hunger is a privilege of the living

[A/N:] I reblogged a post a few days ago by cunningqueer that said: "btw it's okay to believe magic is real. You don't need to try to logic your way through or obscure science and "spicy psychology" the magic into "rational" things," and I could not agree more. A lot of this post is rephrasing my original reblog, but I'm adding to it and organizing it better to make my stance easier to understand. Before I get started, since this is such a hot button topic, please read the entire post before forming an opinion. I will cover and counter several of the arguments that people normally use to try to argue against the overarching point I'm making here, and for that reason I won't be responding to replies to this post that try to make the same arguments I already countered without engaging with my point! If you accuse me of being anti-science, you lack reading comprehension. Thank you!

What Constitutes 'Mundane'?

The statement 'mundane over magic' has two core features:

1. the implication that there is a hard and fast divide between the mundane and the magical; 2. the implication that the mundane takes priority over the magical.

In the contemporary spiritual community, broadly, the 'mundane' is accepted as all that which is attested to by science and could be proven empirically. Generally speaking, in casual conversation, it's either about things you can perceive with your five senses, or things to do with medicine; but the broader sentiment remains: it prioritizes all that which the social consensus believes to be in accordance with scientific reasoning and common sense.

This is a big feature in the spiritual community. Within the contemporary witchcraft / pagan space specifically, I would venture a solid 70% of people fall victim to the fallacious idea that science (as we know it now) is The One Objective Truth, and spirituality is secondary to it. Because people believe that western science is the objective truth that the world operates on, they also are forced to believe that the default state of things is inherently nonspiritual. The conclusion that has to be drawn from the assumption that western science is objective fact, is that the world possesses a fundamental, non-spiritual truth - and people do believe that, consciously or subconsciously. For many, that preconceived notion serves as the axis they build their entire practice around.

There is something to be said, here, before I continue, about the fact that science itself doesn't acknowledge itself as objective. It does strive to be objective - insert acknowledgment of the heated debate around the concept of objectivity - but science and scientists are broadly self-aware enough to acknowledge that it often can't be. Even though the philosophical underpinnings of science believe in the possibility of objective truth, and the merits of pursuing it, not even each individual scientist believes in objective truth.

“The admiration of science among the general public and the authority science enjoys in public life stems to a large extent from the view that science is objective or at least more objective than other modes of inquiry.” -- Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

"In everyday discourse, there is a continuing tendency to characterize the objective as that which speaks for itself without the interference of human perception, interpretation, judgment, and so on." -- Prof. Melanie Feinberg, MIT Press Reader

Objectivity is, paradoxically, somewhat subjective. Nevertheless, many people in the community - even those who pride themselves on never forsaking science in favor of spirituality - still hold to the idea that there is objective objectivity to science, and let that color their understanding of spirituality, expecting people to prioritize this feigned objectivity over their own belief systems, indiscriminately at that.

Now let absolutely nobody accuse me of being anti-science, or of believing that science should never take precedent over spirituality, but we will get to all of that momentarily.

The Coloniality of Mundane > Magic

An unfortunate side effect of accepting western science as The One True Truth, is that people treat the (historic) cultures they are taking beliefs from as being intellectually inferior to science. This makes sense and is an entirely natural progression of events, because much like if you believe that there is One True God to whom all other gods are subject, if you believe that there is One True Truth, any other way of experiencing, rationalizing, understanding or recording existence is inherently inferior to that Truth. In that sense, prioritizing the 'mundane' over the magical often comes in the form of treating historic or cultural belief systems and practices as completely secondary. As more of a fun expression or a hobby, without much faith in it, that deserves to be tossed to the wind as primitive, silly or unintelligent as soon as it comes time to believe that it is capable of actually doing something for the practitioner. It's certainly one of the greatest pitfalls of modern conventional practice, and the reason that since the pandemic 'witchcraft' has behaved more as a severely oversaturated trend than as an actual rising belief system.

