From Magic to Reason: There and Back Again

In the days before Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century, there was a belief in what we would call magic: there was no identity. Things did not remain themselves. Anything could change into something else; nothing had a stable existence. A wizard could utter a word which could turn a woman into a hawk, or a boy into a fallow deer.

What did Christianity offer Ireland? Christianity banished the hideous carrion Goddess. It did that not only by replacing her with a gentler and more powerful God, but by offering identity where there had been chaos.

This instability made human life dreadful. On the night after a battle, the opposing warriors would lie down on different sides of the battlefield with the dead and wounded between them. Carrion crows would tear at the bodies. The hideous Goddess of War tore the entrails from hated foes as well as beloved friends and brothers, fathers and cousins and sons. The warriors would not sleep, knowing that after they fell on the battlefield the Goddess would descend to feast on them.

Ireland was far from the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. The Roman civilization stopped at the west coast of the English island. But eventually Rome arrived as missionaries bearing Christianity.

What did Christianity offer Ireland? Christianity banished the hideous carrion Goddess. It did that not only by replacing her with a gentler and more powerful God, but by offering identity where there had been chaos.

The Christian God was more powerful than the most powerful wizard who could speak magic words to transform you into a stone. This new God was so powerful that transformation was ended forever. No more would a mother turn her head for a moment and look back to find that her newborn had grown owl feathers and flown into a tree. No more would a father hunting with his son find that the boy had become a boar.

Those transformations were real—in the mind. But reality was not yet real in the mind. The Christian God, the All-Seeing Mind that created the universe with a Word—that God created an orderly universe. And with order, reality became real.

We humans have trouble trying to connect consciousness to reality: connecting what is inside the head to what is outside. A variant of this difficulty was noted by the poet Byron, who said that reading Ancient Greek was like seeing in flashes of lightning. I have studied enough Ancient Greek to agree with Byron.

It was a great relief to have the powerful God-mind keep order. We can know this by reading translations of the early Irish literature. The emotion changed from bloody chaos and despair to security and joy in a calm natural world. Ireland accepted Christianity and the world stopped shapeshifting.

We humans have trouble trying to connect consciousness to reality: connecting what is inside the head to what is outside. A variant of this difficulty was noted by the poet Byron, who said that reading Ancient Greek was like seeing in flashes of lightning. I have studied enough Ancient Greek to agree with Byron. My first translations were so vivid and shocking that I abandoned the language. It was as though meanings were conveyed in strobe-light flashes, one disconnected impression after the other. As though there were only actions with no continuity in time: now—now—now—now—now— only the changes, the movements, but not a thing that moved purposefully as a unified, whole entity.

Abracadabra… Fast forward about a thousand years after St. Patrick. With the fuller emergence of reason based on identity in a God-built stable world, science had arisen. The human mind had identified enough of what is real to be able to change one thing into another, not in the magical way in which change takes place only inside the head, but change outside the head in reality according to the identity of things.

Coexistent with the birth of science, a new Christianity emerged, one with many versions: Protestantism.

Coexistent with the birth of science, a new Christianity emerged, one with many versions: Protestantism. No longer was a wizard-priest needed to interpret secret knowledge about what God requires in His orderly universe. “Render unto Caesar” became less important as people’s primary allegiance shifted away from superiors in the social hierarchy. A human with a direct relationship with the God of Identity has no need to bow to other humans. People could study the God-book to perfect their relationship with this God. God’s own human Son taught each individual how to achieve and maintain that relationship.

Through this personal relationship with the God that created and ordered the world, each individual gained a direct relationship with His creation—the world.

No longer was there full primacy of consciousness, in which the inside of the head was paramount, in which existence, like a dream, took place in the mind.

No longer was there full primacy of consciousness, in which the inside of the head was paramount, in which existence, like a dream, took place in the mind. Now there was primacy of existence—the reality of that which is real—via the God-consciousness which created the orderly, understandable universe; via the God-consciousness which offered the gift of identity to struggling human minds.

Today we are trending back toward magic.

What happened?

