An Enchanted World

I am relatively new to the bloggers' world. Over the weekend, while trying to access my blog, my eyes landed on my blog count. I was surprised that since April this year, I have written almost 180!  A question popped up: "Whose blogs did I enjoy most"?". I discovered three. I found that compared to theirs, mine limps along as clumsily as a grounded albatross or platypus! What do their blogs have in common? They have all been carefully planned, with well chosen background colors, words in appropriately contrasted font and text colors, beautiful and sometimes stunningly beautiful photographs, melodious music and short, precise words often in the form of poetry. In short, they suggest to me a world very different from the everyday lifeworld that I inhabit. I was shocked a little bit later by what I disovered when by hazard I picked up a book by one of my favourite authors, Thomas Moore, then lying on top of a pile of books close to the window ledge beside my bed. The book was entitled Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. I opened it. My eyes were caught by the chapter title "This Magical Life". Various passages were highlighted in the familiar green of my favourite marker.The qualities of my favourite blogs: imagination, enchantment and magic were almost exactly those mentioned by the author!

According to the cover blurb, Moore had been a Catholic monk for 12 years, then a clinical psychologist and is now a writer and lecturer who lives in New England with his wife and two children. He also has degrees in theology, musicology and philosophy and is an ex-professor of religion and psychology. 

Moore says he was surprised how much our secular life nowadays had been impoverished by the lack of magic. To the ordinary guy, life may seem complete with our fact based education, practical careers and workdays and entertainment aimed at numbing us to the pressures of modern life."What is missing in all this is the penetrating enchantment of every experience that rises out of a world that is alive and that has deep and mysterious roots of power.",says Moore.

In many cultures, the magus speaks of magic as a means of exercising power. But in our society, where power means domination of others and personal gain, the goal of magic is misunderstood. For centuries, there has been two kinds of magic. Black magic is concerned with coercing or inducing Nature towards our narcisssitic ends. However there is another kind of magic, more respectful and more humble towards Nature: white magic.  

As far back as 1487, Pico della Mirandola, had written in his Oratio, that white magic is "the highest realization of natural philosophy" but his friend and mentor Marsilio Ficino thought that on the contrary, philosophy should be the initiation into the mysteries of Nautre and of life. He practised what he preached. In his own work, it is difficult to distinguish between philosophy, theology, music and magic.

To Ficino, magic is primarily an erotic process emerging out of the interaction between plants, animals, humans and earth and generally Nature. It involves also inter-relaitonships of the elements and the "sympathies of body, soul and spirit". To him, magical effects may arise in our daily lives in the form of a view of life which sees life as  a connected and related community of beings in Nature and among humans.  If we apply this philosophy to our daily life, we can all find considerable power by living closer to Nature, not only physically, but in imagination.

We are accustomed to thinking that knowledge, education and literacy will save us from the threats of Nature and from our social ills. But to Moore, the magic of Nature is rooted in love. We should adopt a fundamentally erotic approach to every aspect of our life. We think we can solve all our problems through reason and we often approach problem solving through our intellect. But to Moore, our heart is usually not convinced by rational explanations. Nor is it much affected.

If we think that the heart is implicated in all our activities, we can then work to influence the "emotional pulse of the heart but to do so, we need to learn more skill in magic than in thought." We need to learn the magic of love. Ficino says: "the works of magic are works of Nature but art is its handmaiden...Nature is a magician." The arts of magic help us find power for the heart and offer a way of living so intimately with the ways of Nature that its magic becomes our magic. If so, we can "forge a creative and effective life by being tuned in to Nature's potency.".

To Moore, the word sympathy has long been thought of as a word of cause and effect as if it were a physical law. But it is not. It is a heart word. It points to an intimacy amongst things that is best expressed not through the laws of Nature but as natural affection, a "kinship of qualities that gives the impression that Nature is a web of connections rather than an arena of separate existences.".To Moore, the most rudimentary princple of magic is sympathy: there is a constant consonance of actual life and man's mythic memories: between life and imagination.

Frances Yates, writing about Ficino's magic, says "the magus enters with loving sympathy into the sympathies which bind earth to heaven ...this emotional relationship is one of the chief sources of his powers." . The magus is one who is so devoted to Nature that he lives in continuous sympathy with it. We often think of magic in obscure and esoteric terms. It is precisely this esoterism and exoticism which keep it away and out of our everyday lives. But if we look at magic as the magic of sympathies between things and apply this point of view to our daily life, we can see that even interior design, feng shui is largely the practice of natural magic. It is an attempt to arrange life for maximum sympathies between the house and man's lives, for emotional and practical powers.

Most of us finds it easy to love things, and know that things have relationshops amongst one another. We must learn to see everything through the eyes of love: our dogs and cats, our car, our home, our books, our musical instruments, our tools, the objects that we use. To Moore, the magician, like the mystic, is in love with the world of the senses and the world of mysteries and sees these two worlds as" inherently connected with one another". Thus Ficino loved to paint the ceiling and walls of his bedroom with stars and astrological signs so as to help him go  out into the world with a more acute awareness of the connection with ourselves and the world. 

The magus does not separate eros and logos, love and knowledge. He is a grounded philosopher utterly entranced by the world before his eyes. He "knows materials, colors, temperatures, properties, and the history of many things and in that knowledge, he finds power...is educated and trained not just to know about things but also to live in this world effectively empowered by the things of Nature and culture." He understands that man is not alone, that he is intimately connected to the world around him, not cut off from him, that the world supports him, offers guidance and sustenance and can help us make ordinary life extraordinary.

To Moore, the poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson both know how to keep the transcendental element intact and preserve the magic of Nature and write explicitly about the value of a magical approach to life. We must learn from them to tap the resources hidden in Nature and in the world around us, through the use of analogies, metaphors and images. We too, by living an artful life, can fill our lives with the materials and images that strengthen the imagination and shorten the gap between our sense of self and the "outside" world.

Magic is not just a procedure. It is a way of life. Magic is not just a matter of spells, talisman, angels conjuring, and alphabets etc. We can and must learn to use the magic of poetry and we may find to our surprise how little efforts may often bring huge rewards. We must use our imagination, our power to conjure up images which assists us to see the sympathetic connection between things and between things and ourselves, our lives.

We are a magic starved society. We try to create an effective and humane culture on the limited basis of scientific method, machinery and materialist philosophy and the more subtle and myterious resources of nature goes unnoticed and are dismissed as superstitition, eccentricity and naïveté.  But to Pico della Mirandola: "there is no latent force in heaven or earth which the mgaician cnnot release by proper indcuements". Since magic works primiarily on the basis of sympathies and similarities among the qualitis of things, the most effective decoys are images. We must learn thereofore to bring in the cosmos into our lives, through images of sun, the moon, the stars etc. In the ancient message of The Emerald Tablet, the centuries old summary of alchemical teaching says, :"As above, so below." Emily Dickonson knows how to bring magic into her life. She wrote to her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross: "Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.". Like her, we must learn to re-orient our values and learn to see everything through the eyes of the sympathetic magic between things and learn that everything in this world is connected through Eros, if only we know where and how to look. We must learn a lesson long forgotten since our childhood: we must learn to re-enchant our lives through the magical eyes of Eros.