I guess that in order for this blog to ever be complete, it’s important for me to actually define what magick is in my opinion. There have been many famous definitions and for the most part they all amount to the same thing: magick is simply influencing things in the world with the Will. This includes things such as visualizing receiving money for several days and then all of a sudden you get your stimulus check, or to light a pink candle to help you to find love, or even to wish other people unhappiness (for example, break-ups are common causes of subconscious negative magick) and have them be depressed or upset for several days.
I believe that this is a decent enough definition, but that it really doesn’t encompass everything I personally associate with magick. The commonly stated definition doesn’t ever include any sort of divinatory work, and whether this is magick is definitely debatable. My theory though, is that they are almost always intertwined. It is like saying that war is battles and spying is something completely different…but all wars have spying. If you take out the divinatory aspect, much of shamanism is considered non-magickal, as well as tarot cards and runes (for divinatory purposes).
My new definition requires several definitions of terms for complete understanding. First of all, I don’t believe that there is a single god or goddess or even a pantheon of them that are all powerful. I believe that there is a “web” that encompasses all of our “spirits/energies” and that any manipulation/reading of the web is magick. This includes shamanic journeys (whether they are for informational purposes or for healing/other purposes), all divinatory methods, astral travel, following hints from the natural world (animals, plants, random coincidental events), and even following hunches. This may seem like a broad range of subjects, but in truth, they are all connected and therefore shouldn’t be separated.
I’ve found that it is useful to re-evaluate my definition of magick as I develop. When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I have defined magick in my life as everything in the universe…to explain, if you don’t get my ideological simplistic statement, is that all things are interconnected…life is death, past is present is future…you are me and I am my son…we are the same, yet experience different points of view…in the relativistic sense i suppose. Yet, at the same time, I am my own person with my own mind and my own choices, apart from others. I have to disagree on one point though, I don’t believe there is more than one god(read GOD), i believe there is the life force, akin to “the force”…that permeates all things that makes all things, we are a part of we are made of, I read a book that is appr. 100 years old, and it made perfect sense…it read easily, yet profoundly, we are gods…we are GOD.
Well Roderick, I think you’ve mistaken what I mean. How about a better explanation: I agree completely with your idea of GOD and I call it a “web” because it is more of interconnected pieces of energy that are bound together. Much like the tiny little one celled organisms make up a jellyfish, we are just cells of this GOD or “web”. Our terminology is different in this respect and that’s all. Now, I think you are mistaken about what magick is though because by your definition everything you do in life is magick and therefore the word magick has absolutely no meaning to it at all. There has to be a “not magick” for there to be a “magick”. So my definition is simply extending our energetic influence to other “cells” rather than keeping it to ourselves. We are “pulling” on the web or influencing the world as gods.
And as an aside, what book did you read that was 100 years old that spoke of the fact that we are gods?