Cybernetics And Human Knowing. Vol. 15, no. 2, pp.

33-48

The Transversal Communication, or:

Reconciling Science and Magic
Inna Semetsky, Ph.D.1

This paper uses the Tarot card “The Magician” as an index of non-mechanistic, mutualist, causality
that enables the dynamics of self-organization. The philosophical framework is derived from the
process metaphysics of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, as well as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
The action of the Magician in Nature establishes a transversal (Deleuze’s term) communication,
which is capable of creating a semiotic bridge over the dualistic gap between mind and matter,
science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and
object, human experience and the natural world. The figure of The Magician is akin to Hermes, a
mythical messenger that enables communication between different levels of reality, creating genuine
novelty when it intervenes into the two realms and creates a semiotic bridge between them. Yet, such
is the real action of signs in the natural world. The paper also presents a model that uses geometry on
the complex plane and the corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world makes
human pre-cognition possible. The model presents a process-structure that incorporates the
transversal communication in its very dynamics.

In the course of modern history, science and magic have gradually become separated
into a pair of binary opposites. While acknowledging what the “pure reason” of
modernity considered to be a supernatural action, the former nevertheless attempted
to explain the latter in terms of a regular method of a direct cause-effect connection as
a method of explanation in natural science, promptly arriving at a conclusion of either
anomalous effect (as in magic) or anomalous cause (as in mantic). This paper uses the
sign of “The Magician” as an index of overcoming a dualistic split between science
and non-science and in the context of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics as well as process-
philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey and French postructuralist Gilles
Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored in this paper for the purpose
of asserting the function of the Magician in the natural world and explaining the
meaning of this sign (Fig.1).

Fig. 12

1. Institute of Advanced Study for Humanity (IASH), The University of Newcastle Australia.
Email: Inna.Semetsky@newcastle.edu.au
34 Inna Semetsky

What is called magic may still be considered a science, however unorthodox – a

science of not observable but hidden relations that are nevertheless (and in accord with
Peirce’s pragmatic maxim) capable of producing real effects when a cause in question
is not at all obvious. The world of Nature seems to be full of this as if “magic”: in the
self-organizing (Jantsch, 1980) or self-programming (Lloyd, 2006) universe, the
reality of Whiteheadian process is such that causal determinism coexists with self-
determination. Jantsch (1980) defined consciousness as the degree of autonomy a
system gains in the dynamic relations with its environment; thereby even the simplest
chemical dissipative structure can be said to possess “a primitive form of
consciousness” (Jantsch, 1980, p. 40). The image of the Magician represents such a
trace of consciousness embedded in the material universe, in agreement with
Whiteheadian proto-mentality attributed by him to all occasions. The sign of the
Magician is an indication of how mind (as Peirce’s category of Firstness) becomes
embodied in matter (Peircean Secondness) by means of the evolutionary process, or
Thirdness that serves as a “mediation, whereby first and second are brought into
relation” (Peirce, CP 6. 7). From the perspective of the logic of explanation, this card
represents the functioning of yet “another kind of causation” (Peirce, CP 6.59). The
Magician serves as the index of a self-cause disregarded by a science of modernity
which reduced the four Aristotelian causes, including formal and final, to a single type
of causation.
The dynamics of self-organization proceeds in an autopoietic (Varela, 1979)
manner along environmental perturbations and compensations effectuated by means
of transversal communications (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) between the different
planes or levels of order. Such unorthodox conversation (cf. Varela, 1979) as a
reciprocal communication between the levels is a feature of autopoietic systems. The
very act of such communication is capable of overcoming what Whitehead in his
Adventures of Ideas called “the paradox of the connectedness of things” (Whitehead,
1961, p. 228)3. The four semiotic tools on the Magician’s table (see Fig.1) are the
signs not of instrumental rationality, but of phronesis, that is, practical wisdom. They
correspond to four suits in a deck or, respectively, four Jungian functions comprising

