Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

I'm going to be shocking and launch this week's Magic Monday a few minutes early, since I'm here on Dreamwidth,. (The picture is Thomas Taylor, the great Regency-era Platonist and worshiper of the Greek Gods, godfather of the modern Neopagan revival)

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday sometime before I get to them all.

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use the button below to access my online tip jar. 

With that said, have at it! 

***This post is now closed to new questions. See you next week!***

Comments

Magical successes?

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG, this is Bogatyr,

Introducing your Kek series, you said that (paraphrasing) magic is what the excluded turn to when they have no other ways to influence the system. I was expecting you to describe how the Chans had achieved something concrete by doing this, but you went in quite another direction. That’s left me scratching my head. What examples have there been when magic successfully tipped the balance?

In England, as you pointed out, Charles I’s magic didn’t help him; the Commonwealth was established using muskets, swords, and pikes.

In Russia, the Tsarist court, and the middle classes of Russia at the time of the revolution, were awash with occultists of all kinds, and they completely failed to save their system. Revolution by means of rifles (plus the Cruiser Aurora) triumphed.

In China, the Taiping mystics, and their successors, the Boxers, both failed to use their magical systems to overthrow the Manchu. Western rifles, cannon, and Maxim guns preserved the Imperial system. Both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong used firearms to achieve change.

In South Africa, Nongqawuse’s prophecies led the Xhosa to catastrophe. Later, Umkhonto We Sizwe used Ak-47s to much greater effect.

In other words, I can’t think of an example where the excluded have successfully used magic to overthrow the power system that oppressed them. Success in either direction generally comes - if you’ll pardon the phrase - from the barrel of a gun.

I can only think of two successful uses of magic as a policy tool.

The first is Dion Fortune, et al, mobilising magic to defend the realm against Nazism.

The second - and I believe this was discussed back at TADR - was when the US Establishment after WW2, seeking to avoid the kind ofl leftward swing that returning servicemen were driving in the UK, used occult methods to focus the workers’ attention on consumerism instead. (Correct me if I’m wrong; my memory may be at fault, but I believe that was the gist of it).

Thus, magic has only been used successfully to protect the status quo, not to change it. What examples are there that I don’t know about it, where the magic of the excluded has changed things?

Re: Magical successes?

[packshaud]

Firth's interference is overrated. I want to remind you that it was necessary to combine the immense oil power of the US and the SU to bring down Nazism--and even that only worked because the Nazi war machine basically ran out of fuel. Hitler tried to invade the USSR not because he was a fool, but because he was desperate to conquer its oil fields. Had not the German Army got stuck by winter and the soviets desperately resisted, the world would be very different today...

Re: Magical successes?

[ecosophia]

Firth's work was much more tightly focused than a lot of her less careful interpreters seem to think. She was trying to stop the sudden collapse of national morale that doomed France and the other countries Germany invaded early -- a collapse she believed, with good reason, was being brought about by magical workings on the part of a group of operative mages within the Nazi hierarchy -- and she succeeded at that specific task. Of course it took much more, most of it right down on the material plane, to win the Second World War; her part in it was something small but, arguably, very necessary.

Re: Magical successes?

[ecosophia]

Bogatyr, of course. Magic deployed alone, without being supported by actions on the material plane, is a very weak tool for political change; that's why -- as I mentioned in the series of posts -- what usually happens is that the oppressed and powerless use it to help themselves on an individual level, without trying to change the system. That's a huge amount of what your basic folk magician does, day in and day out. The examples of successful use of magic in a political context always combine magic and other methods.

But I'm still wryly amused that you keep on cycling back to what you expected me to say, and that you think I said that the chaos magicians in the chans didn't accomplish anything. That's not the case, but I really don't know at this point what else I can say to make my point clearer.

Re: Magical successes?

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm, well I would suggest that Periods in which magic becomes popular, then, are periods when more people than usual are excluded from whatever mechanisms their societies provide for seeking redress of grievances. is pretty clearly suggesting more than day-to-day affairs! After all, if it’s day-to-day stuff, well, everyone from paupers to kings and Tsars does that! No need to mentiion the exclusion etc.

Of course, different readers will bring different interpretations to a particular piece of text. In my younger days I spent a lot of time in, or near, apartheid South Africa. My work brought me into contact with literal neo-nazis at a time when the AWB were shooting, and with old-school communists, at a time when the ANC was banned and future leaders of the West were still demanding that Nelson Mandela be hung as a terrorist. Talking about people being excluded, etc, has pretty personal associations for me, which are far from being academic or abstract.

Re: Magical successes?

[ecosophia]

And you're forcing every other situation into that one paradigm. Got it.

Re: Magical successes?

[isabelcooper]

So here's an example, if I'm reading you right, of why exclusion matters: for a very long time, I only used magic or divination for situations involving my love life. Not because it was the most important thing for me, but because it was the only thing I didn't think I could do "myself". I was a cishet white girl, from an upper-middle-class background, in good physical and mental health, first at a college and in a major where I barely had to work and then in a relatively good economy. (In retrospect, I maybe should've done more magic re: jobs back then, but that's another issue.)

Most people of my age and background, at the time, were pretty confident that financial stuff, health stuff, and so forth were either matters we could handle under our own power or things that would work themselves out in time. Magic plus material plane stuff is extra effort--to say nothing of finding out how to do magic in the first place--so I suspect that, if most people can handle the day-to-day stuff with more straightforward resources (money, resumes, antibiotics, the ability to spin a good line of BS on a research paper) they don't even bother looking at magic, much less trying any.

Re: Magical successes?

[ecosophia]

Exactly. Magic takes work, and it's work you do in addition to the regular material-plane effort needed to seek your goals. (One of the standard ways to fail at magic is to do magic and then sit on your glutei maximi waiting for something to drop into your lap.) That's why, aside from those of us who are drawn to magic for magic's sake, most people just rely on the material plane stuff they're going to do anyway.

Re: Magical successes?

[isabelcooper]

I'm remembering either a movie or a TV show where someone comes in and yells at a bruja (I think) because she burned a candle to get him a job, and he didn't. She asks how many applications he's sent, and he replied "I was supposed to send applications?" and...yeah.

Even now, as a practitioner, I find myself reluctant to go to magic for stuff I can otherwise get materially or that isn't a matter of survival. I used it for my dad's heart surgery, for example, but I never thought to do so for any of my multitudinous root canals--it's a standard procedure with little risk, and if I want to have fewer of them, I could always eat less sugar. Similarly, I'm not inclined to do much magic in my current job search, because I figure that if I don't get a job, I'm not meant to/someone else needs it more, but if I didn't have the resources I do, I'd probably feel differently.