What’s the difference in spelling?

Is it magic or magick?

Stay tuned, my friends, if you want to find out.

Hello everyone. I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Since a few of you have asked the difference between the spelling of magic with a ‘C’ as opposed to magic with a ‘CK,’ I thought of making a video explaining to you why there’s this difference in spelling when it comes to magick. The term magick, spelt with a K, was popularized by the very famous esotericist Aleister Crowley – sometimes also pronounced as “Crawly” by American people but I will stick to the British pronunciation of Crowley since he was British.

The spelling of magick with the final K is, according to Hardman and Harvey the archaic spelling for magic in the English language. This ancient spelling of the term was reintroduced by Aleister Crowley as he wanted to distinguish between his own magic and other kinds of magic, as well as distinguish magic of the illusionists from the magic of actual practitioners who truly believed in the existence and practice of magic and rituals.

In fact, Kaczynski explains that the very popular form of spiritualism, which was widespread at Crowley’s time in Britain, became an inclusive umbrella term, at the time, for various spiritual practices. So much so that Harry Kamp described one of Aleister Crowley’s ceremonial magical rituals as a seance, even though he had nothing to do with contacting the spirits of the dead. As a result, Crowley revived the archaic and idiosyncratic spelling of magick to distinguish his teachings from stage magicians and charlatans as Crowley himself states in Magic in Theory and Practice;

I found myself at a loss for a name to designate my work,
just as H.P Blavatsky some years earlier. “Theosophy,”
“Spiritualism,” “Occultism,” “Mysticism,”
all involved undesirable connotations.
I chose therefore the name “Magick” as essentially the most sublime, and
actually the most discredited, of all the available terms.
I swore to rehabilitate magick,
to identify it with my own career.
(Crowley as cited in: Kaczynski, 2012, p. 142)

So Crowley identified his very work and career with the term magick, spelt with a K. Later on, practitioners, not only in the tradition of Thelema, but also in other ceremonial, magical traditions and, even, later on, neopagans as well started to adopt the spelling magick, with a final K, to basically distinguish magick, the actual practice of magic, from stage magicians. This kind of spelling has become so popular among magick practitioners that some of them don’t even know where it comes from, they just know that magic spelt with the final K means actual magic as opposed to fake or stage magic. Another anecdotal belief is that the adoption of the K, at the end of magick, is rooted in Gematria, also pronounced as Gematria, a Jewish form of numerology in which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are substituted with corresponding numbers. This esoteric form of Kabbalah then relates certain meanings to specific numbers giving a spiritual interpretation of the word in relation to its numerical value.

In the “Book of Lies,” Aleister Crowley says that the number 11 is the number of magic itself. So this might be one more reason why he decided to add the K to the spelling of magick although I wasn’t really able to find any evidence suggesting that this was actually one of the reasons as to why Crowley adopted the spelling with a K.

So this is it for today’s video. Hope you liked it. Also, do let me know what you think of this video and whether you have any suggestions for future ones. If you did like this video, SMASH the like button as it really helps our community to grow, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you won’t miss any new videos out, and stay tuned as always for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

REFERENCES

Crowley, A. (1980) Book of Lies, New edition., York Beach, Me., Red Wheel/Weiser.

Crowley, A. (2011) Magick in Theory and Practice, Paris, Martino Fine Books.

Hardman, C. and Harvey, G. (1995) Paganism Today, Thorsons.

Kaczynski, R. (2012) ‘Continuing Knowledge from Generation unto Generation. The Social and Literary Background of Aleister Crowley’s Magick.’, in Bogdan, H. and Starr, M. P. (eds), Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, Oxford University Press, pp. 141–180.

First uploaded 2 May 2020