The expectation that all spiritualities, if intellectually and morally valid, will conform to western scientific values first no matter what, is colonial. For several reasons.

One of them is that modern popular 'witchcraft' is, of course, based primarily on European folk magic traditions, with influences from the (still very cultural) third wave of Western Esotericism. Almost every single one of the traditions that Wicca took and spat out as what we now know as 'witchcraft' are or were animistic traditions in origin.

"Some scholars see the classification of 'ritual' vs. 'profane' [as] a product of Western Enlightenment thinking, an effort to purify and simplify the past. [...] In an analogous vein, it has been pointed out that the Old Norse language has no word for religion, and that Norse-speakers used the term 'siðr' -- 'custom' or 'tradition'." -- Marianne Hem Eriksen, Of Bodies and Buildings: Rituals in the Halls of the Vikings

'Mundane over magical' or any other iteration of the idea that something can be entirely magic-less is fundamentally in opposition with the philosophy that 'witchcraft' already appropriates from, and applying that mindset to it and forcing it to conform to that rationalist idea is ultimately just perpetuating that already extant appropriation.

Further, it is very effectively ethnocidal, because the reason this dichotomy and ranking of philosophical validity ever took hold at all is that people are trying to force spiritualities to conform to what they view as a superior, rationalist truth. It doesn't matter who you are, what your culture is, how elaborate or successful your culture's belief systems are: if you want to be intellectually valid, moral, and generally accepted by the community, you must accept western science as the objective truth, and your culture's understanding of the world as secondary to it.

It's flat-out anti-indigenous, cultivating an ingrained hatred of cosmologies and belief systems that the west views as 'primitive' - which is ironic during a time when science is actually slowly coming around to acknowledging that animistic philosophy was severely ahead of western science on many fronts. If you're forced to think that the only way to rationally or sensically engage with magic is through constantly questioning it according to post-Christian, post-colonial, post-rationalist views, you will do the same to every other religion: basing its validity on how well you can make it work with western understandings of 'truth'. It's extremely destructive.

You must accept the western truth, the white truth, as presented to us by the selfsame scientific community that used to swear high and low that racial theory is scientific fact. Which I don't say to claim that science is pointless or you shouldn't believe in it, but rather to illustrate that western science is and has been deeply influenced and colored by white supremacy, and by the white lived experience in general. It's painted as not only a more intelligent way of thinking, but also as morally better - if you actually believe in magic's ability to do things of significance for you, you're crazy and in need of mental help (see the whole "spiritual psychosis" issue), and all those who constantly hold others to this expectation of prioritizing the Ultimate, Objective Truth of Euro-Western Science™ are saving them from falling into a trap of trope-y craziness.

The aggression with which people will perpetuate this notion is particularly shocking. If you state that you don't believe in the dichotomy between mundane and magic, or refuse to agree with people who are trying to force it upon yourself or others, it's almost certain a fight will break out and you, the opponent, the intellectual and moral enemy, will be accused of endangering others by allowing them to make their own judgments. The only thing that can save you or anyone else that is spiritually inclined from falling into fully fledged, mass delusion, is the white man's science. Let the white man's science save you from your culture's mass delusion. Which leads me to my next point:

Fearmongering and Cult Tactics

It has always been crazy to me to think that it is genuinely believed by an overwhelming majority of the community that if you do not consistently harp on 'mundane over magical', people are going to get hurt. That, to me, indicates not an issue with magic, but a much greater problem: a lack of critical reasoning. I do not want to believe it is true that if you stop telling everyone 'mundane before magical' at every turn, they will start dying en masse. If it were true that every single person in this community would promptly stop doing basic house maintenance, examining their health, and taking their car to the mechanic, that's not a magic problem, it's an awareness problem. It would genuinely suggest that every single person in this community is fundamentally incapable of basic feats of reasoning.

