The Great Gaslighting
“As far as I’m concerned, there is literally zero difference between psychology (the study and evolution of the psyche) and magic.”
This fascinating claim landed in my inbox recently. Its author, Carolyn Elliott, runs an online community that practices Hermetic magic and Jung-flavored alchemy. She was addressing some confusion about why she encourages magical practice as a way of cultivating personal growth.
Honestly, I largely agree with her claim about psychology and magic. I view it as an aesthetically rich way of interpreting Jung.
But there’s a puzzle worth noticing:
If there’s literally zero difference…
…then why does this need to be said at all? Why isn’t it already obvious to everyone?
It turns out there’s a deep, rich history behind this. It’s a wicked tale involving sorcery and enlightenment, betrayal and corruption, and several centuries of manipulation that even the manipulators have forgotten about…
…all, amusingly, leading directly to today’s pandemic.
It’s a context that I wish all people who try to practice this type of magic were more aware of, because ignorance of this causes a great deal of pain and confusion and poor results from attempted magic.
I won’t give the full story here. It’s simply too long for a single article!
But I’d like to give enough to loosen the cultural reins a bit.
The history of science has an embarrassing kink in it.
The scientific revolution really took off in the 1700s, during what’s called “the Age of Enlightenment” or “the Age of Reason”. The Church had been dealt a fatal blow with the Reformation about two centuries earlier, and with its newfound breathing room the West deeply embraced the power of logic, experimentation, and mathematics.
It’s not a coincidence that the American Constitution was written toward the end of this century. It was an intentional experiment in designing a government via reason rather than dogma or power.
The way modern scientists tell this story, you’d think the practices of religious devotion and medieval magic were superstitions we thankfully outgrew.
But there’s one rather key detail that they keep conveniently forgetting to mention:
Isaac Newton was an alchemist.
This was not an accident. Magic wasn’t a distraction for him. It’s not that “he just didn’t know better.”
This was absolutely central to the birth of science.
Had Newton not been practicing magic, science as it is today almost certainly would not exist.
As the story goes, Newton saw an apple fall from a tree, and then he wondered:
“I bet the same power that pulls the apple down also pulls the Moon down. So why doesn’t the Moon crash into the Earth?”
Bear in mind that at the time, even though we knew that the planets move in elliptical orbits, we didn’t know why. Nothing on Earth easily moves elliptically.
But this had not bothered philosophers before. The realm of the heavens and the gods always seemed to behave by different rules than the Earth. After all, the Moon doesn’t fall down! The Sun stays in the sky, as do the planets and stars. So their rules must be different!
But Newton would have recognized that this violates a key principle that some of you may have heard before:
Newton was familiar with Hermetic principles like this one. He would have recognized that the split between Heaven and Earth didn’t fit what he understood from his alchemical studies. So he sought to unify “above” and “below” in a coherent vision.
He also believed in a lawful God. He was sure that God continually intervened in His creation, but that He had a design in mind. This made the universe comprehensible: Even if God were to pass a miracle, it was possible to understand why, because God would choose to follow His own laws. Nothing happens “just because”.
Hence the Law of Universal Gravitation. Not a theory, rule, principle, or tendency. A law.
And even the basic idea of Newton’s Law of Gravitation is Hermetic. It’s literally “like attracts like”. It’s an application of the same Hermetic principles that inspired the modern Law of Attraction.
But all this is just groundwork.
Newton’s most powerful effect on the world was actually a potent act of Qabalistic magic.
In short, he taught the world how to speak hidden sacred Names of God.
I need a brief tangent to the main story here to bring in some context.
Part of the reason we use the word “spell” to mean both “magical effect” and “to name the letters making up a word” is that they both relate to speaking. “Spell” used to mean “say”, as in “Let me spell that out for you.”
I’m pretty sure this relates closely to the Qabalistic idea that words have inherent power. For instance, the Tree of Life has a Hebrew letter associated with each Path. So every Hebrew word therefore describes (and in some sense is) a connection of forces between the Spheres.
