About True Magic
“On earth as it is in heaven”—a podcast helping Reformed Christians to embody Christ’s reign, by finding the spiritual patterns expressed in physical things. We ask scripture and nature two main questions:
How is spiritual meaning expressed in the material world? We understand the physical realm as fundamentally symbolic, participating in heavenly patterns—and we want to better understand how.
How should this intersection of fact and meaning shape our piety? In light of what we learn about the physical imaging the spiritual, and we ourselves being images of the invisible God, how should we live so that we are properly participating in these patterns—that “thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”?
Why magic?!
Because magic is not what you think. Most fundamentally, it is simply creating a “resonance” with spiritual patterns by expressing them physically.
You do this every Sunday in church.
That’s why pagan magic, like Hermeticism, Theosophy, New Age, and other occult practices, revolve around the idea of as above, so below. Satan doesn’t create new things; he perverts and corrupts what is already there. “As above, so below” is rightly expressed in the heart of our Lord’s own prayer in Matthew 6:10, where he says, literally: “thy will be done—as in heaven, also upon earth.”
Magic is thus a much more “mundane” principle than most Christians imagine. Pagans twist it into something darkly absurd—just like they twist all kinds of creational things. They worship the creature rather than the creator; what do you expect? But magic, properly understood, is a creation mechanism—a resonance between the spiritual and the physical. Certain methods or practices of establishing and using this resonance are wicked and perverse, often calling on evil spiritual powers. But liturgy itself works by the same mechanism—it’s just the way God made the world.
Pagan witchcraft is false magic; Christian liturgy is true magic.
All of life is worship. All of life is liturgy. All of life is magic. So we should be very careful to ensure that it is true magic. We explain and justify this in greater depth here:
![[S1E0] What the heck is true magic?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F720cc2e8-6f54-4088-b76c-306549d32b4d_1920x1281.jpeg)
True Magic is a project of Bnonn and Smokey Tennant. It is one half doctrine, and one half documentary. Smokey presents historical and cultural knowledge, and Bnonn applies hermeneutical and theological insights.
We are Reformed Christians and attend Redwood Reformation Church in Rotorua, where Bnonn is a lay shepherd. He is also the author of The Spine of Scripture: God’s Kingdom from Eden to Eternity, and It’s Good To Be A Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity.
If you’d like to contact us, the easiest way is by email:
hello@truemagic.nz
The symbolism of our logo
The True Magic logo combines a number of basic biblical symbols.
The fundamental image is of the cosmic mountain. There is an axis rising into heaven from the top of the mountain, symbolizing both the tree of life and the cross.
There is a Chi-Rho in there, where one side of the Chi becomes the serpent around the tree, but also the river out of the garden, giving life to the world—for chaos and death are both destructive and transformational.
The other side points up to heaven on the right, and down to Sheol on the left, reflecting how Christ’s own hands are represented in iconography throughout Christian history.
The river feeds into the waters beneath the earth, and the branches of the tree become clouds above the earth.
The two inner circles represent the limits of the earth, and the skies and the seas; the outer circle the spiritual realities outside our own that these things point to.
Where to find True Magic in your podcast app
Or, you can just copy the podcast’s RSS URL into your podcast app, to subscribe directly to the feed:
https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/1143240.rss
