This is the second post in a four-part series describing a brief history of humanity’s attempts to define magic (here's the first post). In this post, I explore some specific points in Western history worth our attention when discussing the history which the word “magic” has weathered over time. A voluminous quantity of writing from [...]
Let’s take a quick step into cultural mythology. One of my favorite myths is the story of sacred thieves or tricksters. Lewis Hyde calls tricksters beings that “violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.” It’s a really cool trope: most often a being [...]
Pamela Smith is the Smith of the Waite-Smith tarot deck, the most well-circulated tarot deck in the world. She was a bi-racial American artist, designer, editor, and writer who was born in England; she spent a significant part of her childhood in Jamaica. Her art was primarily known for its striking originality drawing from a [...]
Magic is a word that comes up in a lot of moments and places, and everybody seems to mean the same thing, but in a slightly different way. When I started writing this blog post, I immediately thought, “Let’s write out a working definition of magic for the blog,” which then I realized could span [...]
