An unconfortable epistemic position regarding “Verb Magic”.
Hello Guys,
This post will act as a bottle thrown in the sea, a “Is anyone like me anywhere ?” as well as an occasion, i hope, to discuss a more serious topic with you. Some claims made here might push on your “pseudo-science” button, please read until the end.
Please allow me to start with a brief (not so brief) testimonial in order for you to grab the topic.
I’m a 21 baguette french person.
I consider myself as a rationalist, i believe in demonstration by facts and I believe I don’t have any superstition like telepathy, parapsychology or flat-earth BS. I love all kind of science and deductive/inductive thinking in general. I’m basically passioned by anything that can be interesting.
I am a student in psychology, i’m aware of the scientific methodology and aware of the ton of cognitive bias the human mind can follow. I like physics, astrophysics, human sciences as well as “hard” sciences.
But, and some of you might stop your reading here for what i’m about to say, I recently dove into occultism. please wait and let me explain.
First of all, it’s historically speaking a cool subject to consider, i read a lot of books about alchemy, tarot, mistery cults etc… There’s a lot to learn about epistemology, theology and more. But it developped something else in me. Some kind of beliefs in some king of… magic.
Again, i’m not in a new age type of thinking like “your intuition is the path everything else is wrong”, I’m an atheist and the magic i’m talking about is more like something I got from a lot of philosophical thinking.
To clarify, I believe in “The Verb” kind of magic, the symbol and the ritual. It can look something like a thing A. Jodorowsky calls “psychomagic” (what a marketing term again). I started to believe that most of the things we called magic in the history of occultism is just a beautiful and poetic way to talk about advanced symbolic speech and act, which can have an enormous impact on the psychologic, emotionnal, and spiritual mindset of the person who performs it.
We can find this in franc-maçonnerie, the ritual has no supernatural nature but the power which emanates from the performance engraves a lot of things in your person, and this kinda looks like what we called sorcery at some point in history. In the same mindset, i started sudying tarot, not because i believe in divination of the future or present, but because i think the figures present some kind of strong hermeneutic that can have a deep impact on your life, it can allow you to take a step back from your life easily and understand some life keys that makes you grow, a step back that is sometime difficult to get without strong symbols, and I ask myself more and more if this advantage can be consider as some kind of verb magic.
If you push this logic further (maybe a bit too much this time...), black magic things like “He did sorcery on me now i have no luck in life, i feel sad all the time and all the bad things happen to me at the same time” can be seen as a strong symbolic bound. Someone who believes in sorcery will allow the “wizard” to take a looot of space in his head, granting him an enormous symbolic importance in his everyday life until some point where it can affect his general mindset and therefore his acts and behaviors (this can lead to a general state of cognitive and emotional bias and a retroaction loop of “feeling weird” --> “acting weird” --> “Feeling weirder” --> “acting weirder” --> “Loopin’ again baby”. The wizard would then just be an eloquent, charismatic person who leads with rhetoric, status and psychological sway.
I find this way of considering magic in general healthy and it’s new to me. Please try to understand me, There is a lot of superstition regarding magic and there will always be, let’s just say that from this perspective superstitions are a heritage of our scientific ignorance and the “real magic” underneath all of this would be the power of symbol, which we human can’t live without.
This leads to a problem to me. I was always seduced by occultism and, let be honnest, it would be so great if magic was a real thing. I’m stuck here on a rope streched across a wide gap, and maybe i’m doing all this cognitive gymnatsics just to convince myself that this is a real thing but I can’t prevent myself to think that this is maybe a stable philosophical claim.
I feel weird about all this, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone who can relate to my position. I feel rejected by science to even insinuate these topics and i also feel rejected by serious occultists, serious “philosophical spiritualists” and less serious “new age people” because i try to reduce magic and spirituality to just the power of symbol (I lack intuition blabla). (I have a tendency to read through religion, spirituality and “energy” related topics with my “It’s so clever and powerful if you see it as symbol” glasses, this is my believes and i’ll be glad to discuss this in comments but it’s another subject).
So am i granting to much importance to symbol and hermeneutic ? A great example is psychoanalysis (please don’t kill me). This hermeneutic reading can be a great tool and sooo powerful sometimes when you apply it to myth, society or the indidual. But my rational mind can’t help itself to scream “boooo not proven booooo pseudo science”, And i’m always furious when a dude claims the omnipotence of this theory like a fanatic. Believe me, this is a really an inconfortable position …
What do you think ? two questions, an epistemic one, in the chart of this site and a personal one which does not belong here but please light my lantern guys...
