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The Magus is tuned into nature, and there's nothing supernatural about it

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The Monthly Aspectarian: I often like to start by asking people to briefly tell their story. How did you get to be who you are?

Thomas Moore: I was born in Detroit in 1940, and grew up in a very intensely Catholic family. I went to Catholic school and was very close to the priests and nuns. I had a cousin who was a nun who taught at the school. I was pretty bright as a kid, so I was ear-marked early on as a potential candidate for the priesthood. By the end of eighth grade, I was really fired up with that idea. I thought it would be great to pursue the life of a priest. It was about as high as I could reach, and I really wanted to go for the top. So I left home at thirteen to go to a high school prep seminary, which had a sort of modified monastic life, even at that early age. After my classical education there, I went to Milwaukee where I studied ordinary college courses for awhile, with a big emphasis on Latin and Greek. Then I had a year which is called the novitiate, which is intense immersion in the spiritual life. We took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to be a monk in that order. It’s called the Servite order. The next step was to ship off to Northern Ireland to study philosophy for two years. Most of the courses were taught in Latin and most of the philosophy was quite medieval. Then I came back to Chicago. I had always been interested in music, and in composition especially. So I studied music composition at DePaul for a year while living in a monastery, and then continued to study music at DePaul while I pursued my studies in theology at a seminary in Lake Bluff. By that time, the world was changing. It was the 1960s. I was changing, and shortly before I would have been ordained a priest, I decided that it was time to try something else.

TMA: A big decision.

TM: It was in some ways, but it was so clear to me that I didn’t fret over it. I just went and did it. I was more worried about my family and friends who had pinned their hopes on me going through with becoming a priest. They all took it well. But I was sort of lost for several years, I didn’t know where to go.

TMA: How deeply into the 60s did you get?

TM: I didn’t become a flower child or anything like that, it’s not in my nature. But I really was very hopeful that the 60s and all that time represented would transform this culture for the better. Right into the 70s, I protested the Vietnam War. I was a pacifist and was very idealistic and really thought that things would turn around.

I think we still have good effects from those years. A good sign of that is that those who don’t agree with this life, still blame everything on the 60s, so it still must be there somehow. I still look with a great deal of fondness on those years. For me it was a time of opening up my mind and imagination. My first step in the Catholic church was to open my mind up theologically. Then I stretched beyond Catholicism and got interested in psychology. When I left the order, I thought I might be a musician. I went to the University of Michigan where I had a great chance—it’s a wonderful music school—to study musicology and composition. But it wasn’t enough, and they didn’t like my interests being too broad. I finally went off to study theology in Canada at the University of Windsor. One of my professors told me I should go for a Ph.D. in religion. I told him that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the church. I had done that and it was over. He told me I could study at Syracuse and it would be wide open for me, there wouldn’t be any limitations. I did that and found Syracuse to be wonderful. It was just what I needed. I learned a great deal there and that was the end of my formal education.

TMA: What other systems did you get involved in after you left the church?

TM: What do you mean by “systems?”

TMA: Like Buddhism or other metaphysical systems.

TM: I’ve had sort of an allergy to systems after being involved so intensely in Catholicism. I was very interested in Jung. I studied Jung very intensely. I read his collected works several times, which is a big chore, the history of philosophy and alchemy, a lot of esoteric studies. I don’t regret a minute of it and still read Jung every day. But I decided early on that I wasn’t going to become a Jungian analyst. Although some people today refer to me that way, I’m not a member. But I learned a great deal from Jung and I still do. That was very big.

When I was at Syracuse looking for a dissertation topic, I had one of those experiences where a book fell into my hands from the top of a bookshelf. I opened it up and it was in French, not a language I immediately start reading, but I could read it. I started reading about the esoteric dimensions of the Italian Renaissance through this fellow, Marsilio Ficino. I found out he hadn’t been translated or studied much at all. So I thought that would be a great topic, and the department was very happy for me to choose it. I picked up his book, which is called On Designing Your Life to be in Accord with the Universe, or the word in Latin that means the “Heavens.” I shortened the whole thing to The Planets because his book is all about astrology. How astrology works and how you design your daily life, your clothing, the food you eat, how you decorate your home, how you gather your friends together ... all of this so that it’s in accord with the stars of your birth and your stars at the time. I thought that was quite fascinating. That was a big turning point for me. At the time, I thought it would just be one more paper to dash off, but the influence of it has never diminished.

