HATS OFF TO DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Wisconsin, a pair of men printed out a thousand or so copies of a game. It was amateurish and badly-edited, a Frankenstein’s monster of historical war-gaming (where grown men use miniature soldiers to re-enact battles like Thermopylae and Waterloo), world mythology, J. R. R. Tolkien, pulp fiction, and fairy tales. In my mind’s eye I like to imagine its creators wearing white scientist smocks, in a ruined castle or dungeon, bringing it to life during a thunderstorm. Looking back, I cannot help but wonder, did Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson know, could they have ever even imagined, that their little folio-sized game was about to change the world?

Mere hyperbole? No. That game, Dungeons & Dragons, not only went one to earn more than a billion dollars in sales over the years, it also helped generate hundreds of billions more in video games and online gaming like World of Warcraft. You could not have played WoW, or something like Fable or Final Fantasy, if Dungeons & Dragons had never existed; the stamp of D&D is on almost every aspect of such games. And then there is publishing. D&D practically reinvented the fantasy genre, which prior to the game had been lumped in with somewhat better received sibling science fiction. Inasmuch as most fantasy series are bad recyclings of The Lord of the Rings, most also show the hand of D&D, which has produced hundreds of novels tied-in to the game and its settings.

But let’s back up a second for the non-geeks in the audience (and if you stuck around this long, more power to you). Dungeons & Dragons, aka D&D, is a “role-playing game.” In fact, it invented the role-playing game, a pursuit that might best be described as “improvisational radio theater.” In D&D, one person takes on the role of creating a story, with a setting, characters, and very open-ended plot. The others each create a single character, to act as their alter-egos or personae in the game. In effect, they are each responsible for a protagonist in a story, while the fellow running the game sets the scenes and plays the role of the antagonists. There are of course rules, and numbers, and dice, and these define what a character is capable of doing. For example, all characters had have attributes like “Strength” and “Intelligence.” These come with a numerical value, so a character with Strength 16 is stronger than one with Strength 9, while one with Intelligence 12 is brighter than Intelligence 7. All this should be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever even been near a computer RPG. But unlike a computer game, the action is described verbally, and takes place more or less in everyone’s heads. It is a social experience that focuses on cooperation, communication skills, imagination, and math. All of which in my humble opinion makes it an infinitely superior experience to sitting in front of the video screen.

I owe my introduction to D&D to my elementary school, and to Ms. Virginia Nyahay. My mother had suggested the game to me before, after seeing an advertisement for it in Boys Life magazine. But my real introduction came later. Brought into the school’s “Gifted and Talented Education” program (and really, don’t those words just describe me perfectly?), G.A.T.E. coordinator Ms. Nyahay (who I learned recently went on to become a school principal) gave us a set of the 1977 revised D&D “Basic” rules, revised and edited by neurology Professor and child development expert John Eric Holmes. This was just before the D&D backlash, when grieving mother Patricia Pulling, understandably struggling to come to grips with her son’s suicide, decided to very publically blame the game for his death. It was also before the Christian Right started accusing it of teaching witchcraft (the way the same idiots blame Harry Potter today). No, in those days, it was seen as a good thing for kids, pretty much for all the reasons I mentioned above. Because of my interest in telling stories (or running my mouth and making up things, if you prefer), I took on the job of “mastering” the game. It was the dawn of a life-long love affair.

Aficiandados will of course know that the game has undergone several revisions and changes over the last 36 years, and that there are quite literally hundreds (if not thousands) of similar games produced by other companies. The internet is filled with long and often heated debates between fans of one incarnation or another arguing the inadequacies of all other versions. For my part, I will be the first to admit that I have played and preferred many other role-playing games to D&D, but this does nothing to dilute my affection and respect for the game. The latest version, the very badly named “4th Edition” (there have been at least 8 or 9 major versions, not 4) has been sharply criticized for making several changes to the game, and wildly cheered for the same reason. Playing it last year, however, was like being ten years old again, a heady whiff of nostalgia. No matter how much she has changed, the old girl is still at the core the same.

