>>>>>[The text below is perhaps one of the most important published article on the thaumaturgical arts published since the Awakening began. Read it. Now. Especially if you yourself wield a bit of mana every now and then. It's available in any respectable public library but I figured it would also be a good idea to load it up onto the Shadowland archives.]<<<<<
---Grhymn <23:13:12 / 06-21-57>

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Reality Hacking:
A new take on thaumaturgy and the magical arts

Dr. Orrin O. Fowler, Ph.D., Th.D.
Georgetown University

Allow me to begin with a brief anecdote: In the spring of 2051, I was teaching an upper-division thaumaturgical theory class I was calling "Elemental Intersections" (MAGT-431 at Georgetown and THAU-4157 to the students at MIT&T), hoping to enlighten my students on the implications of elemental effects in conjuring, sorcery, and spell design. Of course, the preceding December, Dr. Elise Gaul published her controversial (but groundbreaking) theory on Principle Formulae and I had to completely rewrite my syallabus in less than a month's time. I wasn't bitter though — she had given everyone anew insight into the mechanics of sorcery and spell design and it was a wonderful opportunity to try and stand on her giant's shoulders. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I was indeed one of those acdemics scrambling to be the first to summit the next mountain of discovery. Dr. Gaul had very eloquently printed what I'd been struggling to say for quite some time: "[a]lthough there exist an infinite number of interpretations and permutations of each magickal act, the fact remains that we [magicians & magical theorists alike] continue to be capable of reducing the total number of causes and effects to some finite quantity thus catalogued in our grimoires" (Gaul, 2050). However, I digress from my anecdote—

I was teaching two sections of Elemental Intersections. The first section was an hour-and-a-half at Georgetown University on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. The second was a grueling four hour lecture at MIT&T on Thursday evenings. For the most part, despite the class' popularity, everyone that wanted to enroll was able to do so. The only real dilemma had to do with one of my advisees at Georgetown, a very bright magical theory student who was as mundane as could be. She approached me with a scheduling conflict, wanting very much to enroll in Elemental Intersections but (due to certain requirements) had already had her Monday and Wednesday afternoon schedules filled. Given the interference and her excellent academic record, I proposed that she telecommute to the MIT&T session. Anyway, once the term got underway, everything went pretty much as I assumed it would. In general, students were receptive when I provided theories which deviated from the accepted hermetic interpretations of magickal phenomena (Bailey & Fowler, 2048; Fowler, 2045; Fowler et al., 2052; Zane et al., 2051), although they became predictably defensive when my assertions directly violated the reverence they all seemed to hold for the popular Grimoire of the period (Chase & Sonsev, 2046). Nevertheless, they seemed to be approaching the material critically and I seemed to be accomplishing my goals for the semester. Then one day I put a figure on the board that none of the students in my Georgetown section seemed willing to even consider. Intrigued, I presented that same figure to the students in my MIT&T section with similar results. However, Jayne (the above-mentioned mundane student) seemed to have no trouble grasping the idea I had proposed.

What I'd shown them was this:

...although it didn't look quite that well developed at the time and it certainly hadn't had a name put to it yet. Regardless, the idea behind the Principle Sphere was the same and, in all actuality, it was simply an old idea now informed by Dr. Gaul's theory.

When I had first written my doctoral thesis toward my Th.D., I had proposed that magickal energies were a great deal simpler to understand than conventional hermetic science claimed. This claim flew right in the face of the prevailing attitude; accoring to the established elite of hermetic magi at the time, it would be centuries before we could even begin to understand how magick "worked." Their reasoning for this was based on simple observation, as all good science should be. What was convenient for all of them was that because they had all arrived at the same conclusion (that magic was hard and would take centuries for humanity to understand) using the same methods (observation), they could save themselves a great deal of in-fighting — after all, it's only by blind luck that thaumaturgists, elementicians, magical theorists, and practical magi could all agree on the same thing. Regardless of its convenience, this dominant attitude seemed impossible to challenge. After all, if a mage has a formula for a psychokinetic spell, it's different than the formula for his fireball, which has a different formula than a more powerful fireball spell. Then, if one were to ask the next mage, her psychokinetic and fireball spells would all be completely different. And yet somehow they all achieve the same effect.

