BENJAMIN BAS

Have you ever thought about where the seemingly whimsical term Abracadabra comes from? Abracadabra comes from the Aramaic abera kedabera which would translate into “I create like the word”. This word hits on a common theme in mystical beliefs, language has a special power. It not only conveys something, it creates when it speaks. Our common idea of how magic uses this power is in the form of a spell that, from out of nowhere, creates something material. This could be the conjuring of a demon or a monster, but it could also be something more abstract like a curse that does have as its effect material consequences.

But we have been misunderstanding the way magic works through how it is portrayed in our day and age. Of course, there are some currents of magic that are still concerned with the indescribable in terms of metaphysical entities, but for this piece I want to focus on a different interpretation.

In this interpretation magic is the giving of a world, it does not explain the world in the way science does, it invents a language through which we can find a new world. Science and philosophy mostly refer to a world, which makes the object of their speech an image, something that is a mirror reflection of reality. Every interpretation does thus always presuppose this reality. It deals with metaphors, models, structurations etc, in order to refer to itself. It says this is like this. Because of this, science and philosophy will always be bound to some extent to what is already within reality. The question that is important now becomes what is reality.

It is a hard term to define, when we walk around in everyday life and experience the world we would of course say we are experiencing reality. Yet, at the same time reality constantly proves to deceive us, we see things that are not there, think things are a certain while they are not. What stays constant here is that reality proves itself to be reality only when it for a short moment it breaks the spell of what we view as real. When we suddenly notice that we can be deceived and see the correction of that deceiving, we are confronted with reality. Why? We as humans want to split up the world between image and essence, something perceivable and something unchangeable. Reality exists behind a veil, we only see the image of it projected in front of the veil. Our urge is then, of course, to look behind the veil. This place behind the veil, I will argue, is a retrospective illusion. It is the place of meaning of God, of the laws of science. Yet, all these things were put in place by us as essential. This place can’t stay empty, we have to keep suppressing the feeling that our world is devoid of meaning, that the place behind is empty. So where once we thought this place was the realm of God, we now see this as the place of reality, the real unchangeable world. But we have to accept that this is also an idealisation of a world. It is not a coincidence that when use the term reality, it is often very ideologically laden. That is just reality! Often refers to a state of being in the world that has to with some structure that is created by us and for us. We have to work, that is just reality! There are only two genders, that’s just reality! Reality is already ideological. It refers to an empty place that is filled by us to structure our everyday existence. The problem is that what exists within this place of reality will seep into our material existence. When racism was something considered to be real, and there were races that were less intelligent or less ‘human’, this of course was not only something ideological. This reality serves as an infrastructure through which our everyday world in materiality is ordered. Racism led to material racist infrastructure like redlining, unequal schooling, prisons and many other institutions. In this way, there is always an interaction between the ideologies of reality and the material infrastructure of our existence, ideology is a form of infrastructure. This is why science and philosophy mostly are an image that refer to a reality, an ideological empty place. Because it is empty, what they portray as the image gets retroactively structured as something essential. Magic does not do this.

Magic realises the following, instead of suppressing the emptiness of the place of the essential, we have to suppress that there is something to suppress at all.

Magic does not give an image of a reality, it is never a metaphor, it doesn’t refer to anything. Magic circumscribes, it makes space for itself, it does not deal in this is like thisses. It provides immediately a this.

Magic only works within the binary world by contracting the essence and the image together. What this move creates is something conspiratorial, something that has no centre to base itself on, it merely has space. It does not talk about subject matter, it talks around it, it hits only the outside of it tangentially, thereby circumscribing a space for itself within the world. Here lies the radicality of magic, instead of placing itself against a world as an alternative, it shows that it was always already there. This is why magic feels esoteric, weird, eerie, it exists as ancient, as mythos. Now you might say, okay, but this is then just myth making, it is not real! And I would say yes, what magic does is show you that real and unreal or a made up distinction. We only perceive the world, there is no essential being behind what we perceive. Magic collapses this distinction to show that we always have the ability to structure the world in any way we want. Magic takes space in reality when reality is not enough for the people who exist within it. There is no essence that bounds us by saying: That’s just how the world works! We can always un-work it.

So the thing that magic conjures up is not a demon, and at the same time it is. Monsters and demons are often categorical errors, entities that we can not really place in our common way of structuring the world. Think of Frankensteins monster, they are not dead not alive they are undead, they demonstrate a way of being that is other yet that still exists in our world. So while magic might not conjure up a demon that exists in some realm we can not touch, it does conjure up an outside here on the inside. A hole in the way we structure our reality, it tears open the walls of reality to show an outside that wants to be let in. It is no coincidence that magic is often practised by people on the outskirts of society, by women in times when they were oppressed the most or by queer people to find a space where their existence is merely possible. The figure of the sorcerer is always this enigmatic figure that does not fit within the structure of the town, he lives on its edges. He defies the state and constantly undermines its authority that tries to reintegrate him in society. He is a politically aberrant, existent while not able to be placed under any category that the state wants to place him in. He can not be appropriated by categories of reality, yet he exists.

So no magic is not real and that is precisely the point, it creates its own existence when it speaks its language; Abracadabra.