I mention all this now for a reason. Some time back I returned the favor Ms. Nyahay did for me all those years ago by starting a D&D club at my school. Dungeons & Dragons is, after more than three decades, still going strong enough that the latest version always gets translated into Japanese, and I thought it would be a good way to shift kids’ interests from PlayStation and Nintendo into something a bit more educational. The mother of one club member bumped into me in the hall this morning and ended up thanking me. Her son, who had always been ostracized and a loner, prefering to stay in his room with the computer, now has friends. They come over to play D&D. She says it has completely changed him. He laughs, jokes, has fun with them. He used to dread coming to school but now looks forward to it. I suspect that for every Patricia Pulling, there are a hundred other mothers with stories like the one today.

For me, I remain convinced that D&D helped strengthen my communication skills, and by running all those games and teaching others to play, the ease with which I can walk into a classroom and get kids to learn things I owe in part to the game. I also wonder if I ever would have gotten a Master’s in the field of religions and mythologies if not for D&D and its cousins. Nor do I think I am alone. Heather Burton, who has become a remarkable artist, told me playing D&D all those years ago helped spark her imagination. And I know a lot of other people reading this will have similar accounts (feel free to share).

And so I say, three cheers to the grand old game.

MIRIAM AND ME

I was just reading online that MGM is planning a remake of one of my all-time favorite movies, the 1983 thriller, The Hunger.

I hesitate to call it a "vampire" movie; after all, the "V" word never appears once in the film, there are no coffins or crucifixes, and the protagonists seem obsessed with seeing themselves in mirrors. But then again, if you were David Bowie and French national treasure Catherine Deneuve, why wouldn't you be gazing at your reflections all the time?

Proving "Bela Lugosi's Dead," Bowie and Deneuve reinvent the vampire

Bowie and Deneuve play John and Miriam Blaylock, an ultra-wealthy Manhattan couple who own a brownstone in Sutton Place, collect thousand-year-old antiques, and give classical music lessons to the spoiled rich girl next door. But like most beautiful people, John and Miriam have an eating disorder; once a week they go trolling in goth clubs and bars picking up young couples to slit their throats and drink their blood (no fangs for the Blaylocks...they carry little ankh-shaped knives on pendants around their necks). Miriam, we learn, has memories as far back as ancient Egypt. John she picked up in England about three hundred years ago, offering him the chance to live for ever.

Smoke and Mirrors: Deneuve lights up "The Hunger"

Miriam, however, lies. While she goes on ageless century after century, the lovers she cons into becoming like her only endure a few centuries before--in the space of just days--their internal clocks speed up and they age centuries. Problem is, they can't die. These poor bastards turn into weak, living mummies which Miriam keeps locked up in boxes in her attic.

John in the Box

If you want to know the rest, rent the DVD. Rounding out the cast, however, is a young Susan Sarandon.

Don't expect the movie to explain why Miriam gets to live forever while all her lovers wither; the Whitley Streiber book it is based upon--which is really more science fiction than horror--explains that Miriam is one of the last survivors of a parallel, blood-drinking species. Transfusing humans can help them live longer, but not indefinitely like her. The movie throws all the boring science out the window and replaces it with what REALLY matters; billowing curtains, superb classical music, and the lesbian love scene to end all lesbian love scenes.

F$@k Twilight. Like the Swedish Let the Right One In, The Hunger is vampire cinema for adults. Granted, it hit me like a ton of bricks when I was all of 15, but it has lost none of its power in the hundred or so times I have seen it since then.

