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1. What do you think is the difference between magic and miracles? Why do you think the author works so hard to make the case for a sacred form of magic?
2. The author proclaims that mysticism, gnosis and magic are not just for priests or ministers but for all people. How do you think the Spirit might bring a mystical, contemplative, and even magical spirituality into the lives of ordinary people? What can we do to facilitate a more mystical, magical, contemplative spirituality in our lives?
3. The author defines a miracle as “the visible effect of an invisible cause, or the effect on a lower plane due to a cause on a higher plane” (page 67). Does this way of understanding miracles change your sense of the presence (or absence) of miracles in your life? What can we do to make ourselves more consciously aware of the “invisible cause” that makes a miraculous effect in our lives?
4. Practice the spiritual exercise of “imagining faith, hope and love.” Do you think of the imagination as a magical faculty? Given the author’s insistence that sacred magic means the union of the Divine and human wills, how can we use our imagination to make ourselves more available to God’s presence and action within?
Carl I am finding your pdf’s so very helpful in a way I did not expect. I mean what I don’t understand logically is nevertheless nourishing my spirit and my connection with the Divine. I chose to practice 4.b and so far what I am happy to notice is a different understanding of faith and hope. I think I’m experiencing a mystical deepening of these gifts. I sense a more embodied presence of Love that has the effect of making me feel more at ease in my own skin.
Thank you!
Aída, thanks for your message. I’m glad you are finding the exercises helpful. I think they are an important part of this process, so I hope everyone takes some time to explore them. MOTT is not just a book full of ideas to be thought about, it is an invitation into a new way of spirituality!
I am interested in the question that our author addresses concerning whether there is can be legitimate magical workings within a Christian framework. I was an initiated Wiccan priestess many years ago, but I left that behind when I returned to Christianity. My reasons for leaving mainly had to do with Wiccan ethics being based on “An it harm none, do what you will.” I find that ethic allows for way too much rationalization of selfishness. It indeed enabled me to rationalize all sorts of bad behavior. The Christian ethic of “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a much higher standard that results in generally peaceful, contented, stable people, at least for those who sincerely follow the Jesus way.
And I just figured that leaving behind Wicca meant also leaving behind magic. Now I am wondering if that is really necessary. If an act comprises the elements our author names (the aim of liberation, the means of the way of Jesus Christ, and the power of human will serving the divine will), then it is legitimate magic according to him. So I guess that if I want to do a working, I am free to do so as long as I keep those elements in mind. There is no risk: “For sacred or divine magic, one risks only that it is inoperative, because of an error–which can be distressing–but it comprises no danger.” (Kindle Location 1173)
I’m not sure what sort of a working I would even do at this point in my life. As Sinead O’Connor sang, “I do not want what I haven’t got.” But it’s interesting to think I maybe could if I wanted to.
Some thoughts on miracles vs. magic and on this chapter generally:
My instinct is to regard magic as a technology for manipulating events through mysterious or supernatural means, with the negative connotation that meaning generally carries. I understand that the author wants to define a type or level of magic, “sacred magic,” based on but transcending the general meaning of the term. I take it that the essence of sacred magic is action aligned with the divine will: as Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Not my will, but yours,” or in the Lord’s Prayer, “your will be done on earth as in heaven.”
There’s sometimes a sense of a kind of arbitrariness in the use of words here and elsewhere in the book so far, as if the author is appropriating words to fit his ideas. I suppose authors must be allowed some latitude to define terms as they wish, within reason, as long as they make the meanings of their terms of art clear. It’s likely, too, that the sense of arbitrariness is amplified by my own ignorance of the author’s sources and my inability to follow the course of his thought completely.
That said, there is a compelling logic to the progression of the author’s focus in the first three chapters, from an inner or divine intuition, to the embodiment of intuition in language, to the expression of the word in the act aligned with the divine will.
Jesus’ miracles should be the paradigm of sacred magic, but the author of MOTT seems to regard Jesus in his divine rather than human person in the account of the healing of Aeneas (pp.55–57). Regarding Jesus instead in his human person, I would think that according to the author’s distinction between a miracle and sacred magic, his miracles are more properly termed sacred magic.
Is it really true that when it’s a matter of confronting bricks and baseball bats and guns and tanks, the subtle rules the dense? I suppose it’s one of those cases where you need to add the qualifier, “ultimately.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a prime example of the need for faith that this is so.
Renee, your post makes me think of my own journey with Wicca and Neopaganism. The slippery ethics was an issue for me as well — I needed a more robust faith in which I felt as if I were being called on my bullsh*t! Clearly, I can still kid myself as a Christian, but hopefully I’m slowly learning to let go of my narcissism.
