The Death of Magic and the End of Time

We live in a time of circuses – at the very least, we have this. Circuses still criss-cross the country: smelly, reprobate throw-backs to another era. The elephants are still horrendously treated, the acrobats are still mind-boggling and occasionally, in a minor circus orbiting at the edges of acceptable society one can still find a two-headed pygmy or a set of Siamese Twins. This something at least, no? The residue of mystery; the last tiny bit of the shamanic spirit.
Not so long ago, magic was everywhere. We humans understood nothing; all was speculation – the work of sprites and Gods. Prophets and seers, those same people that ambulate lethargically through the halls of today’s back wards of asylums, they were the ones with access into the world beneath the image of forms; it was they who spoke directly with Gods, and the future. In those days, ritual meant something – it led in a beeline into the world of the unseen, the place of dreams.
Now, we have beaten back the mystery – through the chimerical “knowledge” afforded us by testable science. We understand! Magic doesn’t exist. Retreating quickly over the past four or so centuries, magic has ben relegated to small, irrelevant puddles in the darkened shadows of our culture: among latter day Wiccans, in absurd, occult practices descended from the once proud traditions of the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Kabbalists. In lotto winners and celebrities, sad shamans for the contemporary worldview. And, in the circus, where the forms or shamanism live on in the caller, the clowns and jugglers, the “death defying feats” (after all, a “death defying feat” was always the entrée into world beyond the world of forms for the Incan shaman or Egyptian priest), where the oily residue of a once oceanic belief in the theurgic universe still resides.

"U Ba Thaw," oil on canvas, 60" x 36", 2007

In our supposed knowledge, we have lost nearly everything. The world that our new zeitgeist, shorn of magic and wonder, has allowed us to dominate is about to shrug its shoulders, and be done with us. The Gods that used to have us cowering, giving us a sense of ultimate Truth, that forced us to be humble with ourselves and the world around us, have withdrawn, disappeared into the ether that we have willed out of existence with out addiction to “information” and “understanding.”

“With the destruction of an immutable set of principles which are the judge of both knowledge and virtue, and with the appearance of a purely terrestrial man whom became the measurement of all things, a trend from objectivism to subjectivism began in Western civilization which continues to this day. No longer was there a metaphysics and a cosmology to judge the truth and falsehood of what men said, but the thoughts of men in each epoch became the criteria of truth an d falsehood. The Renaissance brought forth a new conception of man which made all form of knowledge anthropomorphic.” (S. H. Nasr, Man and Nature, pg. 68)

It’s the Tower of Babel that we build, turning our back on the magic that is the universe, which is existence. We think that because we can name or even nominally understand something (the processes in the brain; the law of relativity), we have somehow subdued it, brought it into our realm, de-activated the magic within it. But – why do certain processes in the brain experience themselves as consciousness; why do the laws of gravity and relativity hold? Why is there someone here to ask why at all? These questions – the true questions – which lead in a bee-line back to the world of magic, are ignored or ridiculed, and we, in an ever-more myopic worldview, grind our teeth in our sleep while figuring out ways to master our domain, ignorant that our time grows dearly nigh . . .