But that's all absurd, right? How could two magi (of the same or similar training) have entirely different means of performing the same bit of sorcery? Isn't all ofthe magick coming from the same place?

This discrepancy has always been what troubled me the most about the hermetic tradition. Why was it that magi could wield an innumerable quantity of different formulae for what seemed like the same basic set of magickal skills? It must be a style thing because the mechanics sure seem congruent to me. Even going back to some of the earliest research (Arrus & Lyon, 2019; Baxter, 2031; Baxter & Carey, 2017; Naylor, 2014), one finds that there tend to be more similarities between spells than differences. And it was this observation on which I based my thesis (Fowler, 2040). In my thesis, I stated that by assensing active sorcery, I tended to detect more similarities between spells than differences. For example, although I would never confuse a healing spell and a combat spell, I also tended to notice that there were so many undeniable similarities between them — and all as strikingly obvious as the differences. Through this work, I became convinced that there had to be some way of (at the very least) finding the common factors and elements between them all. Nevertheless, despite spending two years on the project (a great deal more time than I should have invested in it), I never found any of these "spell templates" (as I called them then) that I was so certain existed. Given the politics of the day and the excessive amount of time I spent on my senior thesis, I very narrowly escaped with my diploma and consequently spent much of my career defending myself and my work. So, when I first saw Gaul's article, it was a complete vindication.

But getting back to my story, why did all of my magically active students have trouble with this figure while Jayne did not?

The reason is because of how hermetic science teaches magick students to be magicians. Hermetic science teaches that a mage must keep a grimoire — a private and detailed tome of every spell the magician knows or chooses to study. The grimoire itself is fine; one could think of it as a kind of compilation of notes reflecting a given magician's study of the craft. However, since the Awakening, hermetic magi have leaned on the crutch of their grimoires more than they should. They have come to believe that there is something about magick that is beyond human comprehension — something infinitely complex. And of course, if that's how you approach magick, then of course it's going to necessitate a lot of notes, diagrams, and esoteric ingredients. Recently though, I have begun to see past the parading charade of magickal libraries, fetishes, and incantations.

But don't go throwing out your foci and grimoires just yet...

When I drew my figure up on the board, I insisted to my students that it was a representation of all there was to know about magick. Not that it was all they needed to know — it was all there was to know. Gaul had found what I'd been looking for; she found those "spell templates" and called them "Principle Formulae." She found a way of learning a spell in totality. The idea I threw out at them was that one could go a step farther than Gaul. That one could learn to become a pure astral conduit. That is to say that there was no identified reason that a person needed to learn spells to cast them. Like I said earlier, if spells tend to have more in common with each other than not, than why go through that whole mess of learning five different versions of the same spell.

My magically active students were horrified at the very thought. It wasn't just the idea that they would have wasted all that money on fetishes, foci, and formulae — it violated their very fundamental understanding of how an individual cast spells. I asked them why that was and, after a moment or two of blank staring, one student replied with: "Then how do you know where the mana is coming from?" The answer seemed so obvious to me: the astral plane — where else? Jayne couldn't agree more. She pointed to my diagram, instantly comfortable with it and told the rest of the class to imagine it as something much larger and fluid. After the other students attacked her (saying things like "How would you know? You've never cast a spell in your life!") she launched into a metaphor, telling them to picture astral space as a language and that the different elements and different classes of spells were all different parts of speech.

