Elemental Perspectives

Are They Friendly Spirits, Rocky?

This is the fifth and last article in my Elementals Perspectives series for PaganPages.  The classical Elements of the ancients – Air, Fire, Water, and Earth – have served for ages as a model by which an ordered sense of the universe can be formulated.  This model has been used by magicians, philosophers, and scientists.  It is quite likely the seed of our modern sciences because it presents the notion that the world around us can be understood through observation of its parts and how they relate to one another.  But the four Elements, like all classification systems, have never covered everything in the universe.  Nor does it provide a way to explain how the Elemental parts of something can produce a whole thing.  What makes the parts add up to more than the whole?  Thus there has emerged a fifth Element.  That mysterious fifth Element has come to be known as Spirit.  It is by far the most important Element and probably the hardest to ‘master.’

As a priest (and as just a plain, curious person) I’ve studied Spirit for years.  This study has now dominated my life.  I’ve even helped write a book about it that I hope to see published.  But even now I have difficulty explaining what Spirit is and how we can use it in our everyday lives.  It is a slithery subject and any study of it often will lead the student to believe they have opened a bottomless can of worms that wriggle in every direction.  Even deciding where to begin that study is argumentative.  But since I am the author of this paper and can begin anywhere I wish without having to argue with anyone but myself, I will start with an attempt at defining the word.

Like many words, ‘spirit’ can be used in a wide variety of ways.  We say, ‘the spirit of the law,’ or ‘the spirit of Hamlet’s father.’ We hear about ‘The Great Spirit’ and we say that the combination and balance of the other four Classical Elements produces Spirit.  To a casual observer, it might seem that the definition of the word in each case was somehow different.  But that actually goes against how words come into existence and grow in usage.  When the word started out in life (in whatever language), it was to signify a specific concept, a unique set of ideas.  As the word grew into wider usage, the application of that set of ideas to explain something also broadened and made the word cover the wide range we use it for today.  Over the tens or hundreds of thousands of years since the word-idea we call ‘spirit’ was born, the basic meaning has become somewhat obscured.

A good way to find out more about the meaning of a word is to look up its synonyms.  If you use Microsoft Word’s handy right-click and ask for synonyms of ‘spirit’ you get: ‘strength, courage, character, guts, will, strength of mind, force, and fortitude’.  Dig a little deeper and you’ll come up with: ‘soul, inner self, life-force, chi, essence, mood, tendency, atmosphere,’ and a lot of other stuff.  Out of all of those words, I finally chose ‘essence’ as possibly my best chance at getting at the root meaning.  It seemed odd to me that the very first word in the whole bunch was ‘strength.’ Later, I felt like banging my head against a wall a few times for not paying attention.  However, at the time I liked the word ‘essence’ so well I did a little happy-dance and started to follow the trail of thought it had produced within me.

Eventually, my thoughts ran this way:  Spirit is in everything because everything has some component of one or more of the Classic Elements.  And, besides, Spirit absolutely must be part of everything because everything has some sort of essence.  Extend this a little further and you come up with: Spirit is the most vital, the most essential part of everything there is.  And that was when the little light bulb went on over my head:  Spirit is the force, the strength behind the existence of everything.  There’s a long (years long in this case) and involved philosophical and theological discourse I’m glossing over here, but I went from the light bulb to the belief that Spirit is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as Deity.

I know this might seem very sketchy and I apologize.  As I said, my wife and I wrote a whole book about it and even then there are spots where we had to settle for a less than rigorous train of statements.  Nevertheless, I’m going to carry on with such bold proclamations and not keep boring you with apologies.

So I will assume that Spirit is a piece of god, or the gods, or however else we care to name that big, wondrous… something… that we all seem to sense is bigger than everything else put together!  And we concluded that the spirit of any one thing has a connection to the spirits of every other thing in the universe.  Another way of saying this would be that every piece or aspect of Deity knows all of Deity.  Any interaction between one spirit (piece of Deity) and another would be known by all spirits in the universe… instantly.  Find this hard to believe?  Check out recent experiments in light; you’ll find instant communication between photons.

Wow, talk about cosmic!  But I think I already mentioned this was heavy stuff.

So let’s say all of the above is true.  What good does it do us?  Aside from being of interest to an old Pagan theologian, why bother?  First of all, I believe this is the kicker in favor of doing magic the Pagan way.  That is, by combining magic and religion.  There’s always a religious (spiritual) element to our magic and always a magical element to our religion.  And the point at which they always meet is Spirit.

