‘What is the relationship between psychology and modern magic?’ was a question asked of me by a friend recently. There are many ways one could look at that relationship. There is the broad historical relationship between magic (as ‘natural philosophy’) and science in general. There is the general point that psychology is literally the study of the soul and therefore one might argue that ancient and modern religious and esoteric thought has always had something to say on these matters. One might alternatively look at the uneasy relationship between modern experimental (often laboratory based) psychology and psychoanalysis. But, if we stick to the terms of the question in that it’s ‘modern magic’ we’re interested in, we can explore what I think maybe the underlying assumption; that magic is a specialist form of applied psychology.

Frater U.’.D.’. famously defined a series of magical paradigms here in the form of the spirit, energy, psychological, information and meta models (HERE). Although many of the principles that Frater U.’.D.’. ascribes to the psychological model are perhaps more properly thought of as psychoanalytic he does, in my view, correctly suggest that this model has been the favourite of English speaking magicians, especially since the 1970’s. Chaos magic usually considers the ‘core technology’ of magic to be belief-shifting and gnosis and both these principles can be most readily understood as psychological processes rather than the activities of spirits or energy. In this essay the author hints that beyond the traditional chaos magic twin-pillars of belief/gnosis there lies the information model that does not rely on trance techniques and  (like anything new) is double-plus good. He also mentions the meta-model, which is pragmatic utilitarianism, and in practice is how many magicians engage with their practice.

My own view is that psychological understanding is a major component in the ontological field within which modern magic takes place. It’s the basic cultural landscape in which our rituals and practices happen. Even people that are adopting a highly spiritist model of magic (and this seems, of late, to have become terribly fashionable) must perforce live in a world where psychology is ‘the Daddy’ now. Our language is shot through with Freudian, Jungian and Skinnerian terminology. Our world is governed by an awareness of human psychology; in advertising, in law and even in those little details of life like the fact that your ATM gives the card back first rather than dispensing your money for (psychologically) obvious reasons. Psychology as a science continues the de-centring process that has been critical in the narrative of the post-Medieval world. In astronomy once we realised that Earth goes round the Sun we lost our position in the centre of the cosmos. Once we understood evolution we lost our place as the pinnacle of God’s creation and became just another animal. Once we began to appreciate that there is both consciousness and then there are all those unconscious processes at work, even our self-awareness was knocked off centre stage.

For magicians this de-centring of the self isn’t such a big problem as we tend to have a much bigger definition of ‘self’ than the narrow sliver of waking awareness we call consciousness. I heard a lecture from Michael Staley (of The Order formally known as the Typhonian OTO) a couple of years ago where he pointed out that magic was a process where the unconscious ‘tides’ were more important than (conscious) will. He suggested that magical acts only really work when they are what the unconscious wants and that the wise magician pays attention (as far as one can to unconscious phenomena) to these tides and attempts to swim with them. For any magickal operation, said Mr Staley, there is the possibility of it working, or not working, or of working in reverse. Pointing out that you’d never use a gun that behaved like this, he suggested that most magick should be about listening to the unconscious and doing its will. In many ways this is what Crowley was going on about with his idea of True Will. Putting aside the more metaphysical interpretations of the Will, Crowley was interested in enacting one’s unconscious drives. His idea was that, unfettered by social restriction, the unconscious would well up, turning every man and woman into a genius, driven by his or her daemon (on the classical sense), and everything would be groovy. Reason was ‘a lie’ and ‘Because’ was ‘accursed’. The apparent nativity of this proposal can be forgiven when we consider that Crowley lived in a world of Victorian prudery, hypocrisy and Freudianism. He understandably imagined that the choking strictures of social convention were what was holding us back from a Golden Age. No wonder he is one of the ‘people we like’ in the famous montage for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the hero of the radical 1960s.

Today we might have a more nuanced view. Aided by the fantastic breakthroughs in neurology, and decades of brilliant experimental psychology, we now have a much better idea of how humans really work. And, while we may still use terms like left and right brain, introvert and extrovert etc, most of us admit to a much more complex and indeed malleable model of the psyche, especially in relation to the social environment.

This malleability is where magic comes in. As well as understanding better how our minds work we have also gone on to develop many more ways of changing them. The number of therapeutic systems which psychology has provided are legion (even if we only stick to those considered ‘main stream’). As agents of change these techniques are magical in that they allow us to change how we see the world and thus (at the very least in a subjective sense) the world itself. Psychology, especially experimental psychology, represents one of the best approaches we have to mapping ourselves, and by having better maps we can better determine where we want to (or can) be. (and of course educate ourselves in how others may wish use these tricks to change our minds for us.)

There is nothing at all wrong about familiarising oneself with ancient maps of the soul. Whether it is the Qabalah, the Nine Worlds or something else that tickles your fancy. But the modern magician should also be familiar with some of the key findings of experimental psychology. Certainly a familiarity with psychoanalytics is essential to understand the work of Crowley, Fortune, Grant, Spare et al. It’s also essential to appreciate some of the most interesting and innovative deployments of magic in the modern age. These include such gems as the psychomagic of Alejandro Jodorowsky   or those brilliant TOPY videos with Derek Jarman.

