Magic is a troubling topic, largely because it’s so loaded with unrealistic associations.
Magic is not flying through the air on broomsticks and turning people into newts. The Lore is rife with stories about just such occurrences, but we have to take them with both a grain of salt and an open mind.
Here’s what I think. I think that for hundreds of thousands of years, humans functioned as integral parts of the natural world instead of trying to set themselves above the natural world. You know how dogs always seem to know when their humans are coming home? Or horses know what you want them to do before you ever give the command? Or cats know when you’re feeling sick and stop being jerks and spend the days laying on the bed with you until you are well? Humans used to have that telepathic capacity. Some still do, those who live as integral parts of nature.
The science of the mind was alive and well and thriving in ancient cultures. A person could be trained in the mystic arts just as easily as we now go to community college. Humans were telepathic, could see things that were “really there,” could use forms of hypnosis to influence people, knew the frequencies to create mass hallucinations or put people to sleep. In some places, India for example, there are still living saints and mystics with “powers” that cannot be understood. Ancient Bards in Britain could stand on the battlefield and cause the enemy to become confused, “in a fog” as some said, and attack each other instead of the opposing force, and they could also put an entire dining hall of strong, brave warriors into a deep trance-like sleep (although they may have had a little help from their friend Mr. Fermented Beverages). It was said that a Druid’s curse could raise boils on the skin, cause intense weakness or fatigue, or cause one’s bowels to be uncontrollable.
A Witch was said to have the power to fly through the air on a broomstick, or to turn people into other animals. There are numerous apocryphal explanations for the broomstick thing, most commonly that they coated hallucinogenic concoctions on the broomstick and rubbed it on their lady parts and then hopped around hallucinating that they were flying, which is both ridiculous and far-fetched in the extreme, not to mention undignified. And it is also extremely unlikely that they managed to turn anyone into a frog, lizard, newt, or rat. But it is highly likely that they were, like the Druids, trained in hypnosis, and could cause someone to believe that they had been turned into a frog, and then that person would hop around saying “ribbit, ribbit” until the hypnosis eventually wore off.
And there’s the all-important word: Belief!
Ah, belief, the power of the mind, and the power of fear to control the mind; yes yes, that’s the critter, right there. If there was a person or a group of people who were so trusted, so revered, and held so sacred that anyone so much as laying a hand to their sword in their presence immediately got them a one-way vacation to the nearest peat bog, then fear and awe of that person would tend to enhance people’s belief in their powers. If you piss off the Druids, they’re gonna say some magic words and you will suffer like you don’t even want to know. You know old Angus who lives out back of beyond who is covered in scabs and boils and is completely mad? He used to be a successful merchant, but one day he tried to overcharge a Druid and whammo, boils. Don’t fuck with the Druids, my friend.
In reality, old Angus probably got syphilis out (ahem) merchanting somewhere, but hey, what a great illustration of what the Druids are capable of. And of course, none of the Druids ever said, “No, that wasn’t us.”
Witches, mostly women, tended to be strong, decisive, independent, no-bullshit types who birthed the babies, tended the sick, and prepared the dead for . . . whatever disposal awaited them. Somebody who sees the incredible messiness of humanity on a regular basis doesn’t much care about “entitlement.” Royal diarrhea stinks no less than peasant diarrhea. Everybody gets conceived and born the same way, and dies the same way, so that makes us all pretty much the same to a Witch: Messy and smelly and prone to explode.
Witches were not particularly nice. No flowers and sunshine and fairies. They were, in fact, the hardest working humans in the entire Village, with a low tolerance for time-wasters and whiners. When a Witch got pissed at you, there was no telling what she would do. Best to keep well away and be super respectful, or you’ll end up like old Norbert who was a frog for a week. No really, a frog. Totally a frog, not a human-shaped hybrid who hopped around and ate flies and spent so much time in the pond that his skin got all wrinkly and he got the worst ever sunburn. I swear a real frog, because my mother’s sister’s husband’s cousin’s niece twice removed who cooks up at the manor house saw it all happen and she told her brother who told it to the Gaffer in the pub one night and he told me when I was a nipper.
