The Metaphysics of Morals

Magical considerations for not being a fuckhead.

Ethics differ from morality in that they are externally imposed through societal or institutional norms. They’re contrived, like laws of the state, and they must be adhered to even if the individual disagrees with them, or else some form of punishment is bound to follow. That punishment may not be so tangible as a criminal charge and may gnaw at the more subtle processes of social interactions. One may be avoided or othered as a pariah, or at the least be faced with the burden of shame. All of these forces are external, pushing in. Ethics never speak of the heart.

Morality, on the other hand, is a wellspring which originates within. Morals are our conscience expressing itself as actionable guidelines and they originate from the part of us which already possesses a coherent intuitive sense of right and wrong. These are not the right and wrong of dualism, not categories under which all things must be filed in one column or the other without room for nuance. This would be ethics creeping in.

No, the moral right and wrong are merely two ideas which may be defined any which way by any given person depending upon how their heart reacts to a given situation. They are not carved in stone but drawn in sand, always subject to the changing of winds as our experiences and reflections alter the patterns inside.

It is my view that what we commonly refer to as morality gets twisted in the tangles of our wounds. We obscure what morality even means through the unaddressed and unhealed distortions caused by our upbringing, by some adult who tried to infuse into us their own ideological framework of good and evil, crime and punishment. They forced upon us their own ethics, expecting us to assimilate them as our morals, and all under the threat, whether vague or explicit, of punishment or disappointment.

This removed our agency. This is a wound. When it comes to our relationship with our own ability to tune in and allow our conscience’s vague whispers to become actionable morality, there is likely a bit of static for most people.

The truth is that there is something comforting about relying on ethics which are simply handed to you. It takes far more effort to learn how to be present and mindful in each situation, stop and feel your heart, listen to what your spirits and your inner voice are telling you, than it does to thoughtlessly follow a list of rules.

But what about the rare occasions when either a code of ethics or personal morals are based in metaphysics?

Are we too jaded to notice? If a Buddhist refrains from retaliating against an attacker, are they being virtuous or are they being wise in the context of an advanced comprehension of karma? Are they enlightened or just trying to avoid ever having to meet that attacker again in another life by getting any further entangled with them?

Let me ask you this, Does it matter?

Out of the Ten Commandments there are four which are also Buddhist precepts. They also happen to be rather universal. But why is that? Personally, I see a world without these four values upheld as being a fucking mess. And when I say that it’s not rhetorical; I’m just looking around at what’s here. But it’s more than messy in the obvious sense. When these four tenets get broken, things get metaphysically fucked up. There is always a more disturbing invisible mess in the spirit, behind the dumpster fire we can see. These often take longer to undo than we realize and have more far reaching implications.

“Don’t lie” is an interesting one. Much could be considered here, which may become a separate essay, but my thoughts first race to the idea of Yeats recording oral traditions which mention that the Tuatha Dé Danann held a profound respect for honesty. And while we don’t seem to find this in earlier, more reliable sources (so take it for what it’s worth), more contemporary myth seems to have twisted this into an inability to tell an outright lie on behalf of the faerie folk.

In a small way, it could be said that lying is a sort of cosmic fraud, though often the consequences are not so small. Lies break the world’s congruence in a way, even when they’re spoken with good intentions. Mere omission or misdirection re-routes the current (or allows it to re-route itself), but a lie crashes against it: Anomalous and out-of-place information which is asynchronous with the rest of reality. The value of refraining from spreading un-truths might be a precept and a commandment, but there are other beings who value this virtue as well, so take care not to throw babies out with bath water.

In the Buddhist precepts gossip, slander, and harsh speech in general are included in this idea, and again here we can see how practical this set of rules actually is if we consider how a few misplaced words or a piece of information shared with the wrong third party can potentially invite havoc into our personal or professional lives. There is a definite distinction between a lie and misdirection, as the faerie folk are said to omit information and allow assumptions to occur in the minds of others without these qualifying as a lie, and I think it is sound to be mindful of the difference, regardless of whether this is true for the faeries. It’s also worth considering that there is an attainment in Vedic traditions called Satya Pratiṣṭhā, the graduation to which signifies a spiritual master achieving total alignment with the universe through mindfully never speaking un-truths. It is said that once this has been completely attained, and only then, a master may very occasionally speak something which is not true at the time of its utterance, and that the universe will then bend to conform to it, making whatever they say a reality instantaneously.

“Don’t steal” seems obvious enough, too. Though I would suggest that the metaphysical implications, again, run much deeper than keeping order within society or respecting asymmetrical power dynamics. Taking something which we have no right to take creates a vacuum. There is created through this act a karmic void which will, one day, demand recompense. We never know how it will come collecting, we never know what it will take, or how much interest will have accrued by then, and we don’t even know in which lifetime it will return to haunt us. But we can be certain that it will. The universe keeps score, not to punish, but to teach. When we cease giving it a given reason to teach us, it will know that we have learned. It’s also worth considering how our behaviors are seen by the spirits, and by different factions and classes of them. How do the virtues we either choose to give mind to, or not, reflect on us through the eyes of various beings? Are we behaving in concordance with those with whom we feel most intimately aligned, or are we carelessly pushing away those whose company we would like to keep? Forget about legality, consider the spirits. What kind of person do you want to be known as to them?

“Don’t do sex that harms.” Yes, that’s really how I’m choosing to phrase that. Sex is ideally not a weapon though it has always been used as such. Aside from the obvious very human traps of thinking with one’s genitals and breaking up families, when I sit with the idea of sexual morality what comes to mind is the application of the previous virtue, “not lying”, but towards transparency of intent. It is objectively kind of shitty to pretend to really like someone and feign a genuine connection just to satisfy base desires, like the asshole gaslighting his date into bed and then never calling again.