TMA: You have maintained an interest in astrology?

TM: Yes, but I discovered that I personally don’t have the knack to be an astrologer. Just like I can’t paint, I can’t astrologize.

TMA: Among the various things I do, I’m an astrologer.

TM: I thought you probably were.

TMA: The name of the magazine tipped you off.

[laughter]

TM: There’s a slight hint there. I’m very interested in astrology and have lectured to astrologers at international meetings.

TMA: It was one of the things that I studied on the way to being who I am. You mentioned alchemy. If you’re going to work western magic, you need astrology as a language. I started studying it on that basis and I realized that this was something for me to do.

TM: That’s how I am. I consult astrologers. I think I know the language fairly well, but I’m very interested in what was going on during the renaissance about astrology because it wasn’t the same astrology as it is practiced today. It was very similar, but they had an interesting philosophy behind it.

TMA: Modern astrology has almost been reinvented in the last 120 years or so.

TM: Yes. So I was very drawn to that way of thinking, and designing life. I liked the fact that it was a spirituality, but was totally connected to everyday experiences and the physical world we live in.

TMA: One of the things I really liked in looking at your website is your emphasis on living. So much of spirituality and spiritual teachings have been about not living. What was next for you?

TM: Well, I finished my Ph.D. and couldn’t get a job. I tried very hard and finally was offered a job teaching psychology, which was a bit odd because I had never studied psychology. I’d read it, but I didn’t have any official credits or anything, and they hired me anyway. That only lasted a year and then I went to Southern Methodist University to teach religion, mainly to freshmen students. I wanted to let those young people know that there is a way of looking at religion that is not about belief and moralism, but something else, much richer. I taught this huge course for about seven years and at the end of that time, the University told me that they didn’t want me to teach there anymore.

TMA: Why was that?

TM: There were two things. One, they didn’t like my teaching style. As I said, I was more interested in having these kids be exposed to a way of thinking, especially there in Texas where they get a lot of Christian Fundamentalism. And I wanted to expose them to something else that was about world religion and mythology and literature. They also didn’t like the fact that I wouldn’t write for academic journals. I just couldn’t bring myself to write in that style. I wanted to write to a much larger audience, and that just wasn’t accepted at that university so they denied me tenure. Interestingly, I was invited back two years later to give one of their major lectures, trumpets blaring ... I don’t think that the people who invited me knew that I had been there before.

People began asking me early on, when I first started teaching in Texas, if I would be their therapist. I had studied therapy intensely in Syracuse, and I was prepared to do therapy, so I made a transition from teaching to a private practice.

TMA: How long did that go on?

TM: Probably twenty years. I tried to get teaching jobs after that, but nobody would open a door. I tried to do holistic centers and they would not have me. So what I would do is, I’d put up notices at libraries saying I was going to give a lecture. Between the very little therapy I did and the lectures, I just survived.

TMA: The holistic centers wanted to bring people in who had big books.

TM: Yes, I had written some books, but they weren’t popular. I had rewritten my dissertation, but nobody was too interested in magic and astrology. They gave me a hard time. I was struggling with the very people who now really want me to come.

I moved to New England and there I wrote Care of the Soul. My publisher asked if I had any expectations. I said, as long as I could become a full time writer, if there was any way we could make that work, I’d be delighted. And it happened, enough people bought the book that I was able to make my living at writing, and that’s what I do now.

TMA: How would you describe the essence of the teaching of the Care of the Soul?

TM: I think it’s a difficult book to read. But ordinary people read it and tell me that they get a sense of self acceptance; they don’t have to be perfect. They can go through the various things they have to deal with, their divorces and losing jobs and that sort of thing, confusion, and there’s a tremendous deep acceptance of the human situation. As I say in the book, I’m not writing about curing anybody, but about caring for whatever the soul is, that very deep sensitive, huge, mysterious piece of our identity. I think that’s maybe what people get from that book. For me, the writing of it was a combination of all the ideas I’d been studying in Jung. I’d been in close touch with James Tillman, he and I were friends and co workers for a long time, and the combination of my ideas and my practice, my experience as a therapist, went together into Care of the Soul, and I think that’s what made it work.