The only thing that has changed for me since then is my understanding of the metaphor at the heart of the film. As a kid, I thought it was about the horror of getting old (watching David Bowie go from 30 to 110 in a few short days is horrifying cinema indeed, and the best age make-up ever put on film). Today, I suspect it is about relationships. I know how Miriam feels. There are the yummy people that you pick up and devour in clubs (tossing the empties into the incinerator you keep in your basement), and there are the ones you fall for. You tell them (like Miriam) "forever and ever," but then they end up getting old and stale. Sure, you keep them tucked away in the attic, and go up to whisper to them sometimes in the dark (classic Miriam line, talking to her mummified exes, "I love you, I love you all"), but you are already out there looking for the replacement.

I used to feel sorry for John. Now i identify with Miriam.

WICCA....THE OTHER WHITE MEAT

I ran into a witch the other day. Not the broom-stick riding, cauldron-stirring, poison-apple kind; she was the Goddess-worshipping, matriarchy, earth-power variety. In short, a Wiccan.

I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with Wicca, a modern religion with somewhat nebulous ties to traditional witchcraft. My affection is based on its core assumption, that each of us possesses the power “…to initiate change. This recognition of ‘power within’ moves us from mass passivity to personal responsible action. We are co-creators and must act with knowledge and responsibility…” (Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, Foreward, The Grimoire of Lady Sheba But this notion is common in most so-called occult traditions, which in general prefer magic (the concept that ritual action can allow the individual to affect the outcome of events) to prayer (the concept that ritual action can beseech higher powers to intervene in events). Wicca is hardly unique, therefore, in shifting focus from priests, ministers, and prophets to the individual person. But where my affection for Wicca ends is in its constant attempts to gain mainstream acceptance, forcing it to adopt more and more traits of conventional religions like Christianity or Judaism, and to “tone down” elements that might make the suburban middle class uncomfortable.

In its early stages, from its emergence in the 50s up until its explosion in the 80s, Wicca was charmingly loopy, making absurb claims and littered with a colorful cast of characters. It was more likely to just call itself Witchcraft in those days, and as a new faith worked overtime to suggest it was in fact an ancient tradition handed down in secret from ancient times. But we can hardly fault Wicca for this; all religions at the start concoct colorfully absurd origin stories. In the early days of Gerald Gardner, Alexander Sanders, Sybil Leek, and Lady Sheba, nobody seemed to be content to “just” be a witch, they had to be “kings and queens of the witches,” boasting that their families had been practicing the Craft in secret for generations and carrying out shouting matches and character assassinations against others with identical claims. As silly as this was, the tabloid spectacle of it all was still more amusing than what came later, as humorless feminists and crystal-clutching New Agers got their mitts on Witchcraft and made it painfully bland. Early on, one might catch witches dancing naked around a bonfire, howling at the moon on a spring night. Later on, they were far more likely to be in their jeans and t-shirts, sitting around a lump of quartz in the living room, holding hands and honoring “womyn power.” The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer pefectly summed up the 90s witch-scene in the fourth season episodeHush;

Buffy: (to Willow, who has just come from her first college witch circle meeting) “So, not stellar, huh?”

Willow “Talk, all talk. Blah, blah, blah Gaia. Blah, blah, blah moon. Menstrual life-force power thingy.”

Buffy: “No actual witches in your witch group?”

Willow: No. Bunch of blessedwannabes. You know, nowadays, every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she’s a sister to the dark ones.”

It was largely the mass-marketing of Wicca that leeched it of any color it once had. Where in the beginning you needed to seek out a coven and hand-copy their ritual book, the post-80s scene saw bookshelves groaning under the weight of self-help witch books, all of which had carefully exorcised “questionable” elements. It wasn’t enough to be about casting spells; Wicca needed to be feminist, politically correct, and environmentally conscious to sell. As it down-played spell-casting, backed away from practicing rituals in the buff, and did away with hiearchy and degrees, Wicca became acceptable to shy, mild-mannered boys and girls who wanted to be “different” without actually being different at all.

