On Christian Magic

And the reality of an animate cosmos

“…there are rising trends in science suggesting that what was once called magic is poised to evolve into a new scientific discipline, just as medieval astrology and alchemy evolved into today’s astronomy and chemistry. The new discipline will be the study of the psychophysical nature of reality, that mysterious, interstitial space shimmering between mind and matter. Understanding how this enigmatic space works in a way that’s consistent with the rest of science requires a new worldview—the lens through which we understand reality.” ~ Dr. Dean Radin¹

Over the past few months, I’ve been pondering the direction of this newsletter. What began as an exercise to push myself to write—something, anything—became an outlet for me to process my break-up with progressive activism and a reductive gospel of social justice. Recently, I’ve been challenged to clarify my vision for what I want to do here and set some goals. When I dug down deep and asked myself, “what do I really want to write about? What do I want to devote the most significant portion of my passion and energy to accomplishing?” the answer came back loud and clear: through writing and storytelling, I want to teach people about Christian magic. 

I sighed in frustration when I heard this answer. A few of my friends and a fair number of my readers will laugh when they read this, because if you know me or have read this newsletter at all, you will know that I talk about these two subjects with some frequency. I’ve written about the thin line between mysticism and magic, and the magical aspects of the Eucharist, among other things. Yet there’s something about putting those two words together in a mission statement that strikes me as hopelessly cheesy, like evangelicals who blatantly rip off popular books and movies while adding a salvation message. WitchTok and other manifestations of the occult trend show no signs of abating, and my head says that baldly presenting myself this way will come across as a desperate grab for relevance.

3rd century catacomb painting depicting Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead with aid of a wand.

But when I speak it out loud, I feel a deep-down sense of rightness and satisfaction. Yes, I say. Of course that’s what I want to write about. I love these two things, and I believe they are helpful and true and using them together is necessary for the moment we’re in. Christians, even the progressive ones, tend to get anxious and uneasy at any whiff of the magical arts, and occult practitioners are likewise suspicious of Christians. But I know that both these streams of spirituality have enriched my life, that one has enhanced my appreciation of the other, and that together they have helped me to better understand the nature of reality.

1. What is Magic?

What we call the material world is only a small piece of what exists. We know, for example, that there are frequencies of sound we cannot hear and wavelengths of light we cannot perceive. We know this because we’ve developed instruments to detect and measure them, but it doesn’t take any great leap of imagination to intuit that there are likely realities beyond our capacities for measurement that we remain blind to. Scientists are increasingly suspecting that the universe itself is conscious and that what we understand as matter may be a product of that consciousness. 

Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, who has PhDs in both philosophy of mind and computer engineering, likens our experience of the world to a pilot flying a plane in the dark. The pilot cannot see anything through his window, but the screens and dials on his dashboard tell him how high the plane is flying, what direction he’s going in, how strongly the wind is blowing, and whether there is anything in his path. These instruments are not actually the wind, the pressure of the atmosphere, the forces of gravity, or other objects in space. But they have a fixed and reliable relationship with those things that enable him to safely fly the plane to its destination. In the same way, our senses have evolved to take in narrow bands of information that exclude much more than they receive; it is this limiting of input that allows us to think at all. Like a pilot under cover of night, we see through a glass darkly, and most of the time, it is enough.

But sometimes it’s not. There’s a whole world of intelligence and causality beyond the limits of our understanding. It’s not so much that the material world is an illusion, as it is that matter, or nature, is something far vaster and more complex than we can comprehend, forcing our brains to create something like an illusion or simulation of reality that filters out any data not immediately pertinent to our survival needs.²

As the religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal asserts in his book The Supernatural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, nature is super and has properties and capacities far beyond our limited understanding. And we need to expand our modes of perception in order to communicate with this super-ness. Magic can be understood as a type of psychic or mental technology that allows us to engage with the unseen forces of causality to affect change in ways that can be perceived through the faculties of our ordinary senses. It is metaphysical in that it literally goes beyond what we understand as physicality. 

Prayer is a form of magic, as are religious rituals and mental methods like visualization and repeating affirmations, and yes, good old-fashioned spells. There are generally two main forces of causality we are trying to influence with these practices. One is any force or power outside ourselves—God, the Universe, spirits, angels, etc.—and the other is ourselves, which is to say our spirits, minds, and bodies. Ideally, we are targeting both in that we are attempting to reach the forces beyond ourselves while also preparing our own senses to receive something in return.