I will admit that my blog is oriented heavily around critical theory, and that I often criticize the broader magical community for not engaging with critical theory enough, not thinking independently enough, so on and so forth. But the solution to a large-scale lack of critical reasoning and discernment in the community is not to destroy intangible heritage to make it easier to commodify. The solution is education. The solution is to engage people in dialogue about their views, to educate people about their belief system's philosophy and cosmology, to teach people literacy and problem-solving skills. We are not a community of four year olds. This is a community literally oriented around philosophy, faith, cosmology, and learning. We owe it to ourselves and the cultures we take from, historic or not, to cultivate an expectation of critical thinking skills within it. If you are or know someone who would genuinely let themselves die of pneumonia if no one told them to maybe go visit a doctor on top of their cleansing spell, you have bigger god damn fish to fry.

The entire notion, somehow, manages to both force the entire spiritual community to contort itself to be more suitable to "beginners" (nevermind the erasure), and put down beginners horrifically, unilaterally treating them as people who need their hands held through every feat of basic reasoning, problem solving, and self preservation, lest they prove themselves mortally stupid. It's insulting, it's impractical, and most of all just adds to the already very severe problem of critical thinking being underrepresented and undervalued.

There's also something to be said about how 'mundane before magic' is a gateway drug into cult mentalities, because it gives you leeway to assume that there is an external authority out there that can dictate what is and is not magic. First it's the disembodied voice of what you believe to be 'science', but if you've already fallen trap to this kind of shallow pop culture belief, and no one is teaching you the critical thinking skills that this very thing gets in the way of, nothing is stopping you from falling for other, equally common fallacious beliefs - and it is unfortunately the case that the contemporary witchcraft community is oriented around authoritarianism, legitimacy grabs, and validation farming.

How Mundane > Magic Sabotages Your Practice

Maybe the most immediately depressing way in which it's harmful is the way it sabotages the success of one's own practice. Every day I see people asking for tips to connect to their practice better, saying they need to take breaks from their practice, asking for tips on how to get back into it, so on and so forth. The reason that people fail to connect with their practice is the idea that 'mundane before magical' will save them. If you believe that the default state of the world is complete mundanity and non-magic, magic cannot exist. In that universe, magic is nothing but a narrative tool. Mundane before magical suggests that only magical problems warrant magical solutions, but what realm does that leave for magic to occupy? Suddenly magic is only valuable in the sphere of your imagination.

Like I mentioned earlier, the historic attitude towards magic is not that magic is an exception to some universal rule, and seeing it that way is doing an injustice to extremely complex cosmologies and philosophical systems that, often, span back all the way to the beginning of human existence. Despite western science painting these traditions as primitive and unintelligent, they have highly developed beliefs about how magic operates, and their beliefs are not for no reason. If you take no interest in pursuing that understanding or that lens, magic and spirituality may just not be for you. There is a reason that every tradition that has its own magic system that I know of, and certainly every tradition that influenced contemporary witchcraft, believes that magic is a fundamental building block of the universe. And that doesn't mean that all historic peoples were engaging in shared delusions that had no solid backing, contrary to what 'mundane before magical' suggests - rather, they had an extremely complex (and successful) philosophical underpinning that informed their every belief and action. And, perhaps also contrary to common belief: their systems were adaptable and constantly subject to change based on what did and did not work. Our modern science finds its roots in pagan philosophy, let none of us forget.

If nothing has magical significance unless you can somehow deduct with rationalist reasoning that it can’t have been anything BUT magic, you will be so deeply removed from everything around you. Suddenly something can only be spiritual when it has inexplicability and intangibility. Suddenly the nettles by your door are no longer warding allies, suddenly your coworker’s “bless you” to a sneeze no longer protects you from harm, suddenly your mother’s love is no longer a divine thing. Suddenly your gods’ love can only reach you in highly specific ways, and you can’t smell it on the wind anymore. Or, god forbid, if your only experience of religion has been nothing but pop paganism, you never got a taste of that perfect symbiosis in the first place. The glory of faith is that it gives color to a blip of existence. The faiths of our ancestors were built by and for the world that shaped us, and our society is built entirely on the foundation of their beliefs. It is that fact that makes it that I can look to the earth and know every single plant and particulate of soil and cloud and trickle of water is working alongside me to be able to have this experience, and every word and thought I produce is colored by my ancestors’ knowledge of that cooperation. Living your life under the assumption that everything you can touch and understand is dead and meaningless, and magic can only come to you in brief unwitting glimpses into another world, guts all of that. The faith has lost all meaning, and you are waiting for it to find another way to make some.