Despite the concessions it had to make (or more likely because of them), Wicca did succeed, far better than any other occult tradition could claim. It’s slow metamorphosis from lunatic fringe to pop phenomenon mirrored the journey of early Christianity (“Gee, if you guys could get rid of all those uncomfortable Jewish elements I’m sure the Romans would buy it”). Soon, with practioners estimated in the millions (high or low millions depending on who you ask), Wicca was head and-shoulders above similar alternatives to mainstream faith, and those others could not fail but take notice. In blatant imitation of Wicca’s success, Aleister Crowley’s own Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) has been restructuring and repackaging itself as a “Church,” with priests, bishops, and masses (ironic considering Crowley’s dim view of Christianity). Pointing out the fact that in his Magick Without Tears Crowley had disapproved of calling his philosophical system a “religion,” an O.T.O, member replied to me without blinking “but its more acceptable to the public if we call it that.” Had he not been cremated, ole’ Aleister would be rolling in his grave. It’s getting to be these days that the only occult traditions out there still willing to be politically incorrect, anti-consumerism, and unapologetically antagonistic towards conventional religions are Anton LaVey’s Satanists and the chaos magicians, God bless ‘em.

In short, I suppose I like my alternative religions alternative. I’m kind of crazy that way. While I have fond memories of my adventures in Wicca (dancing all night on May Eve, high in the Adirondacks, wearing nothing but a loin cloth and blue spirals all over my skin springs to mind), the bulk of the tradition has become something so tame and tidy it leaves me cold. To my mind, the whole point of magic is to steal fire from the gods, so an alternative religion based on worship and prayer hardly seems worth leaving mainstream faith for. To each is own, of course, but as even alternative religions go mainstream, I find myself being pushed further out into the fringe.

Which is good. I like it there.

ON THE "GOTHIC"

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House”

Though I don’t recall the percise wording, it was Clive Barker who described Gothic fiction as an art form which rejects psychological and pseudo-scientific explanations in favor of poetic, magical thinking. It earns the label, “gothic,” because it recreates the Dark Ages, a time of brooding uncertainty and dark superstition. Gothic came into its own with the Age of Enlightenment; as people turned increasingly towards rationality and reason in their daily lives, the superstitious and the sinister was repressed, predictably to find expression in art. Naturally it was in England—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—that it found its strongest voice and attracted its greatest practitioners before seeping out to infect the rest of the world.

I’ve written all sorts of things since I started around the age of 12, but it is invariably the Gothic that draws me back to write again. My attraction is twofold. On one hand, I write the Gothic because I am intellectually a rational materialist. My worldview does not generally include the supernatural (though I remain open to the possibility should evidence ever present itself). I don’t believe in the notion of devils, spirits, and gods except as projections of the human condition on the cosmos at large. Because of this, I suppose, the notion of them existing is particularly terrifying to me. Which brings me to the second point. I find it very difficult to understand people who do believe in the supernatural. That people chose to live in worlds where the disembodied dead continue to exist, where evil finds genuine personification in the guise of demons, where a single spiritual dictator sits in absolute judgement over all boggles my mind. Writing “Gothic” therefore is a way to explore that side of myself I usually deny, and to try to crawl into the worldview of people I do not easily understand.

My personal feeling is that man is by nature an amphibious being that swims in the lagoon of dreams and irrationality only to emerge and crawl about on hard, dry, logic. This seems natural and necessary: otherwise there would be no art, mythology, or religion. People with no poetry in their souls as at least as broken as those who cannot separate fantasy from reality, and the worst doom I can imagine is to “grow up” and become one of those 9 to 5 people who never allow themselves moments of childish terror and wonder. To characterize such pursuits as mere “escapism” is to mark yourself not as a human, but as some gray-faced automaton.

