Real Magic (Part II)
Church & Science
Like a chessboard, the intellectual landscape of Medieval Europe was divided into two factions.
On one side sat the Catholic church, with all its political clout. Their view of reality is still very familiar today: we humans move around inside God’s creation. We experience it with our senses. According to the church, humanity screwed up somewhere in the distant past and now we’re paying penance for that original sin. The church wants us to think of ourselves as apologetic sinners before an all-powerful master. This bone-chilling passage from Genesis sums it up:
“And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life”
On the opposite side of the chessboard was the magical tradition. Despite a millennia of persecutions and burnings, whispers of pagan magic always persisted on the fringes of Medieval society. According to this tradition, humanity and God are co-creators of the universe we see around us. As in a dream, we are simultaneously creating and experiencing the reality we inhabit. Genesis seems diminished and sad when compared to this elevating passage from an old book of pagan magic called the Corpus Hermeticum:
“If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure.”
The church set itself up as a tollbooth on the lone highway to salvation. That’s why they set people on fire who dared to suggest that humanity might have the ability to compel nature or to somehow alter the reality we experience. Such a thing would be witchcraft! The church wanted its flock thinking of themselves as audience members in the Theater of Creation, not as having any part whatsoever in the play. Maintaining this perception was the key to their lucrative monopoly on salvation.
The strange thing about this worldview of the church is that it managed to survive the scientific revolution intact. The passing of the baton from religion to science meant swapping out the notion that humans are miserable sinners and replacing it with the equally humbling notion that we are irrelevant. Science has it that we are insignificant fleas on a tiny speck in some galactic backwater. Incredibly, the church’s old assertion that we are subjective minds experiencing an objective reality has never come up for debate. Science simply aspires to be as objective an audience member as it possibly can in the Theater of Creation.
Stay tuned for Part III of this series when we’ll explore three fascinating examples that suggest that science, like the church before it, is vulnerable to a lurking paradigm shift…