A Personal Note: Repatriating ‘Christian’ Magic

Introduction

This note is long overdue. The fact that it requires expression, seems to mark an important shortcoming in my recent books and social media posts. I hope to remedy some of it with this post, and more of it with future publications.

Here is the problem as I have come to realise it: Over the last years I spent considerable time researching on, experimenting with and writing about aspects of magic that emerge from the heretic periphery of Late Medieval Christianity. Whether this relates to my work on Johannes Trithemius, the Rosicrucian Movement, or even Paracelsus – all of them were deeply embedded into a Christian paradigm. Additionally, and originally stemming from my practical work with the Holy Daimon, I have come to stress aspects of integrity and applied personal ethics. Repeatedly, I have summarised this latter aspect of learning to attune ourselves to a nobler version of our selves under the Trithemian term of ‘becoming alike to the angelic mind’.

What I didn’t realise, was that the combination of these factors in some circles now garnered me the reputation of working with a specific Christian-bias, or even worse, with a hidden agenda of Christian proselytism.

Allow me to take a clear position on these perceptions. Firstly, I am not a Christian – I am a magician who seeks magic and wisdom in all corners of human thought, be it religions, mysticism, sciences and art. Secondly, let me explain how this approach materialises in my work with Christian sources of magic or mysticism, as well as with spiritual paradigms in general.

Seeing the Mystical Fire wherever it burns.

woodcut from: Paracelsus, Prophecies and Divinations, 1548

Living in a European country dominated by a Christian past and present, (a strongly Catholic community) means living in the ruins of my own plundered and broken tradition every day. Organised Christianity – and due to its long historic legacy first and foremost the Roman Catholic Church amongst it – is the killer of the common as well as the learned traditions of magic. The little that lived on within its cloistered walls was forcefully appropriated, and the roots of pagan philosophy and spirituality were either cut off, hidden or brutally reinterpreted to fit a monotheistic paradigm, as well as an opportunistic political agenda that followed the flavour of the day.

The impressive Christian art treasures of the last two millennia are precisely not an achievement of Organised Christianity. They are a painful expression of the complete usurpation of spiritual life in the Middle Ages under the yoke of a power-hungry criminal organisation, which stopped at nothing. Artists, artisans and intellectuals of the last 1000 years in the West had no choice but to submit to the Christian paradigm, at least outwardly, in order to have access to education and a career. Not only were there no possibilities of artistic expression outside the church-dominated realm of public life, there were simply no possibilities of a life at all.

Such ancestral territory comes with a choice: I can escape it, or I can face it?

A few years ago then I chose the latter. I knew it would be a balancing act: Maintaining the integrity of my own magical path, while deliberately opening up to and searching out the Christian tradition and influences all around. I decided this would need to be a journey without bitterness, but of Promethean spirit instead: To walk right into the brutal legacy of the Christian tradition and to steal as much of their mystical fire, as my own hands can carry. Examining the Christian tradition of magic and mysticism, to me, is a necessary act of repatriating our own indigenous goods – tangible and intangible – out into the pagan wilderness of the sole magician’s workshop.

I was prepared for this journey by my magical training with IMBOLC – part of the curriculum was to embed ourselves into specific religious paradigms for several months and to attempt to ‘go native’ for that period. The focus of the training was to become agile in switching spiritual paradigms, not only cognitively but also emotionally, as lived experiences. It was a practical training in switching emic and etic perspectives of various spiritual cultures. Later on I studied anthropology for a while, and then immersed myself deeply into intercultural studies.

As I had to learn on this journey, it led me past many tombstones of holy heretics who attempted to do the same before me. My next book with Scarlet Imprint (Holy Heretics, 2022) will tell the story of some of the things and practices I found. I sincerely hope it will also shine a light on the beauty, integrity and ongoing relevance of a spiritual mystical path, for as long as it stays entirely disconnected from any man-made organisations of power. This is true for all religions, not just Christianity. Every religion holds their own fruits of learning for the magician if we are willing to put aside our baggage and explore without prejudice.

It is this context and journey, which most recently led me to the writings of Henry Clay Trumbull. In the introduction to the little volume in which I share some of his memorable quotes on what makes for good character, I affirmed my genuine believe that good people show up everywhere. And it is worthwhile to sit with them, to listen to them, and to learn from them what we choose to make our own.

