Imagination and storytelling define humanity. Alone among animals, humans use metaphors and symbols to organize thoughts into patterns of nearly infinite complexity. Because of this, we each live in two worlds: the real and the imaginary. Since we rely upon our imagination to make sense of the real, the borders between the two are necessarily fluid and confusing. Stories are the maps we use to orient ourselves within these bewilderingly overlapping landscapes, to impose meaning and order upon the strange and wild geographies of the human mind. We can’t live without stories, but sometimes we don’t understand that the stories we’re telling ourselves are only stories, rather than perfect revelations of the real. When this occurs we confuse the imaginary with the real, the map with the territory, and risk becoming lost within our own fantasies.

This happens because our stories are layered, with the most important stories, the ones that provide the subtexts for all the others, residing in the deepest parts of our consciousness. We call these stories myths, and they’re so emotionally charged and so culturally pervasive that it’s easy to mistake them for the real.

One of the guiding myths of modern Western civilization is the myth of the magician, the person—usually a man—who uses imagination to harness amoral power and control reality. This figure is found throughout our popular culture, and not just in our fiction, as demonstrated by the very successful 2006 documentary The Secret. The movie celebrates the magician in the most vulgar form by encouraging people to use “the law of attraction” to summon wealth and other good things from a universe the movie compares to a shopping catalogue. This is, of course, part of the same positive thinking movement that hucksters like Norman Vincent Peale and Anthony Robbins have made fortunes from, but it represents only the most superficial layer of the magician myth in modern culture.

Back in the 1960s the respected British historian Frances Yates outlined the role that this myth played in Renaissance thought and how it brought about a crucial psychological transformation that laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Something momentous happened in late 15th Century Italy: the Corpus Hermeticum, lost to Europe throughout the Middle Ages, was rediscovered. These writings were believed to be the apex of occult wisdom from ancient Egypt. The hero of the Hermeticum is Hermes Trismegistus, a composite of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, who was credited with revealing occult wisdom to humankind. His Hermeticum contains magical information as well as philosophical discussions about the origin and destination of the human soul. Hermes Trismegistus was believed to be a contemporary of Moses, and his work seemed to anticipate by over a thousand years the development of Neoplatonism and related philosophies.

Underlying Hermeticism was the belief that everything in the universe, including the human mind, emitted rays that permeated and influenced everything else to different degrees according to patterns of cosmic sympathy. By understanding the laws of sympathy among various things in the universe and by organizing one’s thoughts and behaviors in accordance with these sympathies, a magician could manipulate the workings of the cosmos. The use of imagery, both within the mind of the magician and in the arrangement of the materials he used for his spellcraft, was central to the process. For instance, one of the areas that hermetic magic focused on was the art of persuasion. According to Ian Couliano, the author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Renaissance magicians pioneered the use of imagery to influence people on a subconscious level, developing techniques that are now commonly used in propaganda, public relations and advertising.

In tandem with philosophies of Cabalistic magic, the Corpus Hermeticum shaped the intellectual culture of the Renaissance. In studying the Hermeticum, Renaissance scholars like Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and Nicolaus Copernicus believed that they had found a lost key to human enlightenment and the truth about the human soul. Rather than simply observing and understanding the universe, the magician could also use this knowledge to operate upon the cosmos and to alter it according to the dictates of the will, and to thereby wondrously transfigure human society. This belief marked a decisive break with past tradition. In Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1964), Yates writes that “The Greeks with their first class mathematical and scientific brains made many discoveries in mathematics and other applied sciences but they never took whole-heartedly, with all their powers, the momentous step which western man took at the beginning of the modern period of crossing the bridge between the theoretical and the practical, of going all out to apply knowledge to produce operations. Why was this? It was basically a matter of the will. Fundamentally, the Greeks did not want to operate. They regarded operations as base and mechanical, a degeneration from the only occupation worthy of the dignity of man, pure rational and philosophical speculation. The Middle Ages carried on this attitude in the form that theology is the crown of philosophy and the true end of man is contemplation; any wish to operate can only be inspired by the devil. Quite apart from the question of whether Renaissance magic could, or could not, lead on to genuinely scientific procedures, the real function of the Renaissance Magus in relation to the modern period (or so I see it) is that he changed the will. It was now dignified and important for man to operate; it was also religious and not contrary to the will of God that man, the great miracle, should exert his powers. It was this basic psychological reorientation towards a direction of the will which was neither Greek nor mediaeval in spirit, which made all the difference.”

The scholars of the Renaissance were mistaken about the age of the Hermeticum, which, as it turns out, wasn’t written during the time of Moses, but rather around 300 CE, although scholars like Richard Smoley contend that it transcribed a pre-existing oral tradition that had connections with ancient Egyptian religious philosophy. By the time the Hermeticum’s authenticity was called into question, however, it was too late: for better or worse, the Hermeticum had already altered the Western intellectual zeitgeist. Since that time the magician has remained encoded in our cultural DNA.

In God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999), Professor William Stahl argues that the myth of the magician informs our understanding of technology and, in particular, our understanding of information technology. For example, he points to the repeated use of magical imagery and metaphors by major publications in articles about information technology, as well as to the widespread but groundless faith that information technology will radically empower the technologically literate and bring about a qualitative leap in the evolution of our society, economy, and consciousness. Rather than being purely secular, the culture of technology is supported by a mythological substratum.

There are good psychological reasons for the persistence of such myths. By promising control over the harsh contingencies of human existence, magic soothes our biting awareness of our own vulnerability and justifies optimism for the future. Stahl writes that “Magic is a declaration of hope in the face of fear and powerlessness.”

There is a downside to magic, however, one that goes beyond the facile optimism, self-absorption, and victim-blaming prejudices of the positive thinking movement. This downside is eloquently described in the stories of Dr Faust, the fictional Renaissance magician who sold his soul to the Devil for the sake of power and pleasure.

Stahl writes that “Like Faust we have renounced limits to our knowledge, and today we use our technology to probe from the limits of atomic structure and the genetic code to beyond the limits of the galaxy itself. Like Faust we have sought control to the point of hubris, an overweening pride in our own power. And like Faust, we have begun with noble intentions which have gone unfulfilled…Today, like Faust, we acknowledge no limits to our power and control. A common attitude is that if something can be done it should be done (often with the insinuation that if we don’t, someone else will). . . . Matching our desire to master nature with our need to master our neighbour, modern society has been built upon economic and political dominance hierarchies which ignore reciprocity and holism, see competition and greed as virtues, countenance limitless exploitation, and are continuously at war or preparing for war. Our tragedy is, like Faust, to have gained control over nature and others while losing self-control.”

Even if we wanted to discard the myth of the magician, we wouldn’t be able to. It’s woven far too deeply into our collective imagination to be removed. Even so, in an age of ecological collapse, imperial carnage, and the implosion of American capitalism—that is, in the age of the revenge of the real—we need to be aware of the myth’s influence over our lives and to temper it. To help us find our way through the wilderness of the imaginary and the wasteland of the real, it’s Faust’s story, more than Merlin’s, Gandalf’s, or the precocious Mr Potter’s that needs to be told and told again.