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The psychology and philosophy of magic.

In my last article, on the history of magic, I compared magic to religion and science, but without attempting a precise definition of magic. On the assumption that certain entities can exert a hidden influence on one another, magic is a method of acting in the world through sheer power of will. The notion that the universe is pregnant with subtle connexions is supported by, of all things, the study of mathematics, and it can sometimes seem that maths is at only one remove from magic.

Magic is often considered a gift, such that some people have it to a high degree and others, the muggles, barely at all, perhaps because their will is weak, unsettled, or untrained, or because magic does not run in their family—for like madness, magic is often hereditary. Whatever the case, people without magic are usually portrayed as lacking in cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, and would not see possibility even if it slapped them in the face.

Magic is sometimes divided into white and black, and high and low. Black magic is selfish and does not consider other people, whereas white magic is altruistic or selfless, and seeks in general to maintain or restore the equilibrium of the universe. The magician’s psychological makeup determines what kind of magic, white or black, he or she is able or likely to wield.

Speaking of equilibrium, deflecting objects and especially people from their natural or pre-ordained course is likely to have significant repercussions, which is why, aside from the mental effort and exhaustion, the use of magic is often said to come at a price, either to the magician, his or her client (for want of a better term), or a third party. The equilibrium must, ultimately, be maintained.

The magician is, in effect, a mediator of energies. Low magic involves drawing up energies from the earth, from plants and minerals and so on, and is more the province of common folk. High magic involves drawing down raw, unprocessed energies from the sun and sky, which requires complex ritual and is more the province of an educated or trained elite.

The magician cultivates his or her will through concentration—acquiring charisma in the process—and focuses it through ritual such as ceremony, chant, or spell. Ritual also helps to create the right atmosphere and attitude for magic to take hold. Words in particular can exert a power all of their own. In the language of Ancient Egypt, the sound of a word had a magical power which complemented its meaning, a view of language which we still retain when we talk of ‘spelling’ a word, or visit a psychotherapist. And while words can change the world, getting them wrong, that is, misspelling, can have disastrous consequences.

So far, I’ve been talking as if magic actually works. But does it work, and, if so, how? Unless one broadens the definition of magic to include cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, or simply peak performance, magic does not work, or, at least, not in an immediate, instrumental sense. But magic might work indirectly, by focussing the mind and energies on a particular problem, or through a mechanism akin to the placebo effect or psychoneuroimmunology.

The term ‘placebo effect’ derives from the Latin placare [‘to please’] and refers to the tendency for a remedy to ‘work’ simply because it is expected to do so. In essence, people who associate taking a remedy with improvement may come to expect improvement if they take a remedy, even if the ‘remedy’ in question is no more than an inert substance, or a substance that has no therapeutic effect but only adverse effects that can be interpreted as indicative of a therapeutic effect. It may be that the expectation alone suffices to mimic the effect of the remedy, and brain imaging studies indicate that, in some cases, remedies and their placebos activate the very same mechanisms in the nervous system.

In the UK, the antidepressant fluoxetine is so commonly prescribed that trace quantities have been detected in the water supply. But, as I lay bare in my book, The Meaning of Madness, there is mounting evidence that the most commonly prescribed antidepressants are little more effective than dummy pills which, unlike antidepressants, are free from adverse effects, and cost. So, it might be said that, insofar as antidepressants work, they do so by magic—and, no doubt, would be more effective if accompanied by some kind of incantation.

Remedies that are perceived to be more potent have a stronger placebo effect. Perceptions of potency are influenced by factors such as the remedy’s size, shape, colour, route of administration, and general availability. A brightly coloured injection administered by a silver-haired professor of medicine can be expected to have a much stronger placebo effect, and therefore a much stronger overall effect, than the unremarkable over-the-counter tablet recommended by the teenager next door. This highlights the importance of the psychological, social, and cultural context in which a treatment or intervention is administered, and, more particularly, the significance of the therapeutic act or ritual. If the practitioner, the patient, and their society believe in the magic, then the magic is real by the very force of that shared belief.

No wonder the magician, the priest, and the healer used to be one and the same person—and, in many societies, still is. Like religion, magic may represent a response to anxiety, distress, and a feeling of inadequacy or impotence, especially in the face of natural disaster. And like religion, it may represent a spiritual path, akin, perhaps, to a martial art, which also involves concentrating the mind, channelling instinctual drives, and leveraging forces.

