As a society ‘develops’ it loses touch with many of the things that its people need to stay balanced and healthy. One of the first things to go is trust in magic.

This is a great loss. Before we had organised religion or modern medicine magic played a vital role in both spiritual and physical wellbeing. Belief in mystical things was taken for granted and it fulfilled human needs in ways which science can never do.

Magic is everywhere

Like storytelling, magic appears in all cultures everywhere, so there’s probably a good reason for it. Throughout history, great scientists and philosophers have courted it. Even today, if you read between the lines of the introduction in any book about science you’ll find the existence of magic alluded to. Of course, these writers don’t mention ‘magic’; they call it the unknown, the unexplained, the yet-to-be-discovered…

This is not to knock scientific understanding and progress, and I’m not proposing an either/or choice. You can believe in the rationality of science and also keep a place in your heart and mind for those things which cannot be explained. You don’t even need a name for them, you just need trust.

I’d go further and say that unless you can do this, you’ll be poorer for it (in both the modern sense of having less material stuff and the philosophical sense of spiritual impoverishment). Call it superstition if you like, but for me, weird is wondrous, inevitable, and necessary.