The Eighth Plague

A common misunderstanding of magick places it in the realm of the supernatural. This is fundamentally inaccurate, as the natural world and material world are one in the same. A truly "supernatural" magical process, to my way of thinking, would exist outside the bounds of the natural world and therefore be unable to influence it in any way. On the other hand, if magick is more properly seen as a part of nature rather than separate from it, the possibility of paranormal influence in fact becomes more plausible. Take one of the most famous magical operations of all time - the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Back in 2010 I discussed the possible physical basis of the Biblical parting of the Red Sea, and now Egypt is being struck by a plague of locusts just before Passover, the Jewish feast commemorating the exodus from Egypt.

This time, even the Israelis are worried that the locusts are out to get them. "They may not have ruined Pharaoh, but they could ruin us," one farmer, Tzachi Rimon, told Israel's Channel 10 TV. Locust swarms have the potential to wipe out agricultural crops, and it's been eight years since such a serious assault has hit Egypt's Cairo region and Israel, said Keith Cressman, the senior locust forecasting officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome.

"They came from the Sudan-Egypt border after breeding in December and January, flew north along the coast to nearly Suez, then got caught in some winds associated with a low-pressure system over the central Mediterranean to Cairo," Cressman told NBC News in an email. The weather system moved eastward, and on Monday, changing winds carried the swarm to the northern Sinai Peninsula and Israel's Negev Desert, he said.

The point here is, that like the parting of the Red Sea, there are natural explanations for such phenomena. Locust swarms do strike from time to time and are unpredictable. The point of working magick is to align the probabilities of the natural world such that the event you're attempting to conjure happens at just the right moment. Real magick doesn't look like fireballs or lightning bolts shooting from your fingers or any other movie-type manifestation that depends on physical energy appearing out of nowhere. It just looks like luck - incredible, amazing, and totally out-of-the-ordinary luck.