called “coordinate remote viewing,” because the only information provided about the target was map coordinates. Without thinking about it or looking at a map, what’s your impression of what’s located at 37.819732° latitude and -122.478762° longitude? Later techniques by Swann used more abstract targeting methods, like the randomly constructed label “X2395.” And that worked just as well.

After the secret government program was declassified, variations of the original training methods were developed and taught by former members of the U.S. Army’s remote viewing unit. As time went by, variations of the original method were developed by second-and third-generation students who capitalized on the burgeoning popular interest in remote viewing training. Each new method seems to carry increasingly bolder claims about its amazing new and improved, super-duper, double-secret enhanced learning technique. But the essence of all of these various methods is the same.

Remote Viewing Training

Swann’s original technique was based on a series of stages that I’ve simplified into eight steps. We’ll assume that you have no idea what the target is or where it’s located. It might be a photograph inside a sealed envelope, a person who will travel tomorrow to a location only she knows, or an object that a friend lost a week ago. To make the exercise useful as an experiment you’ll eventually need to know what the right answer is; otherwise you won’t be able to tell if the remote viewing attempt was accurate.

This method may be easier if the remote viewing session includes a partner who can guide you through the various stages. In that way you won’t need to engage the portion of your mind that’s required to keep track of the process. Most classroom remote viewing training, as well as most of the operational remote viewing employed in the U.S. government program, used a human interviewer for this reason. Obviously in a valid experiment the interviewer can’t know anything about the target either. For a novice this process may take a half hour or more. For an expert it can take five minutes. The steps are as follows:

1. Start with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. Holding the target in mind, quickly draw lines, curves, or squiggles. Don’t think about it, just sketch the first thing that comes into your mind. Remote viewing information initially appears as a very brief impression; a flash, a mere glimmer. It’s not like watching a full-color 3-D Imax movie. Also, your sketch might reflect how you feel about the target and have nothing to do with what the target looks like. So don’t analyze what you’ve drawn. Just quickly sketch while keeping your goal in mind: describe the target.

2. List your initial sensory impressions of the target, focusing on movement, odor, taste, touch, and sound. After listing those, add any visual impressions that come to mind, including shape and color. The moment you realize that you’ve named an impression, note it but add that it’s “AOL,” for “analytical overlay.”

3. Mentally examine the target from other perspectives: from far away, close up, low, and high. Capture the impressions you gain from each new perspective. Avoid naming the impressions.

4. Note any emotional feelings you may have about the target.

5. Combine all of the impressions you’ve gained so far and use them to make a sketch or series of sketches that describe the target. Now, based on your accumulated perceptions, write down what you think the target is. This is the first step where analysis should be used.

6. Mentally reexamine the target and look for anything you may have missed.

7. Watch for new insights, novel feelings, surprising elements, or any other aspect that might feel out of place. Sketch and write down these impressions.

8. Compare your sketch of the target with any new information you’ve gained. Revise if necessary.

9. Now compare the actual target with your final description.

Factors involved in enhancing remote viewing performance, or improving divination skills of any sort, were studied by parapsychologist Rhea White in the 1960s. She focused on reports by individuals who had consistently demonstrated high-level psi performance to see if there were any similarities. She found a number of them:

1. Relax. Achieve a state of deep physical relaxation.

2. Stabilize the mind. Meditation may be helpful in encouraging what some adepts refer to as a “blank mental screen,” or what a magician might call the initial stages of achieving gnosis. The goal is to avoid mind-wandering.

3. Direct the mind. After achieving a period of mental stability, ask yourself, “What is the target?” The idea is to direct the mind, which at this point should be in a calm, blank, or idling mode, so it can focus without distraction on the task at hand.

4. Wait with expectation. To explain this, Rhea White recounted a metaphor of the winding of a toy top as a preliminary to its spinning. That is, don’t just wait passively; create a sense of tension, belief, and excitement that the information will arrive. Be patient and don’t force it.

5. Look for a feeling of conviction. To help discriminate between mind-generated fantasies and acquisition of genuine information, you may notice that when the impression is correct it is accompanied by a strong feeling of conviction, or by a burst of joy, vividness, or certainty.

In today’s fast-paced world, we want instant results. Five steps times thirty seconds is two and a half minutes. Who has that kind of time to spare? The talented people that Rhea White studied would sometimes spend an hour or more on a single trial: fifteen minutes to relax, a half hour to create a mental blank screen, then another half hour before perceiving target information and “knowing” that it was correct. Sometimes no suitable impression would arrive, so there goes an hour, wasted. You could have been watching the latest cat videos on YouTube and enjoying a refreshing beverage and a biscotti. Magic is real, but no one said it’s going to be fast or easy.

