The Art of Magic

Spells of words and other languages

Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,
Eddie touched a troll,
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblins gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I've had to make myself.

〰 Shel Silverstein 〰

photo © Artem Maltev on Unsplash

Under the Spell of Language

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

〰 Roald Dahl 〰

“It's not by chance that the word spell has this double meaning - to cast a spell, or to arrange the letters in the correct order to spell out a word,” says David Abram, philosopher, magician, and founder of the Alliance of Wild Ethics.

To be able to arrange letters of a word ~ which was originally a spoken sound ~ in the right order. To then translate these letters into tiny symbols made up of lines and dots. To write sequences of symbols in ink on paper, which can be translated back into a spoken word by someone else ~ may well be the greatest invention of mankind.

This extraordinary feat has established itself as the familiar, ordinary activity known to every schoolchild as writing and reading.

This same activity “was experienced by oral peoples, who had not met the written word before, as magic, as a very powerful form of magic,” says Abram.

In short videos on the Magic of Reading and the Spell of Literacy David Abram leads his audience into a world, which enables us not only to see language, words, and the ways of communication we take for granted come alive in a new light. Being a professional magician, he can also teach us about magic.

As he picks apart the wonders of ‘these little bits of ink on a page’ which enable us to not only eavesdrop on conversations held in far away places, but also witness what people said thousands of years ago, Abram takes us on a journey starting with ‘ostensibly inert bits of ink on a page’.

‘Magic’ simply means here that certain aspects of the process remain behind the veil of understanding and require a leap of faith. As soon as the ‘magician’ (= writer of the words) reveals their secret, the magic becomes part of ordinary everyday interaction with life.

For the oral peoples, words and their ability to string stories together held a different kind of magic. The notion that words and stories had a life of their own was familiar and ordinary to them.

“Among the Cree of Manitoba, for instance, it is said that the stories, when they are not being told, live off in their own villages, where they go about their own lives,” David Abram shares. “Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and go hunting for a person to inhabit. That person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale out into the world, singing it back into active circulation.”

Elizabeth Gilbert tells a related story about ideas looking for people to inhabit. She remembers meeting Ann Patchett for the first time at some event. Both were staying in the same hotel. Over breakfast they got talking about their current work.

Ann Patchett spoke about a novel set in the Amazon rainforest. A young pharmacologist the main character. She travels to Brazil for some drug research, gets entangled in dark events in the jungle, and makes extraordinary discoveries…

What?! Elizabeth Gilbert’s jaw dropped. This had been her idea for a novel! Or at least Ann’s idea had unbelievable similarities to one of her own…

However… she hadn’t followed through. While her Pharmacologist-in-the-Amazonian-Rainforest-idea had been languishing in a drawer, it had gone off to find another writer who was ready and willing to run with it. The result of this story idea is Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder, published in 2011.

photo © Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Literacy of Magic

Only as the written text began to speak

would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade.

〰 David Abram 〰

Long before the written word lost its magic to normality, our ancestors were familiar with a literacy of a different order. Magi and druids were adept in the art of receiving messages from the natural environment and divine sources by reading oracles ~ just like all other priests and priestesses of the Ancient world.

Oracle [from Latin orare = to pray] is defined as a “message from a god expressed by divine inspiration through a priest or priestess, in answer to a human inquiry.”

Oracles could be received by mancy [from Greek manteia = oracle, divination] in many forms.

In Ancient Greece, the person who received such divine or supernatural messages was called mantis [from Greek mainesthai = to be inspired] defined as seer, prophet; one touched by divine madness. (The word is related to Greek menos = passion, spirit. It is the ancestor to many English words, including mania, mental, mind, money… to name a few)

The following list of words gives an overview of the wide spectrum of mancies, which mantis seers were able to receive. Some of these ways of reading an oracle continue to be practiced, or have been revived in recent decades.

