It’s late. Really late. Tonight was a pretty good night, and you’re driving home in the dark in a great mood. Nobody else on the streets. Favorite song on the radio. Life is good. Suddenly you see a little way up the road, the only flaw in your perfect evening – a red traffic light. It’s as if the gods saw your awesomeness and conspired to bring you down a peg. Well, to hell with that!
Slowing to a crawl, you raise your hand and direct your will at the offending traffic light, mentally commanding it to change to green and allow you through (if you’re feeling extra saucy, maybe you’re pointing at the other green light, ordering it to turn yellow because that’s how it starts). Because, after all, it’s your True Will to get home, right? You have the right to absolutely DESTROY that street light if it thwarts you!
And oh yeah, that light gets the message. The opposite green obediently turns yellow, then red, and a moment later your light turns green and your foot hits the floor to launch your car homeward once more. Magic so kicks ass, doesn’t it?
Not so fast there, Perdurabo. What just happened may not have been magic at all. Traffic lights are typically controlled by an inductance loop in the roadway that tells it when a car is waiting, so it’ll usually change for you if there are no cars coming the other way (and are you really trying to pull out in front of traffic anyway?). The ones that aren’t controlled by inductance loops are on relatively short timers (between 15 and 30 seconds in the U.S.). Did you really do magic at all? What just happened is a fundamental part of human mental development – your brain performed a process called Pattern Recognition. The human brain has an extremely difficult time processing chaotic input, and strives to extract patterns from any given situation, no matter how random the signals. Pattern Recognition gives us a sense of order and therefore comfort, by telling us that everything does in fact happen for a reason. Even (especially) when it doesn’t.To put your light-bending in context, this is also why people see the face of Jesus in tortillas.
Before you get all upset and start warming up the hate mail machines, let me explain that I was wanting to post a Devil’s Advocate position on the existence of magic. There are many who claim magic doesn’t exist, or is merely an elaborate fraud, and they have excellent reasons for believing it. Magic being a relatively unexplored skillset in terms of actual scientific method, there are a lot of elements in traditional magic which may or may not be part of actually producing results.
My reasons for writing this aren’t to discourage anyone from the practice of magic, far from it. I wanted to present the counter-argument to magic so that you can practice better magic, cutting out most instances of self-delusion that can weaken your overall magical career. After all, when the chips are down and you’re working magic to correct a really important situation, wouldn’t you rather know what’s really going on?
Another psychological phenomenon which tends to lead people into attributing supernatural causes to mundane phenomena is Agency Detection. This is the mental process present in every animal species as a survival mechanism. It works by attributing unusual phenomena to a non-natural source, to put the animal on its guard by activating its defense mechanisms. For example, hearing a twig snap in the forest or hearing a creaking sound in a dark house at night. Both of these phenomena put both humans and animals on guard, and the first impulse is to assume some living thing caused these noises.
This is also postulated as the reason early humans developed the idea of religion, and the modern manifestation of this is the religio-political drive toward teaching Intelligent Design in schools. Crowley himself even claimed that the spirits of the Goetia (and, by extension, pretty much every other spirit magicians work with) were nothing more than specific portions of the unconscious mind. Ironically, this was the keynote of his introduction to the Lesser Key of Solomon, a book dedicated to the notion that these spirits had independent existence!
Wait, if all magic is pattern recognition and all religion is agency detection, wouldn’t somebody have noticed this? Probably not. The same psychological mechanisms which cause these operations also filters out information which doesn’t fit your comfort zone. Basically speaking, you will forget most of the times you “pushed” a street light and failed, and place greater mental emphasis on the memories of when you succeeded. This is simple Darwinism – you continue practices which have worked in the past and therefore place greater emphasis on success than on failure.
Why would people keep doing magic for thousands of years if it didn’t really work? Because it appears to, and the appearance is everything. Human beings go to great lengths to avoid discomfort, and ritual is very comforting. People enjoy the familiar because it distracts us from the chaos of everyday life, and even the most absurd superstitions produce just enough “results” to provide a sense of having confirmed them.
So how do I know I’m actually doing real magic, and not just fooling myself? In all likelihood, you don’t. The casual user only does magic once or twice a month, not nearly enough to notice any discrepancies in the pattern. Religious users are even less likely to notice, since very few people actually pray for something tangible they can count as an undeniable success. Most prayers are for “God’s will to be done” or for “someone’s soul”, which cannot possibly have any tangible result whether it succeeds or fails.
Are you saying James Randi is right, and magic doesn’t exist? No, unequivocally. James Randi is subject to the same psychological phenomena, and since his focus is that magic doesn’t exist, his confirmation bias highlights the times he judges psychics to have failed and ignores the times they have succeeded, even when they’ve succeeded repeatedly under lab conditions in his own facility. Interestingly enough, his website seems to suffer from confirmation bias as well, and successful psychic demonstrations have been inexplicably not included in his new website’s archives.
Are you saying James Randi is wrong, and magic does exist? No, unequivocally. It’s impossible to explore these phenomena objectively with a human brain, subject as it is to pattern recognition and confirmation bias.
How can I avoid falling into either of these traps? Start paying attention to the results of every working. Keep a journal if you have to. If you really want to try “pushing” traffic lights, bring a lawn chair and sit on the corner and spend a couple hours manipulating both sets of lights and mark down in a notebook each time you were or weren’t able to cause the light to change from green to yellow in a few seconds.
If you’re trying more for spells than telekinesis, pick one spell you feel you’ve had success with in the past and cast it ten times on different subjects. Do it the same each time, and take note of when you achieved the desired effect and when you didn’t. Use the same standards of success in each case.
Plus, do more magic. Do magic all the time, in every given situation. LIVE like a magician. When you’re doing a hundred small acts of magic every day, you’ll find out pretty quickly what produces results and what doesn’t. Confirmation bias only works as well as it does because of sample size – if you’re only doing magic a couple times a month it’s not enough of an influence on your life to remember the failures. Therefore, doing more magic means more input, and you’ll quickly figure out which acts of magic actually produce the desired results.
And honestly, at the end of the day, that’s the reason for every serious magician to do magic in the first place – to produce results. If your magic isn’t working for you, not making your life better, not giving you a greater level of agency in your life, why are you doing it at all?
“Success is your proof; courage is your armour; go on, go on, in my strength; & ye shall turn not back for any!” – Liber AL
Leave a Reply