2. Illustrations on Fig. 1 and 3 are from Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, known also as the Rider Tarot and the Waite Tarot.
Reproduced by permission of US Games Systems Inc., Stamford, CT 06902, USA. Copyright 1971 by US
Games Systems, Inc. Further reproduction prohibited.
3. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who asked a sharp question, where is the Magician? Considering that
the connectedness appears, sure enough, paradoxical in the framework of mechanistic science where effect
directly follows from cause, this question is fully appropriate. Semiosis as an active interpretive process defies
the reductive approach to science. The Magician, as a sign par excellence, is the included Thirdness, the very “in-
between” constituting the process. It is a relation, as the reviewer correctly notices with regard to the immanence
of signs. If we position ourselves “in-between” – that indeed we do when we ourselves become the interpreters
of signs – then the initial tension produced by the view-from-somewhere (subjective) and the view-from-
nowhere (objective) does not hold but creates a connection – a semiotic bridge – between those seemingly
disparate view points. The Magician is not a passive observer but an active interpretant (in the nature) or
interpreter (in the mind). But the semiotic nature, unlike the physical nature described solely by the laws of
mechanics, is itself mind-like!!!! The Magician is some (as yet unknown to us presently) law, a regularity, which
cannot but be described in philosophical (that I use in this paper, borrowing from process-metaphysics as
providing sufficient reference points) and not purely “scientific” language. See also Note 4, below.
 Reconciling Science and Magic 35

the Magician’s intelligence: thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition. Or, alternatively,

these are four elements available to Magician in his alchemical laboratory: fire, earth,
water and air, all the elements of nature brought together to serve the aim of freeing a
human spirit from the constraints and limitations of the material world, that is, to
effectuate a conjunction of opposites by creating a semiotic bridge between the worlds
of mind and matter. Those connections are enacted in “a continual rhythm of loss of
integration with environment and recovery of union” (Dewey, 1980, p. 15), the sign of
rhythm – as a cycle of eternal respiration of life – being expressed by a mathematical
symbol of infinity (see Fig.1) representing the unlimited many on the Magician icon
combined with the number one as the numeral historically assigned to this card in a
deck.
Both John Dewey and Charles S. Peirce acknowledged the continuity in nature.
Dewey described it as being “the intimate, delicate and subtle interdependence of all
organic structures and processes with one another” (Dewey, 1958, p. 295). According
to Dewey’s naturalistic logic (Dewey, 1938), there is no breach of continuity between
the operations of inquiry and biological and physical operations, that is, cognitive
operations grow out of organic activities, without however being identical to that from
which they emerge. As inquiry into inquiry, Dewey’s naturalistic logic is recursive,
that is, its function does not depend on anything extraneous to inquiry; instead, it
establishes continuity between the less complex and the more complex activities and
forms comprising the multiplicity of heterogeneous levels: such continuity is
symbolized by the sign of The Magician. The Magician’s action isn’t just expressed in
signa data but in signa naturalia thereby manifesting itself as the universal principle
in nature. Its action is, however, implicit: As a hidden variable, a.k.a. arcana, it is
waiting to be conceptualized so as to take its place among the laws of nature, the latter,
in semiotic terms, presenting themselves in the form of Peircean habits. It is a symbol
of creative and communicative action that has its place in the natural world as part of
the very action of signs, or what Peirce called semiosis.
At the mythical level, the Magician’s ancestor, Hermes Trismegistus, was
associated with the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek Hermes, a god of
communication and swift action, and the Magician’s idea is first and foremost
communicative and interactive, aiming towards connecting the One with the Many,
discovering unity in diversity and creating diversity out of unity. Among Whiteheadian
ontological categories, creativity, many and one are the ultimate, and it is creativity
that constitutes the condition of possibility for all existence. Whitehead’s process-
metaphysics defines existence in self-structuring and self-ordering terms, and order
and structure themselves are constantly evolving and developing. For Dewey, too,
“order is not imposed from without” (Dewey, 1980, p. 14) – which would be an
extraneous intervention thus making a system allopoietic – “but is made out of the
relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another. Because it is
active (not anything static)… order itself develops. …Order cannot but be admirable
in a world constantly threatened with disorder” (Dewey, 1980, p. 15). The Magician’s
communicative action may be considered as a precursor to neo- or morpho-genesis,
36 Inna Semetsky

