Towards a Philosophy of Magick: Introduction

Written 8-22-23

“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord…” -Isaiah 1:18, King James Version

It may be justly asked exactly what a “philosophy of magick” would look like. How do I define such a thing, and why? And why should the average mage (practitioner and student of magick) care about or study philosophy of magick?

First, I define “philosophy of magick” similarly to other disciplines in philosophy that seek to ground, analyze, and interrogate a given body of practice and field of knowledge production (which I will, for brevity, hereafter shorten as a “field of study”), such as “philosophy of science”, “philosophy of religion”, and “philosophy of history”. Such a definition comes with certain assumptions, which I must make explicit.

Any “philosophy of” assumes the following:

1. The field of study which it attempts to ground, analyze, and interrogate is at least partially rational, that is, one can use reason to better understand it.

2. The field of study is something about which we can produce, possess, and use knowledge.

3. The field of study is pertinent, by which I mean to say that it is worthy of our philosophical interest.

Thus, in attempting to begin work on a philosophy of magick, I am claiming that 1) magick is both a body of practice and field of knowledge production, that 2) magick is susceptible to reason (at least in the same loose sense that religion and history are), that 3) magick is something about which we can produce, possess, and use knowledge, and that 4) magick is worthy of our philosophical interest. I will argue here for these claims.

1. Magick, as both Eliphas Levi (1854, 1856) and Aleister Crowley (1929) observed, can be separated into two categories, which Levi termed “dogma/doctrine and ritual” and Crowley termed “theory and practice”. Such a distinction between “why” and “how” is implicit and explicit in most, if not all, extant “Western” (I am not competent to comment upon non-“western” systems of magick, for the most part) systems of magick and, indeed, most fields of human activity possess such a distinction between “theory and practice”. An old joke that made its rounds in the mathematics lab when I was in college captured this distinction quite pragmatically: “In theory, there is no distinction between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”. If we accept these categories, then we already implicitly accept that magick is both a field of knowledge production, possession, and use (theory/doctrine) and that magick is a body of practice (practice/ritual). This means that magick is what I have termed a “field of study” and that it is therefore an appropriate subject for a “philosophy of”.

2. Magick operates at least partially through the practice and properties of semantic meaning, which is to say that through the investigation and manipulation of symbols which refer to concepts/forces/deities/spirits/portions of the mind/etc (depending upon your tradition and paradigm), we investigate and manipulate the things to which they refer. It is important to note that these symbol-referent relationships are both denotive (e.g. elemental Fire is actual fire produced through combustion according to the conventional laws of physics) and connotative (e.g. elemental fire is also drive, ambition, will, passion, the instigating element in certain formulae and sequences, etc). This semantic relationship between symbol and referent takes place in the mind and specifically within the reason, where we experience and make the associations of equality, identity, and difference which form the basic intuitions that give rise to logic (see the work’s section on logic for details). Thus since magick at least partially consists of these semantic relations that take place within the reason, it seems to be the case that magick is at least partially susceptible to reason.

3. I have already argued that the core relationships expressed within magickal theory and practice are semantic, with our minds providing the link between symbol and referent. From this it follows that a question of the form “does x symbolize y?” is a question that has a definite (though sometimes complex) answer. If we define knowledge as “justified true belief” (the “traditional” JTB definition, Gettier Problem and its variants notwithstanding, see further in the section of this work on epistemology), it seems that we can ask e.g. “does a pentagram symbolize the five elements”, be justified in claiming “yes”, be accurate in claiming “yes”, and, having satisfied the conditions of JTB, thus produced knowledge. In short, while some aspects of magick are “fuzzy”, there are questions which one can answer truthfully and with justification. This means that magick is a subject about which it is possible to produce, possess, and use knowledge.

4. This question is the most difficult to address. Why, exactly, am I claiming that magick is a pertinent field of philosophical interest? And what, exactly, do I mean by “philosophical interest”? I do not mean, as might seem to be the case, that magick is a subject that academic philosophy as a whole, especially the analytic tradition which I was trained in, will consider interesting. If some sort of universal interest by philosophers of all schools and specializations was necessary for a topic to be of  philosophical interest, then many “philosophy of” fields (such as “philosophy of religion”) would not exist. Thus it is clear that some sort of philosophical consensus among academic philosophers is not a necessary condition for a particular subject to be of philosophical interest. So how am I defining a “pertinent field of philosophical interest” if I am not defining it as a “field philosophers are interested in”? Simply thus: “a pertinent field of philosophical interest is a field in which philosophical exploration’s attempt to ground, analyze, and interrogate will add to the production, possession, and use of knowledge within the field and/or to its body of practice”. Put simply, philosophy of science allows us to do better science, philosophy of history allows us to do better history, and philosophy of magick will allow us to do better magick. This purely pragmatic goal motivates this work.

And this answers the second of our initial questions: why should the average mage care about and study philosophy of magick? Because it will allow them to do better magick.

Works Cited:

1. Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant) translated by John Michael Greer and Mark Anthony Mikituk, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation, (TarcherPerigree, 2017)

2. Aleister Crowley (Edward Alexander Crowley), Magick In Theory And Practice, (Dover Publications , Inc., 1976)