TMA: So people took from it what you intended?

TM: Not really. I’m interested in Renaissance magic and Zen Buddhism and Ancient Greek Polytheism. People saw it as self help. I didn’t see it as self help. When I saw it on self help bookshelves, I was kind of surprised because that’s not what my purpose was.

TMA: Where did you think it would land?

TM: I thought it would be in Psychology or Religion. My field was religion, and I thought I was writing about it. I was interested in the place where psychology and religion meet.

TMA: And that’s a very interesting place. I remember there was a magazine around for awhile with that focus, but the concepts and the writing ultimately ended up being on too high a level to reach enough of an audience. So Care of the Soul was a hit, what did you do next?

TM: I kept writing. In the meantime, I got married and had a daughter and a stepson, so that changed my life quite a bit and I was happy. The book happened at just the right time. Before the book, I had $3 in my pocket and wasn’t going to be able to support a family.

I’ve written one book after the other. I’ve been much influenced by Zen Buddhism and am very happy with the article I wrote for Tricycle a couple of years ago called “Zen Catholic.” I tried in a deep way to see the connections, not just the superficial connections between the two, and to see them in myself. So that’s very big. With paganism, I’m very much like my Renaissance teachers, who tried very hard, and I think succeeded for themselves, to reconcile paganism and Christianity. So I continued to write book after book. I don’t write explicitly about my interest in magic because people don’t understand what that is. I don’t write about it academically, I’m not interested in that. But I do put my interest in magic and alchemy into my books, and I just assume people read past it if they’re not interested. I write books on two levels. I write a book at the level I’m interested in. A lot of that aspect is in the footnotes. Then I write a book that I hope is intelligible to many people. My books are not easy to read.

TMA: One of the hardest thing is to put it into language that anyone can read.

TM: I can only go so far in that direction. Everyday I get manuscripts in the mail, people asking me to support or endorse their work, or give them hints on how to get published. And I’d say that 90% of it is far too popularized for my taste. Now I don’t like the academic stuff, I’ve already mentioned that. But what I do want to do is be in the middle, where the writing is of some quality. I like the ideas to be solid and I like it to be intelligible, but I don’t try to make it all accessible. I’m not trying to popularize. It’s not in my nature. I enjoy writing ideas clearly if I can, making them fairly legible for myself. I don’t like very focused writing that’s only for the people in the club.

TMA: Have any of your subsequent books been as big as Care of the Soul?

TM: No. Soulmates did quite well. I think we sold 400,000 copies.

TMA: What are some of the more important ideas in the subsequent books that you hoped would gain a wider audience?

TM: In Soulmates, I really wanted to explore relationships. As a therapist, my feeling was that the soul shows itself, today especially, most vividly in relationship. In people trying to be partners, trying to get married or get divorced, that’s where the soulwork takes place. People don’t see it as that, but that’s what I see as going on. So I wanted to present the issues in relationship as issues of soul. I called it Soulmates, I didn’t mean it so much as the modern notion of finding your one and only, but more that whoever your mate is, the soul is involved, and that is what I was trying to write about. A lot of people were able to follow that book and get a lot out of it.

My plan was to start out with the nature of the soul, a general approach, and go to relationship, where the soul is most vivid. Then I wanted to talk about magic, of being in the world with the soul, instead of writing about natural magic as an object to study. I wanted to write about the things of ordinary life and look at them from a magical point of view. I’d been reading and people are using this word “enchantment,” to re-enchant culture instead of living in this sort of rationalistic, mechanistic culture. But the fact is that I don’t think people got the point at all. Although people that really got it really ran with it; people have formed communities around it and have done incredible things around the world with that book.

TMA: You talk about magic a lot. I’m curious how you would define the term. I have a working definition which I use that I think you may find too simplistic. But I say that magic is the knowledge of and purposeful utilization of natural laws that most people don’t know about.

