What is Magic?: Definitions of Magic

In seeking to understand Magic and what it fundamentally is, we must come upon a definition of the word.

It may only be a working definition, an ever-evolving understanding - but it is necessary to understand it so that we can practice it and live it.

Magic is a word that, like many other words in our language, such as god, religion, science, and others; is often misunderstood. In asking 100 people what magic is you will get 100 different answers - and likely all of them, unless you happen to pick out someone with occult knowledge, will be inaccurate.

Most will probably give the answer that magic is a fictional, imaginary thing found in stories like Harry Potter. That it is a mystical power that doesn’t follow the laws of physics and that it doesn’t exist in the “real” world. That magic is only something from fairy tales.

Magic is very real. In fact, I believe it to be

What I call magic, others may call metaphysics or many other names.

Our modern world is one where knowledge of the occult (meaning secret and hidden) laws of existence is not taught or known except for those who seek it out.

Many would reject that there is anything beyond the physical, material world. Magic is metaphysics Metaphysics is simply physics without the math. It is the physics of consciousness and energy

The Dictionary Definition of Magic

• “the use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces”
• “an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source”

The Etymology of Magic

“The English words magic, mage and magician come from the Latin magus, through the Greek μάγος, which is from the Old Persian maguš. (𐎶𐎦𐎢𐏁, magician). The Old Persian magu- is derived from the Proto-Indo-European *magh (be able).”

Magic is Real

Before attempting to define magic, it is first important that we understand that it is real.

To the initiated, that is those who have a deeper understanding of metaphysics and the occult truths of reality, magic is very real.

Those who deny the reality of magic simply do not understand the physics of existence. How everything is a phenomena of energy, vibration, frequency, emotion, thought, intention, and only on the very surface does it appear as action and manifestation in physical form.

The teachings of the magi simply and clearly explain how our physical reality experience is made out of our beliefs, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and actions.

As one magician rightly said, Magic is “the method of science, the aim of religion”. It is an experimental science where the magician becomes one’s own experiment and one’s life is the laboratory. It proceeds in a very scientific manner, yet delves into the unseen and goes beyond what our current scientific paradigm allows. It is a synthesis of science and art, philosophy and religion, subjective and objective, left brain and right brain, action and contemplation.

Note that some use the spelling of Magick to differentiate it from the magic of fiction and of the stage magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat and sawing people in half. I do not believe that it is necessary to spell it this way as I prefer to reclaim the original spelling.

Definitions

Many practitioners and researchers of magic have attempted to give a definition that defines what magic is.

I will first give my working definition and then share some definitions and descriptions of others.

My Definition

Understanding the essential nature of reality and the structure of existence - that one is a divine creator being and physical “reality” is an illusion of consciousness.

Practicing Magic is therefore the mastery and conscious directing of one’s beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and actions in order to create or mold one’s reality in accordance with one’s imagination and will. The goal of magic is the application of these understandings to empower oneself as a divine creator and awaken to the truth of existence.

• Alternative Definitions: Practices, methods, techniques, understandings towards awakening one’s consciousness and becoming an empowered creator with the ultimate aim of union with the divine.

Magic is the science and the technology of humanity’s ancient past and also of the near-future.

Utilizing one’s infinite Imagination in concert with the liberated Will to consciously create one’s reality-experience in accordance with the awakened heart.

Magic is:

• Using the understanding of the occult laws and truth of nature/reality/existence/energy/consciousness. i.e. Knowing Thyself, the Truth of one’s divine creatorhood
• while consciously utilizing imagination, visualization, desire, intention, will, action, symbolism, association,
• to work with one’s consciousness to shift, alter, and create realities,
• using whatever actions, rituals or tools necessary to create permission slips to support the reality of one’s preferred beliefs
• All towards the realization of one’s Mastery, divinity, and alignment with Truth so as to become an instrument of …..

Definitions & Descriptions of Magic

"Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." "Every intentional act is a Magical act." "Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action." "Magick is merely to be and to do."

• Aleister Crowley

"Magic is the divinity of man achieved in union with faith..." "To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage."

• Eliphas Levi

“Magic is the felt sense that our role in the cosmos is co-creative.”

• Gordon White - https://runesoup.com/2023/04/towards-a-definition-of-magic/

“Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.”

• Terrence McKenna

“Magic is a set of techniques and approaches which can be used to extend the limits of Achievable Reality. Our sense of Achievable Reality is the limitations which we believe bind us into a narrow range of actions and successes – what we believe to be possible for us at any one time. In this context, the purpose of magic is to simultaneously explore those boundaries and attempt to push them back – to widen the ‘sphere’ of possible action.”

• Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos

“Magic is a set of techniques (skills which you can develop) which allow you to create a change in the world around you and yourself by means that are not understood by scientists, religionists, or psychologists.”

• Nicholas Graham

“Magic is the Highest, most Absolute, and most Divine Knowledge of Natural Philosophy, advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right understanding of the inward and occult virtue of things; so that true Agents being applied to proper Patients, strange and admirable effects will thereby be produced. Whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into Nature; they, because of their skill, know how to anticipate an effect, the which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.”

• The Goetia of the Lemegeton of King Solomon.

“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in consciousness in conformity with will.”

• Dion Fortune

“Magick is the science and art “of causing change (in consciousness) to occur in conformity with will, using means not currently understood by traditional Western science.”

• Donald Michael Kraig

“Magick is what we call various ways of making changes in ourselves and the world by means that cannot be explained by currently accepted theories and understandings of science and society.”

• Oberon Zell Ravenheart

“…a science and an art comprising a system of concepts and methods for the build-up of human emotion, altering the electrochemical balance of the metabolism, using associative techniques and devices to concentrate and focus this emotional energy, thus modulating the energy broadcast by the human body, usually to affect other energy patters, whether animate or inanimate, but occasionally to affect the personal energy patterns.”

• Isaac Bonewits

“…the conscious application of imagination and focused attention to bring about a desired goal through visualization”

• Ellen Evert Hopman

“…coincidence control.”

• Oberon Ravenheart

“…probability enhancement.”

• Anodea Judith

"Magic is the science of the control of the secret forces of nature."

• S.L. MacGregor Mathers

“Magic is a psychological art form not a belief system (unless, of course you consider the concept of ’cause and effect’ to be a belief system).”

• Lon Milo DuQuette

"Magic is a comprehensive knowledge of all nature."

• Francis Barrett

“But magic doesn’t mean “no cause.” It just means that we haven’t yet developed scientifically acceptable theories to explain these effects.”

• Dean Radin

"Magic is the art of effecting changes in consciousness at will."

• William Butler

"The work of magic involves transformation, and the first transformation is the shift of perception."

• Marion Weinstein

“Magick is the art of belief.”

• Ludrikos Muttleyos

“Magic is a series of psychological techniques so devised as to enable us to probe more deeply into ourselves.”

• Israel Regardie

While it is not entirely satisfactory either, my definition of magic is “the art and science of becoming a co-creator with a Supreme God.”

• Nick Farrell

“The application of will—directed through a process of repetitive, ritualized or concentrated thought and emotion—to manifest a desired change, effect or result in reality.”

• Mickey Megistus

“Magic is the art of affecting the manifest through the Unmanifest. The manifest is all that can be seen, touched, perceived, manipulated, imagined, or understood. The Unmanifest is none of these things. It is the place, or rather the non-place, from which everything issues. All that comes into being comes from the Unmanifest. All that passes away goes back to the Unmanifest.”

• Donald Tyson

“A magical act may be defined as causing reality to conform to will.”

• Phil Hine

“Magick is just the art of changing the focus of consciousness at will.”

• Robert Anton Wilson

“Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results.“

• Hakim Bey

“Real magick is not merely an assortment of skills and techniques. It’s more like an open minded attitude, a blend of interest and dedication, which allows each honest mage to observe, to learn, to adapt, and to invent unique ways of changing identity and reality from within.”

• Jan Fries

“Courage is the criterion of belief. To back one horse and fancy another means willing one thing and believing another. Magic (faith) is simply a means of unifying Desire and Belief. The subconscious mind is employed to create your belief and unite it to a real desire.”

• Austin Osman Spare

Causing change by directing energy with one’s will.

• Kerr Cuhulain, Full Contact Magick

“Everything works by magick; science represents a small domain of magick where coincidences have a relatively high probability of occurrence. Half of the skills in magick consist of identifying probabilities worth enhancing.”

