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Going to get into some fun and interesting stuff today on A Satanist Reads the Bible. Last time on the show I talked about Max Weber and the disenchantment of the world, determined some things about what magic is, and explicated my general approach to skeptical inquiry on these matters, which is based on looking for prima facie evidence of critical thinking. Just by way of reviewing some of my conclusions, one, I am an antirealist with regards to magic, primarily because magic seems to be unreal by definition; two, I acknowledge that there may be real phenomena which we might reasonably call magic because we don’t understand them well enough yet to not call them that (which I’m referring to as type N pseudomagic for “novel”); three, I acknowledge that there may be real phenomena which might be reasonably called magic if not for the fact that they are real and at least fairly well understood (type K pseudomagic, for “known”); and four, I am open to magical or magic-adjacent practices which are fundamentally non-realist in nature, perhaps more of a psychological tool (type P pseudomagic), though I’m not limiting myself to that at this stage. And I determined that our world is actually fairly similar to that of the Harry Potter series, and “electromagnetism” is just the word that we use for the magic in our world that is real. Or one of the words, at least. I suppose there may be others. The questions I’m aiming to answer are one, whether there are any phenomena like electromagnetism which might be considered magic if we considered their properties independently of their realness (in other words, whether there are any other forms of type K pseudomagic beyond electromagnetism and whether there are any forms of type N pseudomagic at all); and two, if magical practices might be incorporated into personal religious belief and practice in a non-realist way (whether type P pseudomagic is viable, in other words). But first I’ll need to figure out more about what magic is.
Origins of Magic
Magic seems at first glance to be separate from religion; religion does not even seem to exist in the world of Harry Potter and we have no trouble understanding what takes place in that world as being magic. I find the distinction between religion and magic curious, and indeed, looking into the history of magic, it seems that such a distinction did not always exist. In ancient Mesopotamia, magic was an everyday part of life, fully integrated with a religious system involving gods, demons, omens and divination, curses and wards, and rituals of a distinctly religious nature (such as funeral rites) conducted by magicians, who were called ashipu (Geller, 1997; Said, 2018).
I was unsuccessful in my attempts to find a suitable anthropological account of the origin of beliefs in magic in particular; however, in moving on to the theory behind magic, I found some interesting clues. Finding a reliable source that discussed the actual theory of magic in the ancient world was challenging as well. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt by Rosalie David (2002) was an interesting and informative text overall and mentioned magic frequently, but never discussed what the Egyptians considered it to be or how they believed that it worked. Many other sources were purported practical guides to Egyptian magic but had little to no anthropological grounding and typically also lacked discussion of theory. But ultimately I landed on Magic in Ancient Egypt by Geraldine Pinch (1995), which contained exactly what I was looking for.
Heka, the word commonly translated to “magic” from Egyptian, is both the primal creative force of the universe and the patron god of that force (Pinch, 1995). Once that word was available to me, I was able to both find some additional resources and understand the underlying theory behind what David was describing, but more on that later. The ancient Egyptian philosophy regarding the nature of the heka force, as depicted in a text called the Memphite Theology, roughly dating to about 1200 BCE plus or minus a few hundred years, is really very interesting.
…the most complete description of the second explanation of creation—that it began as a divine concept, given reality by being expressed through the spoken word—occurs in the Memphite Theology. Here, the two divine principles of ‘perception’ and ‘creative speech’ are the natural forces by which creation is achieved, when the creator god first perceives the world as a concept and then brings it into being through his first utterance. To achieve this, the creator uses the principle of magic, a force that, according to Egyptian belief, could transform a spoken command into reality.
David, 2002, ch. 3, para. 29
I was rather stunned when I first read that, thinking, “That sounds a great deal like the Greek and Christian concept of Logos.” I did some digging and quickly found that I was far from the first person to notice the resemblance. In a 2009 paper in Study Antiqua concerning the text and the stone artifact on which it was found, Egyptologist Joshua Bodine writes:
It did not take scholars long to recognize that in the ideas of the Memphite Theology there was an approach similar to the Greek notion of logos. The so-called “Logos” doctrine is that in which the world is formed through a god’s creative thought and speech—Logos meaning, literally, “Word.” The parallels with the creation account in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, or with the opening chapter of the Gospel of John in the Christian New Testament, are obvious…
p. 19
In Genesis in Egypt (1988), Egyptologist James P. Allen mentions that this principle (which he also cites as resembling the Logos concept) is not unique to the Memphite Theology and has appeared in other Egyptian religious texts (pp. 46-47). He also mentions that “[t]his principle of in-formation, which links the intellectual with the material, is what the Egyptian theologians conceptualized in the god Ptah [the creator god of the Memphite Theology]. In larger terms, it is the same principle through which the will of all living things works to transform the world around them” (p. 46).
