When we think of 'magic', what do we usually think of? Stage magic may be the first thing that comes to mind – the paid magician who draws a rabbit from an apparently empty hat in front of an audience or seems to saw his glamorous, usually female, assistant in half. We might think of David Copperfield, Seigfried and Roy, Penn and Teller, or David Blaine. More recently street performers have adopted the term 'mentalist' to describe their profession and employ a more psychological method when performing their tricks. These are the magicians who can work out which card you've drawn from a pack or what you've written in a note contained in a sealed envelope. Today, and possibly from the time it emerged in the late 19th century, people regarded this form of 'magic' as being fake magic. People always believed there to be a rational scientific explanation for the the feats being performed but the wonder associated with stage magic was built on the fact that the magician would refuse to reveal how the con worked, the mysterious hidden inner mechanisms and devices associated with the trickery. The secret behind the trick was kept hidden from the credulous public who attended such performances. Supposedly there are schools and colleges of magic founded to share the secrets of stage magic with selected initiates but there is also supposedly a kind of code of honour among magicians never to disclose the mysteries of the craft to outsiders. We might think of the film The Prestige. In this film, the rival magicians are so desperate to learn the other's secret that they are prepared to commit murder to do so. In this film, the secret behind the fake magic of one of the performers ends up being actual magic, actual magic pretending to be science and supposedly taught to the protagonist Robert Angier by Nikola Tesla. I find it very interesting that David Bowie was picked to play Nicola Tesla and I wonder if he was chosen because there is some actual magic associated with Bowie. I know the reader may find this hard to accept.
What else do we think of if we want to try to define the term 'magic'? Much of our contemporary understanding of sorcery, witchcraft, wizardry, comes from fantasy fiction. (For some reason bookshops now put fantasy fiction under the rubric "young adult" and I think this a sad decline.) Think, of course, now, of the Harry Potter books. These books are absolutely full to the brim with magic of all different sorts. Nevertheless it is nevertheless possible to generalise. Harry and his fellow students learn how to make magic potions – often these potions are constituted by multiple otherworldly ingredients and then rendered efficacious through the recitation of an incantation over them. Such potions can make someone fall in love with someone else, age a person, or cure paralysis. Another form of magic consists simply of the practitioner pointing a wand at something or someone and uttering some appropriate word. If a person points his or her wand at someone else and says "Expelliarmus" he or she can disarm his or her opponent. If a person points the wand at someone else and says "Leviosa", he or she can make the other levitate. Thus, in order to perform such spoken-word spells, the practitioner needs a little knowledge of another language, a language which in the world JK Rowling invented seems to be a kind of mashup of English and Latin. A third important way magic is manifested in this world is through magical objects, such as a cloak that confers invisibility, a map that appears on a particular parchment only when wanted, and Mad Eyed Moody's eye that can see through solid objects. Presumably these enchanted objects have been enchanted at some point in the past but I cannot recall if Harry or his friends ever create a magical object – although Voldemort must because he puts one sixth of his soul into each of six horcruxes.
Another fantasy series which might inform our understanding of magic is The Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula Le Guin. In this series the wizards control the natural world by speaking in a language different to their common tongue, a language which the author calls the True Speech or the Old Speech. For instance, by calling something by the name 'tolk', which is the True Speech word for 'stone', the wizard can create a temporary illusion that the thing is a stone, and there are methods, which are more difficult, of actually permanently turning the thing into a stone. As I remember it, the ability to perform magic in these books depends not only on the knowledge of the True Speech that the person possesses but also on an inborn facility or talent for magic, an innate ability that the protagonist of the series, Sparrowhawk, has in spades. In this world, the true names of people are items of information shared only with close friends and family because to know the true name of someone else is to have power over them,
Magic features sometimes in the comic book series The Sandman authored by Neil Gaiman. The magical act that I think especially worth mentioning occurs in the very first issue. Morpheus is summoned by a magical spell and confined within a pentacle for eighty years. His summoner had intended to summon Death so that he that he could live forever. The pentacle is drawn in chalk on the floor of a basement and Morpheus is able to escape at last when one of the chalk lines is smudged, leading to a break in the enclosing lines. Gaiman is drawing on a rich history, in fiction and also outside of it, of imagining that magical symbols and sigils having been drawn in chalk or in other substances can have supernatural powers, a tradition that many believed possible for centuries. It was thought that such symbolic patterns and associated rituals could summon and sometimes trap supernatural beings, often devils and demons, who could then be parlayed with and who might offer extravagant gifts for their release. This tradition informs the opening part of Marlowe's Faust in which Faust summons the demon Mephistopheles and makes a deal with him - in return for selling his soul, Faust receives twenty-four years of magical power. In Faust, the consequence of selling one's soul is going to hell eternally.
