Making Magic
They told me I had powers.
Powers? I had been a magician for seven years, performing steadily back in the States, entertaining in clubs and restaurants throughout the country, yet I had never heard anyone mention powers. To be sure, once or twice a season I was rebuked by some spectator fresh out of Bible school for “doing the work of Satan,” but the more customary refrain was: “How did you do that?” Every evening in the clubs: “How? How did that happen?” “C’mon tell us — how does that work?”
Depth Ecology
Deep ecology, as a movement and a way of thinking, has commonly been contrasted to conventional environmentalism, and especially to approaches that focus only on alleviating the most obvious symptoms of ecological disarray without reflecting upon, and seeking to transform, the more deep-seated cultural assumptions and practices that have given rise to those problems.
Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician
Although the term “animism” was originally coined in the nineteenth century to designate the mistaken projection of humanlike attributes — such as life, mind, intelligence — to nonhuman and ostensibly inanimate phenomena, it is clear that this first meaning was itself rooted in a misapprehension, by Western scholars, of the perceptual experience of indigenous, oral peoples. Twentieth-century research into the phenomenology of perception revealed that humans never directly experience any phenomenon as definitively inert or inanimate.