alectryomancy ~ divination by means of a cock and grains of corn
anthracomancy ~ divination by inspection of burning coals
arithmancy ~ divination by numbers
astromancy ~ divination by astrology, art of judging influences of stars and planets on human affairs
bibliomancy ~ divination by opening a book (especially the Bible) at random
capnomancy ~ divination by smoke
cartomancy ~ divination by means of playing-cards
ceromancy ~ divination by means of melted wax dripped in water
chiromancy ~ divination by the hand, palmistry
cleromancy ~ divination by throwing dice
crystallomancy ~ divination by means of crystals
enoptomancy ~ divination by means of a mirror
geomancy ~ divination by means of signs derived from the earth,
gyromancy ~ divination by a person walking in a circle marked with characters or signs
ichnomancy ~ divination by reading of traces of footsteps
lecanomancy ~ divination by inspection of water in a basin
myomancy ~ divination by the movements of mice
necromancy ~ divination by communication with the dead
oneiromancy ~ divination by interpreting dreams
ophiomancy ~ divination by the movements and coilings of snakes
ornithomancy ~ divination by movement of birds
pegomancy ~ divination by fountains
psephomancy ~ divination by means of pebbles drawn from a heap
psychomancy ~ divination by consulting the souls of the deceased
pyromancy ~ divination by means of fire
rhabdomancy ~ divination by dowsing, use of a divining rod
rhapsodomancy ~ divination by means of verses
scapulimancy ~ divination by means of the cracks in a shoulder-blade put into a fire,
sciomancy ~ divination by communication with the shades of the dead,
spodomancy ~ divination by means of ashes
tephromancy ~ divination by means of ashes from a sacrifice

photo © Mahtab Naghedi on Unsplash

Inflation of the Supernatural

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
〰 W.B. Yeats 〰

The word magic [from Old Persian magush = member of the priestly class] was adopted into English in late 14 c. Originally called magike, it was known as the “art of influencing or predicting events and producing marvels using hidden natural forces.”

Our ancestors assumed this ’supernatural art’ to include ‘the art of controlling the actions of spiritual or superhuman beings’. The jump from controlling the supernatural to associations with sorcery and witchcraft was a comparatively small leap of faith.

Four millennia or more before the words sorcery (c. 1300), witchcraft (1100s?), and wizard (15 c) arrived in English, there were the Celtic druids.

Although direct historic records of these ancient ‘magicians’ are scarce or non-existent, they have been mentioned with great reverence by the Greeks and Romans, going back to at least the 3rd millennium B.C.

“The idea that the Druids were astronomers – observers of ‘the heavenly bodies and their movements’, men who could be compared with Magi of the Persians and the Chaldaei of the Assyrians – is also borne out by the archaeological evidence.” (Barry Cunliffe: Druids, A Very Short Introduction, 2010)

The word Druid entered the English language in the 1560s [from Celtic derwos = true, tree + wid = to see, know] in the sense of true seer.

It is noteworthy that the Anglo-Saxon word treow (equivalent of Celtic derwos) was also used in the sense of tree and truth.

The transfer of the sense of magic from true knowledge to sorcery and witchcraft developed with the colonisation of European indigenous religions by Christianity.

In the Middle Ages, natural magic, which ‘did not involve the agency of personal spirits’ was considered legitimate, as long as it could be ‘explained scientifically as the manipulation of natural forces’.

The further shift of magic into the realm of conjuring tricks by sleight of hand and optical illusion happened in 1811.

Magical objects appeared around the same time. Take for example the Magic Carpet, an enchanted kilim, with the spellbinding power to transport passengers to any destination of their wishes.

Over the past four centuries, the word magic has suffered multiple assaults of identity theft through the development of commercial products which are anything but magical ››› from the ‘Laterna Magica’ (1670s) via ‘Magic Markers’ (1951) to a barrage of contemporary ‘magical cleaning products’ and ‘cosmetic magic potions’.

Such inflation of the use of the word magic, however, does not affect its powers of charm and enchantment. Magic is still all around us.

Magic can be found everywhere, by anyone called to practice the magical art of true seeing, which may include true listening, true smelling, true savouring… in other words, the authentic use of any functions of our sense organs.

Listening to a tree is a good way to start practicing the art of magic.