The Renaissance mages who wove Qabalistic magic, Christian mysticism, Greek philosophy, and Hellenic Egyptian Hermeticism & alchemy into a motley practice were experimenters extraordinaire. One of their more creative endeavors was to use Hebrew Names of God and angels in order to summon potentially dangerous spirits and bind them to do the mage’s bidding.
(This is probably why modern myths have it that mispronouncing a magical spell can be super dangerous!)
However, the most powerful Names of God are unpronounceable. That was thought to be because they referred to aspects of existence that were beyond the kenning of mortals, or were too powerful for humans to safely handle.
Probably the most famous of these is the Tetragrammaton. Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, this is “YHVH”, which is likely where we get “Yahweh” and “Jehovah” from. But the Tetragrammaton really is impossible to pronounce — at least in the conventional sense.
(One could argue that all of existence is itself a pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton! But that doesn’t help your mouth and vocal cords make the right sounds.)
However, if you could somehow find a way to pronounce these hidden Names of God, you would become capable of commanding profound and previously incomprehensible forces.
Newton’s main contribution to the modern world was to translate God’s Names from Hebrew into a fundamentally different kind of language — one that allowed its speakers to pronounce vastly more Names of God.
He even demonstrated its power by speaking an entire universe into existence.
Sadly, most modern folk have never encountered this language. It’s very rarely taught, and its old name has now come to apply to a distasteful widespread practice of psychological and emotional abuse.
This has an Orwellian effect that makes it very hard to explain what Newton actually did, magically speaking, because any and all references to the language usually evoke soul-pain and feelings of inadequacy and fear.
So please bear with me here. I promise, it’s not what you’re likely to initially think it is.
Some of you will have guessed by now:
I’m talking about mathematics.
…but it’s important to note that basically no one today is taught math — not as Newton knew it, and not as I mean it here.
Remember that the ancient Greek schools of math, like Plato’s Academy and the Cult of Pythagoras, were spiritual schools. Mathematics was a key aspect of a mystical practice for coming to directly encounter divine truth. The famous Allegory of the Cave was meant to depict the soul’s journey to encountering the brilliant Light of the Good. In this context, mathematics was a discipline for tuning the mind toward deep spiritual clarity and away from illusion.
But most people reading this have never encountered mathematics — not in this sense. What most people bump into in “math class” is computation. You’re given a method for solving numerical problems, and then you’re given a bunch of problems to solve — usually problems you don’t care about and never will.
This is akin to teaching sex ed purely by showing photos of used condoms.
But it’s much, much worse than that. Students have no reason to find any of the content of math class at all relevant to them. The efforts to fix this with “word problems” are laughable. The real reason most people suffer through a course on algebra or whatever is because they have to, on pain of embarrassment and not graduating and getting yelled at by teachers and parents.
And often, no one really knows why they’re forcing students to go through this abuse — but they usually pretend to:
- “You need it to be good with money.” (Bullshit.)
- “You’ll need it to get into college.” (Maybe true… but why does college require it?)
- “It helps you to think better.” (Oh really? How so?)
- “You need it for the next math class.” (Which I need to take… why?)
- “I know it sucks. I’m sorry it’s like this. But it’s required and you have to go through it.” (Okay, at least that’s honest… but why is it required?)
This whole thing is almost perfectly designed to be a soul-crushing abomination that traumatizes students’ relationship between understanding and wisdom.
And to be clear, this is despite the usually golden intentions of teachers, parents, etc.
The trouble is, most of them were traumatized this way too. The whole thing is a transgenerational mess.
(My Ph.D. is in math education. I say this with no small amount of relevant experience.)
So I want to be clear here:
The language Newton used to cast his spell really is properly called “mathematics”…
…and that is not the thing you’re probably inclined to think it is.
At its core, true mathematics is the divine art of clearly perceiving and understanding truth on your own terms, free of illusions and confusion and social pressure.
