Newsgroups: alt.magick

Steve Cramner writes:

>Okay, I'll bite!  As an astrophysicist, I'm curious about your connections
>between physics and magic.

I was joking and being serious; the reference to Misner, Thorne & Wheeler
came out of Amanda's post about tensor shields - it happens to be the finest
book on any subject I have ever read, I take it everywhere (you should
see the length of my left arm), and I am busy practising shoving camels
through the eyes of needles in the hope that they will let me take it
with me to the kingdom of heaven. (If it isn't already there of course - 
no book such as it is could have a purely human authorship).

The connection between magic & physics? Only in my head. It is convenient
to learn different disciplines under different titles, like 'maths', 'physics',
`chemistry', `computer science', and 'magick' under all its different sub-
categories, but when all this input is resident in the same head for several
years something alchemical happens (e.g. bury the flask containing the materia
prima in a midden for three months). Otherwise rational individuals will
suddenly invent interdisciplinary subjects like `physical chemistry',
and `mathematical physics', and `informatics', and Amanda will reveal that
she uses tensor fields to keep out the bogles, and in a moment of weakness
I confess that Smalltalk and Kabbalah have become inextricably mixed in
my head.

Shava has made the point several times that magic is an ability like
playing the piano or riding a horse, where you can do it but don't
necessarily know how. It is what I call dispositional knowledge, something
you have burned into the wetware, rather than propositional knowledge,
things you can articulate to yourself and other people. Nevertheless, people
*do* try to articulate what is going on, and it is hard, and we reach out
for metaphors, any way of capturing and expressing what is going on inside.
I've really enjoyed the thread on shielding because people have made the
effort to describe their internal representations of "shielding", and
fascinating it has been. One thing that is clear to me is that people will
use *any* linguistic or representational tools at their disposal, and if
a person has a head full of maths, they will naturally find mathemetical
metaphors or analogies, and if someone has their head full of applied sewer
maintenance then it is only a matter of time before they liken the Vision
of Sorrow to a stream full of shit flowing by. Given the nature of the Usenet
it is not surprising that many people on alt.magick have found all sorts
of strange metaphorical connections between their magick and a variety
of technical disciplines. Unfortunately it is easy for someone who is not
familiar with a given discipline to misunderstand the use of metaphor and
imagine that someone has gone soft in the head. It is a long way from using 
(say) the mathematics of theoretical physics as a linguistic tool to some of 
the wilder notions to be found in books on "consciousness and the New Physics".

>'Force' and 'form' seem to enter in a more direct way than in the fairly
>abstract realms of programming structures.  When I first read your Notes
>(gee - over a year ago when they were posted on alt.pagan!), I initially
>identified 'form' with matter and 'force' with energy, but I soon realized
>that was a very naive way of looking at these concepts.  Energy can
>'constrain' and matter can 'cause change'!

Again, metaphor. We are talking about abstractions which one could interpret
as "matter" and "energy", and for some people that would be satisfactory,
and for others it wouldn't.  
>
>Anyway, I'd like to hear about why Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler apply to
>magic to you.  How about Jackson?  Landau and Lifshitz?  :-)?

Misner, Thorne and Wheeler (incarnations of Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar)
were approached by the archangel Ratziel, who offered to dictate to them
the original Book of Creation given to Adam, but lost in the excitement
at having to find a fig tree at short notice. This Ratziel duely did, and they
wrote it down. Thoth, the God of Wisdom, offered to edit the result, and
Hades (this being multi-pantheonic collaboration) dragged out the shade of
William Morris to design and publish the book, which is ostensibly a
book about general relativity, but careful textual analysis reveals within it
the *secret name of God* of 256 components hidden in the Reimann tensor.
Permute the tensor indices (using the technique revealed in the `Sepher
Yetzirah' - see the 231 Gates of Wisdom) and profound symmetries appear, to
reveal a most marvellous name of twenty components, with which (it has been
revealed to me by an angel most sacred and holy) the Great Work may be 
accomplished.

Bet you wish you never asked ;-) I don't know how you can mention those other 
books in the same sentence. It is like juxtaposing William Blake and William
McGonagal. Those are mere physics textbooks. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler is
a book unlike unto any other. 

Cheers,
Colin

P.S. still short of smileys - there was a customs seizure at Heathrow,
with the result that sarcasm and irony are reaping havoc in the south-west
of England. I'm trying to grow my own.