Magical Thinking
A post today at The Lesser of Two Weevils, about the book Widdershins by Charles de Lint, made my thoughts turn to magic.
As an aspiring writer, I'm a fan of the literary gerre of Magic Realism ... think Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. And as a person, I'm a fan of magic itself. I grew up on fairy tales and in college, my boyfriend bought me the complete set of the Andrew Lang Fairy Books ...
... and introduced me to HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon and historical oddities like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (with members WB Yeats, Arthur Machen and Aleister Crowley).
- Yeats
I'm not sure about the details of conflict between religion and magic ... maybe they can co-exist, and do so in books like the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz, where the Catholic vowed religious practice magical rites. I should be the last one to define the difference as I'm often accused of magical thinking :-) but if there is a line between magic and Christianity (that line sometimes seemed blurred - think about Novenas) perhaps it has something to do with the difference between the need to make life's events conform to one's desires, and a trust in Divine Providence.
- Midsummer Eve by Edward R. Hughes
As an aspiring writer, I'm a fan of the literary gerre of Magic Realism ... think Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. And as a person, I'm a fan of magic itself. I grew up on fairy tales and in college, my boyfriend bought me the complete set of the Andrew Lang Fairy Books ...
... and introduced me to HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon and historical oddities like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (with members WB Yeats, Arthur Machen and Aleister Crowley).
- Yeats
I'm not sure about the details of conflict between religion and magic ... maybe they can co-exist, and do so in books like the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz, where the Catholic vowed religious practice magical rites. I should be the last one to define the difference as I'm often accused of magical thinking :-) but if there is a line between magic and Christianity (that line sometimes seemed blurred - think about Novenas) perhaps it has something to do with the difference between the need to make life's events conform to one's desires, and a trust in Divine Providence.
- Midsummer Eve by Edward R. Hughes
posted by crystal | 11:27 AM
17 Comments:
Magical thinking...perhaps that explains why my air conditioner broke, too?
My daughter Jill liked Isobel Allende. I haven't read her, but just this minute ordered Paula, a memoir about her daughter's death.
Hi Susan. Did your air conditioner break too? Must be a pixie conspiracy :-). From what I know of Jill, I can see why she liked the magical relaists.
Are you a fan of de Lint, crystal? I love the way he slips magic into the world -- or rather how he uncovers it, especially the kind of magic connected with nature spirits. Fun stuff.
I've read one or two of the magical realists -- does Laura Esquivel count? I was blown away by Like Water for Chocolate.
Hi Talmida - no I haven't read de Lint and only first heard of him at your blog ... his books sound slike something I'd enjoy, though.
Yes, Esquivel conuts :-) Wikipedia mentioned her in that article on magical realism, saying ...
Mexican author Laura Esquivel also wrote in this vein when she penned Like Water for Chocolate. The book, which sold three million copies worldwide, was later made into a film. Upon its release in the United States, it became the highest grossing foreign film in U.S. history.
What kind of fiction does your daughter like to write?
De Lint is great summer reading -- excellent stories for the plot hit, but cool ideas if you want to drift off and think.
My daughter (who blogs as AnimeJune) is writing fantasy right now - she's big into tranformational stuff - people into animals and the like. She's also big on what she calls the "spoiled princess" school of fantasy. Maybe because she is one?
;-)
She blogs at Gossamer Obsessions.
As a literary device, I'm very interested in magic -- I like gothic novels and ghost stories. I also love Garcia Marquez, as well as other authors that use imagination in their fiction (Borges, Calvino...)
I am interested in magic from an anthropological point of view -- it shows how different cultures relate to their surroundings, what lines they draw between the supernatural and natural, etc.
As far as magic and religion goes, the debate goes way back (I actually read quite a bit about this for one of my orals fields). There was always a concern about folk superstitions and use of magic. The orthodox view is that the difference between prayer and magic is that prayer is supplication, a way to ask for something from God, although you are aware that God may or may not grant it. Magic is a technique, a way to force something to happen through supernatural or hidden forces. In theory, if you think a novena or any other devotion will necessarily make something happen, you're on shakey ground. Of course in practice, many people do look on their devotions that way.
Wiccans believe they are heirs to ancient magical practices passed down in an underground fashion from pre-Christian times. I'm afraid that from a scholarly perspective, that's a very hard claim to maintain.
I've never thought much about this. My first thought is that the basic idea of magic is that there's some kind of other-realm whose powers sometimes incur into the world as we know, it or the known universe.
Seems to me there are difficulties. For example, if something happens that seems to violate the laws of nature as we know them, how do we know it really comes from "outside" the natural world? Maybe we just don't know enough yet about how nature works, and sometimes weird things happen involving air conditioners etc.
Btw, Crystal, I replied to your last comment to the effect that there's no necessary connection between believing in free will and behaving responsibly.
I just feel that in good conscience I owe it to you to point this out...
Talmida - thanks for the link, I'll check out your daughter's blog :-)
Liam - my scripture group is reading Acts, and there's a passage where Peter meets Simon the magician - Peter ends up cursing him for trying to buy the power to bestow the holy spirit.
I think you're right about the difference - asking for something or trying to make it happen yourself.
Darius - if people have free will, they can choose to act responcibly or not, but with determinism, they have no choice. So maybe this is about blame and/or credit. You don't want to blame people who do "bad" things, but with determinism, there's also no credit for doing "good" things, and there's no chance to be surprised by someone, no out-of-character acts that can happen when a person with free will has an epiphany.
