Primitive Man utilized magic as a childish approximation of science. Magicians, sorcerers, shamans and the like, used people’s intuitive understanding of cause and effect, and simple incredulity, to claim control over the workings of the world with charms, spells, invocations, potions, and the like. Eventually, even savages realized that the magician’s trick didn’t work. However, if the unseen forces that controlled the world around him couldn’t be commanded, primitive man reasoned, perhaps they could be placated or amused. Magic evolved into worship.
Today we live in the era of science, but I wonder if the average man’s attitude is not so different from what it was in those earlier times. He might understand the little pieces of the world that he encounters daily, but the system, how it all fits together, that’s too large and complex for him. There’s the kingdom of the keepers of secret knowledge, and it’s as obscure to him as it’s ever been.
Consider the powers granted to him; the ability to fly through the air, collapse time, freeze it, communicate instantly at a distance, heal the body etc. They allow him to giddily glimpse omnipotence, but then befuddle the deepest part of himself. And doesn’t he sense, behind it all, some dimly perceived consciousness, perhaps just now awakening. Where is it coming from?
So, in the wee hours of a supposedly new age he holds on to two trains of thought at once. One the one hand, he’s confident that if he knows how to talk to this thing that gives him so much power, then he can control it. He knows that it will do precisely what he tells it to do, when he uses the correct commands in the correct order. But also, like the Athenians in the Aereopagus, he prays to an unknown god, that the whole thing doesn’t break down, or die, or worst of all, get angry with him.