There are two primary modes of magic: thaumaturgy, the working of wonders and miracles—like performing a successful healing prayer or love spell—and theurgy, aligning yourself with the divine to become more like God (or the gods, for a polytheist). Classic contemplative practices can be seen as a kind of theurgy, as can the purification rituals of ceremonial magicians, like those found in the Golden Dawn. In fact, I would argue that the core sacraments of Christianity—baptism and the Eucharist—are essentially theurgy. Practices like divination and telepathic communication fall somewhere in between.

Not all modern magical practitioners are theistic. Some may rely purely on their individual will to make things happen, or they may engage in prayers and spells that invoke gods while understanding the rituals and their effects to be primarily psychological in nature— something often described as “hacking” consciousness. 

Modern scholars are questioning the line we tend to draw between religion and magic, pointing out that the practitioners of both often do the same kinds of things, like create protection, heal the sick, perform prayers or invocations, imbibe a sacred drink, or fumigate people, objects, and spaces with burning herbs or resins for purification. The distinction drawn is often a matter of who and what the powers-that-be deem legitimate.³

The obvious example is that of Christian missionaries demonizing and prohibiting animist and pagan practices, but the issue of legitimacy and moral value in magical practice is not limited to monotheistic religions. While a religious hierarchy or an imperial state may have an interest in suppressing anything that undermines its authority, all cultures engage in some form of magic and draw distinctions between good or acceptable magic and bad or harmful magic that are rooted in standards of prosociality.

They understand that the same magical technologies that can be used to provide healing and benefit can also be used to harm, just as a surgeon’s scalpel can be used to excise a tumor or to cut someone’s throat. Tribal and indigenous cultures are full of warnings about evil or power-hungry shamans, and witch-hunts are not a phenomenon unique to Christian Europe. The fact that innocent and vulnerable people—most frequently, but not exclusively, women—are often falsely accused of performing harmful magic does not mean that it does not exist. 

2. What is Christian Magic?

What do I mean when I talk about magic that is specifically Christian? I mean the metaphysical technologies that Christians have frequently used throughout history— whether or not Christian leaders have approved of those practices—as well as practices utilized in alignment with the teachings of Christ.

Of course, the issue is more complex than that. Protestants have often sought to exclude broad swaths of Christendom from being properly Christian because they engage in practices that are deemed superstitious or magical. Many church leaders of the early middle ages recognized that much of the pagan or animist practices of pre-Christian culture were useful and beneficial to people, both psychologically and emotionally, and provided a bridge between Christian teachings and pagan culture. They sought to integrate some of these practices while rejecting others and, sadly, sometimes persecuting people as a result.⁴ Some historians have pointed out that many of the people persecuted as witches in 17th-century England were performing the kinds of prayers and rituals that were accepted under Catholicism.⁵ The irony, of course, is that the Protestants caught up in the frenzy of witch-hunting became far more suggestible and prone to superstitious hysteria than the people they were accusing. 

Protestantism has, broadly speaking, been animated by a demystifying and iconoclastic impulse. To the extent that our contemporary worldview has become thoroughly materialistic and disenchanted, we can trace its genesis back to the Reformation and subsequent Enlightenment—ironically so, given that many of the insights that led to those developments came about as the result of some decidedly mystical reading and thinking. Isaac Newton disdained belief in the Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and the utility of the sacraments, but he was keenly interested in theology, believed in the truth of Jewish and Christian scripture, studied alchemy and Kabbalah, and was obsessed with calculating the date of the Apocalypse based on the numerology of Biblical texts.⁶ His theological projects and his development of modern mathematics and physics sprang from a single passion to understand the world as fully as he could.⁷

Despite the best efforts of heresy-hunters and reformers, enchantment has always found its way back into the lives of ordinary people. The Amish and Mennonite “plain folk” of Pennsylvania Dutch country have long practiced a form of folk magic called “pow-wow” that blends elements of pre-reformation vernacular religion, medieval grimoire magic, and Native American lore. Modern-day Pentecostal sects and the derived Charismatic practices widely adopted by evangelicals seem to have their roots in West African animist religions.⁸

My point is that Christians throughout history have innovated and adapted all manner of metaphysical technologies for healing, prosperity, protection, and general well-being; they have done so while maintaining Christian identity, values, faith, and practice and without seeing any contradiction between the two.

