The Magic of Nature

The science of Chaos was born out of the persistent attempts of a determined group of people from a dozen different scientific disciplines who, often working alone and in direct opposition to orthodox scientific beliefs, strove to make sense of what appeared essentially senseless and chaotic.

Working in a holistic manner that sought to look at the effect they were studying as a whole rather than isolate a single one of its parts, they came to grips with nothing less than the boiling broth of the magician: creating order out of anarchy...on a cosmic scale!

Their holistic approach paid off.

They found that there is a correspondence of scaling that is constant in everything, from the way leaves on a tree are shaped to the shape assumed by the dancing flame of a candle.

They realised what magicians have known all along: To make things work you do not require a minute knowledge of the working of every possible part of the connection you are studying, but a visual approximation of the generality governing it. Much like visualising the effect rather than the entire complex sequence of events that must lead to it.

Nature does the rest.

The man credited with laying down the foundations of the new science is physicist Mitchell J. Feigenbaum. His playground of speculation was a by now familiar numerical territory known as a complex plane that is composed of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ numbers, now recognised as arbitrary as both sorts can be as real or imaginary as any other sort.

What is remarkable is that the modern day definition of the complex plane sounds like an updated reiteration of the astral plane concept propagated by Eliphas Levi in 19th century Paris as a way of recovering the microcosm and macrocosm which science had rejected. As we’ve already seen the complex plane consists of two axis where numbers co-exist with their opposites. Levi said that the astral plane gives a picture of the “ultimate reality comprised by a unity compounded of opposites”!

Working within the context provided by the complex plane, Feigenbaum discovered that he could visualise shapes that corresponded not only to static things but also to motion.

Eliphas Levi in The Key to the Mysteries, wrote that the astral plane is filled with astral light “which is the fluidic and living gold of alchemy” and to control it is to master all things, “To direct the magnetic forces is then to destroy or create forms; to produce to all appearance or to destroy bodies; it is to exercise the almighty powers of Nature”!

The procedures and trappings of ritual magic then became -like the studying of the scientist- a means of directing and shaping the Will, making it part of the network of correspondences. Links between the universe and the human mind, which obtained in miniature all factors existing in the world outside it.

Even more to the point, the astral plane is the realm in which thoughts, imaginings and desires have an independent reality. In modern magical theory it is there that the traditional ascent of the spheres mentioned in The Sefer Yetsirah or Book of Creation takes place, enabling man to ascend to the point where he can see the nature of God.

Studying the pictures of the fractal shapes provided by mathematical manipulations in the complex plane, scientists can at last see a simple, beautiful, unifying order underlying the fabric of chaotic processes. An order that is encountered from the microscopic to the macrocosmic. An order that may reveal, according to Australian physicist Paul Davies, not just the nature of God but how God thinks!