that is, the creation of novelty. The creation itself is a continuing dialogue, an
interaction or relation as an ongoing event represented by means of the two indices on
the Magician’s picture. While the Magician’s right hand (Fig. 1) holding the wand
points up-wards, to the skies, his left hand is pointing to the earth enacting thereby the
Hermetic maxim. For it is the second verse of the Hermes’ Emerald Table (Tabula
Smaragdina) that proclaims the ancient formula of analogy: That which is above is
like to that which is below and that which is below is like to that which is above, to
accomplish the miracles of (the) one thing. The Magician’s transversal
communication crosses over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and
magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and
object, human experience and the natural world.
The number corresponding to The Magician card in a deck is 1 – as a symbol of
the Whiteheadian one world without and within, that is, identity between the world
within experience and the world beyond experience, equivalent to the Hermetic
formula as above so below. The Magician’s creative action is part of the dynamics of
auto-poetic systems capable of self-organization such as “the integrity of their
structure is maintained” (Jantsch, 1980, p. 7). The task to maintain the integrity
requires a specific “communication mechanism which is capable of acting much faster
than metabolic communication” (1980, p. 156): this process may very well operate in
qubits (Lloyd, 2006), which are the swift bits of quantum information inaccessible to
the usual sense perception. This communicative mechanism is responsible for
establishing different and new relations so that the system’s boundaries are crossed
and traversed, and new boundary conditions of the system, or its external structure, is
being established meanwhile sustaining the integrity of its internal structure, or what
Gilles Deleuze aptly called the fold as “the inside of the outside” (Deleuze, 1988,
p. 97).
Says Deleuze, “I undo the folds of consciousness that pass through everyone of
my thresholds… ‘the twenty-two folds’ that surround me and separate me from the
deep” (1993, p. 93). This number corresponds to the twenty-two Major cards in a
Tarot deck. Each consequent Arcanum stands in relation of difference to the preceding
one; so identity between worlds within and without experience does not mean self-
identity; the latter can never be completely preserved “in any advance to novelty”
(Whitehead, 1966, p. 107). While “every actual entity in its relationship to other actual
entities is…in the continuum, actual entities atomize the extensive continuum [which]
is in itself…the potentiality for division; an actual entity effects this division”
(Whitehead, 1978, p. 67) symbolized by the images on different Tarot cards. The
Magician establishes coordination (Peirce’s category of Thirdness) between the
noumenal and phenomenal realms despite—or rather, due to—the original difference
between the two. Deleuze ingeniously addressed difference as

not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to phenomenon … Every phenomenon refers to an
inequality by which it is conditioned … Everything which happens and everything which appears is
correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential,
difference of intensity. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 222)
 Reconciling Science and Magic 37

What Deleuze dubbed differentiation (with a t) is the difference in intensity that

establishes a flow of information. These differentiations are connected, and the
process of connection – or local integrations – represents differenciation (with a c) in
terms of it “being like the second part of difference” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 209) that is
capable of producing a difference of the second-order. Such a double process of
different/ciation, as the Magician’s communicative action, appears to border on a
magical act indeed when the Magician intervenes between the different levels, lifts up
his wand and makes “events turn into objects, things with meaning” (Dewey, 1958, p.
166) within the process of interleveled communication that constitutes Peirce’s
semiosis. The action of signs creates a link between the physical world of facts and the
world of objective meanings or values: For Whitehead, facts are creative, or valuative,
and are such due to the principle of creativity as a precondition for novelty. Mediated
by the intervention of the Magician, it is the relation of Thirdness as interpretation or
re-valuation that creates the meaning, that is, provides an experience with value,
which albeit implicit in each and every triadic sign is as yet absent among the brute
facts of Peircean Seconds.
The Magician, as an actual occasion, contains the condition of its own unity (the
number 1) within itself: its objective character ensures that it is the objects of the
natural world that pave the road for cognition, and not the other way around.4 The
“objects” of the natural world, however, are not reduced to “material things” (cf.
Randrup, 20065) but indeed have a mental, or rather proto-mental, according to
Whitehead, character. Creating a momentous “negentropy as semiotic information”
(Spinks, 1991, p. 71), the Magician is capable of trans-coding the analog continuum of
One into the digital organization of Many particulars: functioning as a principle of
continuity and harmony, it has to practically intervene in the world of everyday affairs.
It is the act of intervention that makes Magician an autocatalytic element building the
mutualist feedback of circular (in-direct) causality and representing “kinetics effective
in this moment at each spacial point” (Jantsch, 1980, p. 34). The Magician represents
quality that acts as a catalytic agent (addressed by Whitehead in his Process and
Reality and Modes of Thought) embedded in the system’s dynamics and capable of
eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty.
Becoming and creativity are concepts central to Whitehead’s process philosophy,
and it is the Magician’s auto-poetic and creative action that represents an occasion of
experience constituting the very process of becoming. The recursive communicative
feedback loops comprise the network of mutual interactions that establish a link