Aside from writing and telling stories, one of the ways I keep in touch with my irrational side is my “ritual chamber.” I keep a room in my house set aside for this, as what Anton LaVey so wonderfully called an “intellectual decompression chamber.” Inside that room, the unseen universe of devils, ghosts, and angels is real, and fantasies are indulged in. But these get left by the door. What happens in that room happens to scratch a primal, primitive itch, and when I emerge I can fully be the 21st century rationalist again. The same process occurs when I sit down to write (or role-play). I switch off the part of me that says “Humbug, bah!” and allow myself to think as a child again. I suppose because my world view is in general so bleak (we exist to propogate, life has no intrinsic meaning other than living, death is the end), I need these bouts of irrationality to vent off steam.

If I found religion, perhaps I would no longer need to write at all.

MY OBJECTION TO "OBJECTIVISM"

Don’t get me wrong; I am a fan of Ayn Rand.

Though a mediocre and exceedingly long-winded novelist, Russian born Rand (1905-1982) made a name for herself primarily via her books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. These works reflected and put before the public her personal philosophy, a system which eventually became known as Objectivism. When famously asked by a reporter to define her philosophy while standing on one foot, Rand replied; “Metaphysics = Objective Reality; Epistemology = Reason; Ethics = Self-interest; Politics = Capitalism.” Or to put it another way, reality exists independently of human thought or existence, reason is the only way to understand reality, the purpose of human existence is to find happiness and self-fulfilment, and a hands-off free market society facilitates the rest. For Rand, the most important thing was to think for oneself and never let those in authority—government, religious, or otherwise—dictate truth. Her “rational self-interest” included within it full respect for the individual rights of others, and encouraged people to take their ideals and through the manipulation of reality imbue them with physical form—art in the highest sense. Rand’s is an attractive, reasonable philosophy that would do away with a great deal of the idiocy we live with today. It is hard NOT to agree with her.

But the problem with Rand is that she died before the Gospel According to Bjork;

If you ever get close to a human, and human behavior, be ready to get confused. There’s definitely no logic to human behavior…

That Rand spectacularly misjudged the human animal is clear from her own personal life. For her, human beings could be taught to rationally judge their actions and act in their best interests. What she failed to consider is that a substantial portion of human behavior, quite possibly even the bulk of it, is instinctual, and that our actions tend to be dictated by subconscious impulses rather than rational and considered responses. I would submit before the court exhibit A, Rand’s own infamous affair with Nathaniel Branden.

Twenty-five years her junior, Branden was a follower of Rand’s and one of the arch-advocates of Objectivism. The two became close, and then romantically involved, despite the fact that both were already married and the considerable age gap between them. Both managed to convince their spouses, however, that their affair was supremely logical. It was only reasonable that two intellectuals of their calibre be drawn to one another. Thus the relationship went forward with spousal consent, and Branden rose to become Rand’s second-in-command and “intellectual heir.”

Nothing wrong with this; everyone seems happy. But wait…here comes the punch line.

Eventually similar “logic” convinced Branden it was time for him to take up with an attractive younger model, in addition to his wife and Rand. Furious, Rand made a public spectacle of disowning Branden and villifying him, the Ur-Objectivist proving the old cliché about hell, fury, and scorned women holds true for even the supremely rational. Her pain and rage devastated the organization they had built together, causing a rift amongst Objectivists. To my mind, there is no clearer indication that Objectivism is deeply flawed when its two highest advocates were incapable of acting in their own rational self-interests.

Message, Spock? “Humans, Ayn, ain’t Vulcans.”

No system of philosophy can succeed so long as it fails to take into account our animal natures. Behaviors demonized by religions and ignored by Objectivism have in fact contributed to the survival of our species, otherwise, either they would no longer exist orwe wouldn’t. Even the most basic understanding of natural selection bears this out. We may tell ourselves that our territoriality, violent impulses, and over-powering sexual urges are—like the appendix—useless vestiges of a primal past, but very little in human history or current events bears this out. As uncomfortable as “civilized” people are with the fact, there is very little in modern human behavior that is functionally any different from other pack-mammals. Like chimpanzees or wolves we have hierarchically organized packs, we remain fiercely territorial, will kill to defend our territory, and once our bellies are full spend considerable amounts of time thinking about breeding. If modern Americans, ancient Romans, and a band of gorillas all have much the same behaviors, perhaps it is time to acknowledge they are vital aspects of our being.

