I have developed over time and experience, several categories of general ideas, guesses, and opinions I have for the Craft of Magic and the way that Reality exists. Two of them are what I call “Assumptions” and “Working Theories”. We will look at some of the others in future posts but let us look at these first.

The Oxford Dictionary defines an assumption as “a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof.” Mine are about some of the basic building blocks and conditions that I feel must be true for this Reality to make sense. You may decide that you agree with them, or as is often the case when discussing things we can not see or prove, decide to disagree. That is perfectly ok.

A “Working Theory” is just that, a set of guesses that I have about how the bigger Assumptions work. A bit more of the “well, it probably goes like this but it might go like that” kind of thing. A working theory can be and will get reworked or even discarded based on new evidence or new conjectures while leaving the belief in the underlying assumption still in place.

“All Systems Are Arbitrary”

One of the books that have taught me a lot is “Urban Shaman” by Serge Kahili King, which discusses Hawaiian shamanism as was taught to King by his adopted family. In it, he sets out the “Seven Shaman Principles”. There are seven fundamental principles with an additional fourteen corollaries.

We will discuss the book further in later posts. For now I want to just mention one of them which is a corollary of the First Principle that states, “All systems are arbitrary”.

There is no ultimate Truth. Not if we are going, to be honest about things. Every one of us is the total of our experiences and our education. Many of them are unique. What we are told by our teachers and read from great books in hearsay and second-hand information. Even the discoveries that are so talked about by science have to be taken on faith. They can do the math, show you the data and explain what it means but do you have the education to tell if what they say is true or just made-up BS?

Theologians, educators and scientist will all argue that their systems are based on facts and truth but there are always those occasional exception, aren’t there? Things that don’t fit, or are the fringe of happen stance. Then, let’s throw in some of the ideas about Magic too. You end up with a Universe of maybes and what-ifs.

The true measure of a system for me is simply “Does it work for me?”

I am perfectly happy to use a system that has a hole or two in it, even one that admits to not knowing the answer in some (or even many) situations IF using it gives me results with some reliability.

As an example, consider the time around Columbus’ voyages to America (the 1400s), when it was becoming common to accept the Earth was round and not flat. Consider two ship captains. One who accepts the new reality of a spherical World and another who isn’t quite convinced yet, and still considers it to be flat.

The ability of a lodestone or an iron needle rubbed against one, to point towards the North or the South was well known by early navigators, and by the 1400s was a common tool used by them on land and at sea. The two ship captains wouldn’t know exactly why the compass worked, nor how and even if it still would give the new assumption that the Earth was round. They would though be well familiar with how useful the compass was to help guide them at sea.

Note that the effectiveness of the compass doesn’t depend on the correctness of the World view. It will help both men navigate. Your practice of the Art of Magic needs to be similar. Learn and practice skills that are effective no matter what your World view is. How do you do this? You read, you experiment. You investigate cultures and niche practices with an eye toward commonality.

For now, just remember to view things with an open mind.

First Assumption – “Reincarnation is Real”

Postulating a reality where there are non-physical spirits, powers and deities beg the question for me as to how they got here. If they share our World with us, then where do they reside? How did they come into existence? Why do they interact with us?

It’s not like we’re ever going to see an episode on “Animal Planet” about the life and mating habits of the wild spirits of the savanna. Not like we can see about penguins, bears, or even people. There is no “there they are” to the question. Spirits reside with us, but not “with” us.

You can quite easily build a worldview on the assumption that we each live one and only one life. Most Western religions do just that. That spirits, if they exist, are outside of humans in kind of a quasi-spiritual realm. Some reside in the good realm and others in the evil realm. And that once we die, that is it. We all go off to heaven or hell based on how we lived our lives or what our religious views dictate for us.

Some magical practitioners, usually ones raised in the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism do just that. Their power comes from God. Spirits, in the forms of angels or demons, are there only as an extension of God’s power, or their Adversary Satan. I don’t disagree with the source of these mages power within a Abrahamic centric magical system. It seems to work and that’s good enough for me.

I did have a real problem with the “one life and that’s it” theory from my late teens on. I’ll leave the specifics of my teen years for the “About Me” post. For now let me just touch on the core issue I had with this world view.

I personally believe there is a “creator of all there is”, a God or as I have come to call it a “Great Spirit”. That Great Spirit is a kind and loving God, one that wishes the best for me and the children that are the race of humans. This is a belief that stuck with me as I lapsed away from an organized Protestant upbringing and began looking into magic and the other spiritual paths out there.

That core belief in such a kind God runs counter when you take a look at the World around us. There is a lot of injustice and evil out there. Much of it comes to people undeservingly, through no fault or effort of their own. Bad things happen to good people.

How do you reconcile the two?

Take two people, one who is born in a moderately well-off family, with a pair of loving parents, other relatives there to teach and protect. Who has the advantage of being white, and with it the privledge that comes from that race. Economically secure and given an education in good schools that encourages their curiosity. Never goes hungry and never knows the fear of people around them who might do them harm.

Take the second person who is born in poverty. A minority and living in what could be reasonably called a “slum”. Single mother, who works too much and is never there. Perhaps even addicted to drugs or forced to sell herself for the money to buy food. Never knew their father or any other male role model. Schools are just marginally better than a jail, and where the teachers and staff offer no encouragement or support.

The first person when finished with high school can expect to go on to either college, or if not that, then a path to a good job, maybe a career that will offer a better future than their parents had. Who can count on finding a partner and settling down to raise a family.

The second person when finished with high school, if they even graduate, is faced with no job, no prospect of one that is better than flipping burgers for minimum wage. Who when faced with the crime and squalor of their neighborhood, decides to turn to crime to protect themselves and get ahead. Who ends up in a street gang and by 21 has killed.

By the dogma of “one life and you are judge by that”, the first person ends up in heaven and the second in hell. I couldn’t reconcile my belief of a loving God, with one who would let that injustice happen.

It took a while, it took a lot of reading, and serious thinking but I could, if I assumed that what actually happens to each of us, is that we are born into this life, live it learning the lessons we need to, then die to be reborn into another one to learn more.

In other words, reincarnation.

“What flavor of ice cream do you want? Vanilla or Chocolate…”

When looking at reincarnation one of the biggest dividers in “Do just humans reincarnate, or does all life do it?”

My Working Theory Of How It Works

Traditional magical lore postulates multiple “planes” that exist alongside the “physical plane” that is our World. The Ethereal and Astral are the ones most close to our own, while the Mental and Spiritual planes are higher and usually difficult for magicians (let alone normal humans) to access. It’s believed without having been experienced that there are other planes even above those.

Jason Miller adds two, the “Symbolic” he places between the Astral and the Mental, then the “Causal” (pronounced “cause – al”) placed between the Mental and the Spiritual. which he call the “Perfection” instead. We will discuss the various planes of existence, and their purpose and uses are, in a follow-up post. For now, picture Reality is kind of like an onion, with layers that wrap around and inter-penetrate each other. The Physical as the core, and the Spiritual plane the outer layer.

Most people who believe this structure, then go on to explain that humans reside on the physical plane but we have additional bodies in the ethereal and astral planes, and slowly develop a body on the mental plane as we experience our life