I feel almost no tug toward “magic” in the way I understood it as a Neopagan (i.e., spell-craft, energy raising, that sort of thing). But I do think the idea of sacred magic can be a helpful reminder that we are called to more than just an inner-directed mysticism. Our spirituality ought to make a difference out there “in the world.” Magic is a handy category for the question of how that “difference” is made manifest.
Jack, I agree that our author is not above a certain amount of poetic license when it comes to defining words or concepts to suit his own vision. I also agree that this is something many authors do! And I certainly understand why the concept of “magic” can be challenging for those of us with a Christian center of gravity.
An interesting thought experiment: how would this book read differently if we substituted something like “Sacred activism” or “contemplation-in-action” for his terminology “sacred magic”? Perhaps it really just a matter of semantics? Or not… would be curious to get your take on this.
Carl, reflection on your experiment leads me into difficult territory in epistemology and the philosophy of literature. So I’ll be meandering here even though I’d prefer to be clear, direct, and concise. I’m probably way off base, and it’s not really a direct answer to your question, but here’s an attempt at starting to think this through.
First arcanum: intuition, in the old sense of unmediated, effortless apprehension of an object. Second arcanum: the word, comprehension, fashioning a container for that which is intuited. Third arcanum: manifestation through embodied action, aligning human will with the divine will. And yes, “sacred activism” and “contemplation in action” both fit, and both enlighten.
What nags at me, though, is the kind of thing our author himself points to when he says in the next chapter: “[I]t is rarely that one lets the symbol, the image of the symbol as such, say all that it has to say through its unique context. One lets it say a little, and one is suddenly more interested in one’s own thoughts, i.e., in what one has to say oneself, rather than what the symbol has to say” (p.87).
In general, how should we interpret an author’s words? Do they have an objective meaning and intention that it’s our task as readers to apprehend? Or is allowing the author’s words to evoke our own ideas, images, and experiences, arriving at an approximation or analogue of the author’s original meaning, the best the reader can do?
If we substitute, say, “contemplation in action” for our author’s “sacred magic,” we may find that we like the new term better—that it seems more comfortable, more intelligible, more…well, meaningful. And that may be a step along the way, even a necessary step, as we strive to grasp the author’s meaning, especially if the framework of magic is unfamiliar and forbidding. But is it OK to stop there?
Mystical experience is said to be ineffable—and then mystics write volumes about their experience. Capturing anything of inner experience requires poetry, image, metaphor, analogy to point toward the nature of that experience, contain it in a way and always only partially, allow it to be shared. It’s a very different kind of communication than, at the opposite extreme, mathematical expressions that convey meaning objectively, precisely, and exhaustively.
Why does our author choose this particular container to convey the meaning of the third arcanum? Why a species of the genus “magic”? What conceptual framework does this belong to? What do we gain and what do we lose by introducing instead another term of art that brings along its own conceptual framework?
It’s an arduous journey, but I think truly honoring the author’s work, fully responding to his attempt to contain and share meaning, requires that we follow the path he lays out. For me, that will require at least that I understand the Hermetic tradition more fully, by reading in and about that tradition.
I suspect it makes a crucial difference, finally, that the author has chosen *this* means of expression, not *that*, to convey his meaning.
Jack,
I definitely think the author, who comes across to me as very intentional with his language, used the word magic for a reason, especially given who his intended audiences were — and that includes people who belonged to occult orders and performed ceremonial/ritual magic! The entire book has to be considered as a whole, I think.I’m reminded of something he wrote in the letter on the Hermit, which is all about the reconciliation of opposites. From page 221:
“It is thus that the prudent Hermit would be able to offer you dozens of answers to dozens of questions, giving them spontaneously and without apparent care for their mutual agreement, and you would have the impression that each particular answer is absolutely ad hoc and that it is in no way due to a preconceived intellectual system. You will ask, perhaps, if this is not a matter of ‘intellectual poetry’, such that each particular answer appears spontaneously and ingenuously, although it may certainly be appropriate and conclusive.
“This would be the first impression. However, after thought and reflection, you would find that all these spontaneous and well-intentioned ad hoc answers disclose a ‘whole,’ an organism of synthesis behind them, and that they are in essence prodigiously married, and in essence constitute only a single articulated ‘word.'”
To the more conventional Christians reading the book, who wonder how “magic” has any relevance to them, I would suggest that our churches could really use some sacred magic. Why are so many folks leaving them? Because many churches are dry and lifeless!
“To the more conventional Christians reading the book, who wonder how “magic” has any relevance to them, I would suggest that our churches could really use some sacred magic. Why are so many folks leaving them? Because many churches are dry and lifeless!”
I agree, Morgan. My sense is that magic offers a sense of wonder and possibility to those who explore it. Christianity, by contrast, has become so focussed on duty and obedience and “doing the right thing” that few people experience any real wonder — let alone joy — within the institutional church. And then Christians wonder why so few young people stick around!
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