Do you ACTUALLY believe in magick?

I get asked this often, and I usually have a deck of cards, a couple of coins, or some bit of mischief up my sleeve to dispel credulity.

So the answer I would say is yeah—but probably not in the way you mean by ‘believe.’ I’ve spent a long time practicing magic, and I take it seriously as a way of working with attention, symbolism, intention, perception, and experience. There are parts of it I regard as psychological and experiential, and there are parts where I’m comfortable saying, ‘I don’t actually know what’s going on.’ I don’t need to pretend certainty to find the practice meaningful.

I think the interesting question is what we mean by ‘magic.’ I don’t necessarily mean that I can violate physics on command. I mean that human beings can deliberately change their relationship with perception, meaning, attention, behavior, and circumstance through ritual and symbol. I’ve practiced that for years. Whether there are dimensions of it that go beyond psychology? Maybe, I’m not sure in entirety, however.