Geoffrey Ashe's column

Only once in my life have I attempted to write a novel. It happened when I wanted to air some notions on magic and occultism, and found that they insisted on taking fictional form. The result was published last summer. Here is a sentence from a review of it in that organ of the intellectual and rational Left, the New Statesman:

This is certainly the most interesting question posed by the novel: why are the notions and attitudes embodied in the word magic gaining ground, particularly among the young? And here is a sentence from a review in that organ of the intellectual and rational Right, the Economist:

This, of course, is the important issue raised by this otherwise unimportant book: why is there a revival of magic, witchcraft, druidism, satanism, all the irrational luggage of organised superstition that western man has been shrugging off these 300 years past? The pained question has become something of a cliche. Nobody seems to try answering it. The interest in magic does indeed exist. Also it is deeply involved with the Alternative scene. How far this is a good thing I will not now consider. But it seems worthwhile to take a look at the other side, at the intellectual opponents. When so-called humanists bewail the occult revival and ask 'why', what are they really driving at? If they want an answer, what sort of inquiry would they favour?

I will tell you. A rigged inquiry. Let me repeat, I don't intend at the moment to speak on behalf of the magicians and occultists. But I do want to draw attention to the way they have shown up their critics - or rather, tripped the critics into showing themselves up. A great deal of 'scientific', 'rational' thought richly deserves this unmasking. It claims to free people's minds, and shuts them in. It claims to be fearless, and is cowardly. It claims to be radical, and is conservative.

With many of its spokesmen, as we can now perceive very clearly, it is a technique for evading discussion of anything they are afraid to discuss. That covers plenty of ground. Just at present I am concerned with magic, in a broad sense. When a New Statesman type asks why it has become popular, he dares not even contemplate the obvious answer: 'Perhaps because there is something in it.' Instead, if he pictures an inquiry at all, he pictures one that might be called sociological.

To over-simplify a little (not much), a suitably unbelieving researcher would go around interviewing believers; he would ask what it is in magic that interests them; he would probe their background and mental make-up; and then he would generalise, and be hurt and puzzled if anybody pointed out that he hadn't properly faced the question. Even thus, a few years ago, a researcher talked with several UFO-seers and announced that they all hac! some trifling psychological abnormality in common. That was the inquiry, that was the conclusion, and no more was said. We have lately been getting much the same style of talk from Dr Jonathan Miller, on the subject of telepathy. 2

Such a ploy is not 'explaining'. An apter word might be 'exorcism': an incantation to make the disquieting question fade away and stop being a nuisance. With magic we will stick to magic as our exhibit - any inquirer who proposes to behave thus, even an honest one, is starting off with two assumptions. Both are question-begging and both are false.

The first is that he can pin magic down with the sort of definition he can feel at home with, a tidy definition that will enable him to handle and tame it. Either he already knows what it's about, or he will soon pick up enough by talking to its adherents and reading their books. The trouble is that he doesn't and he won't testify that they do not know themselves what the forces are which they profess to be working with. To quote the most famous of them in the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley: 'Even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether, so that when one is able to do it, one does it without conscious comprehension, very much as one makes a good stroke at cricket or billiards .

qfta~!\\ tiff~ IY?iJ~c? This is daunting for the scientific anatomizer who can't endure mystery. Nor is it a mere counter-evasion on the magicians' side. I can witness to its truth, at least if divining or dowsing counts as magical. I have tried this twice, on an archaeological site, and succeeded both times. The first time, the result was positive and correct; I found what I was looking for. The second time it was negative and much more impressive, because the divining-rod's message, though it turned out later to be as correct as before, was dead against expectation. By all the rules the thing I wanted should have been in that area. In defiance of expert judgment and my own confidence, the rod insisted by plain inaction that it wasn't ... and it wasn't.

But I had not, and have not, the slightest notion of how this happened. Quite simply the rod twisted or failed to twist, and knew more than I did. The reason may have been subconscious, electrical, occult or whatever you please, I can't say. What could an interviewer achieve by asking me whether I believe in dowsing and if so why? The reply would have to be: 'Sorry, the question's meaningless. I know that certain things happened. Give me a theory of what dowsing is, and I may be able to tell you whether it sounds likely.'

The second false assumption of the pseudo-scientific researcher is that he knows already, not only what magic is, but that there is nothing in it. In all its forms it is a delusion disproved by science, with no room left for mysteries that escape his technique. Hence, what he actually has to run to earth is not magic but the mental defect that makes people fall for the delusion.

Question-begging again. In the first place, it depends on the previous assumption. You can take some trivial kind of alleged magic, newspaper astrology for example, and rip it to pieces. You can't ge t at the core of the matter, you can't say whether the more serious kind has anything in it, till you can at least make a guess at what it really is about. Patient study of it may lead (Jung decided that it did) to truths not easily reached by any other route.

Apart from that, the idea that science disproves it is quite mistaken. It amounts to this, that no one has performed magic al or quasi-magical feats under controlled laboratory conditions. Even if that were true (it is not), it would still be far short of a disproof. The supposition is that magic al phenomena are produced by a conscious technique, which works in every situation. like boiling a kettle. Anybody familiar wi d: them knows they are not like this. All th at is discredited by the argument is a type of event which the sensible believer would not, as a rule, expect anyway.

What the 'scientific' thinker is really doing here is defining proof in advance so as to make proof impossible. The trick lays him open to a reductio ad absurdum .. . if I may borrow a useful phrase from the age when classical education still flourished. His method disproves too much. An experimenter could not, for example, makf a couple fall in love (the real thing, not sexual excitement) under controlled laboratory conditions. He might perhaps induce a mock-up by drugs and hypnosis. But the reality occurs all over the place without such aids. On his own lab-bound showing, there is no evidence that love exists. Manifestly it does. Or take anothe; example, artistic inspiration. Great poet~ and music have sometimes been compose.: to order. But the feat has never been pe rformed, and never will be unless by a fluh. under controlled laboratory conditions. Just the same, great poetry and music exist. Authentic magic may exist too. The tests lie elsewhere.

I am not attacking reason. I am sugges:- 1

ing that there is something badly amiss with the meaning given to it by those wb: invoke it loudest. When they are off thei: guard you can catch them making ama~ admissions. Let me quote another book review, by A.L. Rowse, no less. A year or.so back, when discussing a work on magi=. he dropped the casual remark that peop~ who think rationally are wrong more of"..::1 than others, because they fail to understand the majority who don't. That ma.l5 me gasp. I have always supposed that reason was a method of arriving at truth of thinking right. If Dr Rowse finds th a! :c is, in fact, a method of being wrong mo:?: often, what good is it? Surely his idea of what is meant by 'reason' needs overhauling?

Readers of William Blake will know what I have in mind if I mention the na:m Urizen. Never forget, however, that bef.r. his fall Urizen was the Prince of Light ; znt he will be again. n