MAGIC

What is magic?

Often it's our word for the intriguing yet unknown; the gray, malleable areas of existence.

Magicians entertain us because they understand this area of existence and they're able to use it to seemingly bend reality to their will. Yet, we also know they are deceiving us, that their magic is not real magic, but skill we admire as the skill of a professional athlete or performer. In fact, anyone who is talented in a certain area could be accused of having a sort of "magic", an ability to warp the boundaries of possibility.

Yet, in this sense, we aren't just referencing skill. No, there is something extra within talented people which allows them to excel in a particular area. It is as mystical as the force which moves the planchette across the Ouija board or the dowsing rod to a particular spot. What made them this way? Why were they chosen? Who chose them?

As we ask this question about people, we could also ask it about other things. Why did we choose 3 and 7 as lucky numbers. What is luck? Why do we associate it with certain inanimate objects?

For luck is just as much magic as sleight-of-hand and a wizard's wand.

The question, then, is this: is magic us or is it beyond us? Are we tapping into the Great Beyond or are we deceiving ourselves to serve our own over-active imaginations?

After all, magic isn't just new age shops and card tricks. It's mathematics (the magic square, magic numbers) and religion (faith healers, sacred objects). It's inundated so deeply into reality that we barely notice it sometimes, Santa Claus is magic but he is also a catalyst for consumerism and, therefore, an essential idol within capitalism.

Even love is of a most mystical and (dare we say) magical nature.

There are multiple essences to magic and it's indicative of American society that we are so fast, so distracted we have yet to examine fully the depth of our acceptance of this term and all its incarnations.

This month, ERGO Magazine will explore magic in its most supposedly frivolous as well most serious aspects. Hopefully, this month's issue will be a realization that what we all think we think about magic is an illusion after all.