THEURGY: CALLING ALL SPIRITS

Why is it when we talk to God it’s called praying,

but if God talks back it’s called schizophrenia?

~JANE WAGNER

People have different reactions to the concept that there are disembodied spirits around us all the time. For those who believe in guardian angels, or that their departed loved ones are still present in some form, the idea can be comforting. For those who’ve been frightened by tales of demons, the same idea is horrific. There are endless stories about such entities. And a case can be made that all of it, from legends of the wee people, fairies, and forest sprites to tales of angels, demons, and even extraterrestrial aliens and UFO encounters, arises from a common source. But so far scientific evidence that such experiences involve intelligent, independent, nonphysical entities, as opposed to a mixture of human-centric psi and psychological effects, has not been established in such a way that people who are intimately familiar with the evidence, and even sympathetic to the idea of entities, will reach the same conclusion. In my opinion, the scientific jury is still out regarding the reality of such spirits or entities.

Of course, my hesitation doesn’t mean that such entities don’t exist. It just means that we don’t have methods yet that can strictly discriminate between psi effects in the living and independent, disembodied intelligences. Some claim that we can communicate with spirits using electronic devices and computers. And some of the evidence for what is known as electronic voice phenomena or instrumental transcommunication (ITC) is intriguing. But there too the methods do not strictly exclude explanations based on psi. One source of information about electronic methods used in this line of research is the ITC Journal, run by Dr. Anabela Cardoso.

As far as the practice of theurgy goes — the act of evoking spirits — it should not be taken lightly that ghosts and demons are indispensable plot points in horror films. Or that skeptics laugh at the notion of disembodied spirits, even if that laugh is nervous and one eye twitches uncontrollably.

The esoteric literature on theurgy suggests that if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it. There are plenty of books on theurgic spells and ceremonial rituals that appear to be relatively benign. But given that scientific guidance for these practices is so thin as compared to the other two classes of magic, and because of the potential psychological consequences of shattering your belief system by encountering something that scares your pants off, I will pass on providing practical exercises. This is a topic that requires expertise and wisdom, and because of that, it’s inadvisable to learn from a book. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

from Real Magic by Dean Rodin, pp. 73-93

The Origins of Magic and Religion

 

What we all are only beginning to experience is a radical paradigm shift — a scientific reconsideration of the role of consciousness in the physical world. Major paradigms in science don’t change very often; they prefer to sit around like curmudgeonly custodians of conventional wisdom, scoffing at new ideas. But when those ideas do start to slide, confusion erupts, experts bicker, and skeptics start to sweat. When the dust settles, a new paradigm takes shape. Then what?

Then we live in a new world. One of the consequences of this new world is that the esoteric practice of magic will emerge from the shadows, where it has been quietly simmering for about five hundred years. But this time magic, sometimes spelled magick to distinguish it from magic tricks, will be seen through the lens of science. Societal taboos that long suppressed this natural capacity will begin to dissolve, and new light will shine on who we are and what we’re capable of.

Some say magic is a legendary power that can bend destiny at will. Modern minds are naturally skeptical about such claims. Science tells us that magic is wishful thinking. It violates the laws of physics. It’s fantasy. No educated person could take it seriously. But it turns out that magic is quite real and has been hiding in plain sight. Today, through the bright light of science, we can see and begin to understand magic in new ways.

Magic is to religion as technology is to science. That is, one difference between religion and magic is that the former is essentially a faith-based theory about the nature of reality, while the latter involves testable applications of that theory. Theories provide meaningful structures proposed to account for an otherwise chaotic and bewildering existence, while applications provide the means of controlling some of the chaos.

The religion-magic relationship is actually more complex than the science-technology connection because there are two major categories of magic: supernatural and natural. Initially, everything was considered to be supernatural because our earliest ancestors had no idea about how anything worked. So they naturally attributed everything to invisible, supernatural causes, meaning above or beyond the natural world — the divine, or one or more gods.

Then someone noticed that there were aspects of nature that were predictable —the movements of the sun and stars, healing qualities of certain muds and plants—and that realization sparked interest in visible, here-and-now, human-centric natural magic. Supernatural magic was eventually adopted by religion, and natural magic split into two branches, the exoteric (outer, physical world) and the esoteric (inner, mental world). The exoteric branch evolved into today’s science. The esoteric branch is where magic has been hiding.

