5.
Newton’s Alchemy, Hegel’s Grimoire, and What Civilization Owes to Magic
Even before Cat’s fine young husband disappointed my early hopes by turning out to be a blood-pact Satanist, I knew that bad magic is as wily as a virus. It can survive anything. It can pop up anywhere. Cat said one reason so many Americans still believe in the winds of ill fortune is that bad magic was hearty enough to make the trip over the ocean. I’ve noticed the robust nature of trouble in many contexts. Good always seems to be puny and late to arrive. I can’t count how many stories of suffering and worry I’ve heard that ended with God finally coming to the rescue. Nobody ever asks why it took him so long, but I can’t be the only one who’s wondered. Have you ever heard anyone say, “And finally the devil showed up”? No. He’s always on the spot, raring to go, got the tools ready. If anybody was hiring, he’s the kind of guy they’d go for.
I should have known all about the power of bad to sneak its way into good. It wasn’t reasonable of me to expect so much of the good witches of Salem, but I did. Perhaps that was because the magic of Salem reached out to me even before I got there. I’d called ahead to set up interviews and talked to one of the witches, a woman named Gypsy who owns a magical shop. When I said that I wanted to write about magic, she replied, “Oh you do, do you?”
Then she directed me to wait until the night of the new moon and light three white candles. I was to sit before them and say, “May this be for the good of everyone concerned.” I liked the idea. So I did it. The light of those candles turned everything in my tatty, cluttered old study beautiful. The room glowed with the warmest light I’d ever seen. I was so charmed that I lighted the candles again a week later just to bask in the aura, but it wasn’t the same, and it never has been since. Gypsy said the glow was the Goddess showing up and being amplified by all the other people calling on her that night. Maybe so.
I went to Salem early on in my hunt for good magic because witches, often called Wiccans, are the best known of the magical people and probably the most numerous. The 2000 U.S. Census puts them and other pagans at more than 300,000. When other types of pagans are added in and counted on a worldwide basis, some people say the number might go up to a million. Numbers for any of the magical people are hard to come by because they don’t organize well, often don’t join groups, and may count themselves as adherents of many systems at once.
I was especially attracted to Wiccans because they are adamant about doing only good magic. They like to say that all acts of pleasure are the Goddess’s rites, an idea very different from the notions I had grown up with. The God I knew didn’t have much use for pleasure. In fact, whatever people liked, he seemed not to like. Jesus wasn’t much better. He was kinder, but his directives to me always seemed to be about giving up what I wanted so that someone else could have it. Jesus seemed to be on everybody’s side but mine.
If this Goddess the witches liked so much was being worshiped with every act of pleasure, she would grow in power every time people laughed together, and if the laughter turned mean, she would say, “Come away with me to a better place.” She would thrill when a baby lifted its arms and someone who loved it picked it up and felt that sweet weight of a little trusting body. She would be around during good sex, and we ought to back away from bad sex just as fast as she would. She wouldn’t mind a bit if when a sermon or a lecture or a “good for us” message bored us, we decided to have an ice cream sundae instead of listening. And what’s more, when caring about the pain of others felt as though it was simply too much to bear, she wouldn’t reproach us for being callous but would say, “Take a break. You can care again later.”
This goddess sounded fine, especially when paired with the witches’ other rule. Do what you will, they say, providing it harms no one. Whatever you send out comes back threefold is another rule. Using magic to override another person’s will is completely verboten, which means you can’t even do a love spell with a specific person in mind. Some Wiccans won’t do healing spells for sick people unless the person agrees to it first. These tidy rules do have a downside.
With regard to the Wiccans, one vampire told me, “They’re the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the magical community. Totally sure that they’re right.” The Wiccans are also much maligned in the magical community as being too white light. Fluffy bunny magic, it’s sometimes called. Their insistence on ignoring the importance of the dark side is a dangerous distortion, according to some magical people. Those two problems are the selfsame problems that Christianity or any religion that aims at being completely good has always had. They go with aspirations of high holiness like fat with cheese, but I was too desperate to affirm the good for such depressing truisms to have any appeal to me.
The story of the Wiccan movement’s beginning is a wonderful illustration of just how hard it can be to know what’s right and true with regard to spiritual matters. Wicca began in the 1940s with a retired English civil servant named Gerald Gardner. Twenty years earlier, a writer named Margaret Murray had claimed that witches persecuted during the Inquisition had participated in a pre-Christian fertility cult with a female deity. Later scholars discounted her stories as having been built on the accusations and confessions extracted from witches under torture. Gardner, influenced by Murray, claimed that an old woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck initiated him into a coven that had existed since the persecutions, often called the burning times by neo-pagans. Later Gardner published stories of contemporary witch covens.
