Great stuff.
It's a difficult topic to talk about because I feel magic is a verb, and not so much a noun.
Belief for me, when starting out as someone with a secular brain, that looked something like "suspend disbelief and criticism while in ritual, then 'invoke often' until it all comes alive, then once alive (or contact is made, however you think of it) up your game progressively."
As a games industry art director, I spent many years researching human creativity because part of my job was to foster creative thinking among my teams. For our purposes, I feel "immersion" is a much better word. You don't "believe" in a movie you are watching, you just accept it as true while you're in the theater.
Simon Dyda, another grim trad magician, articulated a very similar view to my own in his oh-too-short chapbook 'The Wandering School of Secrets,' quoted below:
Reading his book was very confirming for me, and I was like, " Oh, thank goodness it's not just me saying this." There's long precedent here in African-American Conjure / Hoodoo. They usually don't go into trance either.
I have done very effective Daimonic sorcery with no trance. I happen to enjoy trance so to add it even when not necessary to feel like I am actually doing something. And of my most effective "empty-hand" and overnight sorcery was when I was head-deep in a vision from saying my standard morning prayers, but that needs more experimentation. I think maybe it's a force multiplier of some kind, but exactly why, I can't say for sure right now
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The Wandering School of Secrets POV
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A common misconception in modern occultism is that magic will only start working once the magician has overcome certain hurdles, such as learning to banish thought through meditation; correct breathing techniques; the building up or channelling of esoteric energies; physical and mental exhaustion; the use of narcotics; the study of psychology and/or neurology; the fortification of one’s will power; or by developing one’s ‘psychic’ abilities. Other supposed requisites include entering a trance state, or having an orgasm and then banishing any thoughts concerning the desired goal.
None of these things are necessary in magic. These hurdles have been imposed on magic by the mindset of late nineteenth and early twentieth century hipsters, a mindset which despite its spiritual and mystic pretensions was so anchored in rationalism that it could not believe that magic would work without a struggle. This mindset believed magic to be largely psychological in nature, that struggle had to be one concerned with consciousness and state of mind. The trendsetters of the so-called Occult Revival, rather than seeking out actual practitioners of Western magic, instead looked to Indian mysticism for inspiration, blending it with Western mysticism to create the fridge-raid soup of New Age flakery, neopagan pantomime, and pseudomasonic pomposity that was characteristic of twentieth century esotericism and occultism.
According to this mindset, for magic to be real it must be especially difficult; requiring a trained singlemindedness and focus and/or some means of bypassing the mind in order to transcend the laws of physics and ‘nudge probability’ in a desired direction. If at any point this becomes easy, it should immediately be made more difficult in order to succeed.
All such statements as these are self-defeating nonsense: no special powers of focus, concentration, and attention beyond those required to perform any other task are necessary, and to engage in any power struggle with one’s own mind is counterproductive and serves only to undermine the efficacy of the practitioner.
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In traditional practices, magic is worked through an interaction between the magician and spirits, not through a struggle between the practitioner and their own mind. The magician need not hack their way through mental undergrowth in order to perform magic; instead, magic itself opens the way to magic magia viam aperit. The only mental tool the magician requires is the imagination.
The key word in this use of the imagination is immersion. Anyone who has immersed themselves in a novel or a poem has experienced this magical state of consciousness in which perception is altered and extended by the imagination.
Immersion is facilitated by story. When performing magic, the magician will be calling upon story of one sort or another, be it in the form of verses from Holy Scripture, the deeds of deities in mythology, or the use of their epithets. For this reason it is important to familiarise ourselves with the myths, legends, or scripture relevant to the spirits we are engaging with.
We will talk more of the use of myth and story in magic anon. Of equal importance to the use of the imagination, the magician should avoid the pitfall of rationalisation when performing magic.
Many books on magic contain theories of magic which often amount to magician apologetics for either a medieval religious or a modern rationalist audience and are of no practical use beyond reassuring readers that the practice of magic is a sane and acceptable pursuit.
We learn from experience that magic works, but we cannot demonstrate why it works any more than a physicist can demonstrate why the laws of physics work the way they do.
It is far more productive to accept magic on its own terms, regardless of how ‘unscientific’ those terms might appear to be. The magician is not required to believe in magic for it to work; instead, the magician should disregard the question of belief entirely.
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