Natural magic evolved into science as refined methods and technologies were developed that allowed us to control natural forces (like electricity) and to perceive beyond the common senses (as with a microscope). If instruments like the electric battery and the telescope had never been invented, life today in many ways would be as it was in the late Middle Ages. But with such instruments and many others like them, our worldview significantly expanded, theories were developed to account for the new observations, and in the process we’ve become highly adept at focusing on the outer, physical world. We know that our worldview is accurate because it continues to spawn reliable technologies, many of which would have seemed like pure magic even as recently as the 1950s.

Indeed, in the early twenty-first century it’s probably fair to say that most people have no idea how computing or communication technologies work. I don’t mean “work” in the sense of knowing how to operate a computer or a smartphone, but rather in the sense of knowing how to build these devices from scratch, or even understanding the main principles underlying these devices. These technologies aren’t considered magic because their easy availability gives us faith that someone, somewhere (or, more likely, teams of specialists distributed around the globe) knows how they work. Meanwhile, esoteric magic has also evolved, using its own methods and theories. Not surprisingly, the esoteric worldview is very different from the one that’s the basis of today’s technologies.

The history of esotericism is deeply entwined with the histories of science, religion, philosophy, and metaphysics, and it’s been explored in fastidious detail by many generations of scholars. But it’s important to review it here, even if briefly, to give you a feeling for two central ideas: first, that esoteric ideas have been vigorously suppressed in the Western world for at least a thousand years, and second, that the esoteric worldview provides hints for why magic works.

PREHISTORIC TIMES

Given the mystery of life, its endless uncertainties, and the certainty of death, the first self-aware creatures were strongly motivated to understand how they had ended up in this mess and whether there might be something better to look forward to. Some of those early souls may have gained mystical glimpses of reality through the discovery and use of entheogenic (psychedelic) compounds.

A persuasive case for this possibility is made by the esteemed religious scholar Huston Smith in his book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. As language developed, the experiences of these early psychonauts, amplified by their creative imaginations, became codified into cosmologies (that is, origin stories).

Individuals who were especially adept at entering these rarefied states of awareness, which afforded visions of reality beyond the here and now, were the first magicians and shamans. Religions developed as the mystical cosmologies were elaborated. Later, those origin stories were supplemented with rules for acceptable behavior and proper forms of homage to authority. Shamans didn’t enter these states because all the cool kids were doing it; rather, they did it because their tribe’s survival depended on it. They were healers, oracles, and warriors wrapped into one, and they were charged with sustaining their tribe and defending it against rival groups through whatever means necessary, including magical techniques.

ANCIENT TIMES

As tribes’ settlements matured into towns, cities, and empires, the cognoscenti of the day gained the luxury of time to turn their thoughts from matters of daily subsistence to grander concepts of spirituality and religion. German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) labeled the period from about 800 to 200 BCE the “axial age.” The term refers to an intellectual swing from matters of basic survival to more abstract and transcendent ideas.

Given today’s fast pace, you might have to schlep through a computer or smartphone software update every month or two. But in primordial times thousands of years and untold hundreds of human generations would come and go, and absolutely nothing would change. Considering the almost inconceivably leisurely pace of our ancestors’ lives, the six-hundred-year axial age arrived like a historical lightning bolt.

During that period Taoism and Confucianism emerged in China; Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism appeared in India; the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others emerged in Palestine; Zoroaster (the Greek name of the Persian prophet Zarathustra) founded one of the first monotheistic religions; and the Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, did something new: they questioned the origins of the universe, pondered the meaning, morality, and fate of humanity, and founded the origins of logic, mathematics, and rational analysis.

This shift in perspective is sometimes referred to as the emergence of “second-order” thought, in that humans—at least the ruling classes—began to think about themselves from broader or higher perspectives. The new way of thinking led humanity away from worship of tribal deities and toward contemplation of more universal concepts. Unified kingdoms and “supreme” gods became a new vision. To achieve such goals it was necessary to develop ways other than raw brutality to respond to insults and other aggressions. 

The new vision was hopeful, an aspiration that has always been difficult to sustain given our hard-wired drive to strike first and ask questions later. But the impulse was set, and a case can be made that human violence has steadily declined as civilization has spread throughout the world. Of course, instances of violence tend to saturate the news media, so it might seem like the world is becoming more dangerous. But that’s only because breaking-news reports of carnage cause our hearts to beat faster than calm stories about simple human kindness.

