How Not To Do Magic, Further Revisited

[ecosophia]

In the debate in this journal a few days back about the public working against Donald Trump, a central point of disagreement had to do with the meaning of symbols. One of my four criticisms of the working focused on the incoherent symbolism of the ritual.  In response, the designer of the ritual, Michael Hughes, insisted that the symbol I’d discussed meant what he wants it to mean, not what the last few centuries of magical tradition says it means. Those of my readers who know their way around the debates between traditional occultists and the current crop of avant-garde postmodern mages know that dispute well enough to sing all the verses in the shower, and it didn’t get any closer to resolution this time than it ever does.

Fortunately there’s a convenient way of checking such claims. Magic is justified not by faith but by works; in less gnomic language, if you want to know whether your philosophy of magic makes sense, pay attention to the results. The jury’s still out on the working against Trump—he’s still in office, and the various media meltdowns directed at him don’t seem to be doing all that much to hinder his ability to advance his agenda, but the participants can still insist that eventually the working will show some sign or other of achieving its purpose.

As it happens, though, Hughes also launched a similar public working intended to slap a curse on the NRA. Those of my readers who want to read the complete spell can find it here.  The short form is that he had people take dollar bills, daub them with red ink to represent blood, recite a verbose and angry malefic incantation over them, and mail them to the NRA.  In other words, the working sent money to the NRA, having helpfully charged the money with magical force and painted it bright red, the symbolic color of life, strength, and vitality.

The results were exactly what traditional occult philosophy would predict. In the month after Hughes launched this working, the NRA’s fundraising arm raked in a record amount of money, mostly from small donors. Nice work, folks.

There are two lessons I’d encourage my readers to draw from this. The first is that magic works; the second is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, it doesn’t necessarily work the way you want it to. The reason traditional occultists rely on tables of correspondences is that it keeps embarrassing things like this from happening.  After all, it doesn’t matter a rat’s handbag what you think a symbol means, if the powers you’re invoking have their own ideas on the subject—which, as it happens, they do.

Oh, and by the way, it’s not just occultists of my particular tradition and cultural background who recognize red as a magical symbol of life, strength, and vitality. In Taoist magic, you use red to invoke yang, the solar, vital, and expansive energy; in traditional Southern conjure, you use red things for luck, health, vitality, and sexual potency, not for cursing; in the traditions of the First Nations of the maritime Pacific Northwest, the red tamanous are the healing spirits. I could go on. Magic is not whatever you want it to be, and symbols don’t mean whatever you want them to mean—as the outcome of this working demonstrates.