What else do we think about when we think about magic? We might also think of the Haitian practice of Voodoo. If a Voodoo practitioner makes a doll and then attaches to it something like a thread of hair or nail clipping that once belonged to a particular person, then any harm the Voodoo priest does to the doll also befalls the person whose likeness has been represented. By sticking pins in the doll we can cause pain or harm to occur to a real person in the real world. We might also think of the ordinary superstitions people entertain. I might try to avoid walking under ladders, feel worried when a black cat crosses my path, or fall into panic should I break a mirror because all three occurrence can prefigure spells of bad luck.
In trying to give a broad encompassing picture of the types of actions and effects that we think of when we think of 'magic', I have drawn largely on how magic is represented in at least a few works of popular fiction. But, right up until the Enlightenment, learned people believed in the literal truth of magic and it may be that ordinary people continued to believe in it right up until the end of the nineteenth century. To give just one example, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and published in 1533, comprise three 'grimoires', that is books containing precise instructions for performing a variety of magic spells often involving astrology. In his influential book, The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, James Frazer argued that human civilisation typically has three phases: belief in magic followed by belief in religion followed in turn by belief in science. Frazer himself, like a good late Victorian, didn't believe in magic because he thought it had been supplanted by a more realistic paradigm, the belief system we call science, a paradigm that first became dominant in the Victorian era and is still more or less dominant today although we now have far come complex scientific theories than the Victorians had. (Think of Chaos Theory for example.) This tripartite distinction is important to what I shall discuss in the rest of this essay. Because The Golden Bough is an important work of comparative anthropology, although one now largely discredited, it may be helpful to describe Frazer's view of magic. Frazer though that magic was the opposite of science, and said that it was based around the idea "that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy". Frazer called this 'sympathetic magic' and divided it into two sorts: homeopathic magic and contagious magic. Homeopathic magic involves the idea that a resemblance between two things enables one to affect the other, for actions performed on one to bring about some positive or negative change in the other, while contagious magic involves the idea that one thing can continue to affect another thing that it has at least at one time had contact with after they are separated. These two conceptions, incidentally, seem to be echoed, respectively, by the quasi-scientific theory proposed by Rupert Sheldrake of 'morphic resonance' and by the now well-established scientific theory connected with quantum mechanics of 'entanglement'; however, in Frazer's day, the dominant paradigm was that the natural world worked something like the mechanism of a clock and that anything like spooky action at a distance had to be a relic of a now discarded belief system. Like all bold ideas Frazer's views of magic (and religion) had a seductive appeal and influenced some notable poets, such as T.S Eliot and W.B Yeats, but we should try to resist being swept away by its audacious simplicity. Frazer's definition applies well to Voodoo dolls but much less well to a boy wizard exclaiming "Expelliarmus" and disarming an opponent or a person's sense of foreboding occasioned by the possibility of walking under a ladder. It does not apply to something discussed by Andrew Mark Henry in a recent interview with Alex O'Conner watchable on Youtube, that in antiquity and through the medieval period ordinary people would write curses on clay tablets and place them in the vicinity of temples. None of these examples of magic fit with Frazer's ideas of homeopathic magic or magic via contagion and so obviously we must seek a broader definition.
