Magic

The word Magic refers to the manipulation of creation without a concomitant material intervention.

List of Connection Techniques

Connection Technique > Affirmation, Affirmation of Connection, Autogenic Training, Biofeedback, Bornless Ritual, Breathing, Caloric Reduction, Cocooning, Connection Visualization, Dance, Deprivation, Detachment, Dhikr, Drumming, Fasting, Flow Control, Flow Purification, Graduation Invocation, Holotropic Breathwork, Hypnotism, Hypoventilation, Intent, Intent to Connect, Japam, Mantra, Meditation, Mindfulness, Musical Audition, Mysticism of the Historical Event, Poetry, Power Quest, Receptive Seeking, Relaxation, Sensory Deprivation, Spirit Canoe, The Method of the Lamp, The Way of the Hollow Bone, Thought Control, Vajra Breath, Vision Quest, Visualization, Writing, Zazen

Related LP Terms

Magic > Force

Non-LP Related Terms

Magic > Focus, Mana, Miwi

Notes

Aleister Crowley defined magick as "The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." As much as I really dislike the man and his मोह writings, he was bang on with this definition.

Spencer Rogers identifies several forms of magic, including sympathetic magic, imitative magic, contagious magic. Imitative magic' is magic based on imitation--what happens to the picture or figure of a person happens to the person. Contagious magic is magic conducted on objects that have been in contact with a person (hair, a person's possession). Repetition magic involves the repetition of formula, prayer, or incantations. In all cases, this form of magic is an attempt to focus and discipline intent.

Contrary to fundamentalist belief, the early medieval Christian Church as OK with the idea of magic. According to this Wikipedia article, "The fierce denunciation and persecution of supposed sorceresses that characterized the cruel witchhunts of a later age were not generally found in the first thirteen hundred years of the Christian era. The medieval Church distinguished between "white" and "black" magic. Local folk practice often mixed chants, incantations, and prayers to the appropriate patron saint to ward off storms, to protect cattle, or ensure a good harvest. Bonfires on Midsummer’s Eve were intended to deflect natural catastrophes or the influence of fairies, ghosts, and witches. Plants, often harvested under particular conditions, were deemed effective in healing."

Magical Formula: Force + Formation = Creation.

"Consciousness is not bound by the constraints of physical creation," (BOLIFE) though consciousness certainly is.

Israeli Regardie of Golden Dawn fame psychologized magic and made it into a "technical system" for psychological development, particularly the "integration of the human personality..." and "bringing into operation the creative and intuitive parts of man [sic]"

Newton wrote extensively on Biblical prophecy, studied the occult symbolism in the structure of Solomon’s Temple and the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and expended immense effort performing experiments in his private alchemical laboratory. His concept of a universal gravitational force connecting all bodies in the cosmos was clearly influenced by ancient mystical ponderings on the subject, and his views on mechanistic causality were cast in terms of some willful, mind-like influence on the course of the physical world. As another biographer has observed, Newton regarded the ultimate mechanism of change in the universe to reside in “the mystery by which mind could control matter.

One of the greatest champions of the mystical Neoplatonic movement in European intellectual circles was the German physician Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, more popularly known as Paracelsus, as renowned for his contributions to alchemy as for his immense influence on the development of modern medicine. For Paracelsus, as for many other scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ancient practice of alchemy represented a convergence of the spiritual and physical domains of experience via the Hermetic relationship of microcosm and macrocosm. Such work could be summarized in much the same terms we might use to describe our own: the systematic study of the interaction of consciousness with the physical world; the examination of the tangible ramifications of that interaction; and the use of metaphor in comprehending and representing the process.

Bacon himself believed in natural magic and proposed systematic investigation of telepathic dreams, psychic healing, and “experiments touching transmission of spirits and the force of the imagination.”

Footnotes

References