4. “Objective” here is close in meaning to Peirce’s objective idealism and his philosophy of panpsychism in which
it is ideas that constitute what we call the furniture of the world, “the real stuff” of the universe, as the reviewer
calls it. In Peirce’s time this “stuff” was not called information but signs. Lee Smolin, acknowledging our debt to
Peirce, rightly refers to it as information with its continuing chain of references (representations) that create a
semiotic process proper.
5. I am grateful to Alex Randrup for providing this reference and for his comments on this paper. The evolutionary
and transpersonal approach used by Randrup supports the thesis of this paper: Mind cannot be reduced to
personal Cogito, but transcends it eventually turning in Transpersonal Self (as an image of “The World” referred
to further below as a symbol of our one-ness with the world) precisely because a self-organizing principle –
represented by the Magician – is immanent in Nature thus making it not inert but active. See also Note 3 above.
38 Inna Semetsky

between the levels of order, that is, a connection created as if by wave of the
Magician’s wand. Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism posits actual occasions as
spatio-temporal events endowed with experience that, albeit dim and not fully
conscious, nevertheless defies the sharp bifurcation of nature into mindless matter and
conscious mind. In contemporary physics event is defined as an actualized possibility
of this event’s objective tendency, or its potentia, to occur. In general relativity, events
exert a causal influence on the very structure of events: Structures are thereby
evolving, that is, they are process-structures that defy the strictly linear causality of
classical mechanics. The circular causality operates two-directionally: “from the
bottom up (projection) and then from the top down (reinjection)” (Griffin, 1986,
p. 129).
Process ontology, as non-physicalistic, posits potentiality as a semiotic bridge.
This connection, in mentalistic terms, enables the very “transition between
consciousness and unconsciousness [that] need not be interpreted as a change of
ontological status but as a change of state, and properties can pass from definiteness to
indefiniteness and conversely” (Shimony, 1997, p. 151). The Magician’s
communicative action is akin to bringing the unconscious (as proto-mental) to the
level of consciousness by virtue of the actualization of potentialities. The presence of
the Magician enables the production of real effects on the actual plane of
manifestation. The Magician’s real yet imaginative (see Fig. 6 further below) action
provides the opportunities to see the possible in the actual and respectively—and
because of the code-duality (cf. Hoffmeyer & Emmeche, 1991)—to affect the degrees
of freedom.
The Magician’s creative imagination “terminates in a modification of the objective
order, in the institution of a new object … It involves a dissolution of old objects and a
forming of new ones in a medium … beyond the old object and not yet in a new one”
(Dewey, 1958, p. 220), but within what Deleuze called a zone of indiscernibility
between the two. The Magician’s auto-poetic function is complementary to the
spontaneously emerging, and relatively stable, structure within the totality of the
process in the overall triadic sign-system. The relative stability is a sign of semiosis: A
new regime of signs is part of the overall dynamics reflected in the evolutionary
process represented in the sequence of Tarot cards in a deck. As the Magician “cuts
across some old habit” (Dewey, 1958, p. 281), it simultaneously represents a potential
tendency to form a new one. Cutting and cross-cutting by means of the Magician’s
wand establishes multiple becomings in a mode of “a new threshold, a new direction
of zigzagging line, a new course for the border” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 45), together with
the “emergence of unexpected and unpredictable combinations” (Dewey, 1958, p.
281) functioning as ideas along many transversal lines. Yet, the Magician itself is an
Idea, a virtual tendency. While just musing6 in potentia, it still possesses a peculiar
“feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior [as] … the feeling of

6. In “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, written in 1908, Peirce presents musement as an element
of the abductive-like – that is, intuitive or insightful – process.
 Reconciling Science and Magic 39

habits working below direct consciousness” (Dewey, 1988, p. 26) because by itself it
is one such organic habit immanent in the field of the Jungian collective unconscious;
it in-habits the latter. The field of collective unconscious is constituted by the
archetypes, as Jung called them, the action of which is akin to Peircean signs
(Semetsky, 2001) and always needs an interpretation for the creation of meanings for
experience. Rundrap (2006) too considers consciousness as always collective, above
and over an individual mind. Timewise, the psychological Now, as Rundrup calls it,
would have encompasses the philosophical past-future (as per Fig. 6 further below)
precisely because of the functioning of the Magician as a semiotic bridge between past
and future in the present moment of here-and-now, interpreting—therefore
transforming—this very present! The transformation of our habits – the evolution, or
adventure, of ideas, as Whitehead has called it – culminates in the last Major Arcanum
in a deck, called “The World,” which represents the ideally individuated or
Transpersonal Self, that is, an integrated personality as inseparable from its life-world
and capable of transcending the boundaries of the reductive and ego-centred Cartesian
Cogito.7
As noticed by Ruthrof (2005), it was Heisenberg who conceptualized the cut as a
sort of incommensurability between the classical and subatomic levels of description
in physics. Heisenberg acknowledged Zwiespalt, or a strange contradiction, between
empirical questions at the level of classical physics and the theoretical constructs, such
as wave functions in multidimensional mathematical spaces of the quantum world.
The indeterminacy is where the cut is; despite the fact that on both sides of the cut the
relations are deterministic and described either by the laws of classical physics or the
differential calculus of quantum mechanics. Yet, it is between the levels where the
relation breaks down, or becomes cut off. Peircean triadic semiotics, however,
provides for the connections between the levels, or the different regimes of signs, by
means of an interpretant (the Third) that creates a semiotic bridge over the said cut:
Signs grow, develop and can always be translated into other signs.
In Peircean terms, it is an interpretant that creates the meaning for a sign. The
following graph illustrates the process of how the interpretant of the sign in a genuine
triadic sign-object-interpretant relation becomes a sign in a subsequent triadic
relation, and so forth (Fig. 2):