One of the sparks that energized the axial age may have emerged from personal experiences within the various mystery schools, which flourished throughout the ancient world. These schools had similar goals: initiation into the mysteries sought “to ‘open the immortal eyes of man inwards’: exalt his powers of perception until they could receive the messages of a higher degree of reality.” In practice, this consisted of experiencing a ritual death of the physical body and subsequent resurrection into a new body, with new capabilities of intuiting secret wisdom, often regarding the functioning of the body itself.

One of the longest-lasting schools was the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, active from about 1500 BCE to 392 CE. Most of the Greek philosophers regarded the Mysteries with awe. Even the Roman skeptic Cicero (106–43 BCE) wrote, “Nothing is higher than these mysteries…they have not only shown us how to live joyfully but they have taught us how to die with a better hope.” Hundreds of years later, the Greek philosopher and statesman Themistios (317–385 CE) mentioned the Eleusinian Mysteries in an essay he wrote on the soul: "The soul [at death] has the same experience as those who are being initiated into great Mysteries….[A]t first one wanders and wearily hurries to and fro, and journeys with suspicion through the dark as one uninitiated: then come all the terrors before the final initiation, shuddering, trembling, sweating, amazement: then one is struck with a marvelous light, one is received into pure regions and meadows, with voices and dances and the majesty of holy sounds and shapes: among these he who has fulfilled initiation wanders free, and released and bearing his crown joins in the divine communion, and consorts with pure and holy men."

The Lesser Rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries involved a theatrical allegory of what (supposedly) happened after death. It was unusually democratic for its time, being available to both citizens and slaves. But the Greater Rites were available only to selected patrons. These were said to provide a personal experience of the afterlife. The ritual included drinking a potion known as kykeon, a mixture consisting of barley, mint, and water. Kykeon might have been similar to soma, the potion mentioned in the Hindu Vedas that some scholars now believe was an entheogenic compound. While the actual composition of these concoctions is unknown, we do know that they were made from grains, and ergot—a poisonous fungus that commonly grows on grains — contains lysergic acid, the core component of the most powerful psychedelic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

The Eleusinian Mystery School was forced to close in 392 CE when Christian emperor Theodosius I, head of the Holy Roman Empire, officially declared the rites pagan and therefore heretical (that is, they were so popular that they interfered with the Church’s authority).

One of the more famous mystery school initiates was Plato (427–347 BCE), student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. Plato proposed the existence of a “higher domain” of pure Ideas. To help explain his concept, Plato used an allegory of prisoners in a cave. As the story goes, these prisoners spent their entire lives chained up in a cave in such a way that all they could see was the cave wall in front of them. They couldn’t see a fire that was glowing behind them, nor that a group of actors was holding up puppets and casting shadows on the wall of the cave. For these prisoners, their entire world consisted of those shadows.

One day a prisoner was released from the cave and taken outside. At first blinded by the light, after a while his eyes adjusted to the brilliance, and for the first time he saw the vibrant colors and depth of “real” reality. His former ideas about the world were shattered, and when he was allowed to return to the cave he excitedly explained to the other prisoners that their shadow existence was an illusion. There was a richer, intensely luminous world just a few steps outside the cave. But regardless of what he said, or the arguments he used to try to convince them that their reality was a pale cartoon of reality, the other prisoners thought he had gone mad.

Plato used this allegory to argue that there was a difference between the everyday appearance of the world, shaped by everyday language and concepts, and the world itself. Common sense provides a poor facsimile of what is really “out there,” so to grasp the true nature of reality — Plato imagined that this consisted of what he called eternal Forms or Ideas — requires a special form of knowing, called gnosis. Knowledge gained through gnosis is different from intellectual or rational knowing. American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) provided a definition for a similar word, noetic, in his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Noetic experiences were, as he described in the flowery language of the early twentieth century, states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.

Gnosis is thus a type of deep intuition, a means of knowing that transcends the ordinary senses and rational thought, like knowing “from the heart.” A mother knows she loves her child; it’s not something she has to rationally, logically, or analytically figure out. Note that gnosis being non-rational does not mean it’s irrational, for that would imply faulty knowledge.

From the perspective of magical practice, gnosis may be thought of as an “intense consciousness of something.” The term grok, from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, also gets at this idea. At one point in that novel the character Mahmoud describes grok as to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us [ordinary humans] as color does to a blind man.

