A post entitled A Church of Magic over on Kjetil Fjell’s blog has, despite being over a year old, been recently brought to my attention. The subject matter covered, a type of sociological, OTO-obsessed, college-kid “Thelema” inspired by Team418, is not the usual fare for this site, but in this particular entry – and in the comments to it – Fjell makes some extraordinary claims that illustrate nicely what’s wrong with this kind of undergraduate approach whose proponents appear to be becoming more vocal in recent months.

Firstly, it will be helpful to summarise what the entry in question says, since the task is made difficult by Fjell’s disjointed writing style and clumsy English.

He begins by distinguishing two types of “magic”. The first, “Frazer’s magic”, is the type outlined in The Golden Bough, one which assumes a regular and predictable order behind physical events, but which assumes an order which is simply wrong, something Fjell freely admits. The second, “religious magic”, is one “that attempts to win over the favor of supernatural beings with sacrifice and prayer.” In comparison to the first type, religious magic assumes alternately that there is not a regular and predictable order behind physical events, or that there is one, but that it is regularly overridden by “the capricious intervention of supernatural beings.” He then goes on to declare “this is the key feature which separate[s] magic from religion: One is testable, the other is not,” having already determined that while “magic” is testable, when it actually is tested, it is almost universally found to be false. This, as far as it goes, is a reasonable summary, which merely serves to make the remarks we will encounter later all the more extraordinary.

Fjell’s points then start to become somewhat labyrinthine. He says that “you can’t create a Church of Magic” because magic “is simply what does not work or what we understand badly and consequently works poorly.” We then come to the first of a number of bizarre statements:

It should also be noted that what differentiates magic from religion is it’s rigidity, and consequently Crowley noting success after breaking the rules is an indication that his magic falls more into the category of religion than magic and is not really working along the lines of Frazer’s magic

Let’s analyse what this, in combination with the prior points, actually says:

1. Crowley did magic;
2. Magic doesn’t work;
3. Crowley noted success in magic, despite the fact that it doesn’t work;
4. Crowley got his success by “breaking the rules”, therefore he didn’t do magic at all, he did religion;
5. Religion is not testable;
6. Notwithstanding the fact that religion is not testable, we can nevertheless somehow determine that Crowley noted success in religion.

Fjell remarks that “very few modern [practitioners] of Magick [have] such an approach to it for the simple reason as even Crowley notes in his diaries and books, that it is not that simple.” Well, quite. Upon reaching this point, and getting one’s head around the sheer contrariness and incoherence of it all – as well as the aforementioned promise that he really doesn’t mean what he says – we can clearly start to suspect very strongly where this is going, which is likely to be: “therefore, it need not worry us that magic doesn’t work, because we don’t do that kind of magic, we do religious magic, and since that isn’t testable, we’re immune to skepticism, although we can still somehow claim ‘success’.”

He goes on to (correctly) say that “to base an organization around magic…consequently amounts to…organized superstition…the majority of it’s members will quickly defect when they discover that it doesn’t work”. Then, he says that “religion…introduces…compensator[s], which are non-empirical (in the sense that they can’t be disproved) reimbursements for the considerable resources that a member invests into their religion. For Christians this is redemption from original sin, for Buddhists it is Nirvana.”

This is the second of our overtly bizarre statements. Up to this point, Fjell has clumsily, but nevertheless correctly, denounced magic as – in Frazer’s words, which he quotes – the “principles of association…illegitimately applied…all magic is necessarily false and barren.” He then goes on to say, in effect, that religion is better, because what religion provides is “non-empirical (in the sense that [it] can’t be disproved)”.

Again, let’s pause for a moment to reflect upon what he’s saying, which we can translate roughly as follows: “Magic is nonsense which is easily disprovable. This is a problem. Therefore my solution is this: let’s instead believe in nonsense which is not even testable, and therefore will never be disproved. That way, we have a sound intellectual basis for our beliefs.” Got that? Read it again, just to make sure.

Now, for the sake of completeness and scrupulous fairness, Fjell does claim that he’s not proposing any such thing, merely evaluating whether or not such a thing would have a negative impact on the “religious movement” of the OTO (which he insists on misdescribing as “Thelema”). But, since he is a member of the OTO, and says that as a result of the foregoing analysis “there is nothing stopping Thelema [Ed: i.e. the OTO] from being a successful new religious movement”, and regularly in other venues states that he does indeed want the OTO to become a more successful new religious movement, it’s pretty clear that that is indeed what he is proposing, despite his protestations to the contrary.

Then we have this:

To sum up the question is not the actuality of the claims [i.e. of the existence and super-powers of “praeternatural beings” or “secret chiefs” who direct the workings of the universe], I have through my own experience come to regard them as true, though I freely admit that someone who do not share my personal history would not do so…I am saying that they are religious rather than scientific claims, which does not say that they are parables rather than facts. Whether or not one is convinced of Crowley’s claims however is another question. I of course am, but I recognize that these proofs would be too weak to convince everyone. I do however think that they like most religious claims are strong enough to convince many people…As such the validity of it is a philosophical one rather than one that can be disproved in the conventional modern sense of the word.

So, let’s recap. These “religious claims” are “non-empirical”, and, as such, are not subject to empirical evaluation. Yet, somehow, there are some “proofs” of them. And these “proofs” are “weak”. Yet, “of course”, Fjell is “convinced” of their truth. And they are “strong enough to convince many people”. But the validity is only “philosophical”.

