We should separate two parts to doing “magic” or any magical sort of practice. First there are methods, tools, and approaches. Second there is purpose, meaning, and spirituality. In both cases, there are individual choices, paths of learning and training people go through, and potentially longer traditions to be a part of.
But modern Western traditions of magic are pretty brief, really —just back to Crowley or the neo-Druids fifty years ago. There are thin threads of older practices, for instance around herbalism, but anyone wanting tradition has to reconstruct, invent, or borrow to put it together. This is hard, but it’s a little easier to do with methods — and experimentation is a viable path to develop something new but legitimate. In terms of purpose and spirituality, however, we really haven’t got much of anything. That’s the big hole in magical practice today. We just don’t live in a society with a traditional role for the magician.
This is a big problem. The power of our magic is going to be very limited if we don’t have purpose or spirituality behind it — whether that comes from a long living tradition or not. Of course, individuals can have a purpose behind a spell or some other activity, but I see this as weather is to climate; it’s missing long-standing, shared, group purpose.
There is some danger in people casting unscrupulous or harmful magic. This is true of any human activity, or human power, so it’s nothing to get to worked up about. But we should bear in mind that just getting magic power isn’t a good in itself.
The bigger issue for me is we’ll do magic that’s out of alignment with what we really need or want. We live in a modern, capitalistic society, with a lot of ills. Even when we try to do positive work, which remediates some of those ills, it’s hard, because our mind is also stuck in a modern mindset. We may end up casting spells that are fundamentally framed in a modern way, and reinforce modernity without intending to.
Magic needs a bigger goal. This is why I think we need to introduce alternative frames of mind to any magical practice. Traditional shamans, for instance, we trying to bring balance to their societies; right spiritual wrongs, and help their people through hard times . Today, I think many of us don’t want to reinforce or aid modernity too much: we want an alternative. Well, we’d better make this explicit.
Some people reach back a little bit in time, to the charms and harvest festivals of agricultural Europe. This is a nice respite, and it gets us back to thinking about the land. But for me it’s not going nearly far enough. I want to draw more inspiration from hunters and gatherers and pastoral nomads: people who had a radically different way of relating to the land, and by many accounts had senses of intuition and magic we’ve all lost as modern people.
But we can’t go back to be hunter gatherers. We all live in the modern world. It’s going to have to be a hybrid system of goals and meanings we use in our magic. Eventually we may be able to invent something new, that takes inspiration from lots of places. Effective magic has to deal with the world we live in; but it can also aim for something we really need; a society where magic has a place, among other things.