Rand also makes the mistake of assuming everybody wants to be “John Galt.” The truth is, there are many types of people, some of whom are fiercely independent, some who want to lead, and some to whom the idea of standing out fills them with mortal terror. Again, we see the same in other species, and it may be something in our DNA. I’ve heard the arguments that if we teach people to think for themselves, they all would, but such egalitarianism excludes the possibility that many people like to be told what to do. And while I would agree that our current education system is designed to create workers rather than free thinkers, isn’t it odd that some free thinkers still emerge from the system? Perhaps free-thinking is something inherent in their natures, something that cannot be beaten out of them even through the banality of modern education.

It would be nice to think that everyone could learn personal responsibility and act rationally. But there are a great many people who will have sex without that condom knowing the dangers, people who smoke knowing it might kill them, people who reach for the sixth or seventh drink before they have to drive home. Surely they have been educated to the dangers, but the fact is the urge to feel good often triumphs over reason. It may well be that before we can improve the human condition, we need to figure out some way to safely satisfy and indulge our animal behaviors. Ignoring them hasn’t seemed to have worked so well, not for Rand or anyone else.

IMAGINATION AND THE END OF HISTORY

Deprived of the hawk’s keen eyesight, the wolf’s olfactory prowess, or the tiger’s teeth and claws, the human animal was compensated with superior problem-solving capabilities instead. Put a chimpanzee in a room with two sturdy boxes and a banana dangling from the ceiling just out of reach, it will never occur to our monkey friend to stack the boxes and stand on them to get the fruit. A three-year-old human will.

What this means is a uniquely human capacity to conceive of things not as they currentlyare, but as they might be. We call this faculty “imagination,” and it very likely our greatest gift. Without the ability to first imagine, invention and problem solving cannot occur. Instead we are stuck with things as they are, reacting to our environments but not consciously acting upon them. Imagination is the single root of religion, art, and science (for despite the popular conception of scientists as unimaginative technicians, it’s frankly impossibly to hypothesize unless you can imagine what might be). Humanity owes practically everything it has to imagination.

Ironically, then, imagination is something we are quick to stifle in children and remain suspicious of as adults. Past a certain age, being a “dreamer” takes on negative connotations, and we push our adolescents to grow up and live in the “real world.” Public educational systems (at least the ones I have had experience of in America and Japan) seem far more content to focus on memorization and repitition than the active encouragement of creativity. Too often, even when schools do include art, literature, and music in their curriculums (such programs are nearly always the first to go when budgets get tight), they emphazise established art forms and encourage imitation of them. I am sure we all recall being told the “correct way” to interpret Shakespeare, “why” Mozart was a genius, and “what” makes Monet gifted. Far less time is given on activities that encourage students to imagine their own forms of self-expression.

This is not a criticism of teachers. The old addage about “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach” is not only crap, it demonstrates the misplaced value society places on being the worker bee rather than the thinker. Teachers—particularly when they are young and new to the profession—seem hell-bent on encouraging imagination and creativity in students. It is not until the strictures of the system crush this out of them that they give up and start teaching by rote. Public education is ultimately in the hands of politicians, and this, frankly, is what is wrong with it. It is easy to assign blame to the teachers for failing schools, but we are quick to forget they are bound by rules and policies born out of re-election campaigns and not any real interest in nuturing minds. Invariably this is why alternative schools—allowed to break the rules—perform better.