It’s not about numbers or computation or proofs, any more than language is about the alphabet or grammar or memorizing poems you don’t care about.
It’s the art of sharpening, and effectively wielding, the Sword of the Magician.
So with that said, let me explain the impact of Newton’s grand spell.
His main written work described the entire world of movement — on Earth, in the Heavens, the microscopic and macroscopic, every nuance everywhere — with a few very simple mathematical expressions.
He had, in effect, created a full physical universe made of math.
The objects in Newton’s world are not things as you and I are used to them. They’re geometric structures that are magically also equations (the same way y=x is magically also somehow a line). They interact according to mathematical laws. They have no intention, no soul, no artistry. Newton’s universe is a mechanical clockwork space where all movement is fully predetermined, forever.
But then the wizard went one step farther:
He opened a portal for entering his new universe.
He showed how the movement of the planets all make sense if you view them as objects in his strange world. He could explain their observed elliptic orbits using the same mathematical principles that show how apples fall from trees.
Suddenly we could view ourselves as being in Newton’s heavens.
This was a very powerful tool. Walking through Newton’s portal, we could model all physical movement as precisely as we cared to measure it. To this day, Newton’s work is considered the beginning of serious modern physics.
But that turned out to be a fatal flaw too.
After a while, people forgot there was a portal. They started insisting that we live in the mathematical world, that we always have, and that all impressions otherwise were pure delusion.
Newton’s portal worked so well that it required no spiritual awakening whatsoever to use it. Anyone could learn the language and then wield it to command powerful forces of reality much like you or I can use light switches without understanding electricity.
But this created an illusion. It became more and more unspoken that of course we live in a world governed by mathematical laws. Maybe we’re wrong about exactly which ones — Einstein famously tweaked and updated Newton’s laws to account for the unvarying speed of light — but obviously we have basically the right idea! After all, our technology works!
Never mind that our technology lacks a certain wisdom.
I don’t say this to generically bash the flaws of being human, or to criticize science for being imperfect. I mean this as a pointed critique of the forgetfulness imposed by the last 300 years of scientific obsession with Newton’s magic — not realizing that it is, indeed, magic.
In many cases, magical training required a kind of spiritual initiation. If you didn’t get the glimmer of enlightenment that let you see the underlying wonder and terror of reality, then people who had gotten that insight usually wouldn’t teach you the more potent arts of manifestation. Often you couldn’t learn them because, prior to penetrating the Veil of Paroketh, you actually have no damn clue who you actually are or what you’re capable of or how to access your own power.
Which is to say, the Western practice of magic was (among other things) an enlightenment discipline that yoked wisdom and power.
Newton’s spell called in a new era where access to a kind of deep magic no longer required wisdom training.
Oops.
So the unwise neo-mages started stupidly proclaiming that because there’s no room for concepts like wisdom or divinity in Newton’s mathematical clockwork machine, they do not exist, and belief in them is superstitious nonsense that should be rooted out and destroyed.
Sadly, this included targeting the branches of magical practice that focus on cultivating wisdom.
One of the first targets was all of religion.
To be fair, mainstream Christianity was a dying and shattered spiritual path by Newton’s time. It had become vastly more interested in power and dogma than in enlightenment.
But this doesn’t excuse a certain foolish gaslighting.
The God of magical Qabalism, for instance, isn’t an “imaginary friend”. God is more like reality itself. John Michael Greer really captured this nicely, I think, in his book Paths of Wisdom (p. 11):
“The words we use to describe the universe are symbols of our experience of the universe, which is itself a symbol of something else. About that ‘something else’ we can know almost nothing. […] all we can every really experience are the symbolic images the ‘something else’ creates in our minds. Still, after a fashion, we can reason about it. We can postulate that, in some sense, it exists. We know that it lies beyond the universe we experience, that it gives rise to that universe in some manner we don’t understand. We know that its true nature is totally inaccessible to us. And as we consider these attributes, we may begin to realize that this ‘something else’ sounds very much like what mystics of so many different places and times have called God.”
