Talk:Magick

The "K" is used to distinguish the word from "magic" as in stage magic, slight of hand and such.

Magick is often defined as "Altering reality in conformance with will". That pretty much means changing the world to be how you want it to be.

Some Points of view

This is a very broad subject, so it's probably best to add some common viewpoints. Add yours if it's substantially different to those already below.

Elseware

Some people define magick as the stuff you do with altars, sacred tools to demand angels and demons do your bidding.

Others would say that anything you do which changes the world in ways you want is magick. This could include spells, divinations (if you want to know stuff), martial arts (if you want not to get beaten up), psychology (to get people to do what you want/help them become happy), computer programming (to process information), gardening (if you will your garden to look nice or bear fruit), teaching (if you want others to know stuff), Storytelling and performance if you want others to think in a certain way.

It's all very well to do complex ritual to ask the angels to oversee your radishes, but you should probably do some weeding, kill the slugs and the like or the spell probably won't work.

In my experience, the most effective forms are always those that change the person doing the working, not the world outside.

If you want the world to change then either

• change yourself to be the kind of person who will change the world
• change yourself to believe the world has changed (See Emperor Norton)
• change yourself so you don't care any more

I believe the proper terms are Macrocosm for the world and Microcosm for you (or the world inside you).

Elseware 16:54, 2 Sep 2003 (BST)

Quantum

Magick is hard to define in the same way Art is hard to define. Often called The Art, it has many branches that can be extremely dissimilar (compare Voodoo with Technomagick for example) but they all share some basic features;