Ultimately, a successful magical practice will always require you to do this deconstruction. You must be willing to challenge your own beliefs and preconceived notions, and you must be willing to question why the people of the cultures you take from believed what they believed, or you are not only getting in your own way in terms of connection and magical success, but also blatantly appropriating from a historic culture you literally cannot be part of. The dead deserve autonomy, historic cultures deserve autonomy. They deserve respect and honor, and their beliefs to not be skewed and ridiculed for the purposes of the appropriator. Nevermind how the appropriation of historic cultures affects the (often still living) descendant cultures.

Of course it is difficult to feel connected to a practice that can only be special and meaningful in certain moments, that can only be perceived and engaged with in small, unexpected blinks. It's hard to feel connected to magic when magic is something you have to make happen all the time rather than feeling it flow through you and you through it as you go about your life. The beauty of the belief systems that neopaganism and contemporary witchcraft are built upon is that they made everything have the meaning of magical moments, all the time. You shouldn't have to go out of your way to make 'mundane' things magical when you care enough about magic as a concept to seek it out and make it part of your identity like a witch or any other kind of practitioner does. So how do you remedy this problem? How do you integrate magic and mundane like these cultures did for thousands of years prior, without sacrificing the value of modern science, without putting yourself in harm's way, and without falling into delusion?

Integrating Magic and Mundane (without falling into dangerous habits)

I do think I should start this off by saying that if you experience genuine, unadulterated belief in magic as a force in the universe (rather than as something that can only be true if filtered through the lens of conventional science) as delusional, magic might not be for you. Or, at the very least, some time spent reflecting on the other points in this post may be in order. I'm not saying that you cannot believe in science, or that it shouldn't be allowed to filter it through the lens of science, but you have to do that in a conscious way. You must understand the nature of the belief without the interference of western science before you have the right to change it for your own purposes and force it to conform to the beliefs of the oppressor's. That's the nature of decolonization, no matter who you are or where your focus lies.

That said, having a functional relationship with spirituality isn't about believing less, it's about a few core skills that you use within the context of your faith, to make reasonable decisions.

We should probably tackle the science issue first: and similarly, the answer to balancing science and spirituality isn't to believe in spirituality less. After all, were you to pluck some random from the neolithic age and show them an X-ray machine, they wouldn't see the supposedly fundamental difference between that and magic that we are propagandized into seeing. They would see highly advanced magic, because there is no fundamental difference. Science has more in common with spirituality than most anything else. It is a highly developed belief system, with its own methodologies, cosmology, and specialists. It has the same deep impact on people, giving them something to believe in and be passionate about, a way to understand the world. It has its own pitfalls and flaws, it makes mistakes, and we work together to amend them. We defer to people who know more about it, who spent huge parts of their lives in traditional and institutionalized forms of education, where the knowledge of their occupational ancestors was imparted onto them, so they could improve and perpetuate it and continue to serve their community with it. What sets science apart from other kinds of magic isn't that science is more intelligent, more reasonable, or more objective, but rather that science is an extremely advanced system, in some ways far more advanced than any other predecessor. But that advancement didn't come without sacrifices, like ecological destruction and energy costs, nor did it come without extreme pitfalls and it getting way the fuck ahead of itself. We can learn from ancient belief systems and apply their wisdoms into science just as we can incorporate science and its successes into our belief systems, with respect and honor to both.