But beyond all that, magic, whether it works or not, is an external projection of the human psyche, an external projection of our internal or psychological truth, which is why it features so prominently in fiction. Fairy tales often begin with a formulation such as, ‘Once upon a time in dreamland’, and magic is that dreamland. Like dreams, magic makes use of condensed symbols, and, like dreams, it is a kind of wish fulfilment.

In the same vein, magic might be compared with mental states such as psychosis and neurosis, which, like dreams, can also involve condensed symbols and wish fulfilment. Sigmund Freud linked magical rituals and spells with neurotic and obsessional thought processes, and there are arguably some parallels with compulsive acts, which are a response to obsessional thoughts or according to rules that must be rigidly applied.

Magic is, arguably, on a spectrum with madness, and magical thinking is especially prominent in schizotypy, or schizotypal personality disorder, which predisposes to schizophrenia, and also shamanism. As discussed in my related article on the history of magic, Plato distinguished between madness resulting from human illness and madness arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that this divinely inspired madness has four forms: mysticism, inspiration, poetry, and love. Love, according to Socrates, is not a god, as most people think, but a great spirit [daimon] that intermediates between gods and men.

Similarly, in The Sorcerer and his Magic (1963), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that magic is a mediator between normal thought processes (common sense, reason, science…), which suffer from a marked deficit of meaning, and pathological thought processes, which abound with meaning:

From any non-scientific perspective (and here we can exclude no society), pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather than opposed. In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality… We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.

Some of my regular readers may have wondered why I turned my pen to so apparently frivolous a subject as magic. But we now know that magic means much more than it may at first seem. Aside from its links with madness and with healing, it is a mirror of the mind, and even, like love or beauty, and science and religion, a mode of belonging to the world.

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Life in Epicurus' garden
Life in Epicurus’ garden

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay lightly revised on 21 August 2026.

Why do we garden? We spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort digging, planting, pruning, watering, and weeding, only to have to do it all over again. Yet gardens have been with us since the beginnings of civilisation, serving not merely as sources of food but as expressions of power, religion, philosophy, and our relationship with nature.

Ineni, architect to Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1492 BCE), had his garden painted into his tomb, along with a list of all the trees within it—presumably, so that they might be accounted for in the afterlife.

Ineni’s garden included:

  • 170 date palms
  • 120 doum palms
  • 73 sycamore figs
  • 31 persea
  • 16 carob
  • 12 grapevines
  • 10 tamarisks
  • 8 willows
  • 5 figs
  • 5 pomegranates
  • 5 garland thorns
  • 2 moringas
  • 2 myrtles…

A grand garden of this sort symbolised control and mastery over nature, a haven of peace and plenty, of order and beauty, by which to project the status, power, and temperament of its owner. Other, more famous, examples include the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Gardens of the Real Alcázar in Seville, and the Gardens of Versailles.

The garden could also have a religious or philosophical message or dimension. For example, the Old Testament’s four rivers of Eden are represented by four watercourses in Islamic paradise gardens, and four paths in Christian cloister gardens. The Zen garden, by hinting at hidden principles, serves as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.

The Gardens at Versailles reflect a rationalist, Cartesian vision of God-given ideas and principles for the intellect to apprehend, whereas English landscape gardens are more in the empiricist mould, presenting nature as a stream of sensory experiences skirting across the blank slate of the mind.

In either case, the garden represents a taming of nature, from dark and deadly forest, or disease-infested swamp, to an extension of our living space: open and structured to still our minds, but retaining enough mystery to sustain our interest and even, perhaps, capture our imagination.

Trees as Symbols

Individual plants too can have a meaning. English churchyards often feature yew trees, which are poisonous, dark, and evergreen, and symbolise both death and immortality. A yew tree is commonly found near the lychgate, where, prior to the advent of mortuaries, the dead awaited burial while mourners kept vigil.

In the ancient world, the palm tree symbolised victory, peace, and bounty, while the cedar of Lebanon symbolised pride, majesty, and dignity. Both also stood for righteousness, as in Psalm 92:12: ‘the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree, grow tall like the cedar of Lebanon.’ Today, Cedrus libani is the national emblem of Lebanon, and a symbol of the peaceful Cedar Revolution of 2005.