Certainly in the Western world, we can identify a general development of belief systems. In the longago human beings were animists, believing the world to be full of spirits. There were spirits, for instance, associated with particular rivers and mountains, spirits that wandered the forest at night or invisibly afflicted villagers with disasters or diseases. The spirits had to be placated or guarded against. Carl Sagan wrote a book called The Demon-Haunted World which I think an apt phrase to describe the world view of ancient peoples. Animism was succeeded by polytheism. We might think of Greek mythology or Norse mythology. Polytheism then gave way to monotheism in the West. It is interesting to consider how this happened. According to what I have read, the ancient people who became the Jews were polytheistic but came to venerate their thunder god, Yahweh, over any of the other gods in the pantheon until eventually Yahweh was it, their only god. This consolidation of belief around a single deity was a means of helping create solidarity, unity, cohesion, among the Jewish people. Christ emerged in this monotheistic setting and then as Christianity spread so too did with it monotheism (even though Christians decided that God was somehow three persons in one, something I have never myself understood and maybe is ill understood by almost everyone). Even through the middle-ages though, occasional Gnostic or Manichean tendencies led some to believe that there were two supernatural forces in the world, Light and Dark, Good and Evil. Such heretical sects were all stamped out by the Christian church as for instance happened to the Cathari in the eleventh century although, as I discussed in the previous essay, Gnostic or Manichaean tendencies may have persisted subterraneously. With the Protestant reformation, Protestants sought to suppress and replace the veneration of saints and of the Virgin Mary, calling such vestiges of a kind of polytheistic and mythopoetic belief system "Popish superstition". The only viable objects of belief, the only ones to be supplicant before, were God the Father or God the Son. We came to have about as pure a monotheism as you can get. Then starting in the nineteenth century science took over from monotheistic religion as the belief system of choice for intellectuals and, despite the diatribes and vituperations of people like Richard Dawkins, I think almost everyone today is effectively an atheist. That is, even the people who profess faith in God still prefer to entrust themselves to the care of doctors and other practitioners of science-based systems than priests. Few would choose prayer over medical care. Despite the angry polemics of proselytising atheists who think the contrary, I think most people today are effectively atheists because most of those who claim to be Christian believe that God has very limited power over their lives, thinking that God's sole role is to furnish the believer with appropriate accomodation after death rather than magically granting the wishes of those still alive while they are still alive.
How does magic fit into this development? It seems to me that if we are to look at magic historically, that is try to understand how it was once conceived as well as how it is conceived of today by people who know of it only through Harry Potter books and Dungeons and Dragons computer games, we need to try to distinguish between two types of magic. Some magicians, historically, had power because they allied themselves with supernatural spirits, often malign ones. In the world of the animists, a world which still exists today among the lower classes in China, gifts given to spirits could ward of threats or bring in good fortune. In Europe in the Middle Ages, witches were supposed to have attained power to harm others by consorting with or having intercourse with the Devil. The black cats who accompanied them were familiar spirits, demonic personages who had assumed the form of cats. Magic was considered anti-Christian – this is something I shall come back to later. However, starting in the Renaissance, a different conception of magic became prominent among intellectuals: magica naturalis, natural magic. In this system, magic was a kind of neutral non-conscious force or power that could be harnessed through appropriate procedures, appropriate rituals or incantations. Alchemy fits into this worldview. Alchemists sought the Philosophers' Stone, the power to turn lead into gold or to attain immortality, but the closeness of natural magic to modern science in many ways can be shown by the fact that the science of chemistry grew out of the magical practice of alchemy. It seems to me that the best modern conception of magic, the kind of magic we find in the Harry Potter series, is magic as a kind of power to alter the world utilised by a magician through appropriate means, incantations, or rituals – the drawing of symbols, or the writing of curses in obscure languages. Appropriate rituals or procedures can focus the will of the magician, enabling the magician to manifest his or her desired goals in ways that seem to defy simple rules-of-thumb concerning how causality is really supposed to operate. Consciousness, properly channelled, can directly influence reality.
