Have you heard of chaos theory? Most people have heard the butterfly hypothesis: a butterfly flaps its wings in South America and the resulting air movements interact with the current air flow, which interacts with the ocean temperature, which interacts with… and eventually a trailer park in Kansas is taken out by a tornado.
Now, before I get snarky comments about hunting down that butterfly and killing it, this is a thought experiment. Probably. The truth is we don’t know. The world is incredibly complex, full of variables we haven’t identified that interact with each other in ways we don’t understand. So could a butterfly take out a trailer park? Maybe. I don’t know. And no one else does either.
This is just earth. There are 8 other planets in our solar system (Pluto will always be a planet in my heart). There are billions and billions (Carl Sagan is rolling in his grave) of solar systems in the universe. Each with its own set of unique variables and reactions. And that’s not even counting dark matter…
The point is the universe is infinitely complex. And we have no idea how it works, other than in broad strokes. That butterfly in South America may not take out a trailer park in Kansas – it might make it rain on a planet we’ve never heard of in another galaxy. We don’t know.
So what does this have to do with magick? I believe magick is a practical application of chaos theory. We do something here and now -, burn some herbs and says some words, and these actions interact with who knows what in ways we can’t understand, and eventually your grandmother recovers from bursitis. THAT’S magick. Doing something we understand (burning candles, making potions) that interacts in the universe in an unknowable fashion but which results in a predictable result.
We call it magick because we don’t understand how the result happens. But we know how to invoke the chain reaction that leads to the final result. But really, it’s incomprehensible science at work.
Barely a Witch 