from right: Steven Brent, Mitch Horowitz, Douglas Rushkoff

VIDEO: Can Magick Save Us?

Douglas Rushkoff and Mitch Horowitz consider

Mitch Horowitz
2 min readNov 3, 2023

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Check out the new live recording of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human Show where we consider the plausibility, purpose, and potential of magick. A preview appears below.

Mitch:

What we call a thought — which is something that our civilization has never really defined even as we barrel toward something called artificial intelligence — is capable of shaping and affecting the matter that gives rise to it. And that is an absolutely defensible statement. Once the individual has the warranted belief that the mind evinces extra-physical capacities, my question about magick — which is a way you harness this extra-physicality — is whether we as a generation and as individuals are capable of doing away with spells, ritual, liturgy, symbol — and understanding that thought itself may be a selective or causative agency, among many other laws and forces, rather than this notion that we exist under one mental super law. I think that life is infinitely messier and that we exist under a complexity of laws and forces. But mind, thought, intellect, psyche — which I consider a compact of emotion and intellect — has the capacity to change things concretely in the individual’s experience. And I’m wondering if the sometimes very thick, dense ceremonial qualities that accompany magick — like what you find in Aleister Crowley, who I honor — is even necessary. If we can experiment with that we may come to something extraordinary…

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Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China