Magical Art

 

Magical art is a hot topic right now, especially in the UK and USA. Australia has its own magical artist, Barry William Hale (b. 1969), a visual and performance artist and an occultist, who uses historical magical techniques in new and innovative ways to make original artworks.

Interest in empowerment through magic has never been more popular, and this explosion can be attributed to the internet. The BBC reports that “videos with the hashtag WitchTok have amassed more than 30 billion views”, while the “#witch hashtag has received nearly 20 billion views, #witchtiktok has nearly two billion views, and #babywitch, a hashtag for those new to the craft, has more than 600 million views.” While much online “magic” is about self-care and spruiking small businesses, magic is actually an ancient intellectual and somatic practice concerned with accessing supernatural entities and forces for knowledge, self-development, and power.

Magical art can be traced back to the Symbolists and Decadents of the late 19^th century. Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Salons de la Rose+Croix combined Catholicism, Rosicrucianism and occultism. Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was directly inspired by spiritual entities. Well-known modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky were inspired by occultism, designers from the Bauhaus school were engaged with occult spirituality, and Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varro’s works are suffused with magic and mystical imagery.

While historically magical art is reasonably new, magic itself has an old pedigree, and this is what Barry William Hale taps into when producing art. His magical influences and methods span the centuries from the ancient world until today and include accessing the powers of ancient Egyptian and Greek gods, Kabbalistic mysticism, Renaissance Hermetic magic, the Enochian system developed by Elizabethan court magician, John Dee, and the ritual techniques of famous twentieth century magicians Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare.

Barry William Hale’s work, ‘Demonomania Rhizotoma’ is on display at the State Library Victoria until 31 May 2026 in an exhibition called Creative Acts, curated by Michelle Moo, Angela Bailey, Kate Rhodes, Nandini Sathyamurthy, and me - Caroline Tully. 

What is Magic? Barry William Hale's magic case in the Creative Acts exhibition

 

In my last blog post about the Creative Acts exhibition at State Library Victoria I explained that each case of objects in featured artist Barry William Hale’s part of the exhibition would be explained. We will focus on the relationship between the cases and Hale’s commissioned artwork, his other artistic output, and magickal practice. In this blog post we will focus on the Magic case in general. Subsequent posts will examine individual objects within this case.

What is Magic?

The word ‘magic’ derives from the ancient Greek μαγεία (mageia) which referred to the ritual activity of Persian priests or magoi and which was so different to Greek religion that the Greeks categorised it as ‘magic’. Over subsequent centuries there have been many definitions of ‘magic’. As Wouter Hanegraaff says, ‘one will therefore receive very different answers depending on the historical period in question and the personal agendas of whoever is being asked’. Hanegraaff observes that magic has been defined as: ‘ancient wisdom’; ‘worship of demons’; ‘natural philosophy and science’; ‘occult philosophy’; ‘pseudoscience’; ‘an enchanted worldview’; and as ‘psychology’. Although ‘magic’ is understood differently within diverse historical and cultural contexts, in general it can be described as the use of ritualised words and actions, usually outside the sanction of official religions, which attract supernatural beings to influence events. British magician, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), used the spelling ‘magick’ which he defined as ‘the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’.

Magic may seem an obscure or fantastical practice but, along with religion, it is a method that has been used by humans to negotiate their relationship with the world for thousands of years. Barry William Hale’s magical influences and methods span the centuries from the ancient world until today. They include the power of Set, the ancient Egyptian god of the desert, chaos, storms and strength; the openness to inspiration characteristic of Bronze Age Minoan ecstatic religion; and the physical sensation and raw emotion typical of the worship of the Greek god Dionysus. Barry’s magical lineage continues through Jewish Kabbalistic letter mysticism, the Renaissance Hermetic magic of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and the system of Enochian magic developed by Elizabethan court magician, John Dee, up to the magical revival in late 19th century France and England. From there, the magical current manifested in the most famous and notorious modern ceremonial magician, Aleister Crowley. His channelled text, Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), received clairaudiently in Egypt in 1904 and the basis for the magical religion of Thelema (Greek for ‘will’), along with the grandfather of modern sigil magic, Austin Osman Spare, are other direct influences on Barry Hale.

Objects in Hale’s magic-themed case include: illustrations by Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) such as a double-headed herm; one of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettesheim’s (1486–1535) Three books of occult philosophy (facsimile); composer Larry Sitsky’s (1934–) Trio. No. 7 [music]: Enochian sonata: for two violoncellos and piano; an anonymous work from the David Halperin Collection, Kabbalah on the laws of the transmutation of letters and words of the Hebrew alphabet and its combinations (before 1864); Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) The spirit of solitude: an autohagiography, subsequently re-Antichristened The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929); Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, featuring a tattoo imprint by Hale.

Also featured are a statue of the Egyptian god, Set, from Hale’s personal collection, a Seth amulet dating to 1294–30 BCE and a Minoan gold signet ring with an ecstatic scene (facsimile of CMS II.3 No.51) both borrowed from the Chau Chak Wing Museum; a bowl in the form of a Silenus mask (2^nd–4^th century CE) and a Greek lekythos vase depicting the god Dionysus, both loaned from the Ian Potter Museum of Art. An Aramaic incantation bowl was loaned by the Australian Institute of Archaeology; and an obsidian mirror made in Mexico is a personal loan by Hale. 

The Creative Acts exhibition at State Library Victoria is on until 31 May 2026. Come on down and check it out, You might even run into Barry or me there! We’re always happy to talk about the exhibition and related topics.