It should be clear to most people reading that entry that Kjetil Fjell is a long way from being a complete idiot. He appears to be intelligent, thoughtful, and, for someone for whom English is not a first language, at least reasonably eloquent in that medium to somebody willing to spend the time parsing his writing. And this should not be surprising – it does indeed take a degree of intelligence to come up with such pure and unadulterated gibberish as this. Imbeciles can write nonsense, but it generally is just nonsense; it takes a more developed mind to grasp concepts like this sufficiently well as to create such an asinine and raving stream of lunacy as this.

It’s hard to even know where to begin with this inanity, but we may as well try. Firstly, let’s look at the idea that the evidence is “weak” in his own words, but that he’s convinced anyway. He may as well go ahead and explicitly add the implied “because I’m a gullible idiot who’s easily convinced by crappy evidence” at the end, because that’s really what he’s saying, whether he knows it or not. Crappy evidence is crappy evidence no matter who is looking at it, so if it’s crappy for everyone else, it’s equally crappy for you. For no area should this be clearer than for religious claims. The world is replete with gullible fools who are convinced of the truth of their religious claims because of some kind of “personal experience”, often qualified as “direct” experience by folks such as Fjell as if that makes it all OK. If you accept your own personal spooky experiences as evidence of the existence of secret chiefs, then you have to accept that the bizarre religious claims of just about every other religious clown throughout history are equally true, even when they contradict, as they usually do.

Spooky experiences are not evidence for anything other than the fact that you’ve had a spooky experience, and they are certainly not evidence for supermagical secret chiefs controlling the universe. The celebrated “miracle of the sun” in Fatima in 1917 involved a group of people, estimated at between 30,000 to 100,000, many claiming to have witnessed the sun variously making “sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws”, and “appearing to be loosened from the sky and to be approaching the earth”, yet the rest of the solar system, not to mention the rest of the planet, seemed to remain curiously unaffected by this catastrophic galactic event. If this many people can be so utterly mistaken as to the interpretation of their own senses, then “feeling a presence” and allowing yourself to become impressed by coincidences and amusing number games should be instantly discounted as evidence of anything except your own suggestibility.

Secondly, it would be nice if he could make his mind up whether these claims are “non-empirical” and “not disprovable”, or whether they are not. If they are “non-empirical” then they are not verifiable by experience, and if they are not verifiable by experience, then precisely how is one’s experience supposed to convince one of their truth? If a claim is by its nature “not disprovable” then it is not provable either; if it is a non-factual claim which evidence cannot disprove, then it is also a non-factual claim with no evidence to support it, either, and if there’s no evidence to support it, then what on earth are you doing taking it seriously in the first place? Did you just wake up one day and decide that you were going to believe it, or what? If you have had an experience or experiences which have convinced you that a claim is true, then you cannot turn around and say that such a claim is “non-empirical”, because you’ve just that second said that it isn’t.

As we saw earlier, this idea of “religious magic” looks very much like its purpose is to reject skepticism by proposing that any arbitrary ridiculous claim is “non-empirical”. But Fjell, like many occultists, wants to have it both ways. As John Bowie pointed out in the comments to that entry – before he was stopped from doing so by an embarrassed Fjell protesting that he was “off topic” by criticising his ideas – that by this logic, Crowley’s claims are “are allegories or parables”, which undermines the whole project. But this is not what Fjell and his comrades want; they want to be immune from skepticism, but they want to assert the rational truth of their claims as well, so they must resort to inventing a type of claim that is somehow both empirical and non-empirical at the same time. In exactly the same way that Fjell is compelled to invent “religious magic” to avoid having to explain why, after having gone to some lengths explaining how magic doesn’t work and magical societies are nothing but “organised superstition”, he is both a member and a promoter of a magical society which he believes to be the future of mankind. It’s a brand of doublethink, and shows the lengths to which otherwise intelligent religious believers have to go in order to hang onto their precious delusions, and in order to maintain at least a semblance of sanity in the face of the sheer risible nonsense that they want to believe in. When someone proposes increasing the size of an organisation by hoodwinking gullible people into believing things for which there is no evidence, and then comes out on a public blog and says openly that that’s what they propose, you have to wonder how they manage to get themselves out of bed in the morning.

There are a bunch of other laughs in that and other entries on that blog for anyone who cares to look, but we’ll close with this observation. Fjell talks about how the OTO (again, he insists on calling the OTO “Thelema”) changed to an “open and organized religion ruled by an elite who practiced it as an essence religion,” how Crowley “quickly realized that most people did not have the aptitude for Magick”, and about how “the problem of false negatives which is the result when people with no ability tries it out which is why essence religions do not attract a large group of people”. It is a very common occurrence among occultists to dismiss the “profane” or the “lumpen” – the proles, in other words – and to propose an elite band of Thelemic superchums to benevolently rule over them and perform magic spells to bewitch their neighbour’s ox, or whatever else. It is interesting that when all of these people talk about the elite, and the proles, they never seem to include themselves in the latter category. Which is curious, given that occultists are almost uniformly lethargic, pimply, vampire-wannabe rejects who never grew up, can’t get the chicks, and prance around circles in colourful robes with serious looks on their faces, believing themselves thereby to be attracting the favourable attentions of gods and other space-aliens.  One thing which everybody should be able to agree is “empirical” is that whoever the “elite” ruling the planet are or may be, it’s not going to be that bunch of lunatics.

So, in conclusion, the next time someone starts spouting off about ruling the proles because they’re so much smarter, you can simply offer them a preconstructed retort: “Which one of us believes in supermagical space aliens controlling the universe, again?”