Trees can also be planted to mark an important occasion, which is why British royals are often asked to brandish a shovel. In an annual tradition, the Friends of my local park purchase a noteworthy tree and invite a dignitary such as the Lord Mayor to plant it.

A New Religion?

Today, gardens and gardening are more popular than ever. Millions of people in the UK garden, whether in a garden, on an allotment, or simply on a balcony.

The BBC’s flagship Gardeners’ World, presented by Monty Don, attracts millions of viewers—which, in the UK, is many more people than go to church.

Community garden projects and ‘guerrilla gardening’ are on the rise, as are garden towns and villages. A few years ago, one of my neighbours organised for thousands of daffodils to be planted on a neglected and overlooked common, transforming it into a Wordsworthian idyll for the selfie generation. I wonder, do they know that ‘daffodil’ is Narcissus in Latin?

Screenshot of Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter
Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter. Narcisse, moi?

Good for Mind and Body

Gardening is more and more recognised, and even prescribed, for its health benefits. These include increased muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness; improved sleep and diet (if you grow your own produce); reduced stress, anxiety, and depression; a greater sense of community and belonging; and better self-esteem.

You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: some of these benefits accrue simply from visiting a garden, or even just looking over one—although it probably helps to notice and mentally engage with the greenery.

Researchers in Korea randomly assigned hospital patients recovering from thyroidectomy to rooms with plants and flowers, and rooms without, and found that the test group fared significantly better, asking for less pain relief and requiring less time in hospital. So yes, it makes sense to bring flowers, and, at home, to have indoor plants.

Even street trees greatly benefit our health. An American study looking at the city of Toronto found that, for cardio-metabolic conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity…), an increase of just 11 trees per city block had a comparable effect to an increase in annual personal income of USD 20,000.

How might gardening help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.

In 1920, a mentally strained Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the post of assistant gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey, explaining in a letter to a friend that he had been longing for ‘some kind of regularized work which, of all the things I can do in my present condition, is the most nearly bearable…’

Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is an attack on the highly abstracted, convoluted, and strained philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz (whom I nevertheless love), and famously concludes with the phrase ‘we must cultivate our garden.’

The Gardening of the Soul

In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers describes this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or phenomenology, as it is sometimes called—as ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.’

Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees…

If gardening makes us feel better, it also makes us into better people. It is a moral education, a school of life, instilling virtues such as pragmatism, patience, perseverance, reliability, and humility, which then transfer out into other spheres.

In his treatise on agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato is quite clear that farmers make the bravest and strongest soldiers, and that, of all men, they are ‘the most highly respected, most stable, and least hated (minime invidiosus).’

In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Socrates compares the wise man to the good husbandman, who is careful to scatter the right seed in the right soil in the right season. Similarly, the good teacher is careful to sow the right words in the right soul at the right time. For Plato, the Divine Teacher, teaching is the gardening of the soul.

Building on these notions, Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) founded his philosophical school in a garden just outside Athens. The Garden sought to return to an agricultural golden age of harmony, community, and self-sufficiency—to ground a flourishing life in the midst of a flourishing garden.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ 

Time Made Visible

A garden is a microcosm of the outside world. Gardeners are acutely aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature: which flowers are in their prime, when to plant out the seedlings, when and how and how much it last rained. Just as music is time made audible, so the garden is ‘time made visible’ (Clive James).

Winter is difficult, yes because it is dark and cold, but also because time is no longer structured by a succession of flowerings and fruitings. Time becomes amorphous, to be entertained and endured rather than savoured and celebrated like the season of magnolias, cherry blossom, rhubarb, plums, or chestnuts.

More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and, later, to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits and flowers of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year-round to create Arcadian moments of perfection.

But moments are all they will ever be. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?), but when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus concludes: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

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We are being lazy if there’s something that we ought to do but are reluctant to do because of the effort involved. We do it badly, or do something less strenuous or less boring, or just remain idle. In other words, we are being lazy if our motivation to spare ourselves effort trumps our motivation to do the right or best or expected thing—assuming, of course, we know what that is.

In the Christian tradition, laziness, or sloth, is one of the seven deadly sins because it undermines society and God’s plan, and invites the other sins. The Bible inveighs against slothfulness, for example, in Ecclesiastes:

By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through. A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.

