Magick or Magic: Why the K, and Does It Matter

Magic with a C, or magick with a K. Same subject. The K is a habit, and the habit has a history.

This is Check Date, from chaosmagick.com.

Wikipedia's chaos magic article opens with the line, quote, "Chaos magic, also spelled chaos magick, is a modern tradition of magic." The second spelling there is the one with a K. Out loud you cannot tell them apart. On the page they point at the same subject.

The habit comes from Aleister Crowley. He tells it in the introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice. In his third year at Cambridge, he was at a loss for a name for his work. Theosophy, Spiritualism, Occultism and Mysticism were all out. They, quote, "involved undesirable connotations." He chose Magick, as he puts it, "as essentially the most sublime, and actually the most discredited, of all the available terms." He swore to rehabilitate it.

He also left a definition. Wikipedia quotes the scholar Henrik Bogdan calling it, quote, "arguably the best known emic definition." Here it is. Quote: "Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will."

Then a plain example. He wants to inform the world of certain facts, so he takes pen, ink and paper as his magical weapons. The printers and publishers are spirits he constrains to carry his message. Writing the book, he says, is an act of Magick.

The usual reason given for the K is stage illusion. Wikipedia's article on magic says Crowley favored the spelling to distinguish it from stage illusionism. I searched the text of Magick in Theory and Practice for that reason and did not find it. Treat it as Wikipedia's reading. Crowley does not state it in that book.

Here is a check you can run yourself. Take the twenty twenty-two edition of Peter Carroll's Liber Null and Psychonaut and search it. Plain magic, no K, appears about one hundred ninety times. The K version shows up three times, and none of them are in the body of the book. They sit in a blurb, in the publisher's front matter and in a book list.

Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos runs the same way. About three hundred plain magic. The K appears only in blurbs, the contents page and the titles of other books. Two core texts of the chaos current, and both mostly skip the K.

So the K tracks the Crowley lineage and a publishing habit more than it tracks any difference in method.

What does differ is the definition. Wikipedia lists several. Dion Fortune wrote this. Quote: "Magic is the art of changing consciousness according to Will." Gerald Gardner called it, quote, "attempting to cause the physically unusual." Anton LaVey described it as changing situations or events in accordance with one's will. Three writers, three jobs for one word.

Start your log with one spelling and one definition, written on the first page. You will search that log later, and you will need to know which word you meant.