No one in the movement but Gardner ever met old Dorothy. In later years many began to doubt that she existed. Doreen Valiente, an English witch initiated by Gardner, wrote that she found Clutterbuck’s birth and death certificates, but whether the old woman was part of an established coven, as Gardner claimed, is still in dispute. There is also evidence that his Book of Shadows, the grimoire, or magical book, she was supposed to have given him, was written by Gardner himself, perhaps with the help of Aleister Crowley.
Wiccans often tout their religion as one of the few with a sense of humor, although some witches are dreadfully self-important, especially about their lineage. An increasing number, however, are unconcerned with the literal facts of their group’s beginnings. Even if the stories were fabricated, the truth of the teachings and the vision they present still hold, say practitioners. Margot Adler, author of Drawing Down the Moon, calls the founding of modern witchcraft the Wiccan myth. “Many have observed that myths should never be taken literally. This does not mean that they are ‘false,’ only that to understand them one must separate poetry from prose, metaphorical truth from literal reality,” she writes.
Plenty of bad has been said about Wicca founder Gerald Gardner, beyond the claim that he was a liar. Frances King in Ritual Magic in England writes that Gardner was “a sadomasochist with both a taste for flagellations and marked voyeuristic tendencies.” With such tendencies, it might seem especially ironic that he helped ignite a turn toward feminine spirituality, which is still growing. It has inspired millions of women to question male dominance in religious ideas. This emphasis on the feminine has quietly spread to mainstream churches and become the subject of wide academic study. Part of the reason is that Gardner’s witches’ religion attracted brilliant, dedicated women and was gaining adherents just as the modern feminist movement began. His story may not have been factual, but his timing was impeccable.
Witches are heavy into ceremony as a way of bringing forces together. As technologies of the sacred, their ceremonial circles may be even more important to them than spell work. Wiccans do both high and low magic, which is one of the most basic divisions in magical thought.
Low magic, sometimes called practical magic, is the easiest kind of magic to grasp. It is about transforming the physical events in the world around us. Low magic is usually about performing spells that affect people and events. It might employ gods and goddesses, spirits or angels, and it might not. Low magic and folk magic are often synonymous, although folk magic is more focus
ed on the idea that there’s an energy or power, sometimes called virtue, present in the physical world to be drawn on. Hoodoo is low magic. The aims of low magic are generally practical. But the belief behind it is quite lofty: that everything is connected—the elements of the earth, the celestial bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral, and human—all are connected and all are able to interact with one another.
Low magic generally works on two principles. The first is the idea that anything that resembles something else will affect the thing it resembles. For instance, make a doll that looks like someone, and whatever happens to the doll will happen to the person. The second kind of magic works on the idea that anything attached to a person continues to be part of that person after it’s detached and will affect the person no matter how far apart they are. That kind of magic might use hair, toenails, blood, footprints even.
All magical people reach far back to former times for their wisdom. That alone is an unusual way of thinking in our modern age. A distinctive feature of modern times is that humans have stopped believing that wisdom comes from the past and they look forward to the future as the site of superior understanding. Modern thinking has made experience and age matter less, and there is now a sense that humans are getting better and smarter all the time. Instead of revering past wisdom, we see it as quaint thinking that we moderns have far surpassed. Magical people, in contrast, seek wisdom by looking backward, further into the past even than the major religions of today.
Such a focus usually makes people conservative in their outlook, but magical people have always been bold. And why wouldn’t they be? Loosed from the constraints that have historically limited humans, they believe themselves to be empowered beyond human imagination. Some think of themselves as divine. Others believe they can command the divine. High magic, which concerns itself with transforming oneself spiritually, makes these claims most emphatically, to such a glorious degree that its practitioners have shaped history, ancient and modern. High magic aims at contacting divinity, usually through secret rituals and ceremonies. It is sometimes called white magic or the Great Work, which is often taken to mean forging a link between the human soul and divine presence. Astral travel to other realms, meditation, and dream work are important practices.
During the Renaissance, high magic underwent a great resurgence and was a vital factor in mankind’s “reawakening.” It inspired science, art, religion, and philosophy by holding out a vision of mankind that was more glorious than anything Christian Europeans had ever known. It informed the thinking of many eminent men, among them scientist Sir Isaac Newton, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and another genius whose name has been largely lost to popular history, John Dee.
This Renaissance resurgence of high magic, called Hermeticism, assured humans that “through his intellect man could perform marvelous feats—it was no longer man under God, but God and man,” writes the historian Peter J. French. The stars were believed to be living entities that shape human destiny and can be influenced by humans. Even God’s angels might be manipulated to help mankind. In describing the powers of the magus, Pico della Mirandola wrote, “To him is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.”