During the Hellenistic period in Greece (from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the emergence of the Roman Empire in 31 BCE), Plato’s ideas evolved into an esoteric worldview. A key figure associated with development of what is now called Neoplatonism was Plotinus (204–270 CE), a philosopher born in Egypt half a millennium after Plato. Neoplatonism proposed the existence of deep interconnections among all things, including what is normally viewed as the distinction between mental and physical phenomena. From the everyday, ego-based state of awareness (I’ll call this personal form of consciousness [c]), mind and matter appear to be fundamentally different. But from the rarefied state of gnosis, which provides direct access to higher states of existence (I’ll call this state of Universal Consciousness [C]), the apparent distinctions between mind and matter, or space and time, are revealed as illusions. That is, from [c] we see objects separated in space and time, and we see obvious differences between mental and physical phenomena. But from [C], all such differences dissolve and naked reality is experienced as entangled relationships in a holistic reality, completely free of the constraints of space or time.

From [C], you directly perceive what [c] experiences as the future or the past. From [C], you also transcend the distinctions that separate you from other objects, and by so doing, you can directly influence the physical world. That is, in a domain without separation you may “become one with,” say, a dark cloud, whereupon you could introduce an intention to rain. Or by becoming one with a friend, you could know your friend’s thoughts and emotions. By proposing the notion of a “higher” reality beyond the shadow existence of ordinary experience, Plato and later Neoplatonism provided a worldview that opened the door to the possibility of real magic.

Treatises on Neoplatonism and many other esoteric ideas were collected in one of the supreme accomplishments of ancient times: the library of Alexander of Macedonia (356 BCE–323 BCE), better known as Alexander the Great. Alexander charged this library with collecting all of the world’s knowledge. He began it in 334 BCE, and in its prime the Alexandrian library was the largest single repository of knowledge in the world—the Internet of the ancient world. The library contained over a half a million documents collected from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India, and many other places. More than a hundred scholars from all civilized countries traveled to the library to live, study, and translate the documents into all known languages.

After being the hub of the world’s knowledge for two hundred years, the library was partially destroyed by an accident in 48 BCE, when Julius Caesar ordered ships in the harbor to be burned during a military campaign. The fire spread to the docks and eventually destroyed part of the library. Over the next five hundred years the library was slowly whittled away as the city came under the control of different factions and religious authorities. Stories have been told about how one or another individual was responsible for burning or gutting the library, but scholars today agree that most of those stories were apocryphal. There are undoubtedly many reasons the library slowly dissolved, but the full story is lost in the mists of time.

Fortunately, over the centuries of its existence many of its documents were copied by scholars from other countries, so portions of the ancient world’s knowledge were retained. Much of that knowledge was about magic. This is not to say that real magic was uniformly accepted by ancient scholars. Some regarded claims about magic with disdain.

An example is the Greek historian Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), author of one of the earliest known encyclopedias. Entitled Naturalis Historia (Natural History), Pliny’s work was consulted by scholars for a thousand years. Regarding magic, he wrote: “Without doubt magic arose in Persia with Zoroaster. On this our authorities are agreed, but whether he was the only one of that name, or whether there was also another afterwards, is not clear.” He also wrote: "I have often indeed refuted the fraudulent lies of the Magi, whenever the subject and the occasion required it, and I shall continue to expose them. In a few respects, however, the theme deserves to be enlarged upon, were it only because the most fraudulent of arts has held complete sway throughout the world for many ages."

And yet, after that opening dismissive salvo, Pliny goes on to describe more than sixty recipes that the magi of the day used to treat various ailments. Some of those methods were based on sympathetic magic, the idea that objects with certain appearances or properties would sympathize, or resonate, with similar objects. Thus, to reduce a fever the magi might create an amulet that looked like a snake, or contained bits of a snake, because a snakebite can produce the sensation of a fever. 

But not all folk medicine was based on magical concepts. Many treatments were developed by pure trial and error. Here’s Pliny’s description of how to treat a cold and sore throat: "I find that a heavy cold clears up if the sufferer kisses a mule’s muzzle. Pain in the uvula and in the throat is relieved by the dung, dried in shade, of lambs that have not yet eaten grass, uvula pain by applying the juice of a snail transfixed by a needle, so that the snail itself may be hung up in the smoke, and by the ash of swallows with honey."

Kissing a mule on the snout and gargling with dried, grassless lamb dung sounds a lot worse than suffering through a cold and sore throat. Maybe patients just said that the treatment was soothing so they didn’t have to do that again. But there’s also an alternative explanation. Some of these ingredients, as odd as they sound, may have had chemical properties that were medically useful. For example, an article in the European Journal of Pharmaceutical and Medical Research describes how cow urine, a traditional Ayurveda elixir, has antioxidant, anti-diabetic, wound-healing, and immunomodulatory properties. 

