irony is the death of magic

doing magic is cringe. deal with it.

my own tweet, 2017

I have spent much of my life as a perpetually embarrassed person. I remember taking foreign language classes in high school and doing so horribly in them that I eventually switched over to Latin. This was at least partly because I was a big nerd who loved mythology and The Odyssey, but I can’t deny there was also major appeal in the fact that Latin isn’t really spoken. The reason I was bad at the other languages is that speaking and pronouncing them properly requires something I crucially lacked at the time: willingness to sound stupid.

The word magic comes from a root that means to be able, to have power. That power has a consistent enemy: lack of conviction. The Picatrix, a tenth-century Arabic compendium of astral magic drawing on Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and earlier Mesopotamian sources, states this directly in Book I: “One who practices magical arts ought to believe in his workings without any doubt regarding the work, because this is how the practitioner is well disposed to receive the aforesaid effects.”¹ Doubt is a poison that undermines the work before it even begins. Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy offers one explanation as to why: the mind contains “a certain virtue” capable of “changing, attracting, impeding, and binding things and men toward that which it desires,” but it operates only when “carried in great excess by some passion or virtue in such an amount that it overcomes that which it binds.”² Your conviction must be strong enough to outstrip the object of your desire.

Dancers in the Temple, Victor Lagye 1888

No one at this point in magical history needs Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic restated for them; his importance here is his insistence on the primacy of Will, which his entire system of Thelema was built around.³ “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”⁴ Austin Osman Spare’s Book of Pleasure builds its entire method around solving this problem of lust of result. This concept is often misread as a counsel to suppress desire or detach from outcome. But Spare identifies the problem as anxious monitoring of desire rather than desire itself: “Concentration is dissatisfied desire, a conflict that can never be satisfied, because of its means.”⁵ Free belief, in Spare’s system, is belief-energy liberated from ego’s compulsive checking, the product of doubt. You don’t continuously dig up a seed to see whether it has sprouted. The practitioner compelled to check has already told themselves something about their confidence in the soil.

Ernest Holmes, a prominent figure in the New Thought movement, describes the same phenomenon. In The Science of Mind he implores the reader to imagine his desires “not as an illusion but as a reality, not as a dream but as an experience; to declare that their presence is now here. BUT WE MUST NEVER LOOK TO SEE IF THEY ARE HERE, BECAUSE THIS WOULD IMPLY DOUBT AND WOULD NEUTRALIZE OUR WORD.”(caps in original) Holmes created an entire spiritual system around the operative power of belief called Religious Science, which integrated the principles of New Thought into a form of applied Christianity. In his own words: “The more power one gives to his thought—the more completely he believes that his thought has power—the more power will it have.”⁶ Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey was adamant about the focused direction of will and attested that scattered emotional investment “only guarantees the weakening of what should be ritualistically directed force, by spreading it thin and diluting it.”⁷ LaVey even applied this condition to the working after the fact. The Seventh Satanic Rule states: “If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.”⁸

Renaissance Neoplatonists, Thelemites, proto-Chaos Magicians, New Thought practitioners, and Satanists have little in the way of shared metaphysics. They agree on almost nothing about the nature of reality or the source of magical power. New Thought teaches that the practitioner participates in God’s creative power; LaVey installs the practitioner as a god. Yet they all seem to agree that being wishy-washy unmakes the work, and none appear to have any tolerance for ironic detachment.

It would be easy to read all of this as an argument for positive thinking, and while I’m not dismissive of that, a purely psychological read here would be radically incomplete. Many of the traditions mentioned assume an animate cosmos populated by entities with their own agendas, stars, spirits, daimons, the Logos itself. The condition of conviction is not just about what you generate internally, but also how you present yourself to the forces that are present and rise up to meet you (or don’t). It is a condition of spiritual authority. Never forget that one of the most brutal owns in history was the direct result of its lack:

And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? -Acts 19:15

The process through which these qualities are embodied and enacted is ritual, and ritual is, at its core, performance. Performance studies comes to many of the same conclusions with regard to its conditions: performing both requires and enacts belief. Richard Schechner argued that theater and ritual exist on a continuum, and that theatrical performance at its fullest produces genuine transformation in performers and audiences.⁹ In other words, “fake it ‘till you make it.” Victor Turner’s concept of liminality describes the state in which this becomes possible: “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial,” a space set apart in which the ordinary rules governing social life are suspended.¹⁰ Liminality requires the surrender of the social self: its definitions, its protective irony, its monitoring functions. Pierre Bourdieu locates this surrender in the body: “The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief… What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.”¹¹

Through ritual, we internalize and enact belief, and this process causes the body itself to also believe. The embarrassed, self-monitoring body, watching itself perform and evaluating whether it looks stupid, cannot properly ritualize. It is present at the ritual while remaining outside it. Artaud makes the same diagnosis: “If our life lacks brimstone, i.e. constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined forms instead of being impelled by their force.”¹² Self-observation drains performance of its power.

This same self-observation is ubiquitous within contemporary irony culture, a relational framework fundamentally opposed to the requirements of effective magic: complete and total conviction in your ability to change reality, and the embodiment of that conviction through performative ritual acts. Irony takes our deepest, most precious desires and transforms them into a text message to God with “lol” on the end.

Jedediah Purdy describes fear as the underlying impetus for this state: “There is something fearful in this irony. It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us to these.”¹³ While irony attempts to function as a protection against vulnerability, it is ultimately a form of cowardice that is incompatible with magical will.

Irony culture polices full commitment in a world that has decided it is naive, embarrassing, a sign of not knowing how things actually work. Taking anything seriously is cringe. Performance is cringe. The cringe response becomes internalized over time: the external cultural judgment becomes internal monitoring, the imagined audience of ironists watching the ritual becomes a permanent presence inside the performance. One cultural antibody to this has been a kind of approved “new sincerity,” earnest and feel-good yet entirely without stakes, in the service of nothing in particular. Magic is sincerity in the service of actually changing something, which is a different and much riskier proposition.

The irony-pilled practitioner and the result-lusting practitioner have the same problem: they cannot stop watching. A practitioner’s compulsive monitoring of the working, unable to entrust the operation to deeper processes, is the same splitting of attention, the same presence of the internal observer. Irony culture has made that observer universal, automatic, and socially rewarded. It trains the psyche at a cultural level, infects practitioners before they begin, and makes its removal feel like abandoning intelligence. Kierkegaard identified the limit of this position in The Concept of Irony: irony “is a nothing that devours everything, and a something one can never grab hold of, something that is and is not at the same time, but something that at rock bottom is comic.”¹⁴

Reject it. Be cringe. Be free.

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1. Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim, c. 10th-11th century), Book I, Chapter 4, trans. John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (Iowa City: Renaissance Astrology Press, 2010-11).

2. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), Book I, Chapter 68, trans. Eric Purdue (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2021).

3. [Thelema]

4. Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), I:44 (1904). https://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm

5. Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1913). https://hermetic.com/spare/pleasure

6. Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind, rev. ed. (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 1938).

7. Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (New York: Avon Books, 1969), Book of Belial. On the intellectual decompression chamber: https://www.dpjs.co.uk/idc.html

8. LaVey, “Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth” (1967), Rule 7. https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/

9. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), ch. 4, “From Ritual to Theater and Back: The Efficacy-Entertainment Braid.”

10. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 95.

11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 73.

12. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

13. Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (New York: Knopf, 1999).

14. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 131.