As for flying through the air on broomsticks, well, it’s far more likely that those skilled in the psychic arts were familiar with some variation of levitation, and could will their bodies to seem or be lighter so they could leap higher and further and faster than ordinary mortals. It wouldn’t take much of an edge to blow a story up to Paul Bunyan size when combined with the background levels of fear and awe the average Witch inspired simply by breathing in and out.
Belief. And a few interesting skills acquired from years of study.
Those skills were real, they just may not have been exactly what got written down. Knowledge like they had got held pretty close to the vest. But let’s just stop for a minute and think about what we have learned through meditation and concentration, how our minds have expanded, how we have the capacity to heal ourselves or others with our hands, with our words, because we know herbs or frequencies or energy systems. How we can use our thoughts to shift a situation from uncomfortable to comfortable. Think about how much you have changed and grown over time since you first discovered that there was more to the world than what the eyes can see.
The Old Ways are still out there, we still have access to them. Obviously we do. But because we have devalued those skills and allowed them to lie dormant for the most part, we have to work a hell of a lot harder to learn them than our ancestors did. We have de-tuned ourselves from those frequencies by obsessively trying to debunk or aggressively disbelieve all “phenomena” as so much poppycock. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that Science Has All The Answers and that anything not explainable in terms of our (extremely limited) understanding of what the Universe really is and how it actually works . . . simply cannot exist. And it’s funny because what scientists on the sharpest part of the cutting edge are discovering are explanations for stuff that Mystics have been actually doing for thousands and thousands of years . . . When Einstein was looking for inspiration or a new question to try to find the answer to, he turned to Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine because he understood that what she was writing about was real, and that there was just no equation yet that could express what she was doing or experiencing.
We have to open our minds again and re-tune ourselves to the old frequencies.
If nothing else, we have to deepen our abilities to heal ourselves, because the pharmaceuticals and the garbage that passes for most food in this country are, literally, killing us. Baseline, everybody should have C&G tuning forks, a singing bowl and a drum or rattle. Learn to use your voice to carry your mind into meditation. Learn to use your hands and your body as your drum when nothing else is available. There are so many classes and courses and workshops available that I can’t even count them all. Find one. The Sound Healing Academy, where I am currently enrolled, has frequent online trainings, and their entire curriculum can be done online as well. I have been a Reiki practitioner for years, but frankly, and no offense to any other Reiki masters, Reiki is a pale fraction of what Sound Healing can do. Tune up, y’all. It’s miracle time.
But we also need to be working to shift mass consciousness from the paradigm of Humans Over Nature, to Humans Part of Nature. We aren’t better than the wolves or the fish or the bugs (well, except for wasps and mosquitoes and those stupid box elder bugs, and don’t get me started on those fake-ass ladybugs from Japan). We need to get over our tiny selves and re-integrate into planetary consciousness, because that is where all the mystery that is Magic, with or without a k, lives.
And I’m certainly not advocating a return to superstition or a rejection of science. We need science, clearly. We need to study and understand better what impact our actions are having on the world before we mass-produce something as diabolically poisonous as the horseless-carriage. We need to tune into the deep wave of knowledge that flows through our Universe and contemplate our actions, ask for solutions, and learn to trust that when we tune into that frequency, we get the most loving information for the highest possible good. We are all eternal, infinite beings, so we need to leave Earth-Mother intact not just for our children x7, but also for the next versions of us that will walk this land. You know how much it sucks waking up to a big mess the morning after a righteous party.
The marriage of Science and Mystery is happening, whether anybody wants to admit it or not. Almost every new advance in our understanding of quantum physics explains some power of the mind we’re rediscovering. Instead of denying it, or saying, “Oh, what I’m experiencing isn’t magic, it’s just physics,” say, “Oh, wow! What I’ve been experiencing for twenty years is actually real and can be explained by physics! Welcome to the party, guys!” The more we claim it and embrace it and apply it to the work we do, the more powerful–and verifiable–that work becomes.