CRYSTAL: Two points:
1) Whatever anybody's theoretical position on free will or determism is, it makes no practical difference in terms of whether we behave in a responsible manner. Either way, we'll teach our children to make sound decisions with an eye toward their own well being and that of others. Either way, we'll want to see violent criminals locked up to prevent them from victimizing others, and hopefully be rehabilitated. (So when I said above that "in good conscience I owe it to you" to point out that I also made this point in reply to you on my blog, that was to be funny... You know... here I am, not believing in a high degree of free will, but behaving responsibly...)
Crystal and Darius will tend to behave responsibly regardless of the answer to the theoretical question of whether we freely chose to be persons who behave this way; or whether our being this way was determined by our genes/environments; or a bit of each. Likewise, the free will/determinism debate makes no difference to how criminals conduct themselves. They're busy with other things!
2) I think you're exactly right: interest in free will centers on being able to blame others and take personal credit. If criminals recognize the good as fully as non criminals do, if they know what makes it good and what makes evil bad, and then freely choose evil knowing full well how harmful it is to their own spirits as well as to others and yet ("for some reason...?") do it anyway, then they are veritable incarnations of evil. We can demonize and dehumanize them. We can make the focus of our criminal justice system punishment instead of rehabilitation. And this feels good. We get to have vengeance without calling it that.
And while taking credit for the good things we do might be good for a child or adolescent's self esteem, a preoccupation with credit-taking in adulthood shores up an ego that we are called to leave behind.
PS Sorry, didn't mean to spell your name in caps like I was yelling! My comment was so long I guess I thought I was back on my own blog, and I do that with people's names so they can find my replies to them easier. (I'm so darned responsible.)
Hi Darius :-)
I'm reading a book, My Life with the Saints by James Martin SJ, and last night I read about Joan of Arc. She is consdiered very holy (lots of credit due :-), yet to me it's unclear if she did what she did because she freely decided to follow advice from above or because her acts were determined by schizophrenia.
In a way it doesn't matter why she did what she did, just that she did it. But the idea of being "holy" depends on free will and intention, I think, so it does matter why she did what she did, in that context.
It's not that I want the right to blame people (and myself) for being bad, though there is some of that in me, but that if determinism is valid, I'm just going through the motions and i'll never have the ability to profoundly change for the better.
My best guess is that saints aren't concerned about getting credit for being holy. Or that, being human, to the extent they are concerned with this, it isn't an aspect of their saintliness!
So if determinism is valid, you're just going through the motions... you can't profoundly change for the better...
I don't see it! All I see is that you don't get to take credit for that process which is "your" life.
A big part of what I'd view as profound and meaningful change in my own life has been finding that "my" life doesn't belong to me. ("Losing your life to find it...")
Darius,
I see you have a new post at your blog ... looks interesting.
If your life doesn't belong to you, who does it belong to? And if it's not yours, how can you lose it? I hate the "It's God's world, and we just live in it" philosophy, whether your God is the Catholic one of a diefied determinism. What your suggesting is a kind of secular Calvinism, and whitout a jackpot at the end for the lucky ones ... even existentialists are less pessimistic, as they at least believe in free will and meaningful choice :-)
I need some icecream!
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I guess we all tend to want to believe that we're balanced but it doesn't always come out that way all the time.
What does that have to do with magical thinking most would ask.
Well for me it's kind of a long step to The Trinity. To try and explain I'll use our old fraction
example but with changed numbers and all numbers will varie with each individual. Let's take our usual fraction 3/3 = 1 and if we consider one of the 3's as a bad number and the other 3 as a good number then our = is balanced to a single unknow unit. The lowest common denominator can vary so much that some numbers might not ever reach a single unit and then there's the problem of knowing if the top number is good or bad.
Again many might ask what am I trying to get at? Well let's pretend that each number has their own personality and for a moment let's imagine that Cinderella and her two sisters take on these role numbers. The best that could be achieved here for a happy ending would be to simplify the two step sisters until they can convert Cinderella into a single Unit and then the two sister kind of disappear or do they?
Cinderella is a fictional story is that not so?
Me, myself and I are also fictional would you not agree?
I better stop now although I've only said about 1/4 of what I want to say and get our bearing as to weather I should even try to continue cause no one might even be interested?
If I don't stop now I might get into talking about the next step of fictional female witches, bitches and angels and/or male warlords, dogs and angels as
another step to finding The Trinity.
What do you think of what I've said so far other than, well we can see that you're not balanced at this moment. Are you sure that you're not suffering from schizophrenia? Who really knows for sure? (lol)
I will be starting a new site in
September now that I've met a lot of new people who for whatever reasons might want to visite.
Thank you crystal
Hi Victor. I would be interested in your site and would like to visit - please let me know when you have it up :-)
Boy, what a grump... :)
This could be because you haven't gnoticed the ice cream is already with you.
It's lo-credit ice cream, which is really better for your spiritual health. And since it's from heaven, it, unlike diet foods on earth, is richer and creamier than the high-credit variety.
So I'm talking about awareness, not philosophy. And that's my take on "losing our lives to find them."
I think the true opposite of pessimism isn't belief, but faith. I have faith without belief.
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