We are so used to synthetic drugs today that it’s easy to forget that modern pharmaceuticals are a recent invention. For millennia, the pharmacopeia consisted exclusively of natural ingredients, because that’s all that was available. Sometimes those forms of natural magic worked wonders, and for reasons that we’re only now beginning to understand in modern terms.

EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Also known as the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages refers to a period of about a thousand years in Europe, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, roughly from the fifth to fourteenth centuries. After Rome fell to the “barbarians,” other than a few pockets of civilization most of Europe turned into one of those post-apocalyptic zombie movies. All forms of scholarship in Europe significantly subsided.

To further tarnish the image of the early Middle Ages as a desirable travel destination for future time-travelers, during that period the Catholic Church’s tolerance of magic rapidly dissipated as Church leaders clamped down on the widespread popularity of pagan beliefs. In the early thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX created the holy police force known as the Inquisition, to combat heresy. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV formalized the Inquisition and authorized it to use torture to force confessions and to burn people alive for their heretical beliefs.

About two hundred years later, Pope Innocent VIII authorized two inquisitors, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, to accelerate the holy work of the Inquisition. Sprenger and Kramer wrote a book entitled Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), which essentially turned witch-hunting into a religiously sanctioned sport. Hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps as many as a million, were arrested, tortured, and killed at the hands of the Inquisition. These horrific acts forced esoteric interests deep underground, and the cultural memory of the terror associated with being declared “deviant” because of one’s ideas or beliefs continues to affect us today.

Now—for reasons you’ll presently discover—we’ll briefly jump five hundred years into the future, to 1945 in Nag Hammadi, a city on the Nile in Upper Egypt. At that time a set of thirteen ancient papyrus manuscripts was discovered. These texts, which were not fully translated until the 1970s, altered our understanding of the Christian Bible. Known as the Nag Hammadi codices, they describe “gnostic gospels” that were left out of early efforts to establish the orthodox interpretation of Christianity, perhaps because the information provided by these gospels differed from the stories included in the New Testament.

The gnostic gospels include the Gospel of Thomas, which begins with a startling opening sentence: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.” Elaine Pagels’s book The Gnostic Gospels provides an excellent description of the discovery and mysteries of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and their influence on understanding the origins of Christianity as we know it today.

Returning to the early Middle Ages: The esoteric tradition of Gnosticism, like Neoplatonism, viewed the central importance of gnosis as a way of directly perceiving higher states of being. But it also added a distinct sense of purpose to Neoplatonism’s cosmology. The Gnostics taught that we are like the prisoners chained up in Plato’s cave. That is, we have a spark of the divine within us, but we’re unaware of it. Fortunately, even though we fell from grace, we can work our way back up the spiritual hierarchy by attaining gnosis of our true being. In this way the gnostic allegory provided a way to escape from the chains of ignorance and the suffering of the material world. We can be like Plato’s prisoner who escaped from the cave.

The Gnostics regarded the Catholic Church with disdain, seeing it as having lost its way through corruption and politics and having neglected the teachings of Christ. As one might imagine, Church authorities were not amused by this criticism, as dramatically exemplified by the plight of the Cathars. The Cathars were a group of Gnostic Christians in the town of Béziers, in southern France. The thirteenth-century pope Innocent III was increasingly annoyed by the Gnostics because their criticism was becoming a major challenge to his authority. The Cathars even went so far as to accuse the Pope of being the puppet of Satan. So the Pope sent his army of Crusaders to Béziers, accompanied by his representative, a French monk named Arnaud Amalric. The military leader of the Crusaders was Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman who was offered a cruel incentive by the Pope—de Montfort could keep the land of any Cathar heretic that he dispatched.

On July 22, 1209, de Montfort arrived at Béziers and demanded that the town turn over the Cathar heretics. The town refused and the Crusaders attacked. During the siege a soldier asked Amalric how were they supposed to tell who was a heretic and who was a proper Catholic. Amalric famously replied, “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” All twenty thousand people in the town were massacred and the city was burned to the ground. On July 22, 2009, the town of Béziers observed the eight-hundredth anniversary of this massacre. History lesson: it is advisable to think twice about annoying those in power.

THE RENAISSANCE

During the Renaissance, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, translations of manuscripts long held in Arabic, Greek, and Asian states were slowly being reintroduced to Western scholars. The invention of the printing press in the fourteenth century and distribution of the translated texts resulted in an explosion of renewed ideas and relief from the stagnation of the previous thousand years. This in turn stimulated an upheaval in religion, politics, economics, and scholarship, and it established the basic structures and Western cultural beliefs that would come to define the modern world.