Fig. 2. A triadic relation (from Sheriff, 1994, p. 35)

7. See Rundrup, 1999.

40 Inna Semetsky

The Magician’s mode of communication functions as the Third, the included middle
that betrays the permanency of the laws of classical mechanics in the observable world
(cf. Nicolaidis, 2001).8 The Magician functions as to “pursue the different series, to
travel along the different levels, and cross all thresholds; instead of simply displaying
phenomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must form a
transversal or mobile diagonal line” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 22). What Deleuze called the
outside – the world without – is ontologically a virtual space that nonetheless
“possesses a full reality by itself [and] it is on the basis of its reality that existence is
produced” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 211). However,

in order for the virtual to become actual it must create its own terms of actualization. The difference
between the virtual and the actual is what requires that the process of actualization be a creation …
The actualization of the virtual … presents a dynamic …a multiplicity of organization … Without
the blueprint of order, the creative process of organization is always an art. (Hardt, 1993, p. 18)

This artistic and creative function is a prerogative of the Magician whose action is
based on the “creative logic of artistic construction” (Dewey, 1998, p. 199). Such an
unorthodox creative logic (really, a contradiction in terms within a strictly analytic
reasoning) is akin to what Louis Kauffman (1996) called virtual, or archaic, logic that
“goes beyond reason into a world of beauty, communication and possibility”
(Kauffman, 1996, p. 293) as well as beyond given facts into a world of interpretable
symbols, meanings and values. While the preceding Arcanum, “The Fool” (Fig. 3)
conveys the image of literally bordering at the edge of Chaos with its unlimited
potential, the image of The Magician brings an element of organization into the
semiotic process because Chaos as a source of potentially significant meanings is
“seen as Creative” (Hoffmeyer & Emmeche, 1991, p. 162).

Fig. 3

8. In “The Metaphysics of Reason” at http://diacentro.physics.auth.gr/rtalks/pdfs/nikolaidis01.doc Nicolaidis

presents quantum dynamics as embedded in the triadic relation vs the binary opposites of the either-or logic, as
shown:

The third term T necessarily provides a bridge between the dyad of A and not-A. Therefore a single quantum
entity will have comprised three terms, quite in agreement with the Peircean triadic sign (Fig. 2). For Peirce, the
whole Universe is composed of signs.
 Reconciling Science and Magic 41

In other words, we witness the artistic, creative construction of logic “from the basic
intuitive act of making a distinction and two fundamental arithmetical acts: (1) making
a mark to signify the distinction and (2) repeating the mark (Noddings & Shore, 1984;
cf. Spencer-Brown, 1979). The unnumbered, and apparently insignificant, Fool
precedes the Magician, which signifies the distinction. The zero numbering of the
Fool picture appears to signify nothing, but not quite so. In fact, the presence of the
Fool in each subsequently numbered card is a truism: 1+0=1, 2+0=2, and so forth.
Similar to the Deleuzian difference, imperceptible by itself, the Fool exemplifies the
zero-point energy, a quantum fluctuation (cf. Prigogine, 1991) or pure information
bordering on becoming active. Like an empty set Ø, an abstract entity of mathematical
analysis that apparently signifies nothing (cf. Rotman, 1987), the Fool organizes a
meaning into what is intrinsically meaningless when it itself enters into relations
following its symbolic leap into the abyss. But it is the Magician that is able to,
quantum-mechanically, “create information out of nothing” (Lloyd, 2006, p. 118), ex
nihilo, the zero mark, the Fool.
Following the Fool’s intuitive leap, it is the Magician, numbered one, that actively
constructs the logic as represented by multiple bracketing {…{…}…}, that is, making
a difference in the context of each consequent Arcanum similar to the infinite series
shown on the Fig. 4:

Fig. 4 (Barrow, 2000, p. 160)