These two different conceptions of magic, the first being that supernatural effects are the result of relationships between the magician and supernatural beings, and the second being a kind of quad-scientific practice in which human practitioners perform specific rituals in order to try to harness a neutral power and thus attain specific ends have always co-existed. And importantly, up until the nineteenth century, magic was believed to co-exist with Christianity. Even the Church founders believed in magic and magi even though they also believed that Jesus was both God and the son of God. In The Acts of Apostles a certain Simon Magus, who was either a magician or founder of a religious sect, asked Peter if he could buy the power to perform miracles from him and it is because of this that the church invented the sin of 'simony', the sin of trying buy holy office. The relevant quote from this book can be found in the Wikipedia page associated with Simon Magus and it is interesting to note that (in English translation) Simon Magus is described as a sorcerer who had bewitched the inhabitants of Samaria. In The Acts of Peter, Simon performs magic in the Roman forum. He is carried aloft by invisible spirits. In one apocryphal source Peter and Paul and in other sources Peter alone pray to God for Simon to fall and he does so breaking a number of bones in his body. It seems like a contest between white magic, associated with Christ and God, and black magic. In around 200AD, the writer Celsus argued that Jesus was neither God nor the son of God but rather was able to perform apparent miracles because he was a magician. Celsus was rebutted by the church father Origen. Thus it seems that early Christians believed in two forms of the supernatural, magic and sorcery on the one hand and divine miracles on the other. They sought to place Christianity in the second camp. The former kind of magic was utilised by sorcerers with or without the aid of supernatural beings, spirits or demons, and the latter kind of magic arose ultimately from the ultimate spiritual being, Jehovah, either directly, or through his son, or through the intercession of one of the saints, and could be harnessed or accessed through the medium of prayer.
I arrive now at one of the central conceits of this essay. Could we regard the practices of the Church historically as being in reality a kind of magic? I would like to speculate that there came to be two types of magic. The first was the magic of witches and warlocks, the magic of village herbalists and cunning folk, the magic associated with beings like fairies, trolls, and elves. The second was the magic that operated through the Christian church. A number of the rituals performed by various churches could be regarded as having all the trappings of magical rituals. There is baptism and funeral services which are intended to ensure that the person born or the person now dead will go to heaven. There is the practice of the Eucharist which through a kind of cannibalism commits the congregation to a shared community. There is confession and absolution in which the sins of a person are washed away. Think of the faith-healing carried out by some Evangelical clerics even today– this certainly seems like a kind of magic. Prayer can be considered as something like a magical incantation in which the person supplicates an ultimate spiritual being, God, Jehovah, Yahweh, for assistance. Consider the opening verse of the British national anthem:
God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King.
Consider also the first verse of the New Zealand national anthem.
God of nations, at thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices we entreat:
God defend New Zealand.
These anthems are both prayer-like and both incantation-like. Through a collective recitation, ordinary people seem to be performing a magic spell to protect the linchpin of their respective communities, monarch via the first and the name of the new-born nation via the second. Frazer distinguished between religion and magic by saying magic "constrains or coerces" supernatural spirits while religion focuses on "conciliating or propitiating them". To Frazer's definition, we could append the observation that if we suppose the whole supernatural world is focused on a single point, a single source, a single supernatural being with a single name, as is the case with monotheism, this might render the magic particularly efficacious. The first lines in the Bible are, of course, "In the beginning was the Word. And the word was God."
I can illustrate the overlap between religion and magic with another personal anecdote. In many churches, including the Anglican Church, a person can make a prayer and light a candle which is then allowed to burn and somehow, perhaps, send the prayer to God through the medium of smoke. In 2013, I felt as though my soul or life was in danger and on a couple of occasions visited the Anglican cathedral in Parnell where I lit a candle and offered up a silent prayer. However, though, I had not decided to become a Christian, that is start attending services and receiving the eucharist – rather I was literally trying to harness the magic associated with Christianity to protect myself and others I cared about. I felt as though praying and lighting a candle was the only way I could assert control over my life. It was superstition rather than faith that impelled me.