Some of the greatest blunders of science could have been prevented if aspects of ancient belief had been taken into account, and conversely we owe many of our most impressive skills to scientific advancement. We can honor and enjoy both, and make progress both personally and interpersonally doing so. The wonderful thing about both magic and science falling into the same anthropological category, i.e. both being so adjacent to the definition of 'religion', is that that means they can be syncretized. Belief in one does not need to come in the form of disregarding the other as stupid and primitive, they can coexist beautifully.

I won't harp on the ways they can be syncretized much further, because we would be here all day and that'd be better reserved for a different post. And, ultimately, how you end up syncretizing them is up to you and entirely determined by the values of your belief system and your personal values. But I will talk about how treating them as complementary rather than oppositional can benefit you hugely. For one, when you accept that science is just one of many belief systems, and only happens to be one of the most advanced ones on earth, it becomes a lot easier to not feel like you're sacrificing your faith in magic when you go see a doctor. If I were to break my leg, I wouldn't go to the ER because I think a broken leg is just too severe for magic to work on, I would go to the ER because western science knows way more about broken legs through their framework than I do through mine. Similarly, my car wasn't built by dwarves, my car was built by engineers. I shouldn't expect that problems located within the domain of the engineer, dwarves will be able to solve - but I can still pray for my safety, or employ a spirit to help me keep things running on the way to the mechanic. Conversely, there are problems and situations that only fall within the domain of my belief system, like elf shot, or problems and situations that could be resolved with both, like the common cold. What, other than disbelief in magic to begin with, would stop me from happily attempting to solve those problems with magic? And if that doesn't work, considering other solutions?

I personally believe that any belief system, if given enough time to develop itself and enough resources to make use of, could eventually in theory be as successful as western science, or even moreso - and look completely different. (Highly recommend Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky if you're interested in this concept). And, building off of that, I truly believe that we as a global society could improve by leaps and bounds if we credited and explored the countless other ways of acquiring knowledge that the human mind has devised. It is so important to understand the context that science exists in, to understand that the only reason science is so very far ahead of any other system of medicine or understanding is because science is, in a way, synonymous with whiteness. Science is only as prevalent as it is because it was built upon the plain, homogenized canvas created by Christian imperialism, and then European colonialism. Those two things eradicated so many belief systems, almost altogether, and then replaced it with the science that sprang from the newly homogenized Europe.

There is also the issue of identifying signs, another common one that people often use the 'mundane before magic' rhetoric on to try to solve the issue of what is a sign and what isn't. But does that actually work? No, it doesn't. How many times does something need to happen before it's magic? Seeing one crow is normal, but seeing three on the same day isn't? Watching a flame flicker one time means nothing, but watching it flicker nine is a sign? Maybe in some cases that works, but there is certainly a better approach.

When you come into spirituality later in life it is inevitable that you will reach a point of curiosity and familiarity where you start questioning what are signs and what isn't. And, because our lives are so high-stress, maybe it's even natural that we really hone in on that and somewhat obsessively look for signs, be that as proof that magic exists or whatever else. The way to cope with that also isn't to believe less or prioritize some feigned idea of non-magicness over the potential for magic, it's about knowing when to redirect your curiosity elsewhere, when to not obsess over something, when it's pointless to pursue those lines of thinking, etc. Thinking that just because something must logically have spiritual significance, that means it is something for you to know and for you to be concerned about, or something that has any bearing on you at all just because you are perceiving it, is often a form of self-centeredness or anthropocentrism. And it is beneficial to tackle, it should be tackled! Spirituality shouldn’t all be about “does this have relevance to me” in the form of questioning whether things are signs and portents and omens and messages from the gods. Sometimes it should be about questioning the place of these things in the greater picture, beyond yourself, beyond your life.