And yet, because there’s a silly version of this to condemn, a popular sport amongst militant atheists is to mock all references to a reality beyond their Newtonian playground. It’s as though they’re saying “If you believe in any God beyond this mathematical world, then you must believe in a stupid version, and therefore you’re foolish.”
Which really is amusing. I mean, they’re kind of implying that they themselves don’t exist. Otherwise who, exactly, is looking at this mathematical world? Is the math looking at itself from the inside somehow?
But I digress.
A related tactic is frame setting. For instance, Richard Feynman gives a brilliant lecture on scientific thinking — precise, clear, beautiful. The man had a marvelous mind. But in the middle he delivers this (my bolding):
“The same goes for astrological influences. If it were true that the stars could affect the day that it was good to go to the dentist, then — because in America we have that kind of astrology — then […] the physics theory would be wrong because there’s no mechanism, understandable in principle from these that would make it go. That’s the reason there’s some skepticism among scientists with regard to those ideas.”
The thing is, that’s not astrology’s claim. I’m sure some astrologers assert this, and if so then Feynman’s critique definitely cuts at their worldview. But astrology’s core premise isn’t about a mechanism within the mathematical sandbox. Rather, it’s about the power of getting insight by tracking a poetic relationship between self and world, and using the planetary bodies as “rhymes” within that “poem”.
(…the very same “poem”, by the way, that likely gave Newton his original inspiration!)
But that’s tricky to translate into the scientific framework. So even brilliant well-intentioned scientists like Feynman end up doing the simplest translation possible into the Newton-like realm of math, noticing that the oversimplified theory doesn’t work there, and then dismissing the original thing with a smirk.
It’s important to realize that these and related gaslighting moves have been going on…
…for over three hundred years.
This is a big part of why naïve realism — a background assumption that there’s an objective reality that’s independent of us and which we perceive mostly accurately — has such a firm hold on Western minds. Since the European Enlightenment, more and more people of authority have just… assumed we’re living in Newton’s new universe.
This has had two disastrous results.
The first has been a systematic destruction of meaning and meaning-making. Notice that Newton’s mathematical sandbox doesn’t have room for meaning, beauty, significance, love, bliss, or self-transcendence. Those are all illusions generated from mathematical objects bumping around mechanically. We might scale it up to “brain chemistry”, but the brain is still a machine inside a clockwork universe obeying pointless mathematical laws.
And that clockwork universe will eventually fade into nothingness, dragging even our feeble illusions of purpose into an existential grave.
This is bleak. Very, very, very bleak.
The standard answer to being trapped in an utterly pointless universe from which there’s no hope and no way out…
…is numbness and distraction.
This is a big reason why alcohol is a cultural staple whereas the vastly safer drugs of insight (LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, etc.) have been systematically banned.
This is also where our cultural obsession with staying busy comes from: “nailing it” at work, keeping yourself entertained, “improving” yourself, keeping going with caffeine and nicotine, etc.
…all while having this background sense that something is dreadfully wrong.
Naturally, once the collective unconscious found a mythic way of depicting this relentless, hopeless, brain-eating cultural infection, a certain kind of story became popular in the modern imagination:
It’s telling that during the same time period, Lovecraftian stories started getting popular. A common theme in Lovecraft’s cosmological horror is that knowledge drives you mad: Humanity lives in a tiny pocket of a vast, incomprehensible, and at best unyieldingly indifferent universe filled with horrible monstrosities. If one of those maddening beings happens to notice you… well, they’ll probably eat you if you’re lucky.
The implied argument is: It’s better to be entertained and distracted and believe in comforting lies than it is to behold the awful truth.
This is a major factor in why information bubbles, social media, and modern journalism all work the way they do. After the 2016 American election, the most stunningly obvious need was to find a way to bridge conversation and heal the divisive scar separating left-wing and right-wing.
But that was less interesting (i.e., distracting) than getting offended and scared…
…which meant profit followed other-side bashing…
…so the conversation actually divided even more harshly to the bizarre point that whether you wear a face mask is a political statement.
