Pentacles, Ancient and Modern

We've previously explored how modern scientists inevitably reflect the mystics of old. Here's another rather stunning pairing: a John Dee pentacle mirrored by a geological mandala from 1920. These two symbols illustrate the ancient Hermetic axiom, "As above, so below." The mystic Dee's celestial vision and the geologist's earthly insight are two sides of the same coin.

Carol Ann Sima once wrote, "It's not magic. It's geology." But we beg to differ!

Magic, Science, and Religion

"He began to think that even though magic, and science, and religion did not all mean the same thing, they all meant in the same way." —John Crowley, The Solitudes

The Whole History of Magic

"If we wish to sum up the whole history of magic in a sentence, we may say that men first regarded magic as natural, then as marvelous, then as impossible and absurd." —"Magic: Its Origins and Relations to Science," Studies in History, Economics and Public Law (1905)

Don't miss Stuart Cumberland's ruminations on "Where has the Mystery Gone in Magic and Mentalism?" (thanks, Gordon).

Obfuscatory Language

"Science, more so than magic, has attempted to obfuscate with language its own irrational foundations." —fadereu on twitter

Magic via Imagination

"The first step into magic is the human imagination. The world of the mind and the world of matter are both real, but in different ways. In fact, if one is more important than the other, it's probably the world of the imagination, where the world of human artefacts, well, all of it, actually originates. The basic paradigm of science tends to rule out consciousness, imagination, because they're not repeatable in empirical laboratory conditions. So it struck me that perhaps through magic there might be a different way to interact with the mind. This might in fact have been what magicians were talking about all along." —Alan Moore, via Phantasmaphile

Sigils, Ancient and Modern

"Nothing definitive has been written concerning the relationship between mysticism and technology." —The Bent World: Essays on Religion and Culture, 1979

Sigils are the mystical circuitry diagrams of old, and it would seem the world of science isn't immune to their influence. Compare the iconography of the logo of Space Technology Laboratories (pictured left; uncropped image here) to the occult sign of Azazel (right). (Azazel, by the way, is "the most mysterious extrahuman character in Jewish sacred literature.") Both images economically intersect arrows, plus signs, x-signs, zig-zags, and curves.

Indeed, it is believed that sigils inspired the design of modern circuit boards. No wonder, then, that artists like Theo Kamecke use circuitry to create sculptures evocative of ancient Egyptian magic.

"In point of fact, the devices that you see in this era, the ones that rely on electrical impulses and circuitry, they are an outgrowth of the original, primal magical urge." —J. A. Wynn, Tales of the Fall, 2008

Science

Science is a magic word today.
—James Capshew, Psychologists on the March (1999)

The very name of “science” is a magic talisman which hypnotizes the masses.
—Society for the Extension of Democratic Ideals, Cultural Freedom in Asia (1956)

“Science is a magic word that disposes the reader to accept as fact whatever is said” suggests Frank Severin in Discovering Man in Psychology (1973). Likewise, “‘Scientific’ is a magic word in the modern world” (Mario Pei, Words in Sheep’s Clothing [1970]). Using imagination and reason, scientists

create a third reality between the reality of the physical world and the reality of consciousness. It is a reality-within-consciousness but a reality-from-physicality. Science makes a new world, a world made by the mind from a world which the mind did not make. The success of science since the fifteenth century has been the success of constructing such a third reality. Because of the prestige of its amazing practical achievements, science has succeeded in gaining an unquestionable and apparently permanent place for its third reality within the general structure of reality-made-by-consciousness. Science is a magic by which we seek to control the physical world through consciousness. Among forms of magic, it is uniquely effective. (Philip Allott, Eunomia, 1990)

Séance

séance
science
sense
essence

"The word seance, French for 'session,' now almost exclusively denotes a gathering held to commune with spirits." —Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead, 2005

Dust of Bones

Don't miss our interview over at The Tarot Channel, all about Magic Words: A Dictionary.

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We were surprised to discover the following magic spell in a modern book of science magic tricks:

"Dust of bones and witch's attire, I command you to draw some fire."

The spell is recommended for setting a sugar cube alight with "genuine witch's dust ... made from the scraping from the bottom of her kettle after she made her brew ... The witches use it to draw fire—lightning—from the sky to start their fires." (Nathan Shalit, Science Magic Tricks, 1998).

This spell harks back to an era when science and the occult overlapped. As Henry Adams noted in his autobiography, "Science has proved that forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic existence his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses, the universe may be—as it has always been—either a supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion, philosophy, and science seem to go hand in hand."