Jayne's metaphor made perfect sense to me. Naturally, not every aspect of the metaphor translated exactly, but it was all close enough. Learning to access the astral plane was very much like learning to speak and magickal applications were very much like speaking and writing. Thinking about it more, I began to wonder how the class response might have been different if the seats had been full of shamans rather than those so-called hermetic scientists. Thinking about it in those terms made me think of an article I had written (Bailey & Fowler, 2048) and all of the sudden, I had a context... As far as the language metaphor went, shamans were to native speakers what hermetic magi were to foreign language students. For the shaman, so much of her magic comes naturally; her grammar might not always be perfect but she can always get her point across and (let's face it) that's what really matters. For the hermetic mage, her magic is something that must be learned over time; she sometimes asks for salt when she wants the pepper but as long as she's got her trusty pocket dictionary, she can make sure that she gets what she wants.

And like that, the parallel that defines my double-doctorate rushed up and slapped me in the back of the head. The application of magick is not unlike the application of one's computer knowledge. Parked in front of a programming terminal with a reference manual for Oblong and a book on fuzzy logic, I can write a program to do anything. If I work at it long enough, I'll even learn enough of the language that I don't even need to look in the book anymore. Next thing you know, I'll have myself a program that reads and writes my email for me. The same goes for astral space. You hack with it long enough, you'll be able to cast whatever spells you like. The revolutionary idea (apparently) is that if you hack around enough with astral space, you'll be able to cast those spells ("write the code") without looking any of it up in the reference manual.

And that is what I call Reality Hacking.

Arrus, C., & Lyon, F.H. (2019). Une étude comparative de cinq formules pour le psychokinesis orthographie la fonte dans la tradition hermétique. Journal Français de Magie Appliquée, 3, 259-267. ("A comparative study of five formulae for psychokinesis spells cast in the hermetic tradition" in the French Journal of Applied Magic.)

Bailey, R., & Fowler, O.O. (2048). A comparative analysis of spell casting techniques between Huron Raven shamans and self-taught hermetic mages. American Journal of Thaumaturgy, 36, 123-130.

Baxter, A.R. (2031). Awakening: My First Five Years of Magicking, a Grimoire and Memoir (2013-2018). New York, NY: Hermetic Society Press.

Baxter, A.R., & Carey, H. (2017). Assensing techniques (part three of four): Perceiving the discreetest of differences. Magickal Review Quarterly, 1, 244-248.

Chase, D., & Sonsev, D.V. (2046). The Modern Magi's Comprehensive Guide to Practical Magicking: Conjuration, Divination, Sorcery, and Spell Design (Second Edition). New York, NY: Hermetic Society Press.

Fowler, O.O. (2040). An examination of the feasibility of graduated-Force spell design. (Doctoral thesis, unpublished.)

Fowler, O.O. (2045). Oh Yeah? Watch This!: Spell design takes a lesson from computer science. American Journal of Thaumaturgy, 33, 65-81.

Fowler, O.O., Lyon-Arrus, F.H., Arrus, C., & Bailey, R. (2052). Spell matrices, spell stacking, and simultaneity: A proposal for Meta-magickal "Cascading" of spells. Northeastern Sorcery Review, 11, 431-456.

Gaul, E.N. (2050). Principle Formulae: A theory of thaumaturgical parsimony for practical magicks. Cambridge Thaumaturgical Reports Quarterly, 36, 17-29.

Naylor, J.I. (2014). Astral anomoly inexplicably differentiates two otherwise identical spells. American Journal of Thaumaturgy, 2, 96-99.

Zane, G., Fowler, O.O., & Daly, A.C. (2051). Benevolent and practical applications for fire elementals. Journal of Elemental Magick, 26, 204-208.

The citation for the above article is:
Fowler, O.T. (2054). Reality Hacking: A new take on thaumaturgy and the magical arts. Journal of Applied Thaumaturgy, 25, 137-141.

This article also provided the basis for:
Joyce, C.E. (2057). Unspoken Tongue: Orrin Oliver Fowler and Reality Hacking. In R. Bailey & R. C. Falk (Eds.), Sages, Seers, Sorcerers, & Summoners (pp. 108-131). Washington, D.C.: Raven's Wing Publishers.