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Chorus. Nothing so sweet as magic is to him Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss….
Good Angel. O Faustus, lay that damned book aside.
Bad Angel. Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art Wherein all nature's treasury is contain'd.
—Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus 31
The enigmas of magic, art, and revolution at first may appear unrelated. Certain affiliations are there, however, which have yet to be drawn into the light. Active in all three experiences is some mysteriously “irrational,” “supernatural,” or “spiritual” feeling.* As yet we have no satisfactory concept of what this is.
Also pervading magic, art, and revolution is an obscure insubordination to the established society and ideology. What this means, at least regarding revolution, once seemed to have been finally clarified by Marx. This, too, is now uncertain.
All magic is founded upon the belief that if someone performs certain actions or speaks certain words in some way symbolically related—as through likeness or contiguity—to certain desired events, the events must inevitably follow. They may or may not actually follow, and to unmagical eyes this seems only natural. But to the faithful the “supernatural” power of magic is never in doubt—any