So rather than see psychology as a retreat for magic, a sad admission that ‘it’s all in our heads, we can appreciate it as providing a wonderful new cartographic tool that, in only just over a century, has thrown up a wide variety of technologies for the discerning magician. It’s also, whether we like it or not, the language of the modern (post) industrialised age. As magicians, if we are to be empowered in this world, we must know how to speak this language fluently.

JV

I’ve got a friend who has a PhD in brain science (in fact she’s an MD too so all those ‘Doctor, Doctor…’ jokes are perfect). Her work involves scanning people’s brains to help us understand how memory functions. She once told me that she and her colleagues spent an entertaining few weeks replacing the word ‘mind’ with ‘brain’ in their daily speech. ‘Brain the gap’  is therefore the message one hears on alighting from a London underground train. ‘I just can’t get it out of my brain’  for that irritating/catchy tune such as this, or this, or this. ‘Brain out!’  as an injunction to increase attention, or ‘brain over matter’ when discussing the paranormal.

Within esoteric and psychological sciences there is a group of similar practices. There is E-Prime, which removes the verb ‘to be’ to create a language that emphasizes process rather than (apparently) static states. Then there is Crowley’s injunction to remove the word ‘I’, which he recommends (along with a bit of emo style self-harm) to his students during his sojourn at The Abbey of Thelema. And of course a whole battery of techniques from NLP.

All these processes make us more vigilant and can have far reaching effects on our world-views.

So, with this in mind (or brain), I’d propose a little chaoist variation. Take one of your beliefs and find a way of modifying your language to suggest that your normal assumptions about it may not be the case. The example I’m particularly thinking of would be when we say that we’ve met such-and-such and entity in spirit work. Or when we’ve invoked a God or Goddess, or been travelling in spirit vision. In all these cases ‘in my brain’ may be added.

For instance:

“I met the jaguar spirit and it spoke to me – in my brain’.

‘The Goddess was invoked into the High Priestess and I could really see the energy – in my brain’.

‘The Loa are really powerful – in my brain’.

‘I’ve spent many years working with a series of awesome demons – in my brain’.

Of course one might argue that such statements are just the natural return and re-valuing of the spirit model into our culture. I’d agree with that and say that its certainly sometimes important to think in this way:

Jung had a very disturbed patient who claimed to have been on the moon. Not that she thought this to be a conscious reality, although it was a dream in which she traveled to the moon. Jung reported years later to analyst Marie Louis von Franz, that his patient had indeed been on the moon. In a well known interview with this remarkable first generation analyst, von Franz commented that when Jung told her that his patient had really been on the moon, she thought that Jung was crazy. She was very rational and thought that for Jung to say that the girl had “really” been on the moon was not reasonable. And indeed, normal rationality fails in these cases.  from here

In a world which one might argue is dominated by reductionist discourses the spirit model serves to re-empower our subjective imagination. But the point for me is that we don’t need to through the materialist baby out with the bathwater. Instead we should attempt to include the spirit world in our material world. Rather than replacing one language with another we should be seeking to broaden our vocabulary. We acknowledge the metaphorical truth of the world both internal (subjective experience) and external (our sense data, including that collected by scientific investigation).

So the miraculous fact that our minds can interact with spirit entities may be described in terms of invisible imaginative worlds and also as brain events. We know this to be true because we’ve got a range of chemicals and even magnetic helmets that can induce the experience of meeting entities. Hardly remarkable since our senses give us the impression of meeting conscious entities (people) every day. So saying the ‘astral’ (which in a proper Santo Daime style should be pronounced ‘ass-traal’ ) is in our brains is nothing more than a statement of fact. Everything is in our brains and, while in a metaphysical sense we could talk about the non-local nature of consciousness and all that, a brain would seem to be an important part of the equipment. People who think otherwise could perhaps demonstrate the strength of their conviction in non brain mediated consciousness by removing theirs (with one of those nose pickers the ancient Egyptians used on the dead perhaps?) and then attempting to go down the shops to buy ten fags.

The use of  ‘in my brain’ also serves to remind us of the uncertainty of our perceptions and the fact of their partiality. I may have seen something nasty in the triangle but I saw it from a specific perspective, at a specific time and so on. Maybe such a practice would put the breaks on all those folk who spend their time conjuring spirits from the vasty deep and then banging on about their visions. Of course were I being handsomely paid like Jung I’d be happy to listen to it all, but since I’m not I often feel these stories demonstrate that speaker has become locked into one ‘reality tunnel’ (as Leary would say).

Entering a relationship with a spirit can be a powerful magic. But to be a magician is to be able to see that relationship in many ways, including as brain event. Seeing things as neurological processes does not have to be dis-empowering. Seeing clinical depression as having a neuro-transmitter component is factually accurate. It can provide us with medicines to help people and is emphatically not identical with ignoring the environment in which the depressed person is living. Understanding the brain mechanics of mental illness isn’t about  forgetting social, cultural, dietary and other factors in its etiology.

If we are to re-enchant the world then we must include all our understanding of it and not take refuge in what is can be an ego-centric subjective imaginal world. We should open ourselves out to many languages and many perspectives. Sometimes we should speak of the spirit of the mushroom, at other times of it’s chemistry, of it’s cultural history and it’s mythic meaning. And whichever language we use could always aim to contain a destabilizing element within our descriptions. Something that serves to open us up to other interpretations and remind us of the limits of what we think we know – in our brains.

JV