Religious reformers such as Martin Luther challenged the rigid authority of the Catholic Church, its increasingly corrupt practices, and its monopoly in defining what Christian practice meant. That challenge provoked decades of wars and persecutions, but it also dramatically changed European politics and national boundaries. As old structures began to crumble, the dust generated a heavy price in the form of nearly continuous conflicts. Fortunately, it also fostered a new intellectual openness that eventually allowed for the rediscovery of Hermeticism.

Hermeticism is named after Hermes, the son of the Greek gods Zeus and Maia. Hermes is known as Mercury in the Roman pantheon and Thoth in the Egyptian pantheon. Hermes/Mercury/Thoth was considered an emissary between the gods and humans, the god of writing, wisdom, and magic, and a trickster. Thoth was held in such high regard by the Egyptians that referring to him as Thoth the Great was simply not good enough. Even Double-Great Thoth wasn’t adequate. But, like in the Goldilocks tale, Great-Great-Great Thoth was just about right. That honorific title led to Thoth’s better-known Greek name, Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes three-times-great).

Hermetic cosmology contends that reality consists of a single Universal Consciousness, known by many names: the One Mind, the Divine, the Tao, Brahman, Allah, God, Source, and so on. To avoid religious connotations of these terms, I’ve referred to this concept as consciousness with a big C, or [C]. In Hermeticism, [C] appears in two complementary aspects, like the two sides of the same coin. One form is a manifested, primordial, “plastic” energy, sometimes referred to within the alchemical tradition as the One Thing. The other form is a non-manifested, transcendent element known as the One Mind. The One Thing reacts to and is shaped by the One Mind.

The One Thing is similar to the Hindu idea of akasha. In Swami Vivekananda’s book Raja Yoga, akasha is described as follows: "It is the omnipresent, all-penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, it is evolved out of this Akasha. It is the Akasha that becomes the air, that becomes the liquids, that becomes the solids….It cannot be perceived; it is so subtle that it is beyond all ordinary perception…. At the beginning of creation there is only this Akasha."

Because the One Thing is viewed as a consciousness-shaping “substance,” its appearance depends on who’s looking and what they’re expecting to see. Moses was stunned to encounter a burning bush that spoke to him. On October 13, 1917, three children near Fatima, Portugal, saw the Virgin Mary, while tens of thousands of others who were present witnessed anomalous lights and atmospheric effects that seem very much like what we’d today describe as a UFO.

Hermeticism may sound like a dualistic concept, with the One Mind and the One Thing being starkly different from each other... but that’s only because [C] is beyond human comprehension, so it’s just described in two forms that are easier to grok. That is, the One Mind only has the appearance of being different from the One Thing. Similarly, personal consciousness, [c], is not separate from the physical world. In other words, from the Hermetic perspective reality is not just physical, it’s psychophysical. This interaction is commonly studied in the form of mind-body connections within the mainstream scientific disciplines of psychoneuroimmunology, psychophysiology, and the neurosciences. It’s also the basis of psychosomatic medicine and the placebo effect. But when [c] influences the physical world outside of the body, which it can do because [c] has properties similar to [C], then that’s called magic.

Hermeticism was considered heretical by the Church because it asserts that all humans have an inherent spark of divine power within us. That is, we have Godlike abilities because [c] is a part of [C]. As a result, from the Hermeticist’s perspective there were no special benefits conferred by following someone else’s dogma, because each of us could achieve enlightenment on our own. As you may imagine, such insolence was unacceptable, so the Church applied its well-honed strategy for maintaining control, and like Neoplatonism and Gnosticism,

Hermeticism was forced to go underground. Hermeticism was rediscovered in the fifteenth century largely due to the efforts of Prince Cosimo de Medici of Florence, Italy, and that was allowed to happen only after the Church’s millennium-old stranglehold on scholarship began to loosen. At this point an important figure enters the picture: Marsilio Ficino, head of the Florentine Academy. Ficino was commissioned by de Medici to translate a set of seventeen ancient manuscripts that had been found in the Middle East.

Ficino’s translation, subsequently called the Corpus Hermeticum and published in 1471, thrilled scholars who were in the process of rediscovering the ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish traditions, all of which were thought to predate the Church. The Corpus Hermeticum manuscripts were originally imagined to be ancient, harking back to the time of Plato or even before the Greek philosophers, but modern scholars now consider them most likely to be a combination of ideas from Egypt and Greece from the first and second centuries.