I’ve discussed Logos on the show before. To review, it’s a concept from early Greek thought which also appears in Christianity and which doesn’t translate neatly to any one English word. “Word” is the most common translation, and in this sense it forms the root of English words like “logocentric,” but it can also mean “speech” or “reason” and is also the root of the English word “logic.” I’d describe it as both the ordering principle of the universe and the means by which we describe that order to each other.
In the Gospel of John, Logos is identified with Jesus and with the creative power of God: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (1:1-3). So looking at David’s text in light of Pinch’s and considering heka as being roughly equivalent to Logos, we can understand ancient Egyptian magic as the use of the primal heka force to transform speech into reality, which is accomplished by means of akhu (“spells”, from Pinch, 1995, p. 12). It may be that some ancestor to the Logos idea is at the root of all belief in magic. Perhaps this is why the modern concept of the spell is so closely associated with incantations. Indeed, the word “spell” is derived from the Old English word meaning “narrative”, “speech”, or “sermon.”
History of Magic Within the Western Esoteric Tradition
In 332 BCE, Egypt, then controlled by Persia, was conquered by Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death, control of the region fell to Ptolemy, who had been one of Alexander’s generals. Greeks ruled Egypt for the next three hundred years, resulting in considerable interaction and mixture between the two cultures. We can take this as the launch point for a brief history of magic, as a component of the Western esoteric tradition, over the next two millennia.
Yet again, it was difficult to find good sources for this research, but I eventually landed on Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013) by Professor Wouter Hanegraaff of the University of Amsterdam. I think it’s fair to say that Hanegraaff endorses the Western esoteric tradition, which includes an understanding of magic derived from the aforementioned Greco-Egyptian roots, but unlike much of what I’ve read, his treatment of the subject is clear and level-headed and does indeed display robust evidence of good research and critical thinking.
In my interpretation, the history of Western esotericism can be broadly understood as successive waves of pre-Classical and -Western and non-Classical and -Western thought interacting with orthodox spheres of Classical and Western thought with which they were incompatible, forming branching spheres of discourse which were dismissed or rejected by the orthodoxy. By Western, I mean the culture of Western civilization, which, following political scientist Samuel Huntington’s account, includes the legacy of Classical Greco-Roman civilization and Western Christianity, among several other cultural features (2011). The history of orthodox Western thought largely converges on Plato of Athens, student of Socrates, born in the late 5th century BCE. The importance and centrality of Plato to Western thought simply cannot be overstated. Alfred North Whitehead, teacher of Bertrand Russell and co-author with Russell on the Principia Mathematica, wrote in his magnum opus Process and Reality that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” and he clarifies from there that he’s referring not just to the system of thought that arose from Plato’s writings but to the “wealth of general ideas” that he presented (1978, p. 39). Plato was part of a tradition of inquiry stretching back centuries before his birth, but of the pre-Platonic philosophers we know comparatively little and Plato clearly codified their methods to such a degree that he can be claimed as the de facto founder of the Western philosophical tradition (Kraut, 2017).
As would be expected from a thinker of this magnitude, schools of thought interpreting his legacy and works went in several directions after his death. One of Plato’s more famous ideas is his theory of forms. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the theory of forms thusly: “The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses” (Kraut, 2017). If I listen to a beautiful symphony, Plato would suggest that what I’m perceiving as “beauty” may just be an imperfect reflection of what real beauty really is, the “Form of Beauty,” an abstract object which exists in a realm of other such objects (“Good” and “Justice,” for example, as well as mathematical objects like “Equilateral Triangle” and the paradigmatic forms of everyday objects such as “Table”). Plato’s student Aristotle ended up adopting Plato’s methods and took philosophy in a different, much more empirical direction, but Plato’s ideas survived among other thinkers and started taking on a distinctly religious character within the context of the aforementioned cultural exchange between Greece and Egypt. The Roman Empire conquered Greece in 146 BCE and annexed Greek-controlled Egypt about a century later in 30 BCE, effecting an even broader intermixture of cultures, including the pagans of Europe and the Jews of Palestine. Numerous schools of thought emerged from this confluence of ideas, including various forms of Christianity, two traditions called Gnosticism and Hermeticism, about which more later, and various mixtures between those and other traditions such as the various forms of Judaism extant at the time. According to Hanegraaff (2013), these schools of thought either became orthodox Western thought, as occurred when Nicene Christianity became the state religion of Rome in 380 CE, or were rejected and formed the Western esoteric tradition, as occurred with Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and numerous other heresies and heterodoxies. Indeed, Hanegraff characterizes Western esotericism in general as being the “rejected knowledge” of the West’s orthodox academic tradition (p. 13).
