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Well, like...
(Okay: Caveat: I do the visualization thing from that Modern Magic book and I draw sigils but am too lazy to convince myself to forget them so... I have little to no concrete experience of all this. That said...)
I've been reading a lot about Jung lately, especially in conection with Gnosticism, and one of Jung's big ideas was synchronicity. Which he said was two otherwise independent events occuring to the same person which have the same meaning. Or something like that.
So I think magic, as it's kicked around here, is an effort to navigate Meaning - which I think is the human element of experience. What makes our lives something other than a random chain of unrelated and disjointed events.
Instead of saying 'A caused B' because B replaced A spatially and temporally, or because A is connected to B spatially, or precedes B temporally, I have this other causal connection which I think is what I consider Magic, where I say A caused B because A and B have a narrative link. They're connected by meaning. So, like, a ritual or sigil or spell to bring money has a certain meaning. It is linked to an event in your life with the same meaning (getting money), and can be said to be causally related.
Hm. I suppose, actually, that so far I've only thought about this in terms of things being spatially disjointed. Like, ritual, then effect, with no physical link. If temporal disjointing were really allowed, then the ritual to cause something could come after the thing it caused, temporally.
I'm just sort of thinking "out loud," here. But I think saying that Magic obeys a different sort of causality explains why it's been 'disproven' almost as often as it's been 'rediscovered'. If you're looking for these narrative cause and effects, you'll find them. If you're looking for physical links, you won't. |
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