Re-Magicking the World

by Stephen Larsen, published in the Chronogram, 1997

The intelligent general reader (all of you) will instantly observe that I spelled Magic with a "k" in my title, which makes the word seem quaint and funny. This was my intent. This world, in order not to seem deadly and boring, or vast and impersonal, or overwhelming and terrifyinging, should seem quaint and funny at the very least; but intricate and magickal is still better.

"Aha!" one of the last great medieval thinkers is in our midst, says the scornful, post-modern fundamentalist (just a few of you). Why make our world any other than what it is: Hurrying subatomic particles in an intricate mechanical dance; a loosely structured sociological network without coherent cultural roots (the USA); an economic arrangement of vast business emporia that bear names such as "Safe-way" or "Grand Union" (My entire family has come to call it "Grand Onion", after our teacher and friend Ram Dass, who urged us to make everything just a little funny, to help wake-up from the cultural trance.)

Ram Dass, A.K.A. Richard Alpert, Harvard Professor, erstwhile Psychedelic Researcher, was one of the first people to do a seminar on our farm in 1969 or 1970, before it was even The Center for Symbolic Studies. He had just returned from India, and was full of the most amazing energy you could feel if you simply sat in a room with him. He blessed our son Merlin, in and out of the womb), and generally raised all of our levels of compassion and consciousness -- afterwards he would do it for a generation. Ram Dass's Seva Foundation, has restored eyesight to many thousands of people throughout India, and other places in the third world. Ram Dass has recently had a stroke and needs all of our best wishes and prayers. And yes, there are rocks and trees and atmospheres, and the vault of the heavens twinkling with points of light -- which our modern religion tells us are giant furnaces blazing in the impossible vastness of interstellar space.

If I'm truly going to be a medieval thinker, though, I should refer to celestial bodies as gods or goddesses, supernatural as well as luminous beings, who have a mysterious influence on our psyches: The moon which sways our dreams and emotions like the drawn plankton in the ancient sea; Mars, who incites people to confrontation and violence; Venus, his spouse, who sleeps in other beds besides her boyfriend's, further vexing his wrath, but who teaches us about love -- all kinds... Here the universe is personified, rendered alive with connections, as in the ancient belief system of animism that permeates the preliterate world. "Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine," wrote the poet William Butler Yeats,

	and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows;
	and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears,
	and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon,
	and the sun and moon were not less divine and changeable.

I once had the misfortune to introduce an astronomer to an astrologer, Naive? So, what did I know at 28? I thought they shared a common romance with celestial bodies and could learn from each other. Instead the astronomer denounced and excoriated the astrologer, telling her that her rather carefully-honed skills were nonsense, that the important thing about the stars was exact measurements and spectrum analyses, not "anthropomorphic" qualities. According to him, she was--a medieval thinker. That astrologer later worked with a Princeton Astronomer to create an ephemeris of the asteroids -- which she interpreted as a fragmented and rediscovered sense of the feminine in our time. When she used it it seemed uncannily accurate.

If you can personify psychological qualities, tell stories about them as characters, they come alive. Joseph Campbell said that until we render our experience into a story, into a narrative, we do not really understand it. His theory is validated by the meticulous work of Jerome Bruner, a distinguished twentieth-century psychologist. Not until we narratize and mythologize our experience, do we come to understand it. Not until we participate more fully in the aliveness that has always been in the world, to we help to re-magick it.

Each summer lots of kids come to our house to play. I am referring to the Live Adventure Game Theater, that our Center has hosted every summer, and sometimes fall--for the last four years. It is for boys and girls, 12-17. The young people are led into evolving a character in which to relate to a mythic world -- usually one devised by the leaders, but incorporating what has worked most effectively from previous games. For several days, they must role-play, in costume: a mad alchemist, poised on the brink of spiritual realization, a fallen witch who has become disenchanted and turned to thievery (don't worry, she is redeemed by one of her familiars, a ferret to which she once showed kindness); a hero that has died and become a spirit guide to other heroes. You could think of it as Dungeons and Dragons in full costume and in the round.)

