Engaging reality otherwise -- aesthetically, dynamically, "magically"?

Contrasting Human and AI Identity in Magical Discourse (Part #9)

As noted above, the term "magic" is readily employed in reference to poetry, music, dance, and the arts in general. These can be recognized as evoking another sense of reality. They may well be used symbolically in ritual and ceremony to that end. Their use on formal occasions -- inaugurations, commemorations, coronations, and the like -- may aspire to achieving a serious sense of "magic", or may be valued from such a perspective, as noted below by Jason Leddington with respect to theatrical performance of magic (The Experience of Magic, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74, 2016, 3).

Care must necessarily be taken in the case of any related reference to religious ritual -- controversially deemed by officiants and believers to be works of magic in their own right (Stephan A. Hoeller, The Mystery and Magic of the Eucharist, 2020; George A. Wells, The Eucharist and the Origin of Magical Ideas, Free Inquiry, 34, 2014, 4; Elise Harris, Pope Francis: sacrament of the Eucharist is not a 'magic rite', Catholic News Agency, 24 September 2013). Debate is clearly required on the role of priests as performing ceremonial magic.

Magical reality enacted by magicians? Complementing the argument of Leddington from an academic perspective is the thesis of Peter Goderie (Reading the Lives of the Sorcerers, University of Wollongong, 2019). The author introduces his thesis with a literature review of the status of magic in post-Enlightenment thought. The study examines the work of four celebrity magicians, exploring the living quality of magic in their biographies and in their fiction. The magicians’ lives demonstrate for the ‘ordinary’ reader that another world is perfectly accessible, and the subject within the text can show us how to access that other-world.

Magical discourse persists in the modern world, and although scholarly consensus recognises that the practice of magic is commonplace, magic is also a subjective practice, and so it is not always easy to make sense of. Thus the magicians speak of walking between worlds, of entering a space apart from everyday life. This discursive space serves as a quarantine. In spite of its ubiquity, magic is taboo in modern public life, and ‘reasonable people’ are often obliged to denounce it. However, when we discover how to read magical discourse on its own terms, the other-space is revealed as the home of an irrational other-self, a subject whose existence seems to be independent of either the reader or the author... The function of magic in a modern context is to ‘think differently,’ to initiate an encounter with the magical other world. Modern magicians practice a subtle hermeneutics of experience; the sorcerers interpret their own lives as texts, rich with secret meanings and ambiguities.

As a ceremonial magician of repute, a contrast is offered by Aleister Crowley, both influential and much deprecated. Also by contrast are the influential initiatives of George Gurdjieff, as variously documented and interpreted (as a "self-crafted mythology"), notably his relation to Crowley (Tobias Churton, Deconstructing Gurdjieff: biography of a spiritual magician, Inner Traditions, 2017).

Some form of magical discourse could be understood as variously characterized by Gurdjieff (Meetings with Remarkable Men, 1963), the discourse within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn of such as Crowley and W. B. Yeats, or the encounters of Nicholas Roerich in his Asian quest for Shambhala. Roerich offers and example of the articulation of their significance through psychoactive art -- notably themed on magic. Any associated conflict could be understood as having been framed metaphorically by Gurdjieff as a ballet (The Struggle of the Magicians, 1914) and subsequently by William Patrick Patterson, Struggle of the Magicians: exploring the teacher-student relationship, 1997).

In the absence of accounts of the interaction between magicians, the reports of the interactions of their followers with gurus in past decades offer some indication of how magical discourse may be transformed into drama -- perhaps remarkably exemplified by the dynamics around Rajneesh (Wild Wild Country, 2018).

Enchantment of the future? Of potential relevance to the implications for the contemporary role of communication for global governance is the "bridge" between The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (15th century) and the thesis by William Bloom (Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations, 1993) -- following his earlier exploration of the Abramelin prescripts (The Sacred Magician: A Ceremonial Diary, 1992). Far more specific with regard to the relevance of magic to the global condition, however, is the articulation through a wide range of recent books by John Michael Greer, a druid, a Freemason, and an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

With respect to any "struggle between magicians", of particular relevance is the critique by Greer of the perspectives offered by Ken Wilber and Owen Barfield with regard to disenchantment (Against Enchantment: I: Ken Wilber, Ecosophia, 18 January 2023; II: Owen Barfield, 1 February 2023; III: Jean Gebser, 1 March 2023). To what extent is there any sense in which the future may be "enchanting" -- and that the possibility is what underlies meaningful "sustainability" that "works"?

