I try to be an avid reader in my copious spare time, and I don’t mean with my ever-expanding RSS feed that aggregates occult, religious, pagan, current event, and the occasional comic blog. My living room at home could always use more bookshelves, and of the three people in my house, I’m the one supplying over 95% of the books, because of course magicians have books. Not all of them are on astrology, divination, conjuration, Hermeticism, or goetia, though. I have a strong penchant for works of the realm of pure imagination, which is to say fiction books.
One of my favorite fiction books ever, and one I highly recommend anyone interested in the brand of magic I pursue, is Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle. It appears to be out of print, but you can still find plenty of good used copies anywhere online. Basically, the premise of the book is this: what if the world we lived in obeyed Aristotelian physics, the cosmos was geocentric with actual crystalline spheres of the planets nesting around us, and history took a drastically different turn during the reign of Alexander the Great that continued the supremacy of Athens and Sparta across the Western world for another millennium? It’s a fantastic exercise in exploring an alternative reality and an alternative history all at once, told in the style of a first-person Homeric epic. Besides its good story and good world-building (of which Richard Garfinkle is an expert, I claim), this is one of the essential books any Hermeticist should read at least once.
However, it’s not all about alchemy and astrology and celestial navigation, since the empire of the Delian League isn’t the only contender for world domination. There’s also the Middle Kingdom, which some of you may recognize as a translation of 中國, referring to China, and they have their own notions of how the world works that doesn’t obey the laws of Aristotle and the alchemists. The Delian League can’t for the life of them figure out how Middler technology works with its weird energy flows, nor can the Middle Kingdom figure out the senselessness of Delian alchemy and science. This goes right down to some of their fundamental notions of science and philosophy that shape their entire worldview, such as the connection between science and medicine. The Athenian Academic Aias, at one point, interrogates the rural Middler Dr. Zi about what Aias perceives to be highly advanced Middler spy communication technology:
“Why does an ordinary doctor know about this?” I asked.
“Medicine is the foundation of science.” he said in the same mechanical way I might recite Aristotle’s laws of motion.
I had seen that sentence in several texts on Taoist science but had never believed they meant it. To our science, medicine was an offshoot of zeology, the study of life, and anthropology, the study of man. No Academic could believe that such a minor offshoot subject could be the cornerstone from which an understanding of the world could be built. (page 158)
Later, after some fairly big conflict in the story, Aias interrogates the Taoist scientist Phan, sent on a death mission to kill Aias and sabotage his mission, about how Phan can know so much about medicine:
“Are you a doctor?” I said, recalling Dr. Zi’s peculiar claim of a connection between the whole of Middler science and their medicine.
Phan’s face wrinkled in contempt. “Certainly not.”
“Then how will you cure him?”
He switched to ‘Ellenic. “I know medicine.”
“But you said you weren’t a doctor,” I said in ‘Unan.
Phan’s black eyes lit with a sudden understanding. “A doctor only knows medicine. A scientist must go beyond that simple beginning. Medicine is the foundation stone of alchemy, and alchemy the foundation stone of science.” (page 256)
I see this kind of fundamental difficulty in trying to understand different occult systems replete throughout modern occulture. We take certain fundamental axioms as truly universal and, worse, for granted based on the system we find our intellectual “home” in, and when we try to apply them to other systems that don’t share those axioms, we run into wall after wall after insurmountable wall. Trying to apply a Celtic understanding of the world, for instance, to Egyptian metaphysics tries to combine two radically different systems that are based upon different rules and develop them differently into two radically different cosmologies. It’s not impossible to truly learn a different system, as I’ve mentioned before several times over, but it’s hard, because we essentially have to unlearn everything and start from the ground up in a totally new land that we’re unfamiliar with. It’s especially hard because we’re always tempted to bring a little of what we’re used to to this new land, and it often has no place right out of the box.
That said, I’ve found an easier way to go about learning a new system, and Aias describes how he became the first Academic from the Delian League to ever understand Middler science:
“We seem to be having a language problem,” I said to Phan. “Let us start from first principles. You know the atomic theory, of course.”
“I have seen that phrase in your books, but I have never understood it.”
“Atomic theory says that everything in the terrestrial world is made of minute pieces of earth, air, fire, and water. The material properties of an object can be changed by modifying the amount of each element it contains.”
