(2024-09-26) Rival Voices On Magic And Magicians

Rival Voices on Magic and Magicians. I think that both “Magick” and “Magicians” are two things that nearly everyone gets wrong and that that's because, while encountering a magician may be a frequent event, knowing that you did is not.

The reason that knowing you met a magician is not frequent, relative to how often you meet them, is that a magician is someone who works through whatever it is that you’re not tracking, either via actively directing your attention away from it, or, much more interesting, and relevant, by working through something you don’t even believe is a thing.

The way I think of magicians, actual magicians, is like living, breathing, cabinets of curiosities: they’re people who have been collecting skills that shouldn’t work, not according to our contemporary ontology of the world, but which do.

my claim is that a magician is someone who specializes in hacking your system. (reality hacking)

In fact, I hold a suspicion that the ‘reduction’ of magicians and magick to “stage magic” and to “illusions” and “tricks” is itself a decoy, to keep your attention misdirected from what’s actually going on.

Illusion, tricks, and stage magic are precisely what I don’t mean when I say “magician”. I mean more like… irl wizards.

A magician can pattern interrupt you to disrupt your OODA loop making it so that compliance with their instructions feels like the most elegant thing to do. (hypnosis)

A magician can notice how “expanded” or “closed” your awareness is, in real-time.

precisely because we believe these things aren’t possible we don’t track them, which is why they can be used as a way to hack you, as a way to run “””magic””” on you.

A magician can very actively try to make you lose your mind, question your sanity, and implant beliefs in you.