The incantation abracadabra is derived from the Hebrew or Aramaic of almost identical pronunciation, meaning “I will create as I speak.” Etymology aside, this statement provides a fairly sturdy definition of magic.
Magic is action in the invisible world that produces a manifestation in the visible domain. To be considered magic the action must also arise via a mechanism that is mysterious or unknown.
Someone transported through time from the beginning of the last century or millennium would assume that the technology of today, mobile computers and communication devices for instance, are feats of magic. They operate in a medium that is invisible to the senses, through electrical impulses transmitted in the atmosphere. We call it science, though this may be a new name for the role played by people called magicians in times past.
Like so much technology, we see an externalization of powers that are present or latent in our human instruments.
In abracadabra is the essence of magic. An image is taken from the shelf of the great library of all possibilities and is concretized as an object or event. We are all unwitting magicians, for we demonstrate this phenomenon many times each day. We begin with an idea, or image, which is fully native to the invisible world, and communicate it into existence.
Is it not revealing that words are formed through spelling and a magician does his work by casting spells? Indeed, the event at hand is itself magical. The words I am writing here at my desk in the dark days leading up to the solstice are reverberating in your mind at some later date, in January perhaps, as the days begin to lengthen. The words resound and create meaning, and that meaning may evoke associations, emotions, and even inform actions.
In this sense all narratives arising from the invisible realm of thought are magical spells. They inform what we think, how we see, how we feel, what we do, and how we relate to one another. These spells are cast upon us from the moment of our birth, passed on by family, education, media, and reinforced though unconscious complicity in society. We are immersed in the magical field of a worldview that informs almost the entirety of our values and deeds.
For instance, the dominant lens of the present epoch is the atomistic, entropic worldview that goes under the general heading of science. Its magical effect is to evoke a sense of competitive isolation (survival of the fittest), meaninglessness (there is no mystery, only measurable data), nihilism (everything matters equally, i.e. nothing matters), and suicidal ideation (we are a danger to ourselves, one another, and life on Earth and might as well die). This is not to say that the scientific worldview is wrong. Nevertheless, its effect on the psyche of those in its spell is observable.
William Blake suggested that “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” This itself is a magical incantation, evoking the quality of wonder and unknowing that accompanies a sense of the infinite, the unknown. It points to the possibility and potential of setting aside the accumulated models and information about ourselves, one another, and the cosmos, and opening to direct contact with ourselves and the world.
Speaking is always casting a spell. Words and the narratives they weave give rise to thoughts, attitudes, and action, both within ourselves and others. Words have magical power. They may be used to destroy and create, to obscure and reveal. As begins the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word.”
To notice the force of the spells being cast, and to be aware that we are continuously casting spells, may itself begin to break the spells we are under. We may begin to believe less of what we believe, to be freed from the grip of opinions and assumptions, and seek to look and come to know directly, for ourselves.
The real white magic is to allow the words one speaks to vibrate in every resonant cavity of one’s instrument, in the chest and throat, head, belly, and spine. In this way the whole of oneself speaks, rather than a part. “I” speak, rather than “Jason.” And that wholeness effects wholeness. It knits fractured parts together and allows remembering, and healing.
I may intend to use words to cast spells that create eddies of harmony in the flow of my life and ripple out into the larger pool of life. With words made magic with intention I bring what was present in the realm of possibility to life. With words I set out a pattern of wholeness, as in the prayer of Jesus Christ: Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
This article appears in January 2025.
