With a subject like magic, one of the first things you have to do is define what you mean by “magic.”One of my personal definitions is, “magic is what happens when we DO religion.” This works for me because I tend to consider all my spiritual practices as magical. You’ve no doubt heard a number of others, such as Crowley’s famous statement that magick (with a k for him) is “the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”

Or Dion Fortune’s version in which consciousness is changed in conformity with will. Starhawk,inThe Spiral Dance, defines it as“the art of sensing and shaping the subtle, unseen forces that flow through the world, of awakening deeper levels of consciousness beyond the rational” and emphasizes that magic is natural, not supernatural.