Magic in the Martial Arts
copyright 1993-Chas Clements
All advanced forms of martial art have their magical aspect. The Taoist practitioners are deeply involved with magic, Shinto has its sophisticated magical aspect as does Islam. The Animists practice ritual magical martial arts, the Hindu and the Buddhist cultures have practices and traditions of martial magic. All the European arts have long ties to magical practice, pre and post Christian era.
Everybody does magic to prepare for a fight, assist in the fight, recover from the fight and prepare for the next fight. Who can say what the affect is, but the effect is to make a warrior prepared to offer himself in the best effort he can make. To make his magic is to prepare himself in the eyes of God and his community to take on an honorable aspect and prepare himself to receive ‘Luck’.
The individual warrior has his own personal magic. He may ‘quest’ or seek visions or dreams. He will make sacrifice, perform personal rituals and take on his talismans of power. He will appeal to his personal guardians, familiars, ancestors or such. The private practice of the warrior is the purest preparation for meeting God that there is in any spiritual practice.
His community will offer group prayer and ritual, they will declare a common cause and make him exempt from punishments, they will present him with gifts made in the attitude of prayer. His state religion will offer its prayer and support. The women will make magic for their men. His father will give his blessing and a personal weapon, his mother will give her blessing and lay hands upon him.
A warrior seeks to make his weapons more powerful with magic. He will name his weapons, decorate them with powerful symbols or talismans, imbue them with attitudes and cognitive action. The weapons may be of offensive attitude; swords, airplanes & tanks, the rifle. They may be defensive; the helmet, shield, radar, socks and mufflers from home. They may be actions of invisibility or secret listening .
The warrior uses magic to toughen his body and technique, and by extension his ‘body weapons’, the airplane, the ship, the horse or tank, the missle. He will resort to secret drinks or potions, special liniments, etc. He receives secret training techniques from divine origins. He will perform his training in the attitude of prayer and dedication.
The spiritual study of the warrior is more important than the physical in many ways. Combat is far past the physical abilities of any man; he acts in exhaustion, deafness, pain and privation. The cultivation of the indomitable intention is done in a posture of effecting magic. He ‘calls the tiger’ or eats the heart of his enemy or of the Bear, collects the heads of defeated enemy or his weapons and artifacts, in order to subjugate his opponents spirit. He pursues the ritual combat in times of peace; gaming, caravan or expedition, hunting, arts and letters, and imbues them with the same importance as the combat experience.
The warrior will weaken his enemy by magical projections and ritual against him. He will seek to understand the intention of the enemy and confuse it, to break his timing and focus. The warrior seeks to controll the weather and the environment against the enemy, to cause him sickness, foul his supplies and sabotage him. He will seek to dominate the enemy with a cloud of dispair.
The natural ally of any warrior is Righteousness. The warrior will seek Heavenly Allies. He will offer sacrifice, penance or loot. He will maintain his honour and integrity in times of no war.
The inevitable product of the warrior is death. He must deal with the departed enemy, his departed comrades, spirit assistants that are no longer useful, and defend against the spirit assistants of his opponent.
With any victory, including survival, comes the obligation to pay for magical power used.. Sacrifices are due, penances must be performed, ritual celebrations; the toast, the virgins’ gift, regarding the trophies and offering them to the powers.
“Science is Magic that everyone can do.” says some program for children. Someday, science will explain even more of what is now considered to be magic and people will wonder how we ever thought that projecting the ch’i was impossible and not replicable in a laboratory. At one time, poisons were thought ‘magical’; predicting eclipses or weather, introducing sickness into cattle, or killing a man by hitting a ‘chi meridian.
All through the ages and in all cultures, people have practiced martial magic; magic in aid of prevailing over enemies, magic of healing, magic of preparation for death of ourselves. How much was pointless and how much was a manipulation of power not yet understood by Science is conjecture, but what is not conjecture is that the field of study may yield something that saves your life some day.
If you choose to fight with only science, you will ignore a body of knowlege garnered over millennia by people whose lives depended on it. If you wait for Science to explain it, you may wait for a long time. How do you measure TaijiQuan, how does PaQua work? Is the Ketchak dancer heavier or lighter during the trance, what’s a trance? Does mushin mind cause synapses to fire more quickly, then why isn’t cha-no-yu done ‘quickly’? Obviously, martial magic has answers for which Science has no questions and questions for which Science has no arbiter.
Religion is the place to look. Most religions seem to be systems of cosmology required to answer basic martial questions: Who am I? Who are You? Why are We Fighting? What will Happen when I Kill You? and Laugh? All systems from ‘simple’ Animism to Evolved Transgenderspecific Deity Identification in the Individual Expressed as Center of the Universe have answers to those and other questions from the martial practitioner, rituals to appease or consequences to punish, means to protect the warrior and to confound the Enemy.
Magic gives us impenetrable shields, Science gives us high tech shoes or slow video kinetic examination, TaiChi knew about that a thousand years ago. Animism tells us to listen to the spirit of the Tree, science tells us which wood makes good spear shafts by resonance sound produced by percussion. The list is long of magical knowlege later explained in terms of definite science and should indicate to us that there is more field for interested exploration.
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