"You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation," wrote Plato; and since Huizinga's channeling of "Homo Ludens", we have begun to wake up to the idea of what play can do, not only for children, but for adults. In it, we are at our most free, and spirit-like. I wrote about this in the last section of The Mythic Imagination (just republished by Inner Traditions International). The circus tent embodies Terrence McKenna's Archaic Revival, with its shamanic effects: being sawed in half, shot out of cannons, flying through the air, fitting into impossible spaces. Embodied as we are, we long to recover something of our spiritual origins. When the world is just Safeways and Grand Onions, gas stations and convenience shops, kids turn to less desireable methods of re-vitalizing and re-magicking the world: drugs and alcohol, fast cars driven at the edge of control, unsafe sex. As Theodore Roosvelt aptly put it, "Every Child has inside them an aching void for excitement and if we don't fill it with something which is exciting and interesting and good for them, they will [likely] fill it with something which is exciting and interesting that isn't good for them."

Some religious (not scientific) fundamentalists have attacked Dungeons and Dragons, and probably would dislike this Adventure Game Theater -- after all, sometimes the youth dance in fairy rings, or fall down dead in large heaps during battles, enact romances. But as recently published sociological studies have shown, when children are interacting in cooperative ways in groups, though they will all seem to be "sleeping together," in the rumpus room, cuddling and sleeping is just what they are doing, probably not having sex. In this way they avoid some of the woes of an affection-starved as well as magick and creativity-starved generation. And they, bless their hearts, may be more capable than we are, of self-regulating and achieving a healthy way of being with each other. After all, aren't they tomorrow's adults? But to the worry that role-play is somehow "evil", or bad for youth, I would say: Observe a piece of a game; sit in on one of their group processes, where they digest this "food for the soul"; look at their faces when they are done with an intensive four-day role play. "Energy," wrote William Blake, "is eternal delight."

Our world needs to play. The games don't have to be expensive ones involving yachts and airplanes, or amusement parks; that is just our cultural trance, the one that pairs economics with BIGGER--BETTER--BEST, to hypnotize us that we need that kind of fun. It can be done with our imaginations and with our hearts. As Fred Donaldson says, "Play Returns us to life's original message." Brian Allison and Howard Moody (and their great staff) do it with a few foam-rubber swords and wizard's staffs that glow in the dark (and a lot of highly skillful preparation: humanistic principles of mutual respect and honesty; a sense of playing by the rules, but being wild within them; well-taught improv exercises; years of experience with New Games and cooperative play. Their skillful guidance helps to make it a "win-win" experience for most young people, which exercises their coping skills, and enhances self-esteem.

We opened up our woods and grottoes carefully to this kind of play, because of the inherent dangers and liabilities. Kids love to run around in the dark and leap out at each other (in case you haven't noticed), and this kind of activity bears inherent risks. But so far our only accidents, blessedly, have been without serious consequences. (If Live Adventure Theater were totally without danger, it would be unrelated to life.) We want our participants to have enough maturity to listen to game rules, develop a mindfulness for the other guy's safety, not play shoving games on the edges of cliffs, nor laying booby traps through carelessness.

And that brings me to my central point. We need to practice for life, for the magickal, dangerous, terrifying, wonderful adventure that it is. We need to play at it. Often all we learn in school is how to sit still -- or be bullied on the playground--or exhorted by teachers -- or browbeaten by coaches. We need a place for the magick to unfold -- as if -- it were real. In creatively anachronistic exercises, we also honor history; understanding by indwelling! (True, medieval teenagers never were offered the opportunity to play astronauts and scientists, and businessmen, but we can play merchants and journeymen, beggermen and thieves.) A Rennaissance fair at Ulster County Community College was very popular for years, probably because of this chance to "dress-up," indwell other times and places. Is the drama of life so pointless that we would think about jumping on the stage for a live performance without even a single rehearsal?

A four day Adventure Theater might mimic Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey: The Call to Adventure, the Ordeal, Secret Helpers, the Winning of a Treasure and (not always so easy), the Return to the Community; in a sense, a rite de passage has been provided, a ritual of transition all-too-lacking in our society -- that spells out the archetypal encounters and transitions of one's life journey. In this way we invite life to be magickal -- playful while serious. Perhaps John Dewey put it best: "To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, in fact it defines the ideal mental condition."

by Stephen Larsen, Ph.D.