With the focus shifted outward, away from the mind, the role of the mind began to slip away so precipitously that the mind itself lost identity. Now only outside the head was real. It seemed that instead of reasoning, people reacted automatically to whatever stimulus bumped into them. The individual mind ceased to be important, so the individual ceased to be important. People became objects to be manipulated, like Pavlov’s dogs and B.F. Skinner’s animals. Like stones. Yet that conceit is only another misunderstanding of the relation of the inside to the outside of the head.

Logically enough, this materialism led back to a monstrous kind of primacy of consciousness. Why is that logical? Because the universe is indeed orderly. Because humans do indeed have a consciousness inside the head and we must also function in existence outside the head.

What arose was a different type of powerful God-consciousness to maintain order in the world.

In the 20th century order was maintained by the spells of powerful Wizards. They eradicated an estimated two hundred million humans who did not fit into the Wizards’ mental image of what reality should be, but is not.

Force is the inevitable alternative to magic. If what is outside the head cannot be controlled by spells, incantations, polemics that arise inside the head, the only alternative is to control by force. Humans who wield opposing ideas must be eradicated from reality by beatings, torture, murder, war.

Today we are trending back toward magic. People cry for a safe space where they can be protected from certain words, as if words are spells with the power to physically injure them.

Without identity, there is no order. There is no acknowledgment of cause and effect, no rationality. There are only heaps of skulls, as meaningless as heaps of stones. There is the return of the carrion Goddess in one of her many incarnations.

We have moved today to an explicit rejection of identity. New Wizards have arisen out of the combination of materialism and magic.

In the head, one can feel like “identifying” as a physical gender which contradicts the biology of the body in existence. One can feel like “identifying” as a “race” which does not represent the genetic makeup of the body in existence.

Note how the meaning of “identity” has been warped.

The automatic reaction to a stimulus now pertains not only to actions outside the head, but to emotions inside the head. Emotions have become materialistic and the fear of magic has returned. People cry for a safe space where they can be protected from certain words, as if words are spells with the power to physically injure them. Other people react to words they do not agree with as though words can bewitch them to commit acts against their will.

There are political and economic Wizards who believe that wealth does not arise from rational thought combined with external actions. There are scientific Wizards who pick and choose data the way storytellers pick and choose bits of reality to make a tale authentic. Except storytellers tend not to believe that Earth itself will obey them.

These are examples of magic. Or, as we might say if we were rational, they are examples of madness.

A new philosophy, less than a century old, emphasizes that reality, identity, and cause and effect exist with no God-consciousness to maintain them. Because reality is real, reason can be used to comprehend it, resulting in a valid relationship between the inside and the outside of the head. This is Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

The ancient wizards were innocent in comparison. Today, with information available to almost all the world’s population from the earliest records to the latest discoveries, there is no excuse for magic. Today magic is not only insanity, but willful insanity.

A new philosophy, less than a century old, emphasizes that reality, identity, and cause and effect exist with no God-consciousness to maintain them. Because reality is real, reason can be used to comprehend it, resulting in a valid relationship between the inside and the outside of the head. This is Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Objectivism is often derided, smeared and misunderstood, but it is not under attack the way that the Christian God is under attack. After two thousand years of development, that God continues to maintain order in the universe for countless people. Many Christians understand their religion in a way that enables them to live rationally, benevolently, while Objectivism is not yet well understood even by many of its few adherents.

Today the carrion Goddess has returned with new strength, while over much of Earth the Christian God still protects identity: the reality of reality and the proper inside-outside of the head. And that is why, in the view of new Wizards, Christianity is the enemy that must be destroyed.

This essay benefited from a 2016 lecture by J. Christopher Byrd, JD, on the influence of Christian thought on the emergence of the United States, comments on earlier drafts by Vinay Kolhatkar, and a reading of Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy.

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About the Author: Sally Jane Driscoll

Sally Jane Driscoll, Literary Editor of The Savvy Street, holds an M.A. in Publications Design/Creative Writing and Publishing from University of Baltimore, where she taught writing and co-founded the literary quarterly, Passager. She worked as reader/fiction editor for a literary agent who represented popular novelists and is senior copy editor on a medical journal. Her short stories, poetry and articles have appeared in Asimov's, Ellery Queen, Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Capitalism Magazine, The Intellectual Activist, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Lyric, Seventeen, Woman's Day and others.