Dualism is nonsense — and incompatible with magic.

As I mentioned in the last column, the idea that magic and the “real” (physical) world are incompatible is rooted in Western Dualism. The belief that spiritual/ magical/ artistic matters and physical/ fleshly/ worldly ones are so distinct from one another as to have nothing in common is nonsense, but has nonetheless been the dominant paradigm for over 2,500 years. Zoroaster started it, Gnosticism (which was essentially the pre- and early-Christian “new age” movement), Christianity, and Islam continued it; and it then infected Judaism, and the modern philosophy of Scientistic Materialism is perhaps its ultimate triumph. Through the lens of dualism, the “debunking” of all things paradigm-challenging continues to this very day.

Western occultists, being themselves products of a dualistic culture, adopted this worldview pretty completely. This is why they invented separate ethical laws for magic (a whole other discussion) and often made their distinctions between so-called “high” magic and “low” based on how physical the goals and/or methods being employed were.

Western occultists also shied completely away from physical magic — after 2,500 years of having magicians who were good at thaumaturgy (“wonder-working” or physical magic) murdered by the religious authorities, who can blame them? This led to Western occultists pretty much losing the ability to do anything other than theurgy (“divine-working” or spiritual) magic. Despite the fact that thaumaturgy and theurgy are opposite ends of a continuous spectrum of magical/religious/artistic methods, they were pushed to the extreme opposites demanded by dualism and redefined as “low” and “high” magic respectively. (We will set aside for now the many racial, gender, and class issues involved in those judgments.)

One of the many revolutionary aspects of the revival of polytheism in the twentieth century was the creation of magical systems, especially in what was to become Wicca, that unabashedly mixed thaumaturgy and theurgy. By creating philosophies and polytheologies that celebrated the presence of spirit in the world and the potential holiness of physical passion, modern neo-Pagans turned dualism on its head. Indeed, this is one of the major reasons why our new-old religions frighten and enrage Western fundamentalists of all varieties; because we erase their artificial boundaries between spirit and flesh, energy and matter, art and the mundane. What’s worse, we deny the “higher” status claimed by “sophisticated and highly developed” religions over the “lower” status of “primitive” ones as nothing more than cultural bigotry.

Because we respect the physical world, we like to learn as much as possible about it. This is why so many Neopagans are interested in science and technology, and why we don’t embed anti-scientific dogmas into our belief systems. On the contrary, many of us find scientific theories about the “mundane” aspects of reality to be intriguing and inspirational in the practice of our magics.

All of which is to introduce the concept that there are certain physical “laws of nature” (usually called “theories” by working scientists) that can affect how magic works. Indeed, these could be considered among the laws of magic themselves, as I first stated in Real Magic and reiterated in Real Energy, when discussing the magical laws of Cause and Effect and of Unity. One of the key ways in which the reader can judge how realistic a description of a magical process may be is by looking to see if these physical laws are being seriously violated (as distinct from evaded or tweaked, which is what good engineering is all about).

The Law of Unity

Let’s start with this familiar magical law:
everything is connected to everything else. We can look at this on several different levels. On the mundane level, any magical target (the specific person, place or thing you intend to change in order to manifest your magical goal) you are likely to be concerned about is either on or in one of the Druidic “Three Worlds:” the land, the waters, or the sky of planet Earth. The physical ground you are standing upon is connected to that underneath your target, blurring into the water or air that might be holding it (bodies of water and air permeate the upper regions of most soil they rest upon).

Everything on Earth is affected by mutual gravitational and electromagnetic fields, and those of the Earth itself, giving us an energetic connection to everything else. Every living thing, from a great whale to the tiny plankton upon which it feeds, is part of the living body of Gaia (the Earth’s biosphere), which includes those physical and energetic connections and perhaps others we have not yet the technology to measure. Gaia, as both the living biosphere and the ancient Goddess, (known as Gaia, the Earth Mother, Danu, Mother Nature, and by a thousand other names), is connected on a spiritual level of reality to all other gods and goddesses, including our own personal patrons and matron deities, who are connected to us.

As long as we’re getting esoteric, let’s not forget that every particle of matter is a knot (a “wave packet”) in a quantum field. The Earth is a huge collection of such knots, each one of which can potentially allow for quantum entanglement with any other particle, what Albert Einstein called, “spooky action at a distance.”

