What Is Magick?
By Migene Gonzalez-Whippler
Magick is a dream come true, a prayer answered, a hope realized.
Magick is also a newborn baby, the petals of a rose, a Beethoven symphony. Magick is many things, but above all magick is an act of creation.
A standard dictionary difines Magick as the "pretended art of
producing effects or controlling events by charms, spells and rituals supposed to govern certain natural and supernatural forces." The words pretended and supposed are examples of the cautious and skeptical attitude many educated people adopt toward magick. This is part of the myth that contends that only the uneducated and the ignorant believe in the supernatural. Nothing could be further from the truth. Primitive societies like those of the Austrailian aborigine and the South American Indian share belief in magick with some of the greatest minds of all time. Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, Issac Newton, and Rene Descartes are only a few examples ot the many great scholars who believed in magick and practiced the magickal arts.
Many of the works of Shakespeare are delicately interwoven
with magickal beliefs. Sigmond Freud was notoriously superstitious, and Carl Gustav Jung made of magick such a serious and profound study that many accused him of falling away into mysticism. To Jung magick carried a perception of reality drawn from the nonconscious and intuitive levels of the mind. He believed that "there is a dimension of human experience that is not external to us in the sense that it can be directly and tangibly grasped. Rather it is within us. This is the essence of the esoteric and occult methods of the past. People who do not understand this and take those teachings at face value miss the point altogether, and therefore they think that these approaches are nothing but superstitions."
Magick as a subject of study was long considered to be
outside the sphere of academic interest. For many centuries it was frowned upon as being unworthy of scientific study and as an enemy of religion and the social order. This is no longer considered to be true by modern scholars, who recognise magick as an important key to understanding man's social, mental, and spiritual development. Because of this recognition magick is being carefully reevaluated by science, especially in the fields of anthropology, sociology and psychology. As a result of this renewed interest many major American universities are now offering courses in the study of the occult, mysticism, and the related arts such as witchcraft, astrology, and meditation.
Perhaps no other science stands to benefit more from the
still unrevealed secrets of magick than modern psychology. Intensive study of the various magickal arts may reveal that the so-called supernatural powers of the magician are in reality the result of carefully developed unconscious forces that are present in all members of the human race. It has been recognized by modern psychology that behind the conscious awareness of both humans and animals there is a driving force or instinctual energy that was called id by Freud and libido by Jung. This raw energy surfaces from the unconscious mind to the conscious and manifests itself in what are known as the fundamental instincts. These are the will to live;  the will to procreate; and the social urge. Jung recognized a fourth instinct, which he called the religious instinct. According to him the religious instinct is the balancing force that allows man to control and direct his more basic urges. It is also the underlying drive behind man's complex systems of morality. Man's desire to discover the truths of nature, his need to define his relationship to the universe, his belief in the existence of God are all expressions of the religious instinct.
We must not confuse the term religious instinct with an actual 
drive in man toward what is know as organized religion. Rather this instinct implies an awareness of a reality that extends beyond the physical world of the senses to a world of nonphysical or spiritual substance, an awareness unsupported by material evidence but existing solely on the strength of intution. Both magick and religion are expressions of the religious instinct. There is, however, one big difference between the two. Religion exhorts man to overcome his baser instincts and to reach instead for the spiritual world, disdaining the material temptations of the flesh. This often results in the repression of man's primordial urges, which were designed by nature to prolong his life and better his  chances of survival.
Sexual repression, for example, is a favorite admonition of religion.
But the sex instinct is also the outlet of creativity in man, and therefore sexual repression often results in stifling man's creative urges, giving rise instead to depression and destructiveness. Likewise, the instinct of self-preservation and the social urge are undermined by religious exhortations to punish the flesh and despise worldly pleasures. Magick, on the other hand, recognizes man's indissoluble link with nature, and rather than stifle his natural instincts it seeks to develop them and blend them into the mighty unit known as willpower. Magick knows that the instinctual energies of the primordial urges can be consentrated into a powerful dynamo that can then be used to bring realization to the conscious desires of man. The secret of magick lies within the unconscious, and all the magician's supernatural powers are only manifestations of the primordial instincts, harnessed and directed through his willpower.
Modern psychoanalytical research has uncovered the fact that
deep within the unconcious mind there exist certain levels of awareness that link each human being with the unconcious minds of friends and relatives, as well as with the mental process of all mankind. This level of awarness is known as the collective unconscious. But even deeper still, the human unconscious forms points of contact with the consciousness of animals and plants. The sum total of these levels of the unconscious mind is known as the superconscious, equated by magick with man's personal god. Magick uses the deeper levels of the unconscious to bring about the changes in the material world. Thus the magician believes it is possible to influence someone's mind on the unconscious level and to subordinate this individual's will to the magician's will.