In Ficino’s day, the excitement over these manuscripts was due to the belief that Hermes Trismegistus might have been a contemporary of Moses, or maybe he was Moses. In either case, scholars hoped that the translations might reveal an ancient wisdom that preceded the Bible, because if that knowledge were brought to light it could demonstrate the long-fabled dream of a prisca theologia, or first true religion, and that in turn might break the Church’s domination of acceptable scholarship and allow fresh ideas to flourish.

Another promise was that the Corpus Hermeticum might be able to liberate long-suppressed prohibitions against the study of magic. Scholars reasoned that if the Church’s doctrine was found to be compatible with much older ideas, then the magical concepts within Hermeticism should also be allowed to be studied. Unfortunately, their hopes did not pan out because by then the Protestant Reformation had all but eliminated the magical rituals popular in Catholicism, such as the Eucharist. And that in turn forced Hermeticism to retreat even further into the background.

But Ficino’s translation was not forgotten. Ficino was one of the first to popularize the idea that there was an ancient secret wisdom at the core of all the world’s religions. This philosophia perennis would be the fundamental, first-principles truth around which the whole universe revolved. This idea was so appealing that it never faded away. The search for this particular holy grail can be found in today’s physics in the form of the many proposed Theories of Everything. Trying to develop a fundamental theory that explains everything remains the obsession of thousands of scientists who, like the esoteric scholars of the Middle Ages, hold the conviction that there must be one “secret truth,” or key principle, underlying all of reality.

One of Ficino’s students, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), later added portions of the Jewish Kabbalah to Hermeticism. The Kabbalah was an ancient cosmology even in Pico della Mirandola’s time, based on sephiroth or spheres of “cosmic vibration” that connect the transcendent divine with the everyday world. The Hebrew word kabbalah means “to receive,” as in “received wisdom.” It refers to the Jewish mystical tradition discussed in texts such as the Zohar, a commentary on the Hebrew Bible.

Pico della Mirandola’s analysis of the Kabbalah proposed not only that Christianity was contained within pagan beliefs but also that it was part of the secret tradition of Kabbalah that (tradition tells us) Moses received on his second expedition up Mount Sinai. Like Ficino before him, Pico della Mirandola was motivated by a search for the prisca theologia. He claimed that his Hermetic-Kabbalistic synthesis, consisting of twenty-six “magical conclusions,” did the trick.

Incidentally, the Kabbalistic text known as the Sepher Yezirah (Book of the Creation) describes a cosmology that some scholars claim is identical to the Emerald Tablet, another key source of the Hermetic tradition. The Corpus Hermeticum is said by some to expand on principles written (in extremely compact form) on the Emerald Tablet.

Like other esotericists in the Middle Ages, Pico della Mirandola was nervous about attracting unwanted attention from the Church, so he described his magical synthesis as “the practical part of natural science.” This strategy was an attempt to separate magic from religious concepts and place it firmly within the bounds of the natural world. Pico della Mirandola’s synthesis was part of a long line of syncretic efforts, meaning a fusion of different religious ideas. Examples of popular syncretic rituals include Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and Christmas. All of these holidays are hybrids based on a blending of pagan and Christian rituals.

Ficino and Pico della Mirandola’s work sparked a flood of new combinations and syntheses of the esoteric traditions, many of which were instrumental in the development of the early sciences. A few of the key magician-scientists during this period were German scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, English mathematician John Dee, Italian friar Giordano Bruno, and Swiss physician Paracelsus. These and many other individuals made the study of magic part of the scientific mainstream during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Briefly, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) wrote his first and most famous work on magic in 1510. Entitled De occulta philosophia (Occult Philosophy), the book was based on a Christian Kabbalistic framework. John Dee (1527–1609), adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, combined the study of the natural sciences with magical evocations aimed at establishing contact with spirits from (what he called) the angelic realm. Italian philosopher, mathematician, and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was attracted to Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas. In his 1584 work, De l’infinito, universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), he proposed that the universe contained an infinite number of worlds and that these were all inhabited by intelligent beings.38 This idea flatly contradicted Church dogma, and Bruno paid the ultimate price for his heresy.

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), who called himself Paracelsus because it took too long to say his whole name, was one of the first modern medical theorists, the founder of homeopathy, and a pioneer in wound surgery. Paracelsus stressed that exercise of the imagination was the beginning of all magical operations. For the youth of the early twenty-first century, Paracelsus is perhaps better known as a character on one of the collectible Chocolate Frog Cards in the Harry Potter novels.

from Real Magic by Dean Rodin, pp. 35-54 and from The Science of Magic by Dean Rodin, pp. 7 and 12