Spirit is the template for existence for a ‘thing’.  It is what causes it to be.  Any and all changes to something represent a change to its spirit.  So if the purpose of our magic is to change something (and what magic isn’t for that purpose?), then we must make a change to the spirit of that ‘something’.  Since all spirits are part of that big, huge, all-encompassing spirit we call Deity (also called by some: ‘the Great Spirit’), then the only thing that can change the spirit of anything else is Spirit itself.

Magicians use many tools to do their magic and each tool has a spirit.  But the most powerful tool in the magician’s bag is the magician himself!  Pagans believe that without some kind of religious discipline the magician’s spirit (and, therefore, his or her magic) can all too easily get messed up.  You might call this the Pagan version of ‘original sin’.  We also believe that the most important matter when doing magic is keep our work from harming others because we know that to harm another is ultimately to harm ourselves.  Learning about your own spirit is even more important than learning about the spirits of other things.

Besides, if we don’t have some way to know our own spirit better, how can we become better at our magic?  See?  There’s that spirit-in-magic and magic-in-spirit thing again.  Ever wonder why the first ‘commandment’ of magic is to “Know Thy Self”?

Okay, I’ve given you my take on what Spirit is and why it’s important.  The next question is: how can we recognize the spirit of something?  How can we ‘see’ the essence of a thing and use that in our magic and our religious (spiritual) work?

The answer is simplicity itself.  No, really: simplicity!  Spirit is the essential, the ‘reality’ of the thing we are observing.  It isn’t all the surrounding mishmash of stuff going on around it, though that surrounding stuff is constantly having some kind of effect (making a change) on that spirit.  We have to be able to observe the subject in the moment.  Learning to see – really see – something clearly requires training and lots of practice.

Whatever system for magic you learn, it won’t be easy.  You’ll likely get better at it as time goes on but you’ll probably never get it right 100% of the time.  You will have to dedicate your life to perfecting this, the highest of all arts.  You will need to increase your understanding and skills in all of the Elements.  It also means you will have to factor in your own spirit because simply by observing something you will change it and it will change you.  This, by the way, fits nicely into modern day physics.  It’s called the Heisenberg Principle.  Anyway, as you can easily see, any act of magic is going to be so complicated by all this spirit changing that to say you know about everything that’s going on is a big fat lie.  By the time you’ve figured out what the spirit of a subject is, it’s changed a million times and so have you.  What’s a magician to do?

First off, don’t expect your magic to turn out exactly as planned.  That also fits in with physics since the Heisenberg Principle is usually called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  Simply put, that principle says you can’t know everything about something all in one shot.  We (magicians), just like physicists, have to accept that if we know enough about something it will work most of the time… but not all the time.  We have to rely upon past experimental data that tells us how certain interactions of spirits have worked out in the past.  A great deal of that information is found in our spiritual studies, our religion.

Well DUH!  That’s why they’re called spiritual studies!  Every religion, even the ones that get upset over using the term, ‘magic’, are there to improve our ability to interact with Spirit.

To be precise, studying Spirit doesn’t demand belief in any sort of god or goddess.  It doesn’t require us to join any kind of organization or declare ourselves to be any kind of Pagan, Buddhist, Catholic, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, or devotees of The Great Ralph.  We can be spiritual without religion.  The fact is that everyone has their own particular form of belief and it is almost impossible that anybody else has exactly that complex of beliefs.  Religion mostly exists so we can find a way of peaceably sharing our beliefs and have a shot at refining them while kicking back and enjoying a brew (hey: bread and wine; cakes and ale – I’m just saying).

And while we’re trying to figure it all out, while we’re scratching our heads and wondering why Plan A didn’t work exactly as planned, at least we have a community of fellow head-scratchers to be with and kick around the wonders, the magic of our lives.  Being Pagans, we’ll be happily serious and seriously happy because, down deep, we believe in the inherent rightness of the universe.  We have accepted that we will forever be scratching our heads over something but we’ll keep trying to get better and refuse to kick ourselves too hard over being ourselves.  The gods (or, who knows? maybe it really is The Great Ralph) are probably having a great time watching our efforts; why shouldn’t we have just as good a time living them?

This series of articles, the Elemental Perspectives, has been a delight of mine for the last few months and I hope you have enjoyed them as well.  I will be offering other articles to PaganPages as time goes on but I’m not planning any other series of related articles such as this.  Of course, that’s my current plan.  Who knows what’s really going to happen?  After all, Plan A doesn’t work out much of the time.

Live, love, and laugh, my friends.  It’s all magic.