What is Magic?
Magic is not simply a matter of the occult or the esoteric, of astrology, Wicca and Satanism; it follows processes inherent to human consciousness and connected to constructive and imaginitive thought. The faculties of imagination - dream, projection, fantasy - are bound up with the faculties of reasoning and essential to making the leap beyond the known into the unknown. At one pole (myth), magic is associated with poetic truth, at another (the history of science) with inquiry and speculation. It was bound up with understanding physical forces in nature and led to technical ingenuity and discoveries. Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act; it has shaped many features of Western civilization. But its influence has constantly been disavowed since the Enlightenment and its action and effects consequently misunderstood.
- Marina Warner, “Stranger Magic” (Harvard University Press 2012), quoted in Harold Bloom’s “Garden of Unearthly Delights,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, March 23, 2012
(via barthel)
