When one sets out on their magical journey, they are bound to come across views of magic based on the concept of Will. This is largely due to Aleister Crowley’s famous definition of magic as change according to the Will. But Crowley didn’t happen in a vacuum,1 and premonitions of his views are found in the cultural and philosophical atmosphere that preceded him. On the other hand, one would be hard pressed to find any mention, implicit or explicit, of the relevance of Will in pre-modern magic.
Let us keep in mind that every age’s view of magic is intimately bound to the philosophical paradigm of that age. Premodern magic is the efflorescence of a worldview where the universe is ruled by coherent forces that go beyond human control, and partly beyond human comprehension. These forces do not require human understanding or cooperation. It is inevitable, therefore, that most premodern views about magic require humans to simply conform to those outside forces.
Primacy is given to the universal source of power, which is seen as external to the individual, at least in our everyday understanding of individual life. Modern (and even more postmodern) magic, on the other hand, is magician-centric. This is because, in the old view of the cosmos, humans are nothing but an epiphenomenon of the interplay of objective and binding cosmic forces to which they must learn to conform. On the other hand, the modern (and postmodern) worldview is founded on the primacy of the individual’s subjective interpretation of the world and their ability to conform the world to this interpretation.
This shift mirrors the shift from ancient and medieval philosophy, where humans are largely tasked with apprehending reality as it is, without creative input, to modern philosophy (starting slowly with the Renaissance and Humanism), where humans project themselves onto the outside world as they come into contact with it, and finally to postmodern philosophy, where objective reality plays no role anymore, and the individual’s own inner world becomes the only one that matters.
| Philosophy | Orientation | Humans |
| Ancient Philosophy | Objectivist | Humans as witnesses of a preexistent order wherein they must find their place. Intellect is exhalted as the tool to understand this order. The Will of the magus means little, acting merely as an instrument in motivating him or her. |
| Modern Philosophy | Subjectivist | Humans become increasingly aware of the difference between the objective qualities of the outside world and those qualities they project onto reality; become aware of their role in creating certain aspects of reality. Intellect and Will are at odds. |
| Postmodern Philosophy | Nihilist | Humans dismiss all notions of a preexistent order to which to conform. Everything is the result of a creative act of the subject. The Will is exhalted, while Intellect is relegated to an instrumental role in forming strategies to reach the aims of one will. |
This tripartite distinction is rather rough (and, if taken too seriously, imprecise), but it will do for the purposes of this article.
The question is if the postmodern view of magic can seriously be the last possible view, or if there is something beyond it. My belief is that postmodernism must necessarily be overcome, together with its magical appendix, not because it is desirable to overcome it, but because it has within itself the seed of its own overcoming, just like every age and worldview before.
It is within the premises of postmodernism to to deny the existence of a self-consistent, objective reality. This is why it is usually accompanied by the deconstruction of all certainties, all values, all meaning, all views.
Obviously, this view is itself self-contradictory: in order to seriously assert itself, it has to deny itself as one of the certainties or views to be denied. This implies that the only way for postmodernism to realize its promise of suppressing all meaning is for it to even suppress itself in the end, in order to avoid becoming the meaning of reality. If this argument holds, then it is inevitable that postmodernism, together with its magical appendix, be overcome.
Far harder it is to imagine what will take its place.
One route that cannot be travelled is that of directly going back to the past. It is impossible to simply ignore hundreds of years of historical development to retreat into the safe haven of a glorified past. History, despite its ups and downs, has only one direction, and that is forward.
And yet, if we take the postmodern approach of denying all self-consistent realities beyond the magician’s will and take it to the extreme of even denying postmodernism itself, what we are left with does look very much like the old view of the cosmos, where the Will once again has little relevance. It is a form of going back by moving forward.
Magic, in this new and old sense, has nothing to do with having power to exert in conformity with the Will, and becomes the art of staying out of power’s way as it works itself. Intrinsic in this view is the notion (which all great occultists generally agree with) that the Magus does not have power, as in so many egoistic views of magic, but merely recognizes its currents in order to best position himself with respect to them.
MQS
- Furthermore, to be fair, Crowley’s notion of Will does not strictly correspond to that of individual volition, although it does encompass it. His idea of “pure Will, unassuaged of purpose” is very close to that of a transcendental Will sitting at the bottom of all individual acts of volition. Ultimately, though, it is merely Crowley’s way of incorporating the blind vitalism typical of his age into his system of magic ↩︎
