"Energy" as Magical Terminology

There are a lot of folks on the Internet who have various issues with the use of "energy" as a term to describe the degree to which magical rituals influence the exterior world. Believe it or not, even some "energy model" practitioners realize that this particular usage is problematic - it's just that so far, I haven't seen anyone come up with another term that's much better.

Magick could really benefit from some sort of standardized terminology, and I have no problem ditching "energy" as soon as something better comes along. What would be best would be a term that has no equivalent in physics, since one of the main problems with the use of "energy" is that it already has a specific scientific definition. "Psychic energy" or "magical energy" is something completely different from the energy of a particle, heat source, or object in motion. The trouble is that most of the words that people try to use instead also have scientific definitions. "Force" doesn't work because that's Mass times Acceleration. "Power" doesn't work because that's Work divided by Time. And the list goes on.

As a prime example of semantic confusion resulting from the use of "energy," witness the confusion produced by my article on the Arizona sweat lodge deaths. When I wrote the line "energy is more tangible than thought" I was talking about the inherent difficulties involved in thinking away an overabundance of infrared-spectrum photons, but sure enough a couple of readers read "energy" in the "psychic energy" sense, and chastized me for making a statement about the tangibility of such phenomena. I'm still not sure if that was my fault for being unclear or the fault of too many Internet commentators throwing "energy" around to describe almost anything paranormal.

Some people use terms like qi or mana to denote what magicians are trying to describe, but I personally would rather not bring in terms from other languages if I can help it because those terms have their own cultural contexts and may just introduce more confusion. Similarly, I would rather not be stuck making up completely new terms because that risks the creation of an artificial jargon-based language that nobody outside the community of magical practitioners will understand. So in my opinion we seem to be left with "energy," inaccurate though it may be.

If English had a word that described "degree of probability shift" that's what I would go with. I try to talk about probability shifts when I can rather than power or force or energy simply because that's the most accurate description of what magical rituals do - they alter the likelihood of specific outcomes in conformity with the will of the magician. Maybe we could work on adapting a term like "shift" - it refers to change in general and has no formal physics definition. However, it doesn't really work as an adjective. Would you replace "powerful" or "energetic" with "shifty?" Again, more connotative confusion.

So if anybody has a better set of terminology suggestions I'm willing to hear them. Maybe if we work together on this we can come up with a standard set of terms that will allow us to discuss different models of magick on a level playing field without resorting to arguing over definitions.

UPDATE: Rufus Opus weighs in on why he finds "energy" such a bothersome term for describing magical phenomena. He brings up one point that I hadn't considered, which is that many people interpret "energy" as implying that there's something that you "use up" when you work magick. I don't read the term that way, but I can see how somebody could.

Patrick Dunn, author of Postmodern Magic, also has an article up on the topic. He's been active in the comments here as well, and proposes "information" as a replacement for the colloquial usage of "energy" as he describes in his book. I can see some cases in which that could work, but as Jason Miller points out in the comments it's awkward for discussing aspects of "energy work" practices like Qigong.

UPDATE #2: After some discussion in the comments, it seems to me that even within the metaphysical realm "energy" is being used to describe two completely different things. That being the case, it's no wonder that some people use the term so sloppily.

The first of these is whatever is being increased by "energy work" - qi or prana or whatever you want to call it. Those words translate literally as "breath" and the "energy" that they describe is indeed worked with using various breathing exercises, although the two words have additional connotations in Chinese and Sanskrit that are not present in English. This usage of "energy" does correspond to energy in physics to a degree, in that increased oxygen in the lungs and increased firing in the central nervous system do relate directly to energetic chemical processes like the ATP cycle and so forth.

The second is the practical effectiveness of a magical ritual measured as a probability shift. This one is much more of a stretch, in that it's not clear that such shifts are related in any way to energy as it is understood in physics. Whether you model it as will acting upon the universe to produce an outcome or as consciousness selecting a particular potential reality something is going on, but it's something that's radically different from how energy works in thermodynamics.

Usually when I'm talking with someone who's being careful to make a distiction between the two what I hear is "energy" used for the first case and "power" used for the second. As in "we raised a lot of energy (usage 1) and the resulting ritual turned out to be really powerful (usage 2)." Thinking that usage over I'm warming up to "power" a bit more even though it is again pulling physics terminology into a metaphysical context.

I'll wrap this up by noting that with terms of this sort the key is to understand them in context without concretizing them. In other words, if you want to call qi energy, make sure that you don't make the mistake of assuming that once you do so you can safely assume that qi shares all kinds of properties with the energy of thermodynamics. Those are the kinds of assumptions that lead to serious errors in understanding how magick works in the real world.