Just throwing a few of my pennies into the pot. Kronos is sure to punish me...
Magic may not necessarily need philosophy, but magic can and often does use philosophy. It also uses science and religion and art as a means of attaining its end. It is an art of utility. If you wish to strip it down of all it’s glitter, simply say “I will it thus, and it is so.”
But Nietzsche might yawn in his straitjacket and tell you as he told a friend, “Wishing won’t make it so.”
So now the sorcerer must read Nietzsche, ask why the fuck he said it, and then test him, or whoever. But to do that one must become a mule laden with books and cross the desert of knowledge. And then he has to face that Dragon in the Desert, covered in scales that proclaim, “Thou shalt…”
CHORONZON does not weep, but he feeds on tears!
Phil Hine called books a magician’s bête noir. Hmm, perhaps this is a call to emulate Bill Murray to burn his books on the Tibetan mountain to stay warm. He’s balanced on that Zen razor, so he don’t need nothing.
Kant said you could be a wise man and never leave the house. The wizard could test this and find restlessness and boredom can become the most horrid of spiritual trials. Perhaps he can make the world come to him, but he might need to translate (or conjure) the old “Thing in Itself” into a daimon that informs him how. He might need justification, a crutch on which so many magicians find themselves having to lean in the face of a world of hostile and frigid intellects bound to mores that constrict and confine. Philosophy can inform one how to act, even call to action, but its visions are nothing without action. Once applied, they are no longer speculation, the words of philosophers become spells – thus, “Every intentional act is a magical act.”
But then there is the question of whether or not magic has a philosophy built into it. JG Frazer called it “proto-science, proto-religion”, as if the early “unsophisticated bumblings” of shamans in nature were merely there to set the stage for a more graceful evolution of the grand wakefulness of rational civilization. Fritz Graf tried to counter this long held working theory by inspecting classical civilization and pointing out that magic was often more like a shadowy twin of established religions. Magic wasn’t some rustic starting point, but a very living and vibrant underground world developing in its own right. While the polis worshipped in daylight and sacrificed to the gods to hold off plague, war, fire and famine, the magician whispered to those same gods at night to get a rich wife or win a horse race. How selfish! This could be a threat to social order and stoke paranoia.
Socrates would have to explain himself before the polis that he was not a polluter of the minds of youth but just a guy asking questions. His judges had already decided that his sophistry was an act of sorcery to seduce pretty boys and pervert the rule of their law. He was a hypnotist. He said he had a daimon that informed him and told him what not to do, and conventional modernist thinking may say he merely meant he had a conscience. But the magoi, lurking in the audience perhaps, looking out for his pretty rich wife-to-be to to make his “bound prisoner” for, or contemplating a door to door exorcism business, may have listened to Socrates and secretly thought, “I have a daimon too and it’s telling me what is possible and that I must dare to do it. I like your style though, old man. Maybe I can steal it from you. Ask some leading questions and hypnotize some screwballs into getting what I want. They’ll call me a trickster if I get caught, but I could get revenge by starting a religion. Enjoy your hemlock!”
Such precedent of hemlock drinking, unfortunately, would prove dry kindling for green wood for many future explorers. The Protestant English would determine ropes are much more economical for silencing big mouths, and they could stick it to the Catholics to boot!
If you want something new, you merely have to look around and you will find magicians constantly trying to reformulate “magical philosophy” before getting onto the exercises and such. Maybe its a bad habit, or maybe, as Charles Fort observed of all writers, they are simply apologizing before they get to the nitty-gritty.
Do I need to be a philosopher to conjure a spirit? Not really, but understanding Plato’s Theory of Forms and its relations to various later Neoplatonic, Gnostic and Hermetic reasonings might inform and even inspire my imagination. Working from the butthole end, Aristotle can at least teach me to pay attention to details – either way, I can conjure an excuse!
Theology can teach me about the serpent eating its tail – I am damned and saved by the same things, depending on who and how I read and who I preached to about it! Following Jaques Derrida in his ramblings upon “text” might teach me an effective means of “banishing” all the above via deconstruction, or, at the very least, I have an entry into hermeneutics.
I thought existentialists were sexy at first, but all I ended up doing was realized I was on the road to some sterilized Buddhism. The light bulb moment for me was when I realized that philosophy was my tool, my bitch, and my sacrificial offering. “Nothing is true, all is permitted!” the Assassin was said to have said. Magic itself, as a daimon, loves and craves knowledge in the head it possesses, in any form. The switch was hit in my mind by none other than our patron god of magic, lover of books and big mouths and sneaks alike, of whom Orpheus sang,
“With winged feet, tis thine through air to course,”
Who lights upon the Pythagorean inspired “lover of knowledge”:
“Oh friend of man and prophet of discourse,”
And gives warning in instruction,
“Dire weapon of the tongue, which men revere…” (or not, as the case may be, is hinted)
And also teaches purpose in the hidden dragon fight which is the Science and Art of Causing Change to Occur in Conformity with the Will:
“Whose powerful arts could watchful Argus kill.”
Other than that, all I got to say is eat your veggies and read Agrippa. He explains everything in the very last paragraph of Book III. Best place to start. I know, with all the wives tales and parables, metaphors analogies and apparently outdated principles, the Three Books are a Sphinx that strangles while it teaches. But if you “illuminate the eyes” as a Rabbi once said, then it’s trilithium for your warp drive, always regenerating to get you somewhere where maybe no one has gone before.
If one ever needs a helping hand, listen to Levi: “The visible reveals the invisible.”
It’s how we found black holes after dreaming about them first.