Despite what seems to me and seemed to Frazer to be a considerable co-extensiveness between magic and religion, the Catholic Church historically has tried as hard as it can to distinguish between the two. People suspected of witchcraft or sorcery were often excommunicated or executed. The miracles associated with saints that sometimes occurred before the death of the saint and sometimes after were seen as evidence of God working through people whereas magic was seen as something Satanic. I would like to suggest that the persecution of magicians, like the persecution of heretical sects, by the Catholic Church, was a means through which the Christian establishment could maintain a monopoly on magic. Perhaps we could regard Christian priests as magicians. Even though we have no documented cases of Popes individually attaining magical goods like eternal life here on Earth, perhaps this monopolisation of magical power is what enabled the Church as an institution to maintain its considerable political, social, and cultural power right up until sometime in the previous century.
Then religion fell away and we had the advent of science. Arthur C Clarke once wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Imagine you are Agrippa and have been teleported from the sixteenth century to the present day, to a world in which people fly to the other side of the world in metal birds and can hold conversations with intelligences that are not human but have absorbed the totality of human knowledge associated with consensus reality into their data banks. Would you not regard this as magic? Consider cell phones. I can punch in a phone number for someone living in the Northern Hemisphere and my cellphone will send out a ballooning sphere of RF waves that somehow latches onto my friend's cell-phone and enables him and I to have a private conversation unaffected by the millions of other cell-phone communications occurring at the same time. This seems to me to fit Frazer's definition of magic, the notion "that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy"; because I do not understand how cell-phones work, to me cell-phone technology is indistinguishable from magic. However almost everyone draws a sharp line between science and magic. There is an assumption that such scientific marvels always have 'rational' explanations. Although an individual may not understand all the sciences, all the various domains from physics, through chemistry, to biology seem to fit together in a near seamless whole that, together with our faith in scientists, undergirds our confidence that science provides a coherent rational world-view that can account for such marvels. This is why Frazer and many after him have made the case that science and magic are polar opposites. Where once Christian priests fought to distinguish magic from religion and largely succeeded, we now have a world which sharply separates magic from science and has largely succeeded, presumably by fostering the perception that scientific technologies have scientific explanations whereas magic either has non-rational explanations or no explanation whatsoever.
In the previous essay, "Concerning the Garden of Eden", I described how arguments between atheists and religious adherents are disputes between people who believe in an atheist materialism grounded in science and people who believe in a single unified supernatural being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent and who they term 'God'. It is a dispute between people who believe nothing supernatural exists and people who believe really only in one supreme spiritual being, although some may profess that this supreme being has underlings such as angels. What I was trying to defend, in the previous essay, was the notion of some middle ground between the two views, some intermediating metaphysics. I was trying to argue that either that the supreme, perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent deity venerated by popular defenders of Christianity does not exist or that He is so far removed from our shared reality that we cannot guess his motives and intentions. At the same time though I was arguing that the supernatural might still exist. God put us in a world in which Evil exists as well as Good, suffering as well as happiness, and so it might be a world of good and evil spirits, good and evil magic. Rather than having to choose between a strict monotheism and a world with no intrinsic values at all, perhaps we could depart from both science and religion and opt for the world of magic instead. I think many of the songs that become popular function like magic spells – this was something I noticed very keenly earlier in the year. I am not talking about singers like Morrissey who are easily intelligible. Rather I am talking about the vast majority of successful pop music that has been released since the 1950s, songs the lyrics of which are often hard to make out but affect the listener subliminally the same way spells chanted or sung in a dead language might affect listeners subliminally. For example, listen to the song "Come Out and Play" by the Offspring, preferably the lyric video. Violent crime in the United States and around the world climbed significantly from the 'sixties or 'seventies until the early 'nineties when it started to recede. I honestly believe that this song, first released in 1994, is a kind of magic spell that may have contributed to the decline. I'll make an observation about much of this successful and in my view magical popular music. Often it plays around with the prepositions 'in' and 'out' and somehow the magic is invoked through these notions of people being 'inside' or 'outside'. Another example is the Talking Heads song, "Road to Nowhere" with its recurring line "Come on inside".
