Magic of the Heart, Head, and Hand

I read an article last year about conflict resolution. One of the nuggets of advice was to know whether someone was arguing from the Heart, Head, or Hand.

The Head cares about what is empirically true.
The Heart cares about what is morally or emotionally meaningful.
The Hand cares about what is useful.

This stuck with me, and I soon started to see it everywhere. Politics, Economics, and Magic included. I started to see it applied to  the Q&A’s for my courses.

I think and teach almost exclusively from the hand, but that doesn’t mean all students want to hear an answer from the hand. When someone reports a vision, my answer is almost always an answer from the hand. Engage the vision while it is happening, but afterwards ask yourself the following questions:

• Did this tell you something verifiable that you did not already know?
• Did it provide anything actionable that you can act on? If so does that thing make sense, or at least not cause much harm?

If its neither, you can just make a note of the vision and move on. Let’s say that a student has a vision of Hekate dancing wildly and pouring blood from her vase into the students mouth. Does it tell you something you didn’t know? NO. Does it provide anything actionable? Maybe. Maybe you need to try to mimic the dance, or maybe you should research a libation or drink for your healing/psychic sense/vision. Or maybe it was just a fantasy without much meaning.

That is my answer from the hand.  It is satisfying to those who seek utilitarian answers and think of magic as something you DO.

Its not a satisfying answer for the heart though. The heart doesn’t want to know what to DO, it wants to know what magic MEANS. The student wants to know if this is a sign from Hekate and what that implies for their relationship and growth etc etc.

It’s not satisfying for the head either. The head wants magic to show what IS. Does Hekate in history ever dance? Was the vision they had a glimpse of her true form? What is the cosmological reality behind the implication and how does it relate to emanationism in the Chaldean Oracles, blah blah blah.

Maybe its a flaw, but I really can’t think about magic from the heart of head. For me it is always about the hand. I eyes glaze over when I hear magicians tell me about their heady cosmological models. Even when spirits tell me about various heavens or such I am always like “Look, Oriens, not to be rude, but is this going to be useful or verifiable in any way, because otherwise I really don’t care.” 

I get only a little less dismissive when it comes to interpretations from the heart. The vision made you feel powerful, healed, or important? Cool! That’s useful if you act on it. If however you just sit around feeling groovy as fuck that you are chosen of Circe, then I am not interested.

I am really just writing this to share the model, and how it may be useful to recognize when someone is talking from a certain perspective. It certainly can help people not talk past each other. That said, if you are in my classes, whether you want an answer from the head or heart, I am probably going to bring it around to the hand. Its right there in my logo 🙂

I don’t really trust magic to tell us cosmological truths about the way thing actually are. I don’t trust it all that much to provide meaning or morality either. I do however trust it to give something to DO. It has proven itself to me for that time and time again.