Greer frames his appreciation of "enchantment" in the light of Max Weber’s claim that the disenchantment of the world is one of the basic elements of modernity:

... Jason Josephson-Storm’s counterargument [The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, 2017] that Weber was engaged in an attempt to erase the presence of magic and enchantment in modernity, and the way that Weber’s claim, inaccurate as it is, expresses one of the core beliefs of modern culture. No matter how pervasive magic, astrology, and other practices of enchantment are -- and they are extraordinarily widespread in modern life -- most people today insist that such things belong to an outworn past and have no legitimate presence in our up-to-date, cutting-edge world... Those ideas cover a good bit of ground, but they have certain things in common: notably, they all insist that enchantment is a thing of the past, and they all argue that its continuing presence in modern culture is both misguided and morally wrong.

Greer focuses on Wilber's belief that human history and prehistory have been shaped by the evolution of consciousness through an essentially linear sequence of structures of consciousness.

He has an abundance of ways of talking about these structures; the specific labels I’ll use here -- the archaic, magical, mythical, mental, and integral structures -- were borrowed by Wilber from an earlier thinker, the Swiss philosopher of history Jean Gebser... Any tradition of spiritual practice in the modern world that makes respectful use of myth and magic is considered by Wilber to be an example of the Pre/Trans Fallacy. That includes those of us who practice magic, of course, but it also includes anyone who seriously embraces any religion in its traditional form, as well as thinkers such as Carl Jung, whose attentiveness to the mythic dimensions of consciousness is in Wilber’s way of thinking wrongheaded, a throwback to a pre-personal stage of evolution.

Greer concludes with respect to Wilber:

From my perspective, the narrative structures of mythic thought aren’t a stage to be outgrown, they’re healthy and necessary elements of all human consciousness, just as much so as the discursive structures of rational thought. Give the mythic structure its proper place and it’s easy to keep it in that proper place. Try to insist that you’ve outgrown myth, as Wilber does, and you can count on having it sneak up behind you so and playing merry hob with your oh-so-rational ideas, inserting mythic narratives into those ideas when you’re not looking.

In his focus on Barfield, Greer notes:

Like Wilber, Barfield argues that among modern Western people, at least, what I am calling enchantment is an outworn condition of consciousness that cannot and should not be brought back to life. Like Wilber, furthermore, he argues that our current state of consciousness, with its materialistic fixations, is a temporary phase that will be replaced, not by the previous state of enchantment, but by a higher state which will make room for a great many of the spiritual impulses that modern materialist thought brushed aside.

With respect to Barfield's evolutionary outcome (as a Christian), Greer notes:

While the state of original participation involved sensing the divine in nature, and the disenchanted state is that of not being able to sense the divine at all, people in the state of final participation will experience the divine presence exclusively in their own souls. Thus human beings will become co-creators with God... It’s entirely possible, as we’ll see, that his ultimate predictions about final participation may yet turn out to be correct in some sense. It’s just that the route there is going to be more complicated than he thought, just as the route to our current state of consciousness involved a great many more twists and turns than Barfield took into account.

In concluding his critique of Wilber's framework of the evolution of consciousness, presented by Greer as linear, he argues:

It’s not a linear process, and many different lines of evolutionary development can -- and did -- unfold at the same time... The problem with the myth of progress is that many of the people who believe in it literally can’t use any other story to think with. Every pattern of events thus ends up getting forced into the straitjacket of the progress myth, and when it doesn’t fit -- and it often doesn’t --that leads to cascading failures of understanding and action... It’s precisely because no one story makes sense of everything that traditional societies had so many myths, each with its own lesson to teach and its own applicability to the events of everyday life. [emphasis added]

As a feature of the "struggle", this perspective would be contested -- as the many commentaries on his critique indicate. As appropriately questionable in its own right, the need for a "paradoxical" geometry (or topology) of a "framework" capable of encompassing seemingly incommensurable understandings of what is "right" and what is "wrong" has yet to be a focus of attention, as can be variously argued:

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