(Appropriately enough, I cannot find an image anywhere on the internet that depicts this divide without implying that the anti-mask folk are reactive nutjobs. But I’m sure their concerns have no underlying validity whatsoever and that any emotional imbalance and pain in them is best addressed via condescension and mockery, right?)
This is, quite literally, mass psychosis.
…which makes enormous sense!
I mean, if understanding reality means seeing that meaning does not and never can exist, do you really want to stare into that Abyss? Maybe psychosis is just… better!
This implicit background thinking, by the way, seems to be why so many governments were so slow to respond to the Covid threat. Governments survive based on their ability to stay in power. If that ability requires keeping the people distracted and entertained with illusions, then posturing becomes more important than tracking physical reality.
Besides, who is going to risk looking at actual reality and perhaps glimpsing Cthulhu?
Behold, the legacy of commanding hidden Names of God without understanding what you’re doing.
“Beware of unearned wisdom.” -Carl Jung
But that’s just the first disastrous result.
The other problem is a tremendous self-doubt that permeates Western wisdom practices.
Like… I’m guessing that you probably have a niggling doubt in the back of your mind (or perhaps not so far back!) that maybe all the stuff around magic and alchemy and the Law of Attraction and Higher Selves and astrology and all that is… just bonkers? Like playing with that is maybe just kidding yourself?
I know quite a few people who started owning the fact that they seem to get channeled messages, and whose lives are vastly improved for leaning into that and just trusting it…
…and yet they have to grapple with a fear that maybe they’re literally losing their minds.
It’s funny how people who are studying physics don’t have to worry about that.
That must be because their worldview is just correct, right?
(We’ll just quietly ignore the question of how anyone could possibly know something like that….)
I sometimes refer to this as “paradigm privilege”. There’s this undercurrent in the culture that just… assumes that naïve materialism is basically right, that science should get the glowing aura of authority, and that we’re embedded in a mathematical world that’s in some basic way like Newton’s.
It’s pretty bizarre when said that way, huh?
But there it is.
And magic-flavored cultures still mostly buy into it.
For instance, Dr. Joe Dispenza got really popular right before the pandemic from what I can tell. But what he’s teaching isn’t new. It’s basically a rebranding of New Thought.
So why do people love what he’s saying so much?
Well, basically because he’s giving them scientific permission to believe in magic.
It matters a lot that he’s a neuroscientist, for instance. And that he uses a lot of biological and brain science terms to describe how his methods work.
He’s bestowing the authority of the privileged paradigm on hope.
“Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience — neurochemically, it’s the same.” -Joe Dispenza
There’s a really basic problem with the approach Dispenza is using though. Well, three problems, but they’re intertwined:
- In order for Dispenza’s magic to work, you have to believe in his science and his scientific authority. But what if he’s wrong? In order to protect the hope and meaningfulness received from Dr. Joe’s teachings, then, you have to guard against potential contrary ideas from other scientists. You need ready arguments that make Dr. Joe’s ideas unfalsifiable, and you need to avoid getting too curious about experiments that disprove his core claims. Which is to say, you have to alienate yourself from love of truth and deep curiosity and skeptical inquiry — the few wisdom practices that survived into the scientific discipline.
- Dispenza’s methods don’t solve the underlying problem — namely that science claims to derive its power from the true view of reality, which happens to be devoid of all meaning. He doesn’t show the exit from Newton’s brilliant existential grave. Or if he does, he buries the lede. So although he offers a way to reintroduce meaning and hope, he doesn’t seem to offer a path for cultivating wisdom, which means eventually his approach will degrade the same way science and religion have.