1. What do you think about this hermeneutic point of view regarding magic and occultism in general ? Am i going to far to convince myself that my dreams are somewhat true or are there really some interesting questions raised ?
2. Do you people experienced or experience this kind of epistemic gap, which can be really inconfortable and makes you think that you somewhat belong nowhere except somwhere in a weird middle, a place where you’re alone and can’t find a damn person to fully accept your position ?
Thank you for reading
Hijol.
If you haven’t yet, I suggest exploring the writings of Anton Szandor LaVey and Peter H. Gilmore (The Church of Satan, https://churchofsatan.com, https://mobile.twitter.com/ChurchOfSatan). I think you’ll find very similar perspectives on the psychological power of rituals, etc.
I myself have a bit of the opposite problem: Enough is proven or patently obvious (when observing the world around me) about the psychological effects that I should believe in some, yet my brain steadfastly refuses to do so beyond verbal acknowledgement, e.g. the preceding “should”. In a similar vein I’ve never felt awe or any similar quasi-religious emotions (e.g. when entering a cahedral, or seeing art), the closest I get is a strong giddyness when seeing how a mathematical proof will work out or a complicated story might resolve. I presume these are a consequence of my being on the autistic spectrum.
Thank you kind sir for answering and sharing your experience.
I’m only vaguely familiar with satanism and all the form it can take, I assumed it was about bringing the human back at the center of the Universe “as a God” at the center of its own experience, dismiss him from its function and raise the human to a realistic and powerful place : We’re not Gods but we’re not a nothing, and we have strengh. I did not know that my claims about a “rational symbolic magic” could find followers here, i’ll take a look !
Regarding your disappointment and desillusion of what’s real I can relate somehow, most of the time reality can appear boring when you realize there is no unicorn, no telepathy, no quantum therapy of vibration (Damn my head hurts just saying these words together) and no attraction laws. At this point we can conclude that we know things and that we don’t know other things but it’s just a matter of time, and it can be pretty boring.
I suggest you consider two (three) points :
-The inner beauty of what’s already there. I’m in the middle of a heat wave here in France and butterflies are everywhere, go grab one (don’t hurt him) and just consider it for a short period of time : Try to grasp the amount of complexity of it, the billions of billions of atoms that compose it, the millions of year of evolution that leads to it. These same atoms that compose this little moth, try to think about (you can’t actually but try to create an idea of it) the travel this atoms made, from the core of a star to maybe the liver of Napoleon and then the cigar of Churchill, then try to picture yourself, your scale in front of the scales of the universe, Time, Space, Lenght Etc… And all of it is here in your hand.
this won’t bring you a religious feeling but maybe something like a spiritual one, a vertigo and a strange feeling that you are dimensionless, a point on a line and that everythings unravel around you, and that you can’t actually grab any of this, because a point can’t reach his arms much further than the point itself.
-The strange nature of what we don’t know. I just gave up on psychology for a simple reason, Every question is basically the same at the end of the “why” string. Every question if you question it as long as you can will end in a space when there’s no word to describe things. There are still a lot uncanny abysses, think about what sleeps behind the door of consciousness, is it an illusion your brains simulate or is there something here we still can’t grasp, think about what waits behind the big bang or at the dawn of life itself.
You seem to like math, think a bit about the Number and the Logic door, what we consider to be the bottom of math, what is it ? Why is this the bottom ? Because it is obvious ? Logic is obvious ? tautology.
There’s another vertigo i can suggest. I have the sense that we have moved a lot on these questions since the dawn of humanity but that we can dig as long as we want there is still more to dig (kinda looks like Aquinas’ argument)
-Finally, just consider you, your fellow humans and other living things being at a center (and not the center) of these two worlds, and here i’ll let you do the job.
This is for me, somewhat of a spirituality in itself, and all these things makes me look at the world in a lot of different ways. Entering a Cathedral I don’t think God I think about all the humans that have been in there, that have worked in there, about the centuries of symbols that show up to you here on the walls (Maybe this is thinking about God who knows). And after all i remind this story of a king who asked for perfect happiness, the magus give him a simple ring, but on the inside of it was an inscription : This too, will pass.
When i think about it i realize I could think all day about what “pass” can mean here, And this I love, This I contemplate… And this is close to magic to me.
Asperger is a strange thing really, I think we all have our wonders, The Autsim spectrum allows you to dig in your wonders till some depths neurotypic people won’t even see but unfortunatly sometimes it closes some doors too yes… Maybe some wonders will stay mysterious to you forever, like maybe music, but in the end as a psycho student and a philosophical jester I believe we all have a wonder in common and this the ontology… And we find new ways to ask the question everyday.
Thank you again for sharing ! This means a lot.