Today, laziness is so closely connected with poverty and failure that a poor person is often presumed lazy, no matter how hard he or she actually works.

But it could be that laziness is written into our genes. Our nomadic ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources, flee predators and fight enemies. Expending effort on anything other than short-term advantage could jeopardise their very survival. In any case, in the absence of conveniences such as antibiotics, banks, roads or refrigeration, it made little sense to think long-term. Today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and it is long-term vision and commitment that lead to the best outcomes. Yet our instinct remains to conserve energy, making us averse to abstract projects with distant and uncertain payoffs.

Even so, few people would choose to be lazy. Many so-called ‘lazy’ people haven’t yet found what they want to do, or, for one reason or another, are not able to do it. To make matters worse, the job that pays their bills and fills their best hours might have become so abstract and specialised that they can no longer fully grasp its purpose or product, and, by extension, their part in improving other peoples’ lives. Unlike a doctor or builder, an assistant deputy financial controller in a large multinational corporation cannot be at all certain of the effect or end-product of his or her labour—so why bother?

Other psychological factors that can lead to ‘laziness’ are fear and hopelessness. Some people fear success, or don’t have enough self-esteem to feel comfortable with success, and laziness is their way of sabotaging themselves. William Shakespeare conveyed this idea much more eloquently and succinctly in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.’ Other people fear not success but failure, and laziness is preferable to failure because it is at one remove. ‘It’s not that I failed,’ they can tell themselves, ‘it’s that I never tried.’

Some people are ‘lazy’ because they understand their situation as being so hopeless that they cannot even begin to think it through, let alone do something about it. As these people are unable to address their circumstances, it could be argued that they are not truly lazy—which, at least to some extent, can be said of all ‘lazy’ people. The very concept of laziness presupposes the ability to choose not to be lazy, that is, presupposes the existence of free will.

In a few cases, ‘laziness’ is the very opposite of what it appears. We often confuse laziness with idleness, but idleness—which is to be doing nothing—need not amount to laziness. In particular, we might choose to remain idle because we value idleness and its products above whatever else we might be doing. Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, extolled the virtues of ‘masterful inactivity’. More recently, Jack Welch, as chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. And the German chemist August Kekulé in 1865 claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail. Adepts of this kind of strategic idleness use their ‘idle’ moments, among others, to observe life, gather inspiration, maintain perspective, sidestep nonsense and pettiness, reduce inefficiency and half-living, and conserve health and stamina for truly important tasks and problems. Idleness can amount to laziness, but it can also be the most intelligent way of working. Time is a very strange thing, and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to waste it.

Idleness is often romanticised, as epitomised by the Italian expression dolce far niente (‘the sweetness of doing nothing’). We tell ourselves that we work hard from a desire for idleness. But in fact, we find even short periods of idleness hard to bear. Research suggests that we make up justifications for keeping busy and feel happier for it, even when busyness is imposed upon us. Faced with a traffic jam, we prefer to make a detour even if the alternative route is likely to take longer than sitting through the traffic.

There’s a contradiction here. We are predisposed to laziness and dream of being idle; at the same time, we always want to be doing something, always need to be distracted. How are we to resolve this paradox? Perhaps what we really want is the right kind of work, and the right balance. In an ideal world, we would do our own work on our own terms, not somebody else’s work on somebody else’s terms. We would work not because we needed to, but because we wanted to, not for money or status, but (at the risk of sounding trite) for peace, justice and love.

On the other side of the equation, it’s all too easy to take idleness for granted. Society prepares us for years and years for being useful as it sees it, but gives us absolutely no training in, and little opportunity for, idleness. But strategic idleness is a high art and hard to pull off—not least because we are programmed to panic the moment we step out of the rat race.

There is a very fine divide between idleness and boredom. In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that, if life were intrinsically meaningful or fulfilling, there could be no such thing as boredom. Boredom, then, is evidence of the meaninglessness of life, opening the shutters on some very uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that we normally block out with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts and feelings—or indeed, any feelings at all.

In Albert Camus’s novel The Fall (1956), Clamence reflects to a stranger:

I knew a man who gave 20 years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognised that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death.

In the essay The Critic as Artist (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual’.

The world would be a much better place if we could all spend a year looking out of our window.