The Languages of Magic: Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils, by Toby Chappell

This is an unusual book. Toby Chappell, whose background includes academic studies in philosophy and linguistics, introduces arcane ideas from semiotics into the field of magic, but doesn’t leave it at that. The subtitle of the book - ‘Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils’ - tells us that the book is intended, as all decent books on magic do, to improve our magical practice. When Chappell gets on to the analyses of magical spells, it becomes clear that we are in the hands of an experienced magician. The author’s other writings include his book Infernal Geometry and the Left Hand Path.

The early sections of the book where he introduces the semiotics of Pierce and Saussure, amongst other writers, were hard going for me; I find abstract thought goes in one ear and out the other until I manage to connect it to actual concrete experience. This difficulty is no reflection on Chappell’s skills in expounding these obscure ideas, and I feel like I understand them a little better. I like the author’s summaries of arguments at end of each chapter. 

Chappell writes: ‘I hope to show that while the terminology may be new, the ideas have been lurking behind the actual practice of magic for millennia’. Much of learning to understand a new discipline consists of recognizing how familiar words are understood in new ways. For instance 'paradigm' in chaos magic means 'reality tunnel’; in Saussure's semiotics, it means a category, a type of word. I realized that many of the models and structures that are named in semiotics aren't new to me, they are things I've absorbed as magical principles without the academic names.

Chappell introduces some useful terms, including the Baudrillard term semiurgy; ‘the creation or manipulation of signs, linguistic or otherwise, to cause specific effects within the psyche of the magician’. Also hyperstition, a term from the bizarre, amphetamine-drenched late 1990s Warwick University group Cybernetics Culture Research Unit: ‘Hyperstitions are initially fictional aspirations that take root and spread (and encourage work towards their realization), such that they ultimately become real.’ They can only be recognised as such in retrospect - had the fiction never taken root in consensus reality, it would remain a fiction. He gives as examples space travel - people had been writing about it since at least the 19th century - and Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, the fictional ultimate grimoire in his Great Old Ones stories, which eventually turned into versions of itself in the form of real books on shelves. 

The process of hyperstition forms a model of magical process: magic begins as fiction and transitions to fact. I’m reminded of one of my favourite short stories - 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' by Jorge Luis Borges, in which an entry about a fictional magical land smuggled into an encyclopaedia leads to that magic appearing in the world. 

The book contains a Foreword by Stephen Flowers, and Chappell references Flowers’ 1986 paper ‘A Semiotic Theory of Rune-Magic’. This theory, constructed for the benefit of academic runologists, is a model of magical action as communication. Flowers writes: ‘It is implied in this model … that the object of the communicative act (the receiver) will in turn be able to act as a subjective source, or sender, of a return message.’ For his theory, Flowers does not need to define what this receiver-sender is; Chappell’s model supplies the notion of the semiotic web, a complex of interrelated signs. These semiotic webs are how we construe the world, how we put our reality together, so they are seen as perfectly capable of responding to the spells we cast. Magic becomes a scheme for hacking the semiotic codes of our inner worlds.

Chappell examines mythologies, and analyses some well-known classic rituals, showing how 'Ritual at its core is a mythic narrative, a story you participate in.' He also gets into fictional narratives (there’s an Appendix by magical writer Don Webb called ‘Why Do Magicians Write Fiction?’), including the verbal iconoclasm of William S. Burroughs. The later writes of how reality creation occurs by the direct fiat of a word, mektoub, Arabic for ‘it is written’. 

The author explores the use of language in contemporary magical currents, including LaVeyan Satanism, Aquino’s Temple of Set, and Austin Spare’s neither-neither and its descendants in the world of chaos magic. He makes some very interesting points about John Dee and Edward Kelly’s Angelic or Enochian calls, and their later life as elements of Anton LaVey’s Satanic rituals. This brings a new focus to Enochian: in stripping the Calls down and rebuilding them for the purpose of raising power, they achieve a new clarity of purpose, and something else. Dee’s records of communication from the Angels show that they are trying to bring about a world where all but 144,000 people have perished in the apocalypse; against that perspective, Satan and Set definitely look like the good guys. 

In conclusion, Chappell writes: ‘… at a deep level, semiotics is virtually indistinguishable from magic, working with constellations of signs that lead towards the desired outcomes in ways not strictly governed by cause and effect.’ 

The book is full of fascinating speculations and intriguing link-ups. One connection I would have liked to have seen is an exploration of the shadow-language of master hypnotist Milton Erickson, leading into the mysteries of ‘hypnosis’ and ‘trance’. 

A connection that occurred to me is with Ralph Tegtmeier’s Five Paradigms idea (https://sacred-texts.com/bos/bos065.htm#google_vignette), the notion that there are basically just four ways of modelling magic (the fifth being the ‘meta’ model, in which we use whichever one we need at the time). These are Spirits, Psychology, Energy and Information. That last one is the least understood in current magical discourse, and maybe we can consider semiotic theories of magic as a subset of - or maybe even the full flowering of - the Information model. 

The author set himself a difficult task, to link the practice of magic to some of the most arcane academic disciplines, and he succeeds. However, I doubt I’ll be using many of those philosophical ideas in my magical practice; this book will be suitable and accessible to practitioners who already frame their overall reality as a complex of signs, and for these, it will be an invaluable document as well as a fascinating read.