Maybe Magic

What if magick is neither supernatural nonsense nor solemn occult theater, but a practical way of tinkering with the machinery of perception? Robert Anton Wilson spent a lifetime investigating the confounding territories where magick, science, psychology, language, and belief overlap. Maybe Magick gathers essays, introductions and interviews charting three decades of exploration, tracing the evolution of a mind learning not to mistake certainty for evidence. The result is funny, provocative, skeptical, and occasionally liable to upend your favorite assumptions. Wilson does not ask you to believe in magick. He asks a more interesting question: what happens when you try it? 

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Maybe Magick: Notes from an Evolving Nervous System is maybe master Bob's single most secret-busting, awe-inspiring exposition of the esoteric arts and sciences of Magick. Every page is a thunderous reminder why I fell in love (and continue to love) this man's scintillating wit and wisdom. (or maybe not). - Lon Milo DuQuette, Author of The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford

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Timothy Leary gave us the Eight Circuit model of consciousness, which he largely concocted in a prison cell. It was Robert Anton Wilson, working the occult underground press, who made the world understand what Leary's ideas meant, and why they were so important. Along the way Wilson redefined magick itself: the investigation of hitherto-mysterious functions of the human nervous system. When I wrote my own book on Leary, Wilson's occult journalism was my map of the territory. - Joseph L. Flatley, author of The Occult Timothy Leary and publisher of Failed State Update

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Bob Wilson was a dear friend and water-brother, and a regular columnist for my Green Egg magazine through the 1970s. We met in 1973, at the same Gnostic Aquarian Conference where I met Morning Glory, my lifemate until her death over 40 years later. Bob's Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger trilogies were a staple of the early Church of All Worlds reading list. Maybe Magick evokes the reconciliation of magick and science in theory and practice via quantum physics, where reality is seen as states of probability collapse, and magick can be best grokked as "probability enhancement." - Oberon Zell, author of Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

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Gathering all of Bob Wilson's thoughts on magic in one place is a treasure. Having them alongside such sharp, informed commentary from people working in that current makes it a pearl beyond price. - Cat Vincent, Cunning-man