• Peter Carroll, PsyberMagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magick

“Magic is not necromanteia – a raising of dead material substances endowed with an imagined life – but a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of stones, drugs, herbs, and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties – and leading to ever new glimpses of the world of wonders around us, ranking it in due order of phenomena and illustrating the beneficence of The Great Architect of the Universe. “

• Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie

“The true practice of magic depends on the legitimacy of the individual human will. The magician wills something to occur which under ordinary circumstances would not occur, and thereby demonstrates the reality of his or her own individuality. Magicians make the world dance according to their tunes, religionists seek to find the tune of the world and have it teach them how to dance.“

• Crystal Dawn and Stephen Flowers, Carnal Alchemy

“Unless a man be born a magician, and God have destined him even from his birth to the work, so that spirits do willingly come of their own accord – which doth happen to few – a man must use only of those things herein set down, or written in our other books of occult philosophy, as means to fix the mind upon the work to be done; for it is in the power of the mind itself that spirits do come and go, and magical works are done, and all things in nature are but as uses to induce the will to rest upon the point desired.”

• Cornelius Agrippa

“Magick is the practice of imposing one’s will upon reality in order to create change. The changes created by magick can take place in the outside world, but the most potent changes occur inside the self – changing attitudes, expanding abilities, pushing accepted limits – all through the exercise of willpower.

• Michelle Belanger

“Magick … may be defined as the process of projecting psychic energy into physical reality where it can then take shape as a spirit. The higher spirits, such as angels, derive from superconsciousness, the oversoul in which the mind exists as a part, whereas the lower spirits, such as demons, derive from subconsciousness, the repressed fears and traumatic experiences of the practitioner.”

• Frater W.I.T.

“Real magic is attuning your spirit and intention with the holon of the universe by gaining a deeper awareness of its parts.”

• Clea Danaan, Sacred Land

“Magick provides the tools to accomplish two things: First is to “know thyself” — to use techniques like journaling, meditation, ritual, and invocation to identify your personal strengths and successes – and thereby discover your true Will. The second is to use the same tools to accomplish your Will.”

• Richard Kaczynski

“My definition of magic is that it’s a ritual or meditation that enables individuals to move along their spiritual path towards God. It’s the goal of all humans to find God and to be present with him. Magic is a gradual process and a development of one’s spiritual nature to become attuned to God. This movement toward God will continue to build in strength until the goal of reaching cosmic consciousness and oneness with God is finally attained in its fullest expression.”

• John DeSalvo, The Lost Art of Enochian Magic

“Magical ability possesses great power,1 full of the highest mysteries, contemplating profound secret things, natures, powers, qualities, substances, and virtues, combined with the understanding of all of nature. It instructs us on how things are different from each other and how they agree. Wonderful effects are produced from magic, uniting virtues by applying things with each other and by accepting their congruity, and everywhere binds and marries inferior and superior gifts and virtues. This is the most perfect and highest science, the highest and most sacred philosophy. Finally, it is the absolute consummation of the noblest philosophy, for all regulative philosophy is divided into natural science, mathematics, and theology.”

“Therefore, whoever means to study these faculties, if they are not educated in natural philosophy—in which the qualities of things are declared and in which one can reveal hidden qualities of anything that exists—and if they are not a worker in mathematics and in the aspects and figures of the stars, from which anything with a sublime virtue and quality depends, and if they are not skilled in theology, where immaterial substances are shown, which all are dispensed and administered, they cannot understand the rationale of magic.24 Indeed, there is no perfect work in magic or any work that is truly magical that does not embrace these three faculties.”

• Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim

Magίck (the spelling with "k" was adopted by Denning and Phillips in the mid-1970s at the request of Carl Weschcke to accord with the Llewellyn policy of thus differentiating "the real thing" from legerdemain) is the production of desired effects, whether within the person of the magician or exterior to it, by means of a deliberate and special use of powers and faculties within the psyche. This may include effects produced by the agency of entities or energies which do not belong to the psyche of the magician: but if the action is to be described as magick it must be entirely under the command, and according to the will, of the magician. Outside of this condition wonders can take place, and continually do so: they may be miracles, they may be effects of spontaneous psychism, they may be caused by possession or by medίumshίp, but they cannot be said to be caused magically.

• denning and Phillips

”While some writers have regarded magic as psycho-therapeutic work (Francis King and Israel Regardie, for example), others have characterized it as the discovery of the unity within all duality, the truth behind all illusions. W. B. Yeats sought knowledge of what he called the single energetic Mind,' and its pole, the single Memory of nature,' both of which he believed could be evoked by symbols. But I like Florence Farr's definition of magic best: Magic is unlimiting experience.' That is, magic consists of removing the limitations from what we think are the earthly and spiritual laws that bind or compel us. We can be anything because we are All."

• Mary K. Greer, in Women of the Golden Dawn

The difference between a definition of magic - the thing that happens And magick - the practice

“The yoga of the west” “The western path to enlightenment”

• Damien’s definition of Magick

“The method of science the aim of religion”