Why We Practice Magic
press.princeton.edu
press.princeton.edu
Weird Studies covered a book called "Sex Secrets of the Black Magic Experts" (title is meant to be jokey, not serious), which outlines a sort of modern approach to thinking about "Magic." It doesn't advocate for magic in the sense of literally believing that some ritual or invocation has some physically measurable effect. Rather, it's more about the idea that the mindset inherent to "magical practice" - like the interpretation of omens, or making some plea to a "god" or "force" - can be a useful mindset, a sort of different lens to view the world through.
As someone who spent a lot of time in my teens and early 20s consuming various rationalistic media (science books, New Atheist tracts, skepticism podcasts, etc), my knee jerk reaction to "magic" has mostly been disdain. But it's really interesting to consider it from this different angle and recognize that "magical thinking" has been a big part of the human experience for as long as we've been around. Maybe there's a baby in the bathwater there that we're throwing away, and maybe the notion of the "practice of magic" could be approached in a way that excises the dumb while keeping the good. (I've come to similar thoughts about religion and spirituality as I've gotten older).
Plus, as a nerdy metalhead type, I have to admit to myself that some of this stuff is just cool, and so it's been kind of fun to "allow" myself to dig into some of the various literature out there on "magic". (The whole Chaos Magic thing is full of fun and wacky stuff, check out "Liber Null," for example).
I think the Weird Studies pod I mentioned does a much better job than this post outlining the ideas in SSOTBME, and they covered another book, Technic and Magic, that has some similar thinking. Highly recommend the pod if that sounds even vaguely interesting.
Links:
SSOTBME podcast: https://www.weirdstudies.com/141
Technic and Magic podcast: https://www.weirdstudies.com/134
For example, let's say you are anxious about money, maybe you are afraid of suddenly finding yourself with no money - so, a simple exercise to face that fear could be to leave the house, for the day, with no phone and no wallet, or have someone drop you off on the next town over and have to figure out on your own how to get back home
The main concept is to create "rituals" that help you address the fears that hold you back, in a practical way
Oh boy. I skimmed the beginning and end of that book, and the author presents some rather... skewed moral sensibilities around sex (See for example "The Red Rite" near the end of the book).
I guess these counter-culture esoteric/religious movements don't necessarily improve on the human flaws of Christian priests.
I think a lot of the Chaos Magic stuff is written in a spirit of playfulness (though there's plenty of plain dumb stuff too), it's kind of the characteristic of that "movement" in magic to play freely with tropes from every imaginable system and mix them in weird fashions.
Even then, there's no guarantee. Many papers are ignored.
For some things, cameras help.
The modern peer review process (as a way to decide which papers get "accepted" vs "rejected") began no earlier than the 1960's.