12:4 Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit;
12:5 And there are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord;
12:6 And there are diversities of operations, but the same God, who worketh all in all.
12:7 And the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man unto profit.
12:8 To one indeed, by the Spirit, is given the word of wisdom: and to another, the word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit;
12:9 To another, faith in the same spirit; to another, the grace of healing in one Spirit;
12:10 To another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, the discerning of spirits; to another, diverse kinds of tongues; to another, interpretation of speeches.
12:11 But all these things one and the same Spirit worketh, dividing to everyone according as he will.
Corinthians 12:4-11
Thaumaturgy can be described as the ability to change things in the material realm or physical plane. This is done through the invocation of Higher Beings, prayers, spells, rituals and depending on the tradition, ascetic practices and self identification with the Spirit or Higher Being invoked. Thaumaturgy therefore existed and continues to exist in the animist and shamanic traditions but also in the Abrahamic Faiths as well as in Hinduism, Buddhism and most religions throughout the world. Religious belief, after all, deals with the supernatural and with those things which cannot be seen by the naked human eye. Of course, Thaumaturgy has strong links with Magic, John Dee makes reference to this method in his work Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid's Elements written in 1570.
In the Hermetic Tradition, changes made in one of the worlds of the Tree of Life have a direct effect on the material plane.
For many people, Thaumaturgy and "Magick" will be seen as primitive, pre-scientific thought that has no place in the twenty first century. Magick (with a k to differentiate it from illusionism) is seen as something that might be amusing in a Harry Potter film or in a work of fiction, but any suggestion that this may work in real life will be scoffed at by most people in today’s positivist and materialistic world and laughed at as a load of mumbo jumbo.
Magical Thinking is something that we can resort to in order to understand faith and spirituality. It is a pointless exercise to approach these matters from the positivist and materialist view point that we in the west have been indoctrinated into. This is not to say that we should discard positivism or scientific belief as this would be foolish. We owe much to science and I am not suggesting we should stare at the sun seeking visions of Our Lady and blinding ourselves in the process or practice bizarre sexual rituals in the desert, nor that we should reject scientific belief. But we should definitely reserve a place within our lives for Magical thought, because this completes us.
We are now able to review magical thought from a more educated perspective and perhaps we can compartmentalise it without
rejecting scientific beliefs. Looking at faith and spirituality from a scientific view point will yield the same results as approaching medicine from a magical thought perspective.
The truth is that there has been a reaction against the excesses of positivist thought and Magick and Occult practices are on the rise in the West. One only need go to specialized book shops such as Watkins Esoteric in Central London to observe how many books on these topics are being written and published today. As part of this reaction against positivism conspiracy theorists have also increased greatly in number as have all manner of bizarre theories such as the flat earth, the belief that vaccinations are in fact bad for us or that man never actually landed on the moon in 1968 as they have had us all believe since. But Magick is something different altogether. It represents the desire to Will and to Be, to Exist being fully conscious of this fact, being ontologically aware of who one is and what one desires to achieve. This is why Magick is usually accompanied by ascetic techniques. Magick represents also freedom and is the space in which the individual negotiates his or her relationship with Self and God (whatever each individual considers God to be). This is the conquest of the numinous: Holiness and the idea of the Sacred normally entail only that which pertains to the ethical and morality but there is another dimension to the Sacred which leads us to the identification of the self with the transcendent.
Thaumaturgy also belongs to the Christian tradition: both the Old and New Testament are filled with miracles, exorcisms, divination, prophecy and so forth. The Bible was written during the Golden era of Magical Thinking and in spite of theologians such as former priest Dominic Crossan's asserion that these texts were written as allegories, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to suggest that much of what they contain were actually understood as literal events.
The Greeks and Romans had philosophy, and followed the dictates of reason when venturing their theories about the human condition and the natural world, but they also believed in Super Human Gods and in the direct effect these Gods had at every level of human existence.
Thaumaturgy, as practiced by Christian mages, follows both the moral good and the identification with the transcendence by imitation of God in the second person of the Trinity. The Christian Thaumaturgist or Thaumaturge aims at changing the world around him or her and in some instances to reach union with God although this is a complex area since there are many crossovers between invocation and evocation and even between Thaumaturgy and Theurgy. Who doesn’t want to change the world for the better? Can circumstances, events and outcomes be changed by prayer and ritual? This is a question to which I can offer no answer. Life is a mystery and in spite of the advancement in science- to which we owe so much -we still have not been able to find answers to the questions posed by the rhetoricians: Who are we? Why are we here? How did we get here and where are we going?
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