The Magus’s Truth

One of the most hypnotic and, at the same time, contradictory notions in the description of the world is the concept of “truth.” It is not uncommon to see people roll their eyes meaningfully at the mere utterance of the word, and an accusation of “untruth” is received almost as a summons to an auto-da-fé.

This notion is especially beloved by all manner of dogmatic doctrines — and with good reason: the claim that “everyone has their own truth, while Truth is absolute” (and, of course, belongs precisely to this teaching) opens wide room for asserting one’s chosenness and condemnation of dissent. There is nothing surprising in the fact that totalitarian religions prize this concept so highly — it is more remarkable that it enjoys undeserved popularity even among the Magi.

Formally speaking, the classical definition states that “truth is the bringing of the mind into conformity with the thing.” Even this statement points to the relativity of truth within the Magical picture of the world. Since the Magical myth describes the cosmos as a picture in which objects are perceived in the way the mind is capable of perceiving them, it is clear that there can be many variants of “the mind’s conformity to the thing,” and all are equally valid. We have said many times that in human cognition one deals not directly with the objective world “in itself,” but with the world insofar as it is sensed, described, and understood. Thus, in human understanding of truth, subjectivity is inherent from the start.

In other words, truth is a characteristic of a Myth; it is the correspondence of perception to the description accepted in that Myth — so the mind is closer to the truth the more the picture it forms corresponds to the description accepted in that Myth.

As far back as the beginning of the second century, Sextus Empiricus held that to prove the truthfulness of a proposition one must adopt some criterion of truth. Yet that very criterion, being a method for recognizing true propositions, must itself be proved by another criterion of truth, and so on ad infinitum.

There is also the well-known “liar paradox” going back to ancient Greece (Epimenides):

“Suppose I am a lawyer and I assert: ‘All lawyers are liars.’ The question arises: is this statement true or false? If I, as a lawyer, assert that all lawyers are liars, and my assertion is true, then… then what? It would mean that I too am a liar. But if I am a liar, then my assertion that lawyers are liars turns out to be true. Yet if I, as a lawyer, speak the truth, then not all lawyers are liars. In that case I am among the lawyers who are not liars… In short, we fall into a vicious circle from which there is no escape: if I lie, I state a truth by the content of the statement, and if I tell the truth by the consequence of the proposed statement, then I must be lying.”

It should be said that the liar paradox played a significant role in the history of the search for a criterion of truth.

In this sense, it is clear that for a Magus there is no and cannot be an “absolute truth”; indeed, there is nothing absolute at all. In the Magus’s deeply anthropocentric worldview, reality is dependent on the mind, and every conception is regarded only as a working hypothesis that may be more or less effective, and accepted or rejected on that basis alone.

In other words, for the Magi (and in this they are not original), the sole criterion of truth is practice. That which proves effective for a given Magus at a given stage of his Way is true for him. Yet in the next moment, that very notion may become an impediment to development and therefore lose its truth.

Everything that cannot be tested by practice is accepted “on faith” (or not accepted) only to lend the picture of the world a finished form. An unfinished picture is ineffective, open, and always allows for leakage of Power; thus even such “untestable” concepts are examined indirectly by seeking their correspondence (or lack thereof), their coherence (or incoherence) with other concepts of that Myth which have so far demonstrated their effectiveness.

So, for a Magus, it is more effective to say not simply, “this is the truth,” but, “for me at this stage, this is the truth,” emphasizing the double dependence of this notion — on the person and on the stage of the Way. This approach allows the Magus to remain fluid, unshackled by dogma, and thus always find the most effective strategy in his struggle.