Magick and Entropy

The word entropy has many uses, my use of the word entropy is in the context of information, closest to my Occult field, (although the usual use of the word is in thermodynamics). I can explain entropy as a measure of unpredictability, I often use it to describe when some random information is truly random, which is important in cryptology. But the same term could be applied to space/time reality.

The entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy. Magick or sorcery is an attempt to understand, experience, and influence the world using rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and of course, language.

Someone once said to me that If it's magic, it doesn't really matter. “All you need is a one-liner saying something like "And now, young apprentice, you need to dump all the entropy into the heart of the Sun", and it's just the same. There are plenty of sources of low entropy around, but they're a long way away. Magic can ignore that distance” I found it an interesting statement nonetheless, Magick and distance … how far is too far?

As Wikipedia tells us about this topic “Now consider the example of a coin toss. When the coin is fair, that is, when the probability of heads is the same as the probability of tails, then the entropy of the coin toss is as high as it could be. This is because there is no way to predict the outcome of the coin toss ahead of time – the best we can do is predict that the coin will come up heads, and our prediction will be correct with a probability 1/2. Such a coin toss has one bit of entropy since there are two possible outcomes that occur with equal probability, and learning the actual outcome contains one bit of information. Contrarily, a coin toss with a coin that has two heads and no tails has zero entropy since the coin will always come up heads, and the outcome can be predicted perfectly. Most collections of data in the real world lie somewhere in between.”

So now it’s how we go on to apply this to Magick. You see there are three variables to watch for in an energy system that leads to a final outcome: entropy; feedback; logos. Entropy is straightforward, it is random unconnected events like a tree falls on you as you go for a walk. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, there is no pre-connection between you being there, the event, the tree, or you on any level of the cosmos. Entropy is random chance.

Feedback is what you do, say, or think that finds its way back at you. The experience of synchronicity is a feedback mechanism. It is the feedback that encompasses all of life, from your own body to the bees and the flowers, enabling them to work together in harmony. Be kind to another they will be kind to you. Be concrete in dealing with the cosmos because it can feedback unwanted outcomes with abstract confusing thoughts.

Logos is the strife-renewal process in an energy system, it is a highly ordered process leading to more order through the paradox of chaos. The energy system comprises of variables; one change to one variable throws the energy system into disorder (thus you have strife); the energy field in the energy system drives the motivation for the energy system to become ordered again in a new pattern incorporating the new change (renewal). Logos is the creative process of the cosmos, its child is the outcome, the forms (what appears and how it behaves) we term creativity, for example, a poem, a new invention, a baby.

There exist people and organizations who flip coins all the time (or more correctly they use computers that simulate millions of flips of coins every second), measuring the ratio, which ideally should be 50% tail and 50% head. Whenever this ratio changes, there exists a ‘disturbance in the energy or in the fabric of quantum reality, one might say. Some people think there is a relation between such a change in randomness, and possibly the outcome of world events in the following short time. Thus we come back to Magick.

Em Hotep - Patrick Gaffiero