The constructive, creative logic as per Fig. 4 is what “energizes reason… [and]
provides the real possibility and the means for opening of communication across
boundaries long thought to be impenetrable” (Kauffman, 1996, p. 293). Such a
transversal communication in which “observer and observed are one” (Kauffman,
1996, p. 295)—the very subject matter of this paper—is what guarantees self-
reference. It is “infinity [that] is self-referential” (Kauffman, 1996, p. 299), and it is
indeed a symbol of infinity as an index of the Magician’s (see Fig. 1) “magical” and
ultimately self-referential action in the world. In contemporary cosmology, the so-
42 Inna Semetsky

called weak holographic principle (Smolin, 2001) posits the world as consisting of
processes, or events, which can only be perceived through representations.
Theoretically, representations – or, in semiotic terms, signs that by definition conform
to the medieval aliquid pro aliquo formula – are all there is: They represent
Whitehead’s one kind of entity. These dynamic entities acting in the world are signs or
“representations by which one set of events in the history of the universe receives
information about other parts of the world” (Smolin, 2001, p. 177). Because they
occur on a scale below ordinary human perception – or, in Hermetic terms, in the
realm of invisible – they can be seen only in their projected format (cf. Kauffman,
1996), an analogy perhaps being a cinematic screen representing a 3-D reality in only
two dimensions: A loss in dimensions is thus implied. We do not know, in general,
how many hidden dimensions might have been compactified (cf. Lloyd, 2006). The
screen metaphor is potent: It accords with the Tarot layout being spread on a flat
surface, making such a surface a locus of meanings (cf. Deleuze, 1990; Semetsky,
2002). The fact is that

the area of a screen – indeed, the area of any surface in space – is really nothing but the capacity of
that surface as a channel for information. So, according to the weak holographic principle space is
nothing but a way of talking about all the different channels of communication that allow
information to pass from observer to observer… In short, the holographic principle is the ultimate
realization of the notion that the world is a network of relationships. These relationships are revealed
by this new principle to involve nothing but information. (Smolin, 2001, pp. 177-178)

Signs, by virtue of their triadic nature, are relational rather than substantial
entities. Tarot layout—functioning as a screen, or projection—thus presents a spatio-
temporal organization of informational “bits” and pieces (pun intended), or signs that
are represented by individual pictures. As regards the psychology of perception,
“space-time ceases to be a pure given in order to become … the nexus of differential
relations in the subject, and the object itself ceases to be an empirical given in order to
become the product of these relations” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 89) when brought to
consciousness, that is, actualized. The discrete structure of the psyche does not
contradict the discreteness of space posited by Lee Smolin’s (2001) quantum account
of the structure of space and time. It only makes us question whether we should
continue positing psyche, in a Cartesian fashion, as a-dimensional and non-extended.
Respectively, the quantum theory in its ontological (Bohmian) interpretation posits the
indivisible unity of the world, which is capable of being fully realized not as a
substantial but only as a relational or interactional system that continuously undergoes
transformations between its various forms of manifestation.
The Magician is immanent in matter in its capacity of a “virtual governor”
(Juarrero, 1999, p. 125), the function of which is non-local but distributed in the
transactional field of action: It makes us understand what Whitehead meant when he
spoke about the fallacy of simple location. The created novelty is in fact a decision
made, or a direction taken by means of the autocatalytic web built by the Magician’s
double-pointed wand: “’Actuality is the decision amid ‘potentiality’ … The real
 Reconciling Science and Magic 43

internal constitution of an actual entity constitutes a decision conditioning the

creativity which transcends the actuality” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 93). In making a
decision, the Magician in us employs the method of inference, which cannot be
reduced to deductive reasoning from premises to conclusion; rather it uses abduction
that “comes to us as a flash. It is an act of insight” (Peirce, CP 5.181), or intuition, or
imagination, that functions analogous to a certain “automatism [as] the psychic
mechanism of perception” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 90; cf. Semetsky, 2005).
The Magician’s imaginative leap, I suggest, can be modelled on the complex
plane by means of imaginary numbers9 that were indeed dubbed magical by Roger
Penrose (2004) and that “appear to play a fundamental role in the working of the
universe” (Penrose, 2004, p. 67) and, as implied by the Whiteheadian one world both
without and within, in the working of the human mind as well. The spatial
representation of the process-structure that enables the sign of the Magician to
function in the world is a grid, although non-Cartesian: The two coordinate axes are
located on a Gauss (or Argand) plane and marked with imaginary, on a vertical axis,
and real on a horizontal axis, numbers respectively. An imaginary number i is the
square root of minus one. Descartes had a rather derogatory attitude towards
imaginaries: it was he who first coined the name. There was no place for them in
Newton’s mechanistic philosophy either: he considered them plainly impossible.
Leibniz recognized their intermediary character and positioned them at the ontological
level between being and non-being. The true metaphysics of imaginary number was
elusive even for Gauss. He however agreed that their geometrical representation
establishes their meaning. For Kauffman, it is simply “remarkable that domains
imaginary with respect to arithmetic are vitally real with respect to geometry” (1996,
p. 293).
Imaginary and real numbers together form the plane, on which a point represents a
complex number a+bi. The point stands for the pair, a of the real numbers and b of the
imaginary numbers. The imaginative invention is an abductive leap along the vertical
axis and away from the phenomenal realm along the horizontal axis; it reaches out to
the noumenal realm of the complex numbers. The analytical representation of
direction is also possible, by means of a vector, or the directed magnitude describing
transmission, that is, the act of taking and bringing home, used by Whitehead as an
analogue for his prehension in the Process and Reality. It is the Magician’s creative
wand that establishes directedness, that is, “a vector [that] already indicates in which
direction the new structure may be expected” (Jantsch, 1980, p. 46). A vector, by
definition, has both magnitude and direction, that is, it can be described in principle
both by a mathematical quantity and a physical property. A vectorial diagram,
therefore, represents the dynamics inherent in abstract structure: it is an organizational
pattern or a process-structure reflecting Whitehead’s process ontology.

