Is Magick Necessary?

Discovering your innate power may be all you need

Photo: oxygen/Getty Images

Several years ago, I experienced an epiphany.

I was asked to write a new introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Richard Cavendish’s 1967 occult history The Black Arts. Cavendish’s title has always sat poorly with the “white magic” crowd, the witches, occultists, and spellcasters who want to be “understood,” who want to signal the beneficence of their work. One British publisher, in an act of chickenshittery, even changed Cavendish’s title to The Magical Arts.

I wondered how to address the title issue in my introduction. Cavendish died in October 2016 — 10 days short of his last Halloween — so he wasn’t around to talk it over. I asked myself: Did the English historian make a mistake with his provocative title? Did he leave the misimpression that ancient alchemists, soothsayers, wizards, and their modern equivalents were up to no good?

Help arrived from Yiddish Nobel laureate and novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), who was no stranger to the occult himself. In an appreciative 1967 review of The Black Arts, Singer wrote: “We are all black magicians in our dreams, in our fantasies, perversions, and phobias.” In essence, we are all after the same thing: power. We hate to admit it. We immediately argue with the suggestion, slander the messenger, and insist that our search is about truth, self-knowledge, and service. Yeah, sure.

Cavendish’s title does not require defending. It is honest. I believe him when he wrote: “No one is a black magician in his own eyes, and modern occultists, whatever their beliefs and practices, think of themselves as high-minded white magicians,” yet they are driven, as we all are, by the “titanic attempt to exalt the stature of man… this gives it [magic] a certain magnificence.”

In that sense, I think the categories of white and black magic are artifice. According to convention, white magic is considered beneficent and black magic selfish. I refuse to think in such categories. I think that is ethically muddled and culturally outdated. All magic, as with all spiritual practice, is a quest to bring empowerment and agency to the human condition.

We say, “Thy will be done” — hoping that the will of a higher power comports with our own. We reprocess the wish for personal power through scriptural verse, genuflection, moral vows, and forgiveness. Underneath it all, we are always saying “My will be done” — but we conceal that. And we assail whomever uncovers it.

I reject the black/white divide, but I celebrate Cavendish’s title for its candor and bravery. Finally, after years of search, I could acknowledge the gryphon in the living room: The ultimate end of the spiritual search is power and expansion of the human situation. With this admission, all kinds of intellectual lights began flickering on for me.