In that vein I think people should really be open to the idea that it can simultaneously be true that everything is magic, but not everything has spiritual significance to you, specifically. I really truly believe that my culture's historic animism teaches, if you read into it, that anything can portent anything. The nature of 'wyrd' is that everything happens because of each other, and everything happens in response to and accordance with everything else. I fully believe that the gods, in their divine wisdom, can look at a bird and divine truly anything about the day ahead, or look at the landscape and do the same thing. Everything happens in response to everything else, all the time, everything is interconnected - a statement that most pop pagans would agree with - and so of course if you were only brilliant and learned enough, if you could only see enough of 'wyrd', you would be able to divine anything about anything by looking at something random. This can be true, and even something you strive towards in your quest to become better at magic, but sometimes it really is just none of your concern.

It's good to learn to ask yourself when looking for signs or interpreting them is actually beneficial. It's also good to ask yourself how looking for signs affects your mental health, and to consider whether understanding more about the nature of signs could perhaps solve any problems surrounding them in your life or practice, or if choosing not to interpret any signs unless they spit you in the face might be a better option. Because that is an option, and one I can actually personally recommend! If the signs are that significant, they'll become impossible to ignore. And other than that, it's perfectly reasonable to just not look for any, and use planned divination to answer your questions and inklings.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Learning how to integrate magical and mundane is a long process, maybe one that goes on forever! We grow up in a world that conditions us from birth to adhere to certain values. Some are well known to be harmful, like racism, misogyny, xenophobia; others are not as sensitive in the common consensus, like latent Christianity (and especially evangelism), eurocentrism, and indeed this notion of scientific superiority. Unpacking your biases towards science and against magic is one of many processes within the broader act of decolonizing your practice. Learning how to successfully integrate the magical and the mundane into each other and have that more holistic, animistic worldview is a long process for everybody, but a very rewarding one, and a necessary one if you intend to practice the faith of a culture whose core beliefs aren't anchored in western science. And, in the process of decolonizing your practice, you retain the right to incorporate science into your practice however you want, and however suits you best - so long as you have the awareness of historic and cultural context and honor it, and so long as you do not force your cosmological beliefs onto other people.

Conclusion

It is frustrating and isolating to cultural practitioners, not just me but many people like me, to watch magic be written off as silly, childlike, fantastical and primitive, even by other practitioners. Especially when often it is us cultural practitioners who acknowledge before anything else that science is the single most successfully developed belief system on earth.

Insisting on 'mundane > magic' as some universal cosmological truth is not only colonial, actively depreciating the value and validity of every culture whose belief system doesn't orient around western science, but also deeply unproductive, sabotaging practices the world over and furthering appropriation and shallow pop cosmology that serves no purpose. It makes people afraid to engage with magic for what it is, and ingrains the idea in people's minds that critical thinking is either not necessary, or synonymous with blindly accepting false statements about the nature and truthfulness of science.

There is a whole world out there, full of harmless, brilliant, powerful magic for you to explore. The world is waiting for you to come back to the same depth of connection that your ancestors, no matter who you are, once felt. Most contemporary pagans, no matter how deeply entrenched in crappy pop cosmology, would agree with the sentiment that 'everything is connected'. I challenge you, reader, to go find that interconnection. You are not done learning about it, no matter how much you think you already know about it. The wisdom of the gods is there waiting for you in this life or beyond. You, too, can plant your feet on the ground - any ground - and feel the earth's rhythms in tandem with your own.

Bibliography:

Reiss, Julian and Jan Sprenger, "Scientific Objectivity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Feinberg, Melanie, "The Myth of Objective Data," The MIT Press Reader (2023).

Hem Eriksen, Marianne, "Of Bodies and Buildings: Rituals in the Halls of the Vikings," The Norse Sorceress (2021), Leszek Gardela, Sophie Bønding, Peter Pentz (ed.)

Further reading:

Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky

A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold

The Certainty of the World of Spirits (to which is added the Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather) - Richard Baxter

Elves in Anglo-Saxon England - Alaric Hall

Ecopsychology - Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, Allan D. Kanner (ed.)

The Living Fairy Faith - Evans-Wentz