Every person lives in his or her own world but there is considerable overlap between my world and the worlds of those I engage with socially. I believe one's beliefs about one's world may somehow magically affect it and the worlds of others just as one may be affected by others. The rituals and practices we term magic act to focus, structure, realise our intentions regarding the world. I think something like real magic indeed does exist but it is largely invisible – it acts through dead languages few now understand, through symbols we know only through a Jungian inherited collective unconscious, through song lyrics and poems that we can only partly decipher. I would like to bring back a world of magic. Why? I believe that an attention to potential magical influence may be the best way to help a person recover from serious mental illness. I believe the God of the Gnostics might have given me some kind of revelation that the best way to view serious mental illness is through the prism of magic – black magic, malign sorcery, curses. It may well be that often the reason a young person develops psychosis and may end up diagnosed schizophrenic is that members of his or her own family have put a curse on him, not through deliberate conscious means such as writing the curse out on a clay tablet, reciting an incantation in a dead language, or summoning a demon to torment him or her, but through their beliefs concerning the person and feelings towards the person. Earlier this year, I thought that if it could be established that a family member of a patient is a bad magical influence on the patient, the patient could be cured or at least have his or her condition alleviated by separating the patient physically and geographically from the family member causing the patient harm. But because magic can act a distance, the severing of the connection might require a stronger magic than just literal physical separation. I am still uncertain how to phrase and recommend to others that mental illness has a magical cause and thus a magical cure partly because workers in the Mental Health sphere would be fishing in the dark if trying to implement magical therapy. In my experience, often mental health workers are more part of the problem than the solution because at least some of them are simply not particularly good people and so, in suggesting that magic is both the cause and cure of serious mental illness, my advice may not be that constructive. When recovery does occur, it may occur simply through dumb luck.
Nevertheless some major paradigm shift is required in the treatment of serious mental illness. At the moment the only real treatment considered practical by psychiatrists is medication. If antipsychotic medication works at all, it works magically, through something like the placebo effect. However, if a person opts to accept his or her treatment, to take medication for the rest of his or her life, he or she is also willingly acquiescing to all the negative baggage associated both with the term 'schizophrenia' and the side effects often believed to accompany psychiatric medicine. This is not a satisfactory answer to the problem of schizophrenia. Often, in fact, when people recover from 'schizophrenia' they attribute their recovery to finding God. In the paradigm I am presenting, this can be explained in terms of the extraordinary magical power belief in a perfectly powerful, knowledgable, and beneficent deity can channel. But because only a few can find this way out, I think the intermediary realm of magic might at least sometimes be a better way to treat serious mental illness. At the moment, though, the magic is largely black. To have Mental Health workers put falsehoods in a person's record, either of their own volition or at the behest of family members who are themselves psychologically compromisesd, is definitely bad juju. It is as though the workers have made a Voodoo doll of the patient and are sticking pins in it.
