We’ve all see movie and television depictions of magic; from the twitching of a nose to the reciting of a special phrase, comes dramatic and often immediate real-world change. We all know (well, most of us) that such depictions are pure fantasy.

Once upon a time, however, magic(k) was a serious consideration, although it was never thought of as being like we depict it on TV. Before Christians came along, the pagans had magical practices; they didn’t write things down a lot, though. In the Middle Ages, magic was huge, but fear of the Church meant that the people who wrote about it either spoke in code or kept their writings hidden.

As someone who has studied paganism, Western Ceremonial Magick, and who has been writing code since 1984, I’ve noticed a few similarities. With code, we use words – specific words – that need to be written down just right in order to work. (Getting them wrong can cause some nasty accidents!) While we have the Internet today, our knowledge used to be stored in thick books that no one but people like us understood. And people who aren’t like us don’t know what we do… to them, it seems like, well… magic.