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What Magic Is...and What It Isn't

Belief in literal magic can be cruel.

When Lady N. was diagnosed with cancer, she wasn't worried.

She knew she was going to beat it. She believed in magic, you see.

All over the country, night after night, people of her lineage and tradition cast circles and raised cones of power to heal her.

They didn't work.

She had given her life to the Craft, but in the end, the Craft failed her. Her magic failed her. Even her gods had failed her.

A dear friend was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is a cruel disease. At worst, it can end in the butchery of prostatectomy, leaving a man stripped of dignity, sexual function, and even sense of identity.

My friend is someone given to expecting the worst. He's not from a magical background, but in our conversations I've found myself, in effect, discussing the basics of magical thinking.

Your job now, I've heard myself telling him, is expectation management.

Expectation shapes outcome. That's the heart of real magic.

You've seen it; I've seen it. All the studies show it. If you expect a bad outcome, you're more likely to get one.

Fortunately, the converse is true as well.

Belittle it as magical thinking; dismiss it as self-deception. If a little self-deception can win you a better outcome than otherwise, then, me, I'm all for it.

Of course, there are no guarantees. You may get the bad outcome anyway, as Lady N. did.

But, in the end, that's not necessarily failure. There's magic, and there's magic.

When Old Lady Manygoats was dying of cancer, her family held a ceremony of healing for her.

They hired a ritualist to lead the ceremony. Friends and family converged from all over.

If you intentionally kill someone, are you legally responsible for their death?

If you intend to kill someone, but get caught before you succeed, do you still bear legal responsibility?

Is it possible to kill someone with magic?

If you intentionally kill someone with magic, are you legally responsible for their death?

If you intend to kill someone with magic, but get caught before you succeed, do you still bear legal responsibility?

If you've answered “yes” to all these questions, you're down with witch trials, right?

One of the things that astounds me about the human animal is our stubborn will to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Case in point: the Turin “Shroud.”

Dating to the mid-14^th century, the so-called shroud is a 14-foot piece of linen displaying what appears to be the imprint of a man's naked body, fore and aft. As a quick web search will show you, many, many people continue to believe that this is the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.

They continue to believe this in spite of the fact that three separate C-14 tests performed in three different laboratories in 1988 proved the cloth to be of medieval origin.

They continue to believe this in spite of the fact that, counter to all historical likelihood, the figure shown on the cloth looks exactly like conventional Western representations of Jesus.

They continue to believe this despite the fact that an actual human body laid out on a cloth wouldn't produce an imprint looking anything like what we see on the “shroud.”

Take a look at the image's “butt,” (lower right). Looks like a (skinny) butt, right?

(“I've seen Jesus' butt. Now I can die happy,” a Christian friend recently quipped.)

Gods. Pagans.

I've been hearing stories. So, I'm just going to say it.

Magic will not protect you from corona virus.

Magic will not protect you from corona virus.

Magic will not protect you from corona virus.

Not your magic. Not nobody's.

Magic will not protect you from corona virus because that's not how magic works. Magic is a finger on the scales of possibility, not a headlock that wrestles reality into submission.

For gods' sakes, hear the voice of experience. Back in the early days of the last Great Plague, I can remember hearing from a number of Radical Faeries that “Faeries can't get AIDS.”

Well, they were wrong. Faeries did indeed get AIDS, just like anybody else. Their Faerie magic did not protect them from the AIDS virus, just as your magic alone (whatever its variety and vintage) will not protect you from corona virus.

Let me add that every single one of those guys is dead now. They all died—predictably—of AIDS.

A few years back, I spent the Spring holidays with my cousin and his family in Germany.

I was standing in the kitchen eating a piece of Easter candy when little Anja walked in. As usual, she didn't miss much.

She immediately took in the bag of candy—exactly the same kind of candy that she'd found in her basket a few days earlier—and you could see lights going on behind her eyes.

Her chin began to wobble.

“But I thought...I thought the Bunny brought the candy!”

Being myself neither a parent nor a believer, I was clearly out of my depth here. I said something mollifying and went to get my cousin.

My undergrad Philosophy of Religion prof defined “superstition” by breaking it down into its component parts: Latin super, “over” + stitio, “standing” (< stare, “to stand”).

“A superstition is just an old belief that has 'stood over' from the past,” he said.

If, as they say, belief is a gift, I didn't get much.

Fortunately, I'm a pagan, so it doesn't matter.

Of course, there are believing pagans out there. Well, better an honest believer than a dishonest unbeliever.

But I suspect that most of us straddle that hedge, with one foot in belief and the other in doubt. And that I can respect.

I reached the crisis of faith early on in my pagan career. I loved the Old Gods passionately, but I realized that I couldn't be intellectually honest with myself and say that I actually believed in them.

I was working as a night watchman that summer, so I had many opportunities for dark nights of the soul. Finally, one night, the hag came down and we wrestled.

All night we wrestled.

In the morning, the Sun came up. Out of that struggle, I had won myself a realization.

Belief is moot.