Gnosticism, as Hanegraaff describes it—and this squares with other accounts I’ve read—is a largely religious collection of ideas which posits that the world we inhabit was created by an ignorant or evil deity—the demiurge—in order to imprison our souls and prevent us from realizing our divine nature. The word Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge.” By coming to knowledge of the divine spark within us (which is only possessed by some), we rebel against the demiurge and realize our true being. As described in the Nag Hammadi scriptures, discovered in 1945, Gnosticism had a major influence on early Christianity, but it was denounced as heresy by the Church Fathers and fully supplanted by Nicene Christianity.
Hermeticism is based on the supposed teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretic merger between the respective Greek and Egyptian gods of knowledge, Hermes and Thoth. I’ve found it difficult to say what exactly Hermeticism is, except that it’s based on writings dating to around the 2nd century CE which are attributed to Hermes, and that magic plays a central role.
These texts contain technical discussions about the true nature of God, the world and man, but point out that philosophical discourse is just a preparation for religious salvation. The Hermetic devotee must transcend mere rational understanding and worldly attachments, to find salvation and ultimate release through being reborn—quite literally—in a spiritual body of immaterial light. This process of liberation and transformation culminates in spiritual ascent and, finally, blissful unity with the supreme powers of divine Light. The material body and the sexual urges are obstacles that must be overcome to achieve this goal; but once the hermetist has been reborn and his ‘spiritual eyes are opened’, he discovers that the divine is invisibly present throughout the whole of creation.
Hanegraaff, 2013, p. 19
Over the course of the next two thousand years, these ideas would be lost, rediscovered, recontextualized, and influenced by new cultural exchanges and developments which were themselves at times influenced by the same ideas, forming the branching discourses that comprise the Western esoteric tradition whenever they conflicted with and were rejected by the orthodoxy. The view of historian Frances Yates, as argued in her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), is that scientific developments in the late Renaissance were inspired by the rediscovery of Hermeticism and Hermetic magic. In his book Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (1990), anthropologist Stanley Tambiah cautions against unquestioned acceptance of this thesis, but acknowledges that the influence of Hermeticism on Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and especially Giordano Bruno, was at least part of the picture (pp. 29-30). The general idea is that investigations into numerology inspired developments in mathematics, investigations into astrology inspired developments in astronomy, investigations into alchemy inspired developments in chemistry and medicine, and investigations into magic inspired a desire to know and master the laws by which nature (of which magic was believed to be a part) operated.
Also during the Renaissance, the Jewish esoteric tradition called Kabbalah interacted with and influenced Western esotericism, possibly as a result of the movement of Jews through Europe after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The Western esoteric tradition continued through the course of modernity in the form of initiatic societies, secret societies with exclusive membership into which one must be initiated and which claimed to hold and protect ancient wisdom (Hanegraaff, 2013, pp. 33-36). Given the sometimes violent reaction of the orthodoxy to the esoteric—Giordano Bruno, for example, was burned at the stake in 1600—the move towards secrecy is certainly understandable. Science, religion, philosophy, and esotericism continued to interact with and influence each other throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in hybridized schools of thought such as the religious denomination of Christian Science, in which I was raised and about which I’ve spoken on this show before, and the psychological theories of Carl Jung (Hanegraaff, 2013, pp. 37-39).