Both in the United States and Japan there is tremendous anxiety over falling test scores and schools that seem to be in decline. But my suspicion is that there really has been no change in the school systems at all…and that itself is the problem. American public education was designed to create factory workers, people with basic skills who could work in the mills and assembly lines. Japanese public education—pre-war—followed the German model, which focused more on making soldiers (you see remnants of this in the military style school uniforms). After the war, it imitated the American model of producing workers. These systems are wonderful for industrialized nations and establishing economies…but what happens after? What happens when you have a populace trained to be obidient and compotent, but not imaginative or creative? Once the factories have all been manned and built, the world moves on but the educational system does not. It may be that neither of these school systems are in decline…they simply are not designed to deal with a post-Industrial world.

The horrible truth may be that what we know of human history is slowly coming to an end. For thousands of years, societies have required large populations of obedient workers who do what they are told and don’t ask questions. Creativity and imagination could safely be in the hands of the few. But when a single farmer can now harvest a field with the right machine—as opposed to requiring hundreds of hands—or when a factory line can be entirely automated, educating the populace not to think, dream, or ask questions is suddenly a liability. It was back in the late 1960s that Anton LaVey noted we were entering a new era in which one child who could create was infinitely more valuable that one hundred that could “believe” or “obey.” Unfortunately, societies have not caught up with him.

The rules have all changed, and I say, "viva la Apocalypse."

THE MATERIALIST MAGICIAN

While I await the appearance of Alan Moore’s “Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” (which judging from his magnificent “Promethea” comic series is bound to be the best thing to hit the occult since Crowley, Spare, and LaVey), I thought I might spill a bit of virual ink on the subject myself

In his rather amusing Screwtape Letters, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis writes that Hell’s greatest achievement would be a “materialist magician.” That’s rather flattering of him, actually. It gives me a warm feeling inside.

It is not difficult to be a “materialist magician” if you have an understanding of what “magic” is and how it works. Indeed, atheism, materialism, and sorcery go very well together, the way strawberries compliment champagne. If you were to put me in a room, for example, with Richard Dawkins and Pope Benedict, I can guaruntee that two of us would find common ground, while the third would remain convinced we were both going to Hell. You do the math.

Naturally, we are not talking “Harry Potter” here. Before we go any further, it might be useful to define our terms. A definition of “magic” that would satisfy everyone from Yanomamo tribesmen to comic-book writing sorcerors like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore would be this; “the idea that ritual action produces specific results.” Essentially, magic is what prayer (“the idea that ritual action moves spiritual beings to produce specific results”) might look like after Ockham took his razor to it. It cuts out the middle-man. This is not to say that magic does not occassionally include the participation of spiritual beings, but the fundamental difference is that the magician is telling the spirits and not asking. In other words, the magician is the cause of the change, and not the spirit. This is significant because for prayer to work, the spirit must literally exist. It must have objective reality to hear the supplicant and grant the wish. For magic to work, the spirit need not “really” exist at all. Rather it can be understood as a symbolic device, an aspect of the magician’s own consciousness, or a pleasant hallucination. Indeed, the magicians who get themselves into trouble are the ones who start to believe the spirits are real. It’s a rookie mistake, but a lot of people make it.

The other rookie mistake is to expect too much from magic. The people who “do not believe in magic” are invariably those who A) never tried it, or B) tried it expecting the wrong effect. The shy, pizza-faced nerd who stands in a magic circle, chanting for the girl-next-door to fall madly in love with him, will inevitably become one of those who do not “believe in magic” when his spell fails. He will probably never understand what he did wrong.

To understand this, let’s first be clear that magic can be divided into two broad categories; the practical and the psychedelic. The two are not mutally exclusive, and often cross paths. By “psychedelic” we mean “a mental state characterized by heightened or altered perceptions,” from the Greek psyche or “mind” and delos or “manifestation.” By practical I mean something intended to produce a specific result. Where people usually fail in magic is concentrating too much on the psychedelic elements, losing sight of the practical.