The revival of Hermeticism marked the dawn of the scientific age, writes French, because it unleashed a driving spirit for power. High magic inspired men with the notion that they could compel nature, force it to serve them in ways never dreamed of before. Where they had once pursued knowledge for its own sake, now humans would conquer the mysteries of the universe because they could grow rich and powerful by doing so. At the same time that Galileo and Kepler trafficked in horoscopes, alchemy fostered a trial-and-error method of experimentation that, coupled with dogged persistence, would soon evolve into the scientific method and yield much more than gold. Magic was the template of science, writes science author James Gleick, citing Friedrich Nietzsche, who asked, “Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?”
Built on the writings of a mage, or magician, called Hermes Trismegistus, Hermeticism reached Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Renaissance was in full swing. Humanism, with its ideas about the autonomy and power of mankind, was gaining sway, which dovetailed with magical thinking quite well. As the influence of theology began to wane, admiration for science rose and with it interest in everything Greek and Roman, including classical texts. These developments set the scene nicely for Hermes Trismegistus, which means Three Times Great.
He was thought to be an Egyptian sage who had lived during the time of Moses and incorporated the Jewish leader’s wisdom. The Hermetic texts include a creation story in which man was once God and can again become God because divine powers are still within him. In this story, man is immortal and can understand anything—in fact, he is called to understand everything. It is through man’s understanding of God that God is able to understand himself.
One reason the Hermetic texts, often called a corpus, excited people of the Renaissance so greatly was that they were so old. They seemed to foretell Jesus’s life and to be the text from which Plato learned most of his teachings. Without those attributes, the corpus would have been given far less attention. The writings’ date of origin, however, had been misunderstood entirely. Later scholars realized that the corpus was written, not by a sage named Hermes, but by a number of people, all anonymous, using the same pen name. It had come into being two or three hundred years after the birth of Christ, which meant that the information about Jesus wasn’t prophecy but history. Likewise, the ideas of Plato were copied from the Greek philosopher five hundred years after his death, not the other way around. The realization that Hermes Trismegistus probably didn’t exist and that Hermetic wisdom was built partially on the wisdom of others and on history robbed the teachings of their main claims to legitimacy.
We’ve already noted that the Wiccan movement’s beginnings are also shrouded in falsehood and misunderstanding. This is true of other magical beginnings as well. As a result, one of the hardest turns to make in understanding magical people—and in understanding many spiritual truths—is coming to grips with the difference between lies, fantasy, and mythical or greater truths. The same might be said of the major religious traditions, and has been said, much to the fury of the more fundamentalist faithful. It is almost as though humans need some grand vision, some story greater than what ordinary life provides, in order to understand mysteries beyond what we see every day. We seem to need symbols and drama to fire our imaginations. A simple rendition of the facts, as true as they may be, simply won’t do the job.
Scholar Karen Armstrong sheds some light on this problem and gives us another way to analyze the value of a story when she notes that modern people and ancient people regard spiritual stories very differently. When modern people demand that religious stories be factually true, they are confusing two ways of looking at the world , logos and mythos.
Modern people, writes Armstrong, tend to look at everything through logos, which is the old word for reason, as though that is the only method of inquiry. But in the premodern world people believed that there was another important type of knowledge that could not be understood through logos. It could only be understood through mythos, which is something like the deeper meaning found in a poem or a great novel.
Logos helps us determine practical matters. It guides us in eating, working, and traveling. It governs science. One of the ways our modern dependence on logos shows up is that we are utterly unable to credit anything that isn’t accessible through logos, that isn’t factually true and understandable in a factual way.
But when we want to understand the meaning of things, to get at the higher truths, we must use mythos. It looks into the deepest regions of our minds, into that which is timeless and unchanging. Mythos might have been what my Methodist friend was talking about when she
said that of course she didn’t believe that vampires are real, but then again, yes, she did. She had some feeling about the value of that old myth, but not being a poet or an ancient seer, she had no words to express it.
In logos it is the literal truth of a thing that matters. In mythos “what really happened” doesn’t matter at all because the kind of truth being sought is beyond facts. Today, as the great stories at the heart of all religions are being discredited because scholars are proving that the stories didn’t “really happen,” some people are experiencing a crisis of faith. In the ancient world that doubt would not have arisen. It was mythos that mattered most.
If we were to reclaim the old ways, would we have access to a kind of wisdom that human beings need in order to fulfill the highest hopes of their humanity? The magical people appear to think so, or perhaps they believe the old stories are completely factual. Whatever we believe about Hermetic origins, the magical systems did fire the imaginations of some great men.
Among the geniuses inspired by Hermetic alchemy in the sixteenth century was a queen’s counselor named John Dee. A philosopher and Hermetic magician, he linked magical ideas to the newly emerging discipline of science. During a time when mathematics was suspect as a dark art, Dee was renowned throughout Europe for his studies of mathematics, navigation, mechanics, and geography. Without his wisdom, England would have fallen behind in exploration and Britain’s empire would have been a much punier realm. His library was the greatest in England. He was, in short, one of England’s most learned and respected men.
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