- The fact that people aren’t caring for the above two points means that there’s a market for spiritual bullshit. Maybe Dr. Joe is sincere and basically right, or maybe he’s sincere and BSing himself, or maybe he’s deceiving others in a narcissistic bid for attention and money. I don’t know — and it’s super damned important that it’s hard to tell! Because that last option — narcissists exploiting the spiritual market — is basically guaranteed to happen somewhere. Those people are going to manipulate the stories that spiritual groups agree on in ways that make those groups even more exploitable over time, which in turn increases how many narcissists show up to exploit the market… giving us a vicious cycle that results in expensive BS workshops and sex scandals and social backbiting in the name of love. So even with perhaps the best of intentions, Dr. Joe is actually encouraging a harmful spiritual market.
Just to be clear: I don’t have anything against Dispenza, or with people listening to and benefitting from him. Given the current social conditions, he might be doing the kindest, best thing he knows how.
I’m just trying to point out the dark consequences of buying into and relying on three centuries of gaslighting.
I could just as well have picked on The Secret. Or HeartMath. Or pretty much every single goddamn reference to the word “quantum” outside of physics and computer science.
(Seriously. I promise, quantum physics says absolutely nothing whatsoever about consciousness. That’s actually super important, and it would be an utter horror shitshow if it did. But explaining this in magic-inclined communities usually amounts to a kind of emotional violence because they’re using the authority of science to validate their ways of making meaning. In one sense, this whole essay is an attempt to help people out of that trap and into a recognition of their power to validate themselves.)
Science is very powerful. It’s worth listening to. None of this is to say that you should ignore science. Do so at your peril!
But I encourage you to keep in mind:
Its culture disowned wisdom.
Let’s conclude by returning to the original question:
If there’s literally zero difference between psychology and magic, why does this fact need to be pointed out?
In short, it’s because while there’s no difference in essence, there is an important difference in branding.
You see, Newton’s potent math box doesn’t really have a place for anything like choice or free will. And yet humans seem to experience it, and to use it to affect things in the physical world. That’s quite a conundrum if you believe we actually live inside that box! It seems to teasingly suggest some kind of spirit from beyond the box, interacting through the human mind.
That’s why the word is “psychology”. The Greek word “psyche” means all three of “breath”, “spirit”, and “mind”.
(It’s very classical to equate breath and spirit. Even our word “spirit” is Latin for “breath”. Being inspired literally means taking in a breath, like the gasp that sometimes comes from insight. And “expire” is a reference to the final outward breath of a dying person, often thought to be the soul leaving the body.)
It’s not really possible to make sense of the human psyche purely from within Newton’s box.
Sure, large chunks can and do make sense. If you damage parts of the brain, this clearly affects parts of the mind. And we seem to have a kind of autopilot that takes us straight home from the grocery store while we’re lost in thought. That part can quite likely be described within the scientific worldview.
But there’s this big gaping window that no one can seem to explain from within the privileged paradigm:
The window you’re looking through.
That which wakes up, and beholds that you exist.
That which is experiencing the idea of the Newton box to begin with.
As a matter of intellectual philosophy, this doesn’t matter all that much. Scientists roll their eyes and shake their heads and mutter something about how “we don’t know” doesn’t mean “it can’t ever be explained”. Mystically inclined folk nod and knowingly smirk at the ignorance of the scientists.
Both are kind of foolish, honestly.
But here’s the thing:
When you actually do the inner psychological work needed to become a more functional human being and transform your life…
…at some point you will encounter your inmost self…
…and then this spurious distinction between psychology and magic truly vanishes.
It’s not a coincidence that Carl Jung, one of the major founders of modern psychology, reintroduced alchemy as a serious and plausible endeavor.
The reason there’s an apparent difference between psychology and magic is this:
- We call it “magic” when we view it as falling outside the Newton box. It’s magic as opposed to science, you see.
- We call it “psychology” when it looks like it might fit inside the box.
When you stop buying into science’s paradigm privilege, and you instead just view it as one (very powerful) tool among many…
…then you can be free of the gaslighting, the meaninglessness, and the need for science’s approval.
You can enter and leave Newton’s box whenever you like.
You can behold all in wonder, and use all that works, freely.
You can remember that you are God.
