Entanglements and Divination

The materialist-scientific paradigm spawned a host of neo-scientific explanations for various parapsychological, spiritualist, occult, and magical phenomena. These fall more or less neatly into the categories of occult aethers, occult energies, and occult information paradigms. Occult aethers or ethers seem to have begun with Eliphas Levi, a 19th-century French cleric who dabbled in magic and Kabbala. He proposed the Astral Light, a sort of medium for the transmission of thought and the support of spirit. Then came the rather more elaborate doctrines of the etheric and astral planes and ectoplasm, and so on, in response to the scientific ideas of the luminiferous ether and the dimensions of space current at the time. Before the popularization of Einstein's ideas, it appeared that gravity could operate like an astrological influence at a distance, and that light and electromagnetic radiation in general would need some kind of a medium to cross space.

From such mighty misconceptions, puny occult explanations developed.

Science constrains the concept of energy with a very tight definition of its properties and this makes it useful. Unfortunately ‘occult energies' suffer from exactly the same problem as with spirit realms -- they mean anything anyone wants them to.

As the so-called information age dawned, it did seem at last possible to nail down an irrefutable explanation of magic in terms of a hidden exchange of information between material structures, including brains, assuming that information had some power to modify the structures involved, and assuming that quantum physics allows the information to find its way to wherever the magician wants in space and time.

I must confess myself guilty of the above, during the folly of my extended youth.

I fell into the trap of making the paradigm so broad that it would do anything I wanted, despite the fact that I could not always do what I wanted by magic.

Now, reviewing my casebooks and my theory books, I can see the need both to limit and to extend my frames of reference.

I suspect that time has a richer structure than we commonly imagine and that a Multiverse or Omnium of realities caused by quantum entanglement and superposition surrounds us in three-dimensional time, and that particles travel both backward and forward in time. In this scenario we do not need ‘disembodied information' to account for the functioning of the universe or the phenomena of magic; the exchange of ordinary particles of matter and energy will do the trick given the extra degrees of temporal freedom.

When the magician divines he interacts primarily with future versions of himself. In divination he basically taps into what he may know in the future. A curious circularity seems to exist in divination; it only seems to work if at some point in the future you will end up knowing the result by ordinary means. This explains why the best results in divination seem to occur for either very short-term divinations about unlikely things that will happen in the next few seconds, or for events that are heavily deterministic, but not yet obvious, in the further future.

In enchantment the magician basically aims to select a future where his wish has come true. The entanglements between the magician, his past and future selves, and his environment can provide many channels for the modification of events toward the desired objective, so long as it does not remain ridiculously improbable. This explains the observation that enchantment tends to work best when used over longer periods of time.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, witches and wizards, may, I believe, constitute the beginnings of: A New Magical Paradigm.

It may not greatly alter the way we attempt to do magic for some time, but it may alter the way we think about why it works, and that may eventually improve our practice.

Perhaps for the first time it offers a potentially testable model, particularly where it relates to divination, and one that we could potentially quantify with a view to eventually wrapping some mathematics around it.

As an afterthought I should perhaps mention the traditional ideas of evocation and invocation once again. Whilst I accept the psychological and sigilistic value of the animist and spiritist paradigms, to me the proof of the pudding in both evocation and invocation remains the quality of the divination and enchantment arising from such activities.

Read Part Two of Carroll's article here.

You can read more about Carroll's theories regarding magic and physics at Specularium.

Peter J. Carroll is a modern occultist and author of several books on Chaos Magic. Co-founder of the Illuminates of Thanateros and founder of Arcanorium Occult College, Carroll currently writes columns for Chaos International magazine.