On the nature of magick

This entry is an answer to the comments on "The death of magick" by Protesilaos (The way of the wizard).

While I agree with most of the content of the post, it heavily focuses on the individual capacities of the self; you can become a magus if you are focused or "special" enough, it's a matter of perception, of self-discipline, of endurance. This posture is not wrong by itself, but rather incomplete when it comes at the core of the initial issue: the death of magick.

The magus, understood as the powerful glass-cannon entity, is never alone; one cannot simply become a wizard on your own, no matter how hard you try, and even if you could, that wouldn't fix the main issue: the disenchantment of the world, as Weber said.

The magi need others to perform the rituals, either adepts or entities to work with; Elijah couldn't have annihilated the prophets of Baal on his own, nor woken up from under the juniper tree, nor Moses open the Red Sea, nor the mystics ascend Mount Carmel without a confessor and a community, and precisely community is the main issue here.

The dissolution of the identity of cities and countries, the changes in population, the desacralization of places and the corruption of rituals and institutions aren't things that we can change through sheer will. The entry was a lament for all we have lost, me as an orphan son of the sun, and you as an expatriated bird.

There is more than self-discipline, plans and pure stubbornness. One cannot rebuild a dying world out of that, nor create a new one out of thin air. The interior castle, so to speak, is built upon a conjunction of selves.

No matter how hard we train ourselves, the stars won't lose their orange cloak, hence the sky will remain silent; without a community, the wandering healer won't come back. Even if we make it to become sages, there won't be any spirits to call, no names to invoke, not a soul to inspire.

The existential dread linked to the post-industrial revolution era has nothing to do with the lack of individual fortune or how gifted we are, but rather with our compulsory engagement in a system that accentuates the loss of meaning and belonging; massive performance for massive benefits, nothing done out of kindness, everything measured by engagement metrics and opportunity-cost comparisons, as Bauman said in Liquid Modernity.

I do believe that there are more things, in the Borges tale sense; people like St. Francis of Assisi wouldn't have abandoned their life for nothing, Sisyphus wouldn't have chosen to trick the Greek deities for no reason in particular, Icarus wouldn't have wanted to catch the sun with his hands — even the myths meant as warnings testify to the reach.

Magic is dwindling, the world is becoming a grey place full of AI, dead internet and capitalist greed; the seriousness of rituals is lost (just go to a regular mass or to r/tarot to see what I am talking about).

How are we going to become mages if there is no magick, if the spirits of the land are dead, our God silent and our traditions and heritage forgotten? What is a mage going to do in an age empty of saints?

Is it a way for us to rebuild our communities? To get back our traditions? To be part of something unfathomably bigger than ourselves?

Can we still be magicians at all?