There are false pretenses involved, and at this level of intimacy and terrain there is a clear violation present. Now, love magic tends to get bundled up into one homogeneous mass in people’s minds, it would seem, but it’s imperative that we disentangle that knot for the sake of a nuanced understanding. There is magic to find love, as in real, mutual, naturally occurring desire and respect between individuals. There is also magic for charm, which has to do with being received well by others, providing an atmosphere of fun or warmth, with an aura of invitation. There is also magic to enchant another person into falling for you, which usually winds up closer to obsession when it plays out, if it lands at all. And then there are glamours.

Straight-up love magic invites what is already present to be noticed, accentuated, and well received consensually. It promotes more love in the world, which is hard to imagine as a bad thing, and removes blockages which may prevent a well-matched pair from missing the boat.

Charm magic, like love magic, is respectful of a person’s autonomy, never fabricating something untrue but dialing up the volume on the good things within the practitioner so they may be noticed and appreciated. There is generally an air of fun about charm magic, and often everyone has a better time because it is present. To be liked, for people to enjoy being around a person, is usually not hurting anyone or knocking innocent bystanders off of their life path.

Enchantment is where we get into the weeds and anyone who has perused Cyprianic black books knows exactly what kind of rapey creep spells of which I speak. This variety is plainly forceful and gives little regard for a person’s agency, though my personal understanding is that the non-consensual nature of them means that there are natural, universal protections in place for everyone which make these spells less likely to work. Still, though. Gross. What if it did work? How many years before they snapped out of it and realized their whole life was a lie? How long before the caster figured out that they still felt empty inside regardless of receiving false affection from their obsession?

Glamours are, in my opinion, the most insidious of all. The outright force is not present, but the song of the siren calls out to the weakest, most under-fed, and most desperate aspects of another person. Glamours are the vampires singing sweetly for permission to enter. They find the secret hopes which may be better off left buried, inject them with MDMA, and then convince you that they’re finally, actually happening, that somebody is finally really seeing you for who you are. All your wildest dreams are going to come true. And then they don’t. And those who use glamours often justify their selfish, attention-addicted immaturity with a legalistic argument that goes something like “Hey, I didn’t force them to do anything.”

Usually the people making this argument in defense of their own magical gaslighting, with which they have no qualm, are interestingly very much against the same manipulation being done outside of a magical context. This profound hypocrisy almost always accompanies glamours and those who employ them.

And while there are usually no victims in love or charm magic, and while enchantment magic in that aggressive sense is amoral/immoral but almost never works the way people want it to, when it comes to glamours they actually aim to draw out issues which are vulnerable in others and prey upon them, sometimes ending preexisting relationships which may have needed work but were generally on a good path forward, or causing recovering addicts to spiral and relapse due to the sheer intensity of emotions evoked. Hey, at least they didn’t force anything. Right?

“Don’t kill.” Now, I know the Buddhist version of this includes animals, but for the sake of broad application we’re going to focus on not killing (or even strictly not murdering) humans. Why not? Well, obviously because it’s an extremely traumatic event, one in which theft is also inherent, both of the remaining life of the victim, and all the moments stolen from those who cared for them. But it does much more than take the life that is taken. Such an extreme event is like a fracture, and the remaining time that person would have lived, that potential, erupts prematurely. On a metaphysical level this damages any living witnesses to the act and potentially nearby residents who are sensitive to the field.

It may leave a stain upon the Place itself and can even displace resident spirits or change their nature. In extreme hauntings, the ghost of the victim can even continue to traumatize the living and alter the course of their lives. How many tales have we heard of a haunted hotel that just seems to attract more horrific violence once the first horrendous act has been established as a part of its history? Like attracts like.

A single murder can cascade through multiple life stories, creating more sorrow, fear, and despair than anyone can ever witness at once. Not to mention the fracturing of the soul of the murderer which inevitably occurs when one human takes the life of another. This fracture then turns the volume down on everything else that person might experience and opens them up to deeper influence by whatever spirits they were entangled with which caused them to murder in the first place. The Little St. James crowd, for instance, likely cannot find a moment of peace or beauty as long as they live, though they will continue to seek whatever thrills they find in doing harm to others. Take it from an ex-crackhead; there are some extremes we simply aren’t built to handle.

In all of these cases we could choose to see some humdrum cliche, an unthinking, fixed rule imposed upon us by our forebears within an ethics to which we cannot relate. Or, we could pull on our big-magician pants and look past our own thin biases and witness the horrors of what happens beneath when these fairly universal tenets are broken.

I’m not suggesting we follow them religiously, because I personally don’t find much value in ethics at all, but I do strongly recommend considering these and other virtues from a purely utilitarian perspective as a means of re-wilding morality and re-connecting to our own innate ability to work with our moral center.

I’ll say it again; Morality is what happens when the conscience is allowed room to crystalize into actionable direction. It is situational, not fixed. It takes direction from our experiences, but it arises from within.

Only you will know if you’ve done right or wrong most of the time, and your version will always differ from that of another person. The important part is that we care what kind of messes we’re making, or not making, and are not wholly blind to this internal mechanism. If we are magicians then we must be aware of the invisible consequences. If we are more than magicians, if we are facilitators, shamans, healers, teachers, and priests, then we have committed to a role as caretaker; Paying attention to the subtle effects of our magic and our actions, and wrestling with the relevant morality, is literally our job.

It’s also just good sense to keep in mind the weight of our hearts and the feather and scale which death will inevitably herald. It grows closer by the minute.

I now leave you with something to consider moving forward when it comes to the differences between ethics and morality, and the final point in my case for the latter; Many Nazi officers who participated in the state-sanctioned and socially-approved extinguishing of life, once the war was over, claimed in their defense that they were simply following the rules.