I'll give an example of magic associated the street layout of the Auckland CBD. I have wandered around Auckland city for decades and had never noticed this until this year. The central landmark in Auckland is the Skytower, a building vastly taller than any of Auckland's other landmarks. The Skytower is on Victoria Street. Victoria Street is, of course, named after Queen Victoria who was the monarch in charge when Auckland was established as a city in the nineteenth century. If you stand by the Skytower and look down Victoria Street in one direction it terminates in Victoria Park Market, once a thriving commercial space and now in sad decline. If you look the other way, you notice that Victoria Street crosses Queen Street, the most important street in Auckland, and then terminates at Albert Park. Albert Park is named after Victoria's consort. Where Victoria street terminates, there is a stone sculpture known as the Gateway Arch because it resembles a kind of enormous portal. It was made from stones gifted by a Northland Iwi after the tapu on them was lifted. In Albert Park, there is a statue of Queen Victoria, a statue of New Zealand's first governor-general Sir George Grey, and a statue commemorating the New Zealand soldiers who fought in the Boer War. Still looking from the ridge upon which the Skytower was built, it is possible to see, over the trees of Albert Park, the clocktower of Auckland University, the university's most historically important building and probably also built in the nineteenth century. If one were to continue to follow the line suggested by Victoria Street, you will pass through the building which housed the English Department of Auckland University, once custodians of New Zealand's literary heritage. The line continues through the Auckland Domain, almost, but not quite I think, passing through Auckland Museum, a museum which houses a number of very significant Maori artefacts. The line continues almost directly to Sarawia street, a street my older brother lived on with his partner when his son, my nephew, was an infant. At the bottom of Sarawia street one could once pass onto Newmarket Park. Newmarket Park marks the Eastern border of the land given to Governor Hobson by local iwi Ngati Whatua in 1840, land which became the city of Auckland. There was once a Maori settlement where Newmarket Park now is but after effluent got into Slaughterhouse Creek, this pa was abandoned. If we keep going we arrive at Bassett Road, where I lived for most of my life, and if I am not mistaken where Allen Curnow, who helped establish New Zealand poetry as a thing of its own, once lived, although it is possible he lived on the next street over, Seaview Crescent.
There seems thus to be a ley-line or city-level kind of feng shui involved in the layout of Auckland City. It seems that in this way the Victorian colonisers could stamp their ownership or governorship, their hegemony, onto a city that was then and is now New Zealand's largest city and was then the capital of the country. It seems this ley-line has a magical influence on the city's inhabitants even though few are aware of it. This magic is to most people invisible.
In wrapping up another long essay, I would like to comment, as I sometimes do, on its structure. I have suggested that I believe that magic is real phenomena and so it may seem paradoxical that when attempting to describe it, in moving towards some definition for it, I began by talking about how magic is represented in fiction. There is a profound puzzle involved here. Why do children love books with flying broomsticks and letters called Howlers designed to scold errant children but get bored by stories dealing with cell-phones even though cell-phones are at least as magical? A rational explanation might be that by playing in an imaginary world, children can learn skills related to navigating the real world. Or it might be that these books enable access to a real world of magic that adult society ignores, dismisses. Perhaps these books furnish children with an unconscious understanding of a magical reality that, in order to survive and function in the real world, adults must suppress. This is a puzzle that I may come back to in a later essay.
Finally I intend to discuss my life a little. I had another 'psychotic episode' this year and my experience of madness has informed the last couple of blog posts. I am back under the Mental Health Act. Now, I am aware that people like to make up stories about others, stories that have a magical effect on the characters contained in those stories. People who read this blog may in a way have wanted me to become psychotic again having managed to get off medication entirely at the beginning of this year. Perhaps people who read this blog are committed to the notion that if a person is on medication, at whatever dosage, he or she is well and if not he or she must become 'ill' again. Or perhaps people quite like the idea of reading a blog by someone diagnosed schizophrenic and under the Mental Health Act. If either of these conjectures is correct, I would like my readers to show a little compassion, send a little of their thoughts and prayers my way in the hope that I will in a short time be allowed off medication again, this time without falling prey to another psychotic episode. Why want your favourite blogger to be stuck on medication, with neither a job nor a girlfriend, for the rest of his life? However things are not as completely bad as I may be suggesting. My Key Worker just last week forced my psychiatrist to write in my medical notes that I am heterosexual and always have been. I have also in the last couple of days realised the enormous harm perpetuated against me by my older brother, something I have suspected for eighteen years but had no solid evidence in support of. I still have no absolutely solid evidence but I am now quite confident. I am not sure what will happen to me next but, oddly, even though I am back under the Mental Health Act I now feel a little quietly optimistic. It may be that the black magic has passed and I due a little white magic sometime soon.
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