3. But magic is all about power and control!

Earlier this month, the theologian and psychologist Richard Beck wrote a series of posts distinguishing between what he calls the “soft” magic of Christianity and the “hard” magic of paganism and the occult. His basic point is that the latter tries to command and control the natural world through use of self-will, mechanistic rituals and rigid cause-and-effect belief systems, while Christianity surrenders to the enchantment and mystery of the world through relationality.

Any pagans reading this right now will surely be outraged, because they would see the distinctions as being precisely the opposite. It is Christianity, they’d say, through it’s rigid dogma of good and evil and heaven and hell, and it’s anathematization of anything that falls outside of orthodox bounds, that is controlling and anti-relational. Beck acknowledges “hard magic” strains within Christianity, like the prosperity gospel pushed by slickly veneered televangelists, but his casual dismissal of neopagan, occult, and animist practices shows a profound misunderstanding and lack of experience with the latter.

To be fair, this line of thought is an old one, repeated time and time again by Christian apologists, but it’s a lazy and inaccurate one. If anything, I’d argue that it’s modern post-reformation Christianity, by stripping the natural world of its multifarious intelligences⁹, that has disenchanted matter and left it ripe for manipulation and extraction. Science and technology are merely quasi-demystified forms of “hard magic.”

This tension between exerting personal will and asking reality or God to bend to our desires vs surrendering to the mystery of God’s will runs throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures. In Genesis, the patriarch Jacob wrestles with an angel, understood to be God himself, and wins. The angel blesses him and gives him the name Israel, “because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”¹⁰ Jacob understands that he has been spared and that the angel could have easily killed him. But God seems to have some desire to see humans wrestle with the constraints of materiality and push past their limitations.

In the Gospels, Jesus further complicates the picture. In the parable of the talents, he says the Kingdom of God will be like a man who gives three of his servants sums of money, or talents, before going on a journey. Two of the servants go into business and make a profit. The third is afraid to lose his talents and hides them away. When the man returns, he is angry with the third man because he has not done anything with the money. He takes it away, gives it to one of the other men, and casts the poor, frightened servant out altogether!¹¹

This is a hard teaching, and one that many Christians, particularly those of the the more liberal persuasion, have a hard time with. I think it would be a mistake to read it as a proto-capitalist apology, but it does suggest that God wants us to take initiative, break out of our servile mindsets, and engage with the workings and machinations of the material world.¹²

In Mark 11, Jesus has a bit of a hangry fit when he can’t find a fig to save his life, and he curses an unfruitful tree, causing it to wither. When Peter marvels at what he has done, Jesus tells Peter that he too is capable of performing such actions, like casting a mountain into the sea.¹³ In fact, Jesus performs all sorts of thaumaturgy that look awfully like “hard” magic. You can argue that some of these, like healing and feeding, are simply humanitarian acts of compassion. But some of them, like walking on water and causing the disciples to catch so many fish they can’t pull the net in, make it almost look like he’s showing off. And when he raises Lazarus from the dead, he messes with the laws of nature as we understand them.

Beck would say that this is just a mysterious demonstration of the soft power of God’s enchantment; we don’t know how it occurs, and we don’t need to know. But Jesus is often shown going off alone to fast in the wilderness or to pray. These aren’t merely pious devotions. These are exactly the sorts of things magicians do when they want to do magic, whether it’s contacting spirits or concentrating power to perform a spell or ritual. And he seems to have taught the disciples to do some of these same things.

I think Beck’s distinction between hard and soft magic is a fair one. It is true that there are many in the occult world who selfishly seek personal power, performing increasingly outré acts and rituals in an attempt to “break” reality and make it bend to their will. But Christians are certainly not exempt from this temptation. My point is not that we should all become edgelord sorcerers, hexing our enemies and glamouring others into doing our bidding. Most contemporary pagans as well as traditional animists would take exception to this behavior as well.

My point is that I don’t believe we are meant to passively capitulate in servile devotion. The choice is not between the hard magic of personal will and the soft magic of surrendering to God. The choice is whether we will become the kind of people who can hold these two opposing forces in dynamic tension, learning to use the hard magic of energetic and technological manipulation in conversation with the soft magic of devotion to something that is bigger than us. And that “something bigger” is not only the supreme consciousness that holds it all together—which is how I understand God—but also the voices of the trees and the animals and all the non-human intelligences that inhabit this cosmos with us.