9. For detailed analysis in semiotic terms see Semetsky, I. (2005). “From design to self-organization, or a proper
structure for a proper function,” AXIOMATHES: An International Journal in Ontology and Cognitive Systems,
Vol. 15, No. 4, Springer Science, pp. 575-597.
44 Inna Semetsky

Vectors model natural entities, the lines of force: In Whiteheadian geometry, the
very idea of the point is the point as irreducibly complex. The higher level of
complexity would have encompassed the physical level in itself like two nested
circles, similar perhaps to Pythagorean tetractys encompassing natural numbers that
are inside the integers that are inside the rationals that are inside the reals, and the real
themselves being just a line among the complex numbers populating the whole plane,
notwithstanding an increase in dimensions, and hence order. The parallelogram of
forces amounts to the resultant vector r as the geometrical addition of vectors and that,
sure enough, represents the diagonal, or transversal communication in accord with
the rules of projective geometry when two coplanar lines intersect. The resultant
vector encompasses two dimensions simultaneously, external and internal,
representing the dynamics inscribed in the indiscernible succession of mental states.
The complex number a+bi pointed to by the arrow of the vector represents a single
synchronic slice of the total diachronic evolution, constituted by both internal and
external relations (Fig. 5):

Fig. 5. The complex plane

The Magician’s creative action therefore agrees with Whitehead’s process that
constructs itself in two modes: internally, or microscopically in terms of self-
determination towards some future goal in terms of “satisfaction” (Whitehead, 1978,
p. 283); and externally, or macroscopically, within the objective field that comprises a
series of actual occasions. In terms of human perception, the unfolding proceeds
precisely in two modes, and the complex plane is “the unfolded surface [which] is
never the opposite of the fold … I project the world ‘on the surface of a
folding…’”(Deleuze, 1993, p. 93). The shaded area on the Fig. 5 is equivalent to the
logical depth. The term logical depth has been elaborated in Hoffmeyer (1993). The
information theory defines a message’s logical depth as the expression of its meaning,
its worth or value. Hoffmeyer labels such logical depth “a semiotic freedom” (1993,
p. 66). In Peircean terms, freedom as the category of ethics is the first category that
manifests in the logic of creative abduction. Ethics and logic complement each other
because it is specifically triadic semiotics, based on the logic of included middle,
which is defined as an ethics of thinking that, for Peirce, is inseparable from human
conduct, that is, an ethics of doing.
 Reconciling Science and Magic 45

