We All Need a Little Magic in Our Lives

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I speak not just of magic but of Magick, and my friend Richard Metzger’s latest project.

Switching gears from dreary financial topics, to say that we all could use a little Magick in our lives is to open the door to quite a few things that receive little attention in our attention-economy world. For example, enchantment: “Our world only cares for unenchanted things.” (Li Po, Chinese poet)

And the view beyond the conventional center: “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

And what’s often dismissed as luck when synchronicity might be the more apt avenue to explore: “We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” (Jean Cocteau)

I speak not just of magic but of Magick, and my friend Richard Metzger’s latest project, Magick Show: A Masterclass in Modern Occultism, a sprawling documentary project made BY occultists FOR occultists partly inspired by the works of English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet and painter Aleister Crowley, who

“believed in the objective existence of magic, which he chose to spell as ‘Magick’, which is an archaic spelling of the word. He provided various different definitions of this term over his career. In his book Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley defined Magick as ‘the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.’”

Richard and I go way back, for as we all know Internet Time is measured in dog years, so our 13 years of friendship are more like 80 years in Internet Time. Richard invited me down to my birthplace, Santa Monica, for a series of interviews, one of which is still online–our 2012 discussion of the Global Neo-Liberal Capitalistic System.

Richard is one of the two people I’ve met who is able to discuss Marxism in an expansive, intelligent fashion, as the rest of the media–to paraphrase Sartre–only learned how to superficially discredit Marx.

During these visits, Richard shared his interest in the occult and music, as well as his remarkably varied work in media, including Disinformation: The Complete Series, which originally aired on the UK’s Channel 4 TV network in the early 2000s.

I confess to envying Richard for two reasons: 1) I wish I’d had the vision and guts to forget about high school graduation, get my hands on a US passport and jet off to London to immerse myself in the vibrant punk-rock scene that enlivened the UK in the early 1980s, and 2) his amazing circle of fellow creatives and iconoclasts, of which I am proud to be part of.

My own interests in magic and the occult veer heavily to the Eastern traditions of Taoism and Buddhism, which I studied academically, and in Carl Jung’s explorations of synchronicity, animus and anima and the collective unconscious. One can get a feel for the range of Jung’s interests in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Judging by the documentary’s trailer (2:25 min), it’s a mind-expanding exploration I can’t wait to see. Yes, the occult has a dark side (wait–they did what?), but it is also a profound expression of our longing for insight and connection to our awareness of things beyond the mere material. And let’s not forget to mention that it’s fun and offers a bit of the rarest human quality in today’s deranged world, whimsy.

If you want to be part of the project, check out Richard’s Kickstarter campaign. He’s already over halfway to his goal, and I’m excited to be a backer of what promises to be entertaining as well as thought-provoking.

In honor of The Magick Show, I coined this aphorism: “Magick is a breeze to get past security.” (CHS)

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