I picked up a copy of Arthur Verluis’ The Philosophy of Magic sometime ago but apart from the first few pages, haven’t put any real effort into reading it until last night. I’m a person that reads in fits and starts and some books just have  to wait until my mood is right. I keep a stock of funny books for when I need a mood lift, for example.

Not that Versluis is a comic, although he can be comical. I’ve written about Versluis before and you may be wondering why I keep reading his stuff since I sometimes appear to have a “hate-on” for him, at least according to an email I received from a Tailfeather reader. The thing is I adore magic, the way magical belief systems work, the power of magical narrative in human life, and especially, the way magical systems are transforming themselves in the contemporary West. And yes, I am an atheist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the power that the concept of magic has on the human mind. And remember, like all art forms, this power is not a bad thing. It’s only when narrative is confused with empirical reality that it gets hairy.

So I keep reading Versluis (and others like him) because he is a magician, and one that clearly that has some deep knowledge of his chosen path. Reading him is instructive with respect to how such belief systems work; how true believers function conceptually to enable magical systems in their life and world.

Having said that, the other reason I read Versluis is because he is also an academic. That I find particularly engaging because I have always associated academia with intentional rationality and Versluis just blows that fucking right out of the water. I mean how cool is that to get blown away and reminded that all is not what you expect. At least for me this disturbance pushes me to attempt understanding, to read, to think, to reason.

The thing is though, that this book is actually a little scary. Or at least, reading it because I couldn’t sleep last night, at 2 AM and 3 and 4, the book took on a kind of horror, like the thought of one of the current batch of mad-dog Republicans becoming the US president and devastating the sanctuary of Western democracy.

Why so scary? It’s not the overall stated purpose of the book. He just wants to say that magic (alchemy, et al.) can only really be understood and practiced properly from within the tradition that gave it birth. OK. His idea is that magic, ripped from the larger tradition (belief system) is like a sick person dealing with symptoms and not the root cause of the illness. That’s just going to cause more problems. Health – in this case spiritual – comes from walking a hermetic path and using magic when appropriate to that path. The assumption, of course, is that walking a hermetic path is synonymous with working for spiritual development and with that bringing on emotional and behavioural adulthood. Of course the biographies of such seekers in history tends to undermine the veracity of such assumptions, but that is something Versluis doesn’t seem to address. (At least in my readings so far. If you have a reference or two that contradicts this, I would absolutely love to follow it up.)

Where it starts to get scary is what he considers to the true path, which, of course, is hermeticism for those of us in the West. What is scary is the disdain, the anger and fear, and the apparently concomitant severe lack of factual historical knowledge or analysis that underlies such a belief in the existence of “true”.

Although it is difficult for us – bound as we are to the dualistic, Cartesian view of existence as consisting in the purely physical and in external series of coincidence – to rightly understand the more organic and unified vision of the traditional cultures, reflected in the West by the Hermetic tradition, it is precisely this which is most necessary, for it is only within such a tradition that magic and alchemy arose, and through which they can be understood.

(As if, even were it true, that a “more organic” understanding of our ancestors resulted in better behaviour with respect to the earth, its indigenous peoples, or non-human animals. I mean what does he think this “organic” understanding really achieved in the functional lives of the society?)

He’s just as mad at modern manifestations of magical religion as he is at the church and science. He names, for example, neo-shamanism. Versluis feels that without the “protective shell” of hermetic tradition, Westerners who practice magical technologies like shamanic drumming and alchemy are in danger. What danger?

For this reason, to the extent that magic and alchemy exist outside a tradition they are – as is the traditional orthodoxy – increasingly subject to malevolent and infernal influences, manifested in greed in the former case and hatred in the latter.

In other words, the fact that we have left behind the traditional belief system of Hermeticism has caused us to be at risk for what the Christians would call the devil and his lesser demons.

I shit you not.

…because the modern era has consisted in a ‘hardening’ against the Divine protection which traditional cultures afforded those within their sphere – in the ‘unchaining’ of the inferior or infernal forces against which modern man has virtually no higher protection, having cut himself off from the traditional.

Dude.

Has he read any actual history? Any idea of what women (or any other power-minority) suffered under those “traditional” cultures? The devastation done to the earth because of the assumptions of such  belief systems. The idea of “purity” for example. The horrendous and morally bankrupt idea that error equals “deformity”. Has he read anything at all about the position of the disabled in our history? Is he really suggesting that “infernal” dangers are something worse than what was done exactly because of those traditions? Does he not understand that those traditional horrific acts were in fact the infernal and malevolent forces he perceives as endangering us today?

This text is a manifestation of a golden-age longing, apparently completely divorced from any real understanding of how those traditions functioned in the real economic, political and ethnic worlds.

I understand why neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and Pythagorian systems hold on to the spiritual movements today. They provide a sense of rootedness, a belief system that is deeply Western and therefore feels like home. The problem is that they are just wrong. Empirically wrong. It’s like holding on to the ideology of the celestial spheres because you just know you are the center of the universe and that damn Copernicus is placing you in infernal danger.

I am not sure I can be said to worship anything, but if I were to have to name something it would be the earth. It is, after all, my life blood, my source, my future. The thing is that exactly because it is so important to me I would rather actually come to know it. Not what my 2600 year old ancestors thought of it (although that is also valuable in a narrative way), but what reality is like from the point of view of the Other, from the Now.

So I balance narrative and science. Currently it is the only way to access something close to the truth, in particular a workable truth for the contemporary world and the world of our children. Traditions won’t cut it. Belief systems alone won’t do. The earth is not the center of the universe. Neither is the sun. It’s better to know this than pretend otherwise. I suspect we’ll live longer as a species if we can come to grips with this.

So, again, why keep reading Versluis and others like him? Because at some point, some academic (believer or not) will find a way to honour his or her “spiritual” tradition in such a way as to not violate the actual facts of the case – whether empirical or narrative. I suspect this might come out of eco-spiritual traditions since many of them are also science majors. Someone, somewhere, will find a way to pull scientific reality and narrative together and then a new, workable, tradition will have had its birth. I hope I live long enough to see it, and am astute enough to recognize it when it happens.