Those knots of energy can combine into ever-larger knots that become the everyday objects we observe around us. The knots can also be seen as nodes of connections in networks, with the larger ones (that are called planets) offering some intriguing possibilities for researching astrological influences.

Perhaps more importantly for day-to-day magical working, network theory (the branch of mathematics spawned by Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon) tells us that you are connectable in only a few steps to any person or place on Earth (no, it’s not an urban legend). A spell using such connections will probably work better if you know all the steps between you and your target, but some of your spell’s information content will get through eventually even if you don’t.

When doing a spell on an animal, a person, or (even better) a member of your family, you might think that you have a “blood” connection through your DNA. Well, there is a tenuous connection through space-time and the evolutionary links that tie all of life on Earth (pretty much) into a single organism (Gaia), but DNA is more useful in terms of the magical Law of Similarity (“look-alikes can affect each other”). If you have a psychic talent for retrocognition (looking into the past), you will find it easier to trace those DNA connections down through the years (or ages) and you will also find it easier to use other connections: the psychic ones we form with everyone we meet and interact with, especially if we touch them physically. These normally fade away unless very strong to begin with and/or repeated frequently, but they still exist in the past.

The primary value of the Law of Unity is to present us with multiple ways to send our psychic energies from where we are to where we want them to go. Just spend some time thinking through what connections you want to use, then come up with appropriate symbolism to represent your spell traveling along those connections.

The Law of Cause and Effect

If you do the same spell, under the same circumstances, you should get the same results — most of the time. This is why it’s possible to learn, practice, and improve our magic. The principle of cause and effect in the physical sciences is the same, except for replacing the word “spell” with “action” and leaving out “most of the time.” Such confidence is generally warranted when working on the physical and energetic levels, but get more complicated on all the other levels of reality.

Let’s say you go to see a production of Wicked (the musical based on The Wizard of Oz), and you bring along a few friends from different backgrounds. You all enjoy it so much, you decide to go back and see it again and again. Then you throw a party to which you invite the cast and everyone has a grand old time discussing how unique each performance was. Well, that is, everyone except the chemist and the engineer, who can’t understand what you’re all talking about. “The same words were said each time!” they protest. “The same costumes were worn! The same actions took place on the same stage in the same theater!”

After they finish laughing, the actors explain, “Susan had a migraine and muffed several lines in the second performance. John sang out of key, and Mary forgot to change into the right costume in the third performance. Bill was experimenting with different gestures in the second act each performance. The matinee was full of rowdy kids who made it difficult to concentrate and disturbed the adults’ experience of the show.” Perhaps you add, “Don’t you remember that we all dressed up like Munchkins for one performance and Glinda gestured to us in the audience during her song? That made it much more powerful an experience for us than the previous shows had been.”

The reason that many physical scientists (and Scientistic Materialists) don’t understand that magic is real is that their concepts of magic are rooted in fantasies of popular culture, in which one points a finger or wiggles a nose and something impossible happens. If you present them with a more realistic definition of magic, such as “the art of coincidence control” or “the imposition of human will on subtle phenomena,” some may be more open to discussion. The reality that no two performances of a play or concert are ever 100.00% identical could be a way to offer the idea that no two magical or psychic efforts will ever be 100.00% identical either, and thus difficult to reproduce in an inappropriate laboratory setting.

As polytheists, we Pagans are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, with fuzzy logic and multi-model theories of the universe. So we can modify the mundane principle of cause and effect into one that works for us on multiple levels. It encourages us to try the same spell over and over to see if we can improve our results, it encourages us to keep records of our efforts and their consequences, it encourages us to eliminate variables one by one until we know the (usually) essential ones upon which to focus. In other words, judicious use of this law improves our magic.

Next issue we’ll take a look at magical inertia and the Forces of Chaos™. For now, my work here is done. Happy Winter, everyone.

Author’s note: I would like to express my thanks to my good friend Dr. William Seligman, Ph.D., for his role as the “physics police” in this column. Naturally, any errors of scientific fact or theory remain my own.

Isaac Bonewits has been a Chief Unindicted Co-Conspirator of the American Neopagan movement for forty years, is the Founder of Ár nDraíocht Fein: A Druid Fellowship, and is the author of multiple books, including Real Magic, Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca, The Pagan Man, Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism, Neopagan Rites, and (with his wife Phaedra) Real Energy.