Again with our nerd. After reading some New Agey books, he stands in a seven-sided heptagon drawn in green chalk on his basement floor, on a Friday night, scattering rose petals. He is calling upon Venus, the goddess of love, to deliever the girl-next-door to him, and the book said all those elements (the number 7, the color green, Friday, rose petals) are sacred to her. He recites some incantations, declares what he wants (“…I want Becky to notice me”), and then sits around on pins and needles waiting for the lovely Rebecca to dump her jock boyfriend and go head over heels for him. The problem, of course, is that all his ritual actions are geared towards the psychedelic experience of Venus, and have no real connection to getting into Becky’s knickers. He will achieve neither because he failed to differentiate between the two.

What he should have done was stew around for a week without jerking off, letting his libido build up to painful levels. Then on whatever night he decided to set aside for his magic, he should engage in some ritual activity that recreates the effect he wants. Forget Venus; our geek should vividly recreate in as much detail as possible mind-blowing sex with the girl of his dreams. Let him verbally describe all the naughty things he’d like to do with her, or draw pictures of them, or even just concentrate intensely on them in his mind. Let him wank off until he can’t see straight, until ever ounce of his pent-up emotion and frustration is expended. Then he should burn all the ritual materials, put Becky out of his head, and act as if he already had her. Done properly, Becky should be out of his system. If she should suddenly see him in a new light, wonderful. But if not it shouldn’t matter. He has scratched that itch. The real power of ritual magic is not in external effects, but in internal ones.

Now, there are certainly tricks of the trade--a cocktail combination of applied psychology, cold reading, and chicanery dubbed by the late Anton LaVey as “Lesser Magic”—our nerd could use to get closer to Becky and make her notice him. But ritual magic is meant to affect the subject, not the object. This is where most people get confused. Used in conjuction with each other, these two sorts of magic can have surprising results. But to rely exclusively on ritual magic to affect your object is a sure path to frustration.

It is this critical misunderstanding that spawns the whole “black” and “white” magic nonsense. A great number of practicing magicians out there whole-heartedly believe it is wrong or “evil” to do things like cast love spells or throw curses. They advocate only magic that helps or heals others. They have spectacularly missed the point. Down through history, magic has been the last recourse of the downtrodden, the held back, and the repressed because it gets negative emotions out of your system. You cannot take a gun into the office and blow your idiot boss away, but there is nothing wrong with fashioning a voodoo doll of him, visciously and vividly dismembering it while reciting all the horrible things you want to happen to the man. It is percisely this sort of thing that magic works marvellously for. It purges the system, and if some tragic accident does befall the rotter, so much the better!

It takes a certain type of personality to do this, of course. If you are not the type of person able to engage in an unihibited release of emotions, magic is not for you. But in reality, magic demands nothing from you that Mardi Gras or really good sex doesn’t. You just have to let yourself go within certain pre-defined parameters.

And there is, of course, the odd coincidence factor. Looking back, I think I can safely say that magic has appeared to reproduce objective results for me roughly 75% of the time. Naturally, such results may have occurred anyway, and I only attach importance to them because of the ritual connection. Further, I have seldom relied on ritual alone, prefering to follow ceremonial magic with positive action. But I’ve never really felt the need to dissect these things, and am comfortable with “happy coincidence.” And though I have had some extraordinary encounters with “spirits,” I have never seen anything to convince me that I am not dealing with projected elements of my own psyche (On some occassions I was tempted to go the opposite way, as one autumn when a “spirit” delivered messages to me in a complex numerical code. Never good with numbers myself, it took me some time to decide whether I was in contact with “something” or whether I had tapped into some part of my head that could produces number puzzles spontaneously. Ever a fan of William of Ockham, I decided the latter was probably the case).

Perhaps what Lewis meant about the materialist magician being Hell’s greatest achievement is that such a fellow would have no use for God. Armed with science to explain how we got here, and magic to fill the gap of “making us feel better” that prayer is supposed to, the Old Boy becomes a bit irrelevant. One can have all of the weird and wonderful fruits of mysticism without really being a mystic at all.