It is the Magician’s imaginative invention that creates the magnitude along the
vertical axis, the logical depth, that is, a leap towards the different level of order in the
complex knowledge-system. That’s why each “actual entity is seen as a process; [and]
there is a growth from phase to phase” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 283), from one Arcanum
to another. In fact, the phenomenal realm along the horizontal axis is just a projection,
a pale Platonic shadow of the complex entities constituting the world of ideas or
goods, among which The Magician is number One. The Magician is a sign whose
function is to establish the relation – a semiotic bridge, a transversal connection – by
virtue of its own “extreme contiguity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 173) signified by
its wand that connects above and below. As Whitehead was saying, “the world within
experience is identical with the world beyond experience, the occasion of experience
is within the world and the world is in the occasion” (1961, p. 228).
The law of analogies as applied to space – as above so below – has its correlate
also in temporal terms: that which was is as that which will be, and that which will be
is as that which was. In a Tarot layout, the philosophical time of coexistence splits into
its three dimensions that are spatially distributed within one and the same spread. The
future, as well as the past, is the present of philosophical time. It is a sequence of
many events that constitutes one enduring object, which is represented in a spatial
configuration of a layout. It is when “frozen in their locations in space and time”
(Kennedy, 2003, p. 53) that all past, present and future events appear to coexist quite
in accord with the block-universe view of relativity theory. That is, the Tarot
diachronic dimension becomes compressed into a single synchronic slice of a layout
when the dynamic process of semiosis becomes projected, that is, momentarily frozen
in its location in space-time in the here-and-now of each reading because of
relatedness, which functions in accord with the rules of projective geometry. The
present state of the human mind, accordingly, comprises both past and the possible
future events projected in the cards’ positions (cf. Semetsky, 2006a).
Positions, signifying the future aspect of time, correspond to the specific synthesis
of time, the memory of the future.10 This expression is not an oxymoron: The block-
universe ontology, for example, implies the tenseless coexistence of the past, present
and future. The static layout does not contradict such ontology. Time becomes
paradoxically a-temporal, tenseless, and, as pertaining to its functioning in a Tarot
layout, is essentially expressed in its fine-structured format that unites positions
combining past, present and future like on a hypothetical temporal map displaying in
the here-and-now the dynamics of what was before and what will have been after. The
subject of the reading in the present moment appears to coexist with itself later: “me-
now” is simultaneous with “me-tomorrow” in agreement with the so-called triangle
argument (Fig. 6) of the block-universe, which concedes that some events in the past
and future coexist:

10. See Semetsky, 2006b, “The language of signs: Semiosis and the memories of the future”, SOPHIA:
International Journal for philosophy of religion, metaphysical theology and ethics, Vol. 45 No 1 pp. 95-116.
46 Inna Semetsky

Fig.6. The Triangle Argument (Kennedy, 2003, p. 63, Fig. 5.3)

The dotted lines indicate simultaneity; simultaneity implies coexistence; and the
coexistence relation is indicated by the two-headed arrow analogously to the double-
directedness of the Magician’s wand. According to Whitehead, future is implicit in
each event as becoming because everything is everywhere and at all times. The
presence of the Magician in the world, illustrated by the diagrams on Figs. 5 and 6
enables a particular organization of thought, which makes pre-cognition possible. Not
limited to the knowledge of facts, it is the Magician’s phronesis, or a deep
understanding of the connectedness of things that leads to re-valuation of experience
enriching the latter with value and meaning. The figure of the Magician is a symbol of
the transdisciplinary, in vivo, knowledge (Nicolescu, 2002): As based on the virtual,
yet real, logic of the included middle, it necessarily leads to the inclusion of values
and dynamic harmonious understanding above and beyond simple analytic
reasoning.11
Signs are relational and they form a process-structure as a network of
(quasi)causal relations between events. Tarot layout is a sign, itself the relational
included middle that mediates between the world without and the world within and
represents both of them notwithstanding that we ourselves as participants, and not the
detached observers, are continuously enacting and re-enacting the world in question.
When The Magician appears in a Tarot reading it brings reassurance and the feeling of
satisfaction and understanding, as a specific instance of freedom. It is the value of
understanding as such that the Whiteheadian promise of knowledge holds. “To treat
the thing as a unity” (Whitehead, 1966, p. 451) is one mode of understanding enacted
by the Magician who is capable of uniting the multiplicity of experiences and creating

11. Such dynamic understanding and the real presence of the oneness with nature would defy the supposedly
“dangerous image” of the Magician. The anonymous reviewer insightfully proposes the very likelihood of the
Magician to coerce others into agreeing with us. Fair enough!!! Each archetype, according to Jung, has both light
and dark aspects, and the Magician’s “darkness” is expressed in its reversed archetype of the Trickster. The
psychologically positive qualities of the Magician, such as wisdom, insight, or vision may indeed turn into their
binary opposites when appropriated by the Trickster. The psychology of the Trickster reflects not wisdom but
cleverness, not understanding but caprice, not insight but wit, and not vision but voyeurism. While the
Magician’s actions are wise and ethical, its counterpart the Trickster, indeed may coerce humans into playing his
games. As a philosopher and Tarot reader (see www.innasense.org)I am fully aware of this possibility and I thank
the reviewer again for his/her comments on the paper.
 Reconciling Science and Magic 47

novel understanding and meaning for an experience. The Magician in us combines

sensitive perception with the practical ethics of know-how (cf. Varela, 1999) and
enables this “total organic resonance” (Dewey, 1980, p. 122) that makes us act wisely
and in co-operation with the environing World.

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