TM: I think it’s a very good definition, it’s excellent. It’s better than any other I’ve read. I agree completely. I’m writing a book on Jesus, and I was writing a paragraph on Jesus as a Magus. I think that I was trying to define what a Magus or a Magician is and trying to say that a Magician, in that sense, is someone who is so tuned into the secrets and laws of nature that people don’t usually think about. By secrets I mean the less obvious powers of nature, that the Magus then derives certain power from that. The Magus is tuned into nature and there’s nothing supernatural about it, but there are certain dimensions of nature that science can’t access or hasn’t accessed.

TMA: There’s no such thing as a supernatural.

TM: No.

TMA: Similarly, I always say that there are no secrets in the universe. What we do have, is relative inability to see. It’s all right in front of us, we’re just not seeing it.

TM: I just wrote a piece on trees for an environmentalist magazine trying to say that you look at a tree and you don’t see what it really is, you don’t see it’s spiritual dimension. You just see lumber. You don’t see it as a being, having a presence, having capacities for relatedness, being part of a family.

TMA: I grew up in a hard core fundamentalist family. I sat in church as a little boy and said, now wait a minute, everybody in this room is going to heaven and everyone else in the world is going to hell? Now come on! That can’t be right. The 60s hit and I went off in all these metaphysical directions and until I stumbled into the New Thought churches, I had written off Christianity as a viable system. I always had a great deal of respect for Jesus’ teachings, but the churches just were not doing it.

TM: The worst thing that happened to Jesus was when they made him a Christian.

[laughter]

TMA: I like that. But what I find so interesting is that I really don’t think Jesus was that concerned about teaching us how to get to heaven. He was trying to teach us to live on earth.

TM: Both in the Canonical Gospels and in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that the Kingdom, which was his metaphor for a new way of life, is a state of consciousness that he was trying to advocate. It’s hard to translate when people don’t know if it means it’s within you, or among you, or it’s there with you. It’s not somewhere else.

TMA: Rejoice, for the kingdom is at hand.

TM: Right. It’s at hand. It’s here. I think that once you take that and start reading the rest of what He says, you have a whole different take on what He was about, which is not about afterlife, but about imagination, how to be here in this world. That would promote equality and a mutual regard. They use the word agape in the Greek, which is not a passionate love between two persons, eros in that sense, but is a kind of love that unites people who are neighbors and, I think, also a connection with the natural world.

TMA: How would you describe the essence of your teaching—and I expect it’s much the same—if you had to sum up what you want to communicate to the world? What would that be?

TM: Facetiously, but truly, I tell people “lighten up.” I think we are people that work too hard. We’re trying to be perfect. We don’t use that word, and we all deny that we’re perfectionistic, but we are. Whenever we decide this thing is healthy and that isn’t, we’re being perfectionistic. We’re trying to be better than anybody else, have a better job, make more money; all of those are misdirected attempts at transcendence. This notion of transcendence is “I’m going to have a higher office.” My office is going to be on a higher floor. I’m going to have a bigger paycheck. Those are all fetishes of transcendence, but deeper there is a desire to really transcend, to find your spiritual possibility and live in a much bigger world. But we don’t have the language. We live in an almost totally secularized society so we don’t have any images or language for that. So we end up translating all of that in terms of money and prestige and ego.

What I’m trying to do is say lighten up and let life flow through you, and be on the waves as they go up and down. For me, a great image in mythology is Tristan of Tristan and Isolde. He’s out there on a little boat without an oar, without a rudder, on the Irish sea. When he lands on shore and finds the woman that he loves for the rest of his life, he finds himself. That’s pretty good. You float your way. You drift. The essence of my approach is to be extravagantly accepting and forgiving of yourself and others. Ride the waves and let life take you where it has good things for you.

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Thomas Moore is an author, psychotherapist, and lecturer who has published many books and articles in the areas of archetypal and Jungian psychology, religion, mythology, relationships, and the arts. More information on his current work may be found at this website, www.careofthesoul.net. Some of his books include Soul Mates, The Soul’s Religion, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, and Meditations. Moore will introduce his newest book, Dark Nights of the Soul, sequel to his New York Times #1 bestselling Care of the Soul with a free lecture and booksigning at Transitions Bookplace in Chicago, on Wednesday, June 2, at 7pm.

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