Phan shook is head. “Anything can be in a state of earth, air, fire, water, or wood,” he said. “The ten thousand things are changed into one another by the natural flow of transformation.”
We continued to argue about basics for half an hour. I explained that matter and form were fundamental to the behavior of objects. He declared them to be accidents, saying that the flow and transformation of things lay at the heart of all science. At the end of that time we had found no common ground, but we were both very thirsty… (page 250)
“I need to know more about your science,” I said to Phan.
“Tell me how to teach you,” he said. There was a quiet glow in his dark eyes and something lay on his shoulders that made his seventy-year-old frame look younger and stronger. “If you can learn to learn, then perhaps I can as well.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I need to know your science, also,” he said, and his eyes grew brighter. “But where do we begin?”
“At the weakest point in the barrier between us,” I said. “The walls of theory are too high; let us start with practice. Show me your equipment. Pretend that I am not a scientist. Pretend that I am some ignorant bureaucrat who wants an explanation of your work so he can make out reports.”
The old man smiled and bowed. “Will you do the same for me?”
“Of course.”
Over the next week, Phan and I gave each other basic introductions to the paraphernalia of our sciences. I showed him how we used rare and dense air to create forced motion, and he showed me how gold, silver, and cinnabar placed along Xi flow could modify or control natural motion. Slowly, the dark cavern in my heart began to grow bright with a second vision of the universe, one of change and flow instead of matter and form. And as the light of practical work grew from a flickering candle to a solar beacon, it illuminated the bewildering Taoist texts I had studied over the years but had gained nothing from. (page 299)
We don’t call it the Study.
We don’t call it the Theory.
We don’t call it the Lesson.
We call it the Work, because we have to make it work. Theory, study, and lessons aren’t enough; they’re all well and good in the abstract, but unless you can pull those things down and apply them in the real world, they get locked up in an isolated ivory tower, and they lock you up with it.
In my experience, the best way to understand how a different tradition works is to go out and see what it does. Not what it believes or what it claims to exist, but actually what it does. It’s the Work, the hands-on practical use and application of the tradition, that shows what it does and how it does it. I mean, consider what the ancestors of our ancestors were doing when they first stumbled upon this stuff. They had no preexisting theories, no cosmologies; they had the land around them and shit happening because of unseen forces. They acted in a certain way, and the unseen forces and the land reacted in a certain manner. It was only after they started codifying and assembling what they learned did the theories come around, and based on what each tribe of ancestors thought was most important (warmth from snow, harvesting enough fish, protection from tornadoes, warding off plague, etc.), they would have focused on different things to do, and thus the theories they developed would have been different.
Thus far in my occult life, I’ve come in contact with Santería, Palo, Quimbanda, Aztec and Mayan stuff, Celtic stuff (both neopagan and reconstructionist), Ásatrú, Thelema, esoteric Judaism, and so many other traditions both modern and ancestral. No, they’re not all compatible to practice side-by-side. No, they don’t agree on why the world works or what a particular entity is or whether a particular thing is ruled by a class of spirits. No, they don’t all think the same things are important. And you know what? That’s all entirely okay, because what they all do is manage the bullshit we have in life. They all manage to achieve particular ends using a particular set of techniques, and that’s what we see first and that’s what we continue with when we learn a new system. Just because they have different and often-conflicting ways to describe the cosmos doesn’t mean they’re not internally coherent within their own individual traditions.
Forget the theory and cosmology and cosmogony; all that will come with time. If you never saw something fall to the ground, why would you believe gravity to exist? If you never had to undergo a shortage of healthy and safe food, why would you believe food poisoning or famine in another country to exist? Humans have to see to believe, and we like hands-on stuff the best to drive the strongest points home. Once we figure out what can happen, we can eventually puzzle out why it happens based on what we know and the hypotheses and explanations we devise that we can put to further testing.
But even then, it all comes down to Work, and when explaining your work, never start with “why”. Ask “what” or “how”. What are the tools you use? How would you describe the effect a particular tool has when used in a particular way? What are the forces you call upon? What are their names? How do they interrelate and interact? How do you gain confirmation that something works? How do you gain information about something you don’t know yet? What do you need to achieve a particular end?
Remember: without work, you’re not doing the Work. See the work that others do to understand their Work.
