Magic and Miracles

Recently I was bemused by a review of one of my Neopagan books in which the critic, in panning the book, accused me of “not believing in magic.” I thought, “Well, if she means I don’t believe in magic the way a 6-year-old believes in Santa Claus, I guess she’s right.” Still, it was interesting for me to ponder about how I think about magic, both now (almost three years after entering the Catholic faith) and then (the book in question, Before You Cast a Spell, was written in 2003).

I first was drawn to Neopaganism — particularly the spiritualities of Wicca, Druidry, and Asatru — because I was interested in an earth-centered and post-patriarchal way of expressing myself spiritually. That’s what I thought Paganism was all about, thanks to reading books by folks like Starhawk, Margot Adler, and Philip Carr-Gomm. Alas, once I got into the Pagan world, what I mostly found were a lot of folks wrapped up in the chase for secret knowledge and spiritual power, both of which categories were rolled together under the umbrella term of “magic” (or “magick,” to use Crowley’s rather pompous revisioning of the word). Hindsight is 20/20, and I realize that, given my unwillingness to buy into the fantasy/superstition of Pagan magic, I was ill-suited to be a Pagan from day one. But I’m nothing if not stubborn, and so I stubbornly tried to make it work — to find some way I could reconcile my naturally skeptical mind with what seemed to me to be the mostly naive if not childlike approach to this notion of magic that I encountered at every turn in the Pagan world.

The question I kept pondering about magic was simply this: “How does it work?” No one — none of the books I read, none of the websites I visited, none of the teachers I studied under — could provide me with a satisfactory answer.