Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib. I'm so excited to take you through this first part of a two-episode journey on the problem with magic, featuring Phil Ford and J.F. Martel from the Weird Studies podcast.

It's still, I pull on this lever and this thing over here happens. Exactly. You're still relying on the same causality.

It's like, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

You know, it always strikes me how many people are into magic and believe that there's some sort of spiritual world working or whatever.

But don't think twice about commanding the beings that they say are

there. I'm going to tap Saturn here for, because I need this or that and the other thing. And have you

ever offered a prayer to Saturn to Kronus? Have you ever spent time with this God?

It's like you're just suddenly harnessing energies that, you know, they might as well not exist when you're not dealing with them, you know?

And that's the thing about magic.

It's like, oh, just do these things, follow these practices, do like make a sigil, how much introspection is there

even on that process. But then we don't know how Saturn interacts with the other spiritual

beings when you decide to employ a fragment of that sort of, that sort of super nature body, you know, amongst all the other beings.

Friends, as we find ourselves in this new world, this weird world that we feel we're in,

people are reaching more and more than ever. In recent memory, it seems to me, for

magic. It doesn't surprise me because this new, weird world feels very unfamiliar to us. We want

tools for it. Maybe we feel humiliated by the sense of a loss of control in the past few years, having been in the sway of governmental and corporate power or the force of a disease process entering into our lives.

Whether or not you even agreed or disagreed with what happened during the pandemic or the elections or wherever you

are, whatever giant force has been going on, you still might feel that you've been subjected

to things beyond your control. A kind of humility might have crept in or a lack of confidence.

And maybe that feeling is false, Maybe it's true. Maybe you

thought you had some ability to direct events that you did not recognize or that you had something

to offer the world that you held back on or that you're offering to the world was dampened by

...