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Myth-Understanding the Magician
- Mark C.E. Peterson
- 4 minutes ago
- 5 min read
“The Magician in Film” is our topic this month, and between Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel’s Dr. Strange, we’ve seen a lot of them on screen over the last few years. This set me to wondering how these versions stack up against what the “Magician” means, myth-wise and not just movie-wise.
Symbolically speaking, the Magician, or Magus, (typically in the guise of an ancient Wise One) initiates a transformational, alchemical process in the world or, more to our purposes here, in the psyche of someone on their pilgrimage to a more “heroic” or authentic life. They do this by articulating the Word, the Logos, that manifests those alchemical processes in the world, or in the consciousness of everyday life—and sometimes even in the form of “the word made flesh.” That summarizes it pretty well.
We’re not just talking about Abracadabra here although, in a terrifying way, Voldemort’s using the Cruciatus Curse on Harry (by “crucifying” him…too obvious?) certainly causes an alchemical transformation. There are happier versions, of course. My first thought for this month was to return to the figure of Willy Wonka, especially Gene Wilder's, who transforms the bitterness of life into chocolate gold. You can probably sort out a dozen or so on your own, but as I got to thinking about magicians I've known in the movies, my mind kept going back to my first movie magician: Merlin in the cartoon version of The Sword In The Stone.
Today, it’s a small world (mythology) after all
That particularly cute version of Merlin-as-Magus got me thinking about “Disneyized’ versions of magicians, legends, myths, and symbols in general; this, in turn, got me wondering what happens when we myth-understand these figures, when a metaphor like Merlin gets co-opted as mere entertainment, as a commodity: an attractively flickering puppet show that reduces us from participants in our lives to an audience of consumers.
Consider the difference between the mythologically meaningful “Magician” we’re talking about from showbiz “magicians,” the Penn and Tellers of the world who perform amazing sleight of hand tricks and delightful illusions that provide an audience with the happy satisfaction of being safely fooled or surprised.
“Safely” is the key word here: it means enjoying the spell they cast without having to undergo the kind of life altering ordeals (and anxieties!) found in initiations of the sort required for an alchemical transformation of the psyche. It’s way easier, and more fun, to watch somebody else go through all that.
Looking through the prism of showbiz magic versus mythologically meaningful magic provides some interesting details in the otherwise blinding electric Edison sideshow of “The Movies.” Like this: what happens when mythology is turned into an industry? What happens when myths, or mythic figures, are turned into commodities?
Merlin is a good example of what I mean. Here’s an AI generated version of “Merlin,” one I asked for in order to duck Disney’s copyright.
Cute, right?
what happens when mythology is turned into an industry?
Rumplestiltskin: now brought to you by the Bawndo Corporation
And maybe this is a perfect example: the Disney version of Merlin is owned by The Disney Corporation. It’s a product designed for the purpose of entertainment-derived profit. At the end of the day, the purpose of movies, whatever the artistic merit, is to make money and the story lines – more often than not these days derived from traditional mythological themes (I’m looking at you, Star Wars) – are designed as entertainments to separate us from our wallets and, only incidentally, as initiations into a more authentic life.
Movies spin straw, or whatever else is at hand, into gold—but not the metaphorical gold myths are supposed to provide. Nope. Literal gold. Lucre.
And so, and this is a bummer I confess, the function of magicians in film is not always to transform our souls, but to bolster studio profit margins. What we’re seeing (as the Frankfurt School did in the last century) is that our most important mythologies have been co-opted, swamped, overwritten, infected, and redefined by the money-making-impulse, a paradigmatic disorder that has redefined all values as economic ones.
Campbell expressed this clearly at the end of The Hero With A Thousand Faces when he says,
[T]he democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed … The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. Its ideals are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. (333-334)
Alchemy: it ain’t what it used to be
This is exactly what Nietzsche had in mind with his phrase, transvaluation of all values. In his case, this meant noticing the initial symptoms of the process by which our civilization’s mythological immune system was blasted into nothing by the advent of science. Bounded in a nutshell, that means replacing meaningful narrative with cold-blooded explanations. Once that bit of humanity was erased, he thought, we’d been left open and empty, ready for whatever set of stem cells or borrowed bone marrow might first take root to reprogram our relationship to the world. And arguably that’s what happened. The timing was perfect: the Gilded Age in which greed was removed from the list of capital sins, and capital itself became the measure of all things.
And so the Media itself, not unlike Medea, is now the Magus speaking the word of our aeon: that Word is the Golden Calf, and the word has been made flesh.
Yikes! Sorry about that, but thanks for musing along!
MythBlast authored by:
Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the archetype of The Magician.
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This Week's Highlights
"If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you."
-- Joseph Campbell