God Hates Magic

 

So say the Christian moms against Harry Potter. Of course, it is no business of mine what such moms tell their children or what they allow their children to read. As a proposition, though, the claim that God hates magic has a somewhat tortuous history. Magic, an anciently attested practice, has historically provoked a schizophrenic response in the Christian world. Popes patronized it and zealous preachers and reformers denounced it. Christians both practiced magic and condemned it. The reason is that, whatever we may think of the matter now, in past centuries what exactly magic consisted in was far from clear. Certainly, medieval Christians thought the arts and sciences legitimate objects of study and pursuit. Viewed from a certain angle, magic was nothing more than another science and another art. This is how figures as diverse as Pico, Ficino, Agrippa or Vaughn viewed it. The damnable art of sorcery, of course, was condemned by all the relevant authorities both classical and scriptural. There was a magic that perverted and distorted nature and involved activating the power of dark spirits OVER nature. The extreme example, of course, was the witch who made a compact with the devil in return for powers over events that exceeded her (and sometimes his) natural capacities. Such magic was manipulative and destructive of the created order. A figure like Dr. Faustus is its paradigmatic victim. Faustus trades his soul for limitless power only to become a slave to the infernal forces who feed that desire. Worse, having rejected the created order Faustus can will nothing meaningful outside it and ends up fetching fresh grapes from the tropics and playing childish pranks on the Pope. He goes to hell having found no correspondent gratification for his dreams of infantile omnipotence. Feeding delusions of limitless power seems the threat that lurks in ANY magic black or white and Faust is not our only cautionary tale. One might think as well of the quasi-fascist ego worship of a modern ‘theosophist’ like Aleister Crowley or the flagrant fraudulence of Madame Blavatsky. Unfortunately for the Christian moms, though, it is quite possible to worship power, violence and self under the name of God and praying for a malign miracle, such that the Holy Ghost will miraculously overthrow duly elected and appointed governors has a ‘dark magic’ quality of its own. The Spirit of God is not beholden to our fantasies of political triumph and revenge and to think otherwise is ‘magical thinking’ in pretty much in the Aleister Crowley sense.     

At any rate the clear ‘successor’ to the magical tradition is western techne which has fulfilled the wildest dreams of the Renaissance magus if in a rather different form. Agrippa describes for us a hologram centuries before anyone was actually known to have created one. If people like Crowley flirted with Nazism that is hardly surprising; the magician binds with words though not with anything like the efficacy of the modern propagandist and his arts!  Magic was, for its respectable practitioners, however, a supremely practical art in which pious contemplation of the cosmic order bore direct fruit in action. Indeed, it fulfilled itself in action of a theurgical, alchemical or astrological kind. Magic was a pure marriage of contemplation and action. Cosmic piety, was, of course, of its essence for the principles of magical operations were embedded in the order and structure of creation. Nature contained power, the power of the great work, which united elemental and celestial forces in a single operation which married the extreme terms of creation. This ‘standing reserve’ of power was activated through a system of correspondences and occult relations hidden within the species of things. A magician knows these powers but, more importantly, can activate them through a special virtue and charisma he attains by attuning himself to the realm of the celestial and intelligential spirits. This attunement is one attained through humility, contemplation, prayer and purgation. It is attained by an overcoming of the lower self and its passions and an active receptivity to angelic and divine influences. Only in such a state can the magus practice. Or so the CHRISTIAN magicians tell us. There seems to me no reason, for instance, why we should think a man like Agrippa insincere in his piety, which he shared with the Platonic magicians of old. Of course, the Faustian question may well haunt the white magus exactly as it haunts the modern doctor or engineer. What is it one DOES with this power? When Agrippa tells us he can write messages on the surface of the moon or communicate telepathically with his teacher one wonders whether he too, like Faustus, is faced with the tragic banality of  absolute power. After all, he is not only the author of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy but of a skeptical treatise on the vanity and uncertainty of all human science!

Indeed, though it is splendid as a bildungsroman there is, to be fair, a somewhat empty character to the world of Harry Potter. The curriculum of Hogwarts is relentlessly practical and technical. There are no humanists in the school of wizardry and no humane studies. Indeed, one might take it as fulfilling a kind of neo-Liberal dream for no time is wasted there on literature, art, science, philosophy or any other such frill. Matters of the mind and spirit are reserved for a hall of mysteries virtually no one has access to. This is indeed the VERY kind of educational program to which our technocratic overlords aspire with only the dead inertia of tradition standing in their way. Except of course that WE do not need brooms to fly or spells to manipulate and charm people. WE have no need for the arts of the magus. We have realized the will to power in magic in its technical form. Still, Agrippa and Vaughn and their strange works do not simply embody a will to power, at least not unambiguously. Magic is first and foremost a vision of the beautiful, of ordered and harmonious action binding together the extremes of matter and spirit, God and the world. If there is the dark shadow of a devilish possibility within it there is an angelic one as well. There is a vision of cosmological order and human attunement to that order and that is the aspect of it that perhaps we most sorely need and might, having no particular need to write on the face of the moon, someday seek to recover.