PRELUDE

THE MAGIC IS IN THE COMMUNICATION
What is magic?

This is one of those questions that many people have outdated ideas about, assuming they have any thoughts about it at all. For some, it’s just a thing stage magicians do in places like Las Vegas. For others, it’s the thing people did before the Abrahamic religions took root and spread beyond their original cultures, calling up visions of shamans and village "witch doctors." For still others, magical thinking is an entirely embarrassing notion in the days of smartphones, cryptocurrency, space exploration, and electric cars—or, in other words, "Who needs magic when we have science?"

Yet science itself can easily become like a religion in the ways people assign to it unlimited powers of explanation; start wars over which branch of science is most correct or useful; or regard anything not sanctioned by their preferred branch of science as evil/primitive/dangerous/ immoral. This is a position known as scientism.

The fact of the matter is that humans are not completely rational. We lash out in anger at things that don’t matter in any objective sense. We play the lottery—whether by buying a Powerball ticket, jumping out of an airplane, or jaywalking across a busy street in Manhattan. We fall in love, and not always with people who will make good long-term (or even temporary!) companions. We vote for colorful politicians more for their entertainment value than for how well they will represent the best interests of their constituents. As a species, we are remarkably bad at assessing risk and making far-sighted decisions that are in our best interests.

This is why any position that claims that reason alone can entirely explain and guide the human condition seems to be at odds with the actual behavior of real humans. Despite our unique qualities, we are still primates at our core—and this evolutionary heritage influences our behavior and social structures far more than most of us would like to admit. Science is a magnificent and essential tool for explaining how; it is wholly inadequate for explaining why or assigning meaning.

So where does this leave magic?

In this book I’m going to do a weird thing: use the science of linguistics and the philosophical toolkit called semiotics to talk about the not-always-rational practice of magic. The terminology and analytical techniques may be modern, but I am using them to get back to an understanding of ancient ideas about how we perceive and affect the world by treating it as a partner in communication. The connection between semiotics, language, and magic is the core principle of this book: the magic is in the communication.

We’ve lost touch with the necessity of remaining truly open to the Being of things.* Communication can only happen between equals, or between those who can sufficiently "meet in the middle" of their knowledge and experience to find common ground for communication. By opening ourselves to the Being—the essential qualities that distinguish "this" from "that"—of what we wish to affect, we can communicate more effectively and thus engage in magic more effectively.

Hardly anyone would deny that language is closely related to communication, but describing magic in terms of communication might at first seem to be a stretch. In fact, the history of magic—whether premodern, postmodern, or anywhere in-between—is replete with tropes and techniques that can be best understood as communication processes. In this book, we’ll look at some of those: sigils, spells, invocations, and even situations where writing itself can be regarded as a magical act. We’ll also explore the idea of a text—a collection of any kind of signs—and how the ideas of cohesiveness and coherence work together to create meaning (and for the magician, thus become a means of changing both the self and the world).

I’m going to be using a lot of relatively recent ideas (late nineteenth century onward) to look at far older things. Throughout this work, I hope to show that while the terminology may be new, the ideas have been lurking behind the actual practice of magic for millennia. Magic-as-communication is a particular conceptual model we can use to understand something essential about magic (and our tendency toward it as a species, even when we try to frame what we are doing in nonmagical terms for social or other reasons). Conceptual models aren’t judged by whether they are "true" (because they are not trying to convey truth); rather, their effectiveness and analytic/predictive power are the crucial criteria for whether they are useful. Conceptual models are ways of thinking about the assumptions, success criteria, and relevance of the things they are applied to. Thus, I can’t prove to you that magic "exists" (whatever that means), but I can show you how magical thinking as a conceptual model reveals and suggests useful ways of looking at yourself and the world. We will also examine how this model might help you to escape the limitations you have placed on yourself through overuse of other models that work well enough in their own domains, such as scientific thinking.

But before we get too deep into that, we need to settle on some definitions that put the relationships between these three ideas of magic, semiotics, and linguistics in their proper context. After all, if we’re going to work with these ideas in a methodical way, we must use criteria and descriptions that reveal meaningful differences—that is, by having some situations that they definitely don’t apply to, and supporting that assertion with persuasive reasons, we can then get a better sense of what situations these ideas do apply to. We also have to avoid being like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, using words like magic to mean whatever we want them to mean from one utterance to the next.

I’ll expand on these definitions in later chapters, but let’s start here.

MAGIC

Magic is a form of operative communication that uses symbolic means to bring about a change in the practitioner (the one doing the magic) and, when necessary, a change in the world outside the practitioner as well.

It’s vital to note that magic is often only one step in bringing about the desired change; it must usually be followed up with tangible action in the world. One of the ways that magic functions is as part of a toolkit for reconfiguring your perception of what is possible so that further actions and awareness will align with it. It’s usually not enough to just think vivid thoughts to visualize a change you want to see in yourself or the world; we are constantly reframing our view of reality and categorizing possibilities according to their likelihood, desirability, and social implications. We have to fight those voices in the back of our heads—of parents, co-workers, neighbors, authority figures, and others—telling us what we should or shouldn’t want or do. This is yet another outcome of our primate heritage: we cooperate to a degree with what those in our circles of interaction and authority want even when we think—or want to believe—we are acting entirely of our own volition.

Let’s break that definition down.

Operative communication means that we are using communication to do something, not just talk about something. This is encapsulated in the idea of a performative utterance—speech that immediately brings about an effect, like "I now pronounce you man and wife." J. L. Austin has quite a bit to say about performative utterances, and we will look at his ideas closely in chapter 3. Humans obviously do plenty of operative communication in nonmagical contexts; thus, while operative communication is a good replacement term for magic that avoids some of the latter term’s historical baggage, it is not enough—at least without more context.

Symbolic means indicates that the practitioner—the one doing the magic—leverages symbols, whether linguistic or metalinguistic, to call up the right imagery that lets them put the desired change in the right context (or frame of reference). For example, the magician who is doing a bit of wealth magic may include in her ritual various things, objects, or representations that to her symbolize and suggest the type of wealth she is intending to acquire.

A change in the practitioner emphasizes that the person doing the magic is different (or at least on the way to being different) in some way following the magical act. They have shifted some part of their self-image, seeing themselves or their possibilities for action or change in new or more coherent ways. Or as my teacher and friend Don Webb says, the secret of magic is to transform the magician. Not all permanent changes in the practitioner will have some corresponding change in the outer world, but many if not most will—the transformed person will reflect those transformations in their behaviors, attitudes, values, and goals.