Already highly fragmented by this point, the Western esoteric tradition here becomes impossible to cover along a linear timeline. The contemporary picture of Western esotericism includes continuations of initiatic orders; new investigations into and reconceptualizations and developments of Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Kaballah, and the esoteric tradition in general; and influences from developments in philosophy and the sciences, such as postmodernism and quantum mechanics. The forms of magic claimed under this tradition are either properly magic and thus unreal, or operate according to causal mechanisms which are presently unknown or not understood, in which case they would fall under type N pseudomagic, according to my definition scheme. Hanegraaff notes as well that
In many respects, these organizations and many similar ones that flourished before World War II can be seen as attempts to compensate for the prosaic world of disenchanted society by cultivating the powers of the imagination as a means of experiential access to parallel realities of magical enchantment. Ultimately, the focus in these contexts is more on individual ‘inner development’ of the magician than on influencing events in the outside world. This means that the very concept of magic acquires new shades of meaning particularly under the impact of popular psychology.
2013, p. 42
…and such magical practices would fall under type P.
Conclusions Regarding the Status of Occult Knowledge
What is it that qualifies some spheres of supposed knowledge to be accepted into the orthodoxy and others to be rejected as heterodox, heretical, esoteric, or occult? As should be clear by this point, I’m using the word “orthodoxy” to mean not only religious orthodoxy but rather orthodoxy in all spheres of thought. I don’t mean to suggest that there is a single dominant school of thought and that all competing ideas are heterodox, or that there is a binary orthodox/heterodox distinction with no grey area, or even that individual spheres of discourse have their own singular, unique orthodoxies. In some cases there is indeed an explicitly defined orthodoxy, but I’m referring more to the fact that, given a sphere of discourse and a cultural setting, certain beliefs are more normative than others. That normativity is both dependent on the perception of the identity of the believer within the cultural setting, and, curiously, at least to some degree, independent of the acceptance of those beliefs as true by other participants in the discourse.
I’ll illustrate by example. Let’s say I, a white American, am attending a conference or convention of some sort and enter a room filled with a statistically random assortment of other Americans and Europeans. Everyone gets into a circle and, by turns, we introduce ourselves and state our religion. The first person says “Lutheran,” the second says “Catholic,” the third says “atheist.” These three all disagree with each other on fundamental matters, but none of them are surprised by each others’ presence. The fourth person, who appears to be of Middle Eastern descent, says “Muslim.” This person was not surprised by the other three, and even if the other three are vehemently opposed to Islam and feel a sense of enmity towards this person, they’re not surprised that there would be a Muslim at a gathering of random Westerners. The fifth person appears to be of Northern European descent, and also says “Muslim.” This elicits some surprise, though in this case it’s not the religion itself but rather the person claiming it. Clearly, the perception within this cultural setting is that Islam is a somewhat heterodox religion for white people. Then the circle gets to me and I say “Satanist.” I’m going to get some looks, no question about it, probably along with some degree of laughter, derision, and incredulity.
I find it endlessly perplexing that those who subscribe in a realist way to, say, Christianity, find some religions to be wrong but acceptable or understandable on some level, while finding some other religions, like Wicca or Satanism, to be bizarre or ridiculous. “Sure I eat the transubstantiated flesh of God every Sunday, and I can definitely understand how Muslims could believe that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse, but worshipping the Triple Goddess and the Horned God? That’s just crazy talk.”
How is it that these orthodoxies come about? The naive answer, at least with regards to what might be called scientific orthodoxies, would be that ideas or theories become orthodox when they are demonstrated to be correct, but this does not explain how it was that scientific theories which have since been replaced, such as the Bohr model of the atom, became orthodoxies, or how the various religious orthodoxies emerged, since they can’t all be correct when viewed from a realist lens. Assuming that the answer might be different for religious orthodoxies and scientific orthodoxies, I looked to two sources, Lost Christianities by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman (2003), which describes how one particular variant of Christianty among several became the orthodoxy in the first few centuries after the death of Jesus, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1962), which describes the process by which new scientific theories emerge and become accepted as what Kuhn calls paradigms.
For Christianity, the emergence of Nicene Christianity as the orthodoxy was likely the result of power dynamics. The nature of its beliefs and organizations, as well as the administrative and economic advantages resulting from its being based in Rome, the capital city of the empire, allowed it to dominate and suppress competing conceptions of the religion (Ehrman, 2003, based on the work of the German theologian and historian Walter Bauer).
The underlying narrative of scientific orthodoxies is an interesting one. I think the popular conception of science would be very different if Kuhn’s work was more widely known. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the core texts of the contemporary philosophy of science and philosophers in general are familiar with it, but I’ve never spoken to a scientist who has even heard of it, even though it was the book that coined the term “paradigm shift,” which has become common parlance.