If Western Magic today still deserves to be called an unruly craft, one that undermines authority and resits orthodoxy in whatever disguise they appear, it should continue to take lessons from all sorts and walks of life. As heretics ourselves, we should remain open to learn from present and past, from grimoires and Christians, from folk people and noble people, from East and West.

The Power of a Paradigm lies in abandoning it.

woodcut from: Paracelsus, Prophecies and Divinations, 1548

Nature does not do paradigms. Nature also does not do ideologies or isms. One of the highest privileges of walking a magical path, is that allows us to step outside the realm of the man-made, the environment that was fashioned and shaped by humans.

The moment we do this, we are entrenched in raw nature, which often appears to us as a foreign realm of Otherness. This realm of nature, far beyond the compartments of human language, does not know any orthodoxies or man-made traditions. It simply is. It is in nature in every moment. Sometimes cruel, sometimes kind, always fulfilling itself.

As mentioned above, much of our work as magicians consist of getting rid of the cultural, social and religious baggage we carry with us, mostly unknowingly. If we walk the magical path well and far enough, we will more and more see raw nature – rather than its man-made, polished surface – shine through our everyday experience.

In a Paracelsian sense, this cultural baggage, we are trying to get rid off, are imprints that have shaped our collective and individual imagination. Operating magic without having cleared the glass of one’s imagination is not only ineffective but right down dangerous: It entails the danger of imagining a spiritual paradigm to be something. Instead of clearing the garbage of our mental images, and freshly immersing ourselves into lived mystical experiences and thus gaining first-hand knowledge through our own emic lens.

Much of the work of the magician resides in cutting off, rooting and clearing out all sorts of collective fantasies and imaginations. Because what we strive for is experience, not collective validation or conformity.

Spiritual paradigms are amongst the most elaborate and yet dangerous imaginations our ancestors have left us behind. They are incredibly well guarded and fiercely defended from any heretical attack.

The original term paradigm relates to an exemplary model. That means, a paradigm is a man-made pattern through which we are offered to look out into the world. Once we put on the goggles of a paradigm we reduce entropy, noise and dissonance, and we increase coherence and meaning in our worldview. The mess suddenly starts to make sense! That is, for as long as we wear these goggles, and only for as long as what we see allows itself to be bent into the patterns that we want to see.

In this respect trying out different paradigm-goggles is a powerful exercise, both in training our mental capabilities, as well as on a magical and mystical path. However, associating any kind of capital-T truth to the patterns we have put over our eyes, is mistaking cognitive comfort with raw reality.

As we said before, nature doesn’t do paradigms. Yet, we as humans benefit from looking at it through diverse paradigms so we can learn to appreciate, understand, and co-exist with it better. – What no paradigm can ever replace, though, is the power that resides in perceiving raw nature without any man-made overlays. The power of willingly exposing ourselves to unfiltered, radical Otherness. The deliberate act of reversing what a paradigm lends our minds: Not to reduce entropy and chaos in how we see the world, but to invite it in. To allow our dreams and fantasies to be shattered, in pursuit of the fluid, subjective, always emergent experience of lower-t truth.

This actually reminds me of the beautiful manifesto published in 1973 in the New York Review of Books. So many aspects of it still resonate with urgency and relevance today. Allow me to quote its final section below. Maybe, as you read it, replace the term intellectual with magician (as well as the old-fashioned he with a gender neutral they) and see what it has to tell about a genuine path of applied magic?

For me, I hear an echo, of a craft that once knew how to apply dissent and critique as well as agreement and appreciation to any source of information. Even to our own first-hand experience. Still today from this manifesto, I hear an invitation to walk our magical path “without messianic pride, independently of all authority and, if need be, in opposition to [...] all orthodoxy, all conformity, all demagogy.”

The first duty of the intellectual, in whatever part of the world he may be, to whatever “camp” he may be committed, is to speak the truth, or at least what he humbly believes to be the truth. He must do this without messianic pride, independently of all authority and, if need be, in opposition to it, whatever it may represent; independently too of all orthodoxy, all conformity, all demagogy. At no moment should intellectuals move from criticism to apologetics. There is no individual or collective Caesar who deserves universal support. The ideally just society is not a society that is devoid of conflict— there is no end to history—but one in which the contestants, when they come to power, in their turn may be contested; a society in which criticism is free and sovereign, and there is no need for apologetics.

— Lucien Bianco, Jean-Paul Brisson, Jacques Brunschwig, Claude Cadart, Gerard Chaliand, et al.; A Manifesto, The New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973

woodcut from: Paracelsus, Prophecies and Divinations, 1548