To do this requires getting our hands and our feet a bit dirty, stretching our muscles and our egos, toppling over when they grow too big for our bodies, picking ourselves back up, and learning to reign them back in. It requires chutzpah and heart, the wisdom of serpents, and the innocence of doves as we learn to cultivate and channel power with integrity and responsibility. We don’t get an out by constantly asking Jesus to take the wheel—not that we can’t ask him to do it sometimes.

4. We need magic now more than ever

Why do I think getting over our fears of unseen forces and learning to do magic is so important?

In a conversation with the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, the theologian Dr. Simone Kotva defines magic as “the ability to influence the world by making an alliance with spiritual creatures” and says that to do so, we must learn to pay attention and communicate with these beings. Magic is the practice of paying deep attention to place and the beings around us, learning to listen and speak a new kind of language.

When you make an offering to the spirits of place, your perception begins to expand. You notice the milk and honey you’ve been leaving out for the fairies is gone every morning, and you get up early one day to watch a hedgehog crawl from beneath a rhododendron bush to lick the bowl clean. You never noticed the hedgehog before, but the maple leaf on which you scribed a note in gold paint is neatly turned over, as if something has accepted your message.

You ask the spirits to show themselves to you, and you begin to notice things on your daily walk. There’s one plant in particular that seems to glow from within, as if it is trying to capture your attention. You receive it as a friend and soon learn that when brewed as a tea, it is good for the insomnia you’ve been struggling with.

You ask the spirits of a new city to receive you and help you find a place to live in a tight housing market. A few hours later, you find the perfect place to live, at a shockingly low rate, on a hill that overlooks a broad, shining river, surrounded by lush and verdant trees. This is what what magic looks like. And it’s how most of the pagans I know practice. It’s not slavish worship with a capital W any more than telling your spouse you love them, giving your children presents, or making an agreement with a business partner is. It’s a relationship.

It’s a letting go of the arrogance that says we can do magic (aka technology) without the cooperation of God and all his creatures; that says that these unseen forces don’t exist and don’t matter; that says the forests, waters, and mineral deposits are ours for the taking, without any concern for the role they might be playing in the overall health and well-being of the planet. It’s learning to meet our deepest needs and desires not through exploitation, but through collaboration. That, to me, is deeply Christian, and it’s incredibly necessary for the times we’re living in.

What does magic mean to you? Have you practiced any yourself, or do you have an innate sense of the magic around you? Do you struggle to reconcile a magical worldview with your faith? Do you just want to learn more, or share your experiences? I’ll be hosting a Zoom conversation for paid subscribers at 3pm Eastern time on Sunday, May 16. Come and ask questions, share your stories, and meet new people.

1. In Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe

2. For further explication of these ideas, see philosopher James Madden’s recent book Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World in addition to Kastrup’s many works.

3. See also the TikTok and YouTube content of Oxford theologian Dr. Simone Kotva.

4. Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe

5. This is not to say that people prosecuted as were necessarily practicing Catholicism. Dr. Francis Young discusses the complexity of the perceived connections between witchcraft and Catholicism in English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829.

6. It’s due in 2060. Buckle up!

7. See Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton, by Rob Iliff and The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton: Alchemy, Prophecy, and the Search for Lost Knowledge, by John Chambers.

8. I first had this insight while attending an evening with the late Burkinabe shaman and teacher Malidoma Some, which had some surprising elements in common with the Charismatic revival services of my youth. I then discovered Michael Ventura’s fantastic essay “Hear That Long Snake Moan,” originally published in LA Weekly in the 1980’s and now archived on the author’s website, in which he traces this chain of transmission. Since that time, scholars have begun to fill in the gaps, and there’s reason to believe that the original day of Pentecost recounted in Acts may have had an African connection.

9. I wrote a bit about this process in the English Reformation in my piece on Our Lady of Walsingham.

10. Genesis 32:28, NIV

11. Matthew 22:14-30

12. I’m aware there is a radically different interpretation of this parable rooted in liberation theology, but I find it pretty unconvincing.

13. I always think about this parable when I read about mountaintop removal mining, which turns the mountains of Appalachia into a toxic coal slurry that runs into the streams and pollutes the water. Twisted, I know! But I think it speaks to fact that we are incredibly powerful, and we need to learn to use it better.