What is “energy”?
It’s hard to read any discussion of magic in a pagan context without seeing someone talk about “energy.” Raising energy, sending energy, feeling energy. The metaphor is so common as to almost feel cliché, which certainly shows that it’s useful to some people. But ever since I first saw a magic tutorial talk about “energy,” I’ve never quite been able to stop thinking about what it really means.
Maybe it’s the fact that I was a physics major. I know the definition of energy in that context: Joules, heat, light, kilograms times meters squared over seconds squared. Energy that has mass equivalent, and is conserved. That is definitely not the sort of energy we’re talking about in a magical context. Magical energy isn’t conserved, it comes and goes pretty freely, and it usually doesn’t result in measurable physical effects.
It’s not that I have a problem with this. I understand metaphor, and “energy” gets used ain a lot of metaphors. I still remember and giggle at a slogan I saw on a drink can years ago: “Zero calories, all energy!” Calories are a unit of energy, I was eager to explain at the time. But of course, that’s not the energy we’re talking about in an “energy drink”. In that case we’re not talking about science, we’re talking about experience; a sense of “amped-up-ness” perhaps. (Look there, I fell into using another metaphorical science word!) There’s nothing wrong with using a metaphorical or colloquial word, as long as it doesn’t limit or misguide understanding of what’s behind the word. So then, let’s take a closer look at what we call ‘energy’. If it’s not joules, then what is it? What are its attributes?
I already mentioned one thing: It’s experiential. Something you can feel; all the “energy work 101” exercises start with suggesting you feel something between your hands, or just above your skin. But it also seems to have more than just intensity; people talk about energy being “off” or “stagnant” or even flavored with various elemental or symbolic quantities. So, it carries information, in a way that can itself be directly experienced. You can “do things” with it, even if those things are, generally speaking, more experiential than physical themselves: raising energy, grounding energy, transferring energy to someone or something else.
Now, take a look at those attributes, and wonder: If we used the word “attention” rather than “energy”, would any of that sound wrong? Attention is, by definition, an internal experiential state. It ebbs and flows, and it has its own qualities; it can be tense or chill, it can be absent, leaving a blank feeling. It’s a basic necessity for nearly any mental effort, and it even seems transferrable, in that experience of feeling someone else’s attention, and having your own heighten in response.
Of course, there’s also places where “attention” misses out. It’s used so often in other contexts that it doesn’t do a good job of feeding the all-important subjective/experiential part of doing magic. “Attention” doesn’t really call the right attention to itself, so to speak. I’m not here to say we should all say “attention” rather than “energy” when we’re talking about magical work, but I think it’s a useful framing. For instance, in my own personal practice, framing “raising energy” as “paying attention” (and vice versa) has been a big aid to both my magical work and my attempts to focus on the right things.
Moreover, there’s a particular context where I believe that thinking in terms of attention rather than energy really wins out: Animism. I’ve found that the more animistic my practice gets, the more uncomfortable I am with the energy model of magic. In a world full of beings, if there’s energy around us, where does it come from? Does a room have “bad energy”, or an unhappy spirit? When we talk about “elemental energies”, are we ignoring the subjectivity and agency of elemental spirits?
The energy metaphor still works in an animist context, but if we think it as attention instead, it becomes a lot easier to re-center the discussion around the persons that attention is coming from, and directed to. An energy offering to a hearth spirit is paying them mind and attention. Energy from a land spirit is its attention on you, so make sure you’re making good use of it. A world filled with attention feels so much more alive and animistic than one simply made of energy.
Still, neither word is exactly perfect. Words like that can’t help but drag along their own contexts, and neither one, to me, really gets to the heart of the experience of doing this kind of work. Maybe that’s why I keep playing with those words, and with other options, trying to refine and define terminology, and draw the distinctions that matter to me and help with my practice.
A case in point involves my current interest in understanding spiritual/energetic sensation. People describe energy (or attention) received as having a feeling, a sound or a color, or sometimes a taste or smell. Some folks talk about this as “vibes”, which feels to me like just another misapplication of a science word, bringing its own baggage. But it’s still a useful distinction, received-energy vs directed-energy.
I don’t really have an answer for all this, but like I did with grounding and centering, I’d still like to close with my own terminology, my own attempt at a system. I tend to center around words related to light. True enough, light is a sort of energy, and has its own metaphorical baggage that it drags along, but in this case, that baggage refers to both energy and attention. It helps me bridge the gap. For me, directed energy, the stuff I gather within and project out is “candescence” if I’m being formal, or “glow” if I’m being colloquial. And then, the whole process of energy-work becomes “illumination.” Does this all privilege the visual? Almost certainly! But that also fits with my personal experience of doing the work; these aren’t words for everyone, but they help me explain to myself.
As I mentioned, my current study revolves a lot around received-energy, attention-on-me, and “astral senses,” and this is a place where I’ve borrowed a term, not from science, but from literature. Borrowed from Madeline L’Engle, who borrowed in turn from Old English and Scots, I’ve found a lot of value in the word “kythe”. As a verb, this means “to make known”; etymologically it’s derived from the causative form of “ken”. In my own personal notes, it’s become an indispensable term to replace verbs like “sensed” or “felt”, to express that I’m talking about something other-than-physical, something that another being had an active role in helping me feel. I can “sense” (hear) someone’s physical voice by virtue of air vibrations hitting my eardrum, and I can “kythe” someone’s non-physical voice by other means entirely.
Someone might look at all of this and see it as unhelpful splitting of hairs… and someone else might look at this and see a framing of terminology that helps them explore meaning in their own life. To me, half of the work of magic is building an internal framework to make sense of the complexities of the worlds around us. For me, that happens through language, and however this language fits with your own experience, thank you for taking the time to read about how it fits with mine.