The picture I had of science as I worked my way through the American public school system was the one that I think most people have, which is that of science as a process of the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Someone makes a discovery, and then someone else works forward from that discovery until they make a new discovery, and so on and so forth. As Kuhn documents, this is not at all how science actually works in practice. Rather, scientists typically engage in what Kuhn calls normal science, which is a process of articulating and solving puzzles related to a paradigm, which is a particular theoretical understanding of the world. Normal science does not seek to discover anything new and indeed actually avoids doing so but rather seeks to to refine and articulate the paradigm. Kuhn refers to normal science as a “mopping-up operation” (2012, p. 24). In the course of normal science, anomalies emerge, things that don’t fit with the paradigm, and when these pile up to a sufficient degree, the paradigm is adjusted to accommodate them. When the paradigm can no longer keep up with the anomalies, the process of normal science breaks down, resulting in a crisis from which a new theory emerges, establishing new paradigms under which normal science can resume. Rinse and repeat.
Normal science, as Kuhn describes it, is not so much an attempt to better understand the world as it is a process of articulating our assumption that we already do. That normal science functions at all indicates that this assumption is at least partially correct, but that presents us with a very different picture of both science and our scientific knowledge of the world than is the popular understanding. The scientific world progressed under the geocentric Ptolmeic model of the solar system for approximately 1500 years after Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model, not because the Ptolmeic model made better predictions (it didn’t) or because it was a better representation of reality (it’s obviously not), but because Ptolmeic astronomy functioned well enough as a paradigm under which normal science could be conducted and because it had not yet generated a crisis which the heliocentric model could step in to resolve (2012, pp. 75-76).
So, how does this tie into magic, and to the conclusions I reached in my last essay? To begin with, we might conclude that belief in magic failed to become a part of established religious orthodoxies because it didn’t support the power dynamics of dominant groups, and that it failed to become a part of established scientific orthodoxies because it failed to provide a paradigm under which normal science could be conducted. The ontological status of magic proper remains unchanged by this—it remains unreal by definition—and type K pseudomagic has already been established as real by virtue of electromagnetism being real. That leaves pseudomagics of types N and P. Type N, once again, includes phenomena like electromagnetism that could be studied and understood but presently are not, and type P is magic performed for personal psychological effect. The question most pertinent to determining the ontological status of type N pseudomagic is whether the present scientific account of the world is exhaustive, whether it can be supposed that it accounts for all phenomena, even if that understanding is only approximate. Are there any extant phenomena which are unexplained by current scientific models and which would be explained by the existence of an underlying phenomenon which could presently be described as magic? I’m certainly not familiar with any, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t any, but all the claims I’ve ever encountered regarding such phenomena have been thoroughly debunked. A more comprehensive answer to that question would require some investigation into contemporary magic practices and what claims they make regarding the phenomena that they manifest or explain, and that will be the subject of the next essay.
Curiously, type P pseudomagic actually justifies itself, in a way. We can ask the same question that we did of type N pseudomagic: are there any psychological phenomena that are unexplained by present psychological models that would be explained by type P pseudomagic being efficacious in some way? The very fact that people practice magic is a potential answer to that question. It’s not a definitive one—we haven’t really explored what it would mean for type P pseudomagic to be efficacious in any way, so there may be better explanations for that phenomenon. That too will be explored in the next essay.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited and Referenced
Allen, J. (1988). Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts. Yale Egyptological Seminar.
Bataille, G. (1989). Theory of religion. Zone Books.
Bodine, J. J. (2009). The Shabaka Stone: An Introduction. Study Antiqua, 7(1), 22.
David, R. (2002). Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books.
Doniger, W. (2005). The Rig Veda: An anthology : one hundred and eight hymns selected, translated and annotated by : Wendy Doniger. Penguin.
Geller, M. J. (1997). Freud, Magic and Mesopotamia: How the Magic Works. Folklore, 10, 1–7.
Hanegraaff, W. J. (2013). Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury Academic.
Kraut, R. (2017). Plato. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/plato/
Pinch, G. (1995). Magic in ancient Egypt (1st University of Texas Press ed). University of Texas Press.
Said, M. (2018, December). Mesopotamian Magic in the First Millennium B.C. | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/magic/hd_magic.htm
Tambiah, S. J. (1990). Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge University Press.
Whitehead, A. N., Griffin, D. R., & Sherburne, D. W. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (Corrected ed). Free Press.
Yates, F. A. (1964). Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. University of Chicago Press.