What’s In A Name?

I was talking to ChatGPT the other day and had a thought: it’s astonishing what difference a single letter can make. It could be your initials (credit: FoundRae), where one letter changes who the world thinks you are, or when Aleister Crowley tacked a “k” onto magic. He wasn’t just playing with spelling. He was drawing a line between two ways of seeing reality, one that I’ll keep returning to throughout this blog. One path points toward sleight of hand and psychology. The other points toward transformation as a sacred technology. That little consonant carries an argument: that words themselves are spells, shaping not only how we talk about power but how we use it. What does that extra letter show us in our ongoing effort to blend wonder with science?

Words change as we do. Magic and magick started out the same, but the Enlightenment pulled them apart. “Magic” got filed under tricks and superstition, while “magick” became a way to talk about personal transformation and will. The same split happened with alchemy and chemistry. They were once part of the same experiment in understanding change until science decided to drop anything that smelled of mystery. Even Isaac Newton couldn’t keep those worlds separate; he spent years experimenting with alchemy while building the foundations of physics. (You can see more about that in a SciShow video here)

Aleister Crowley was many things—poet, mountaineer, mystic, and provocateur. In the early 1900s, he helped spark a revival of Western occultism and gave it a new vocabulary. When he added that “k” to magic, he said it was to distinguish true spiritual practice from stage illusion. In his book Magick in Theory and Practice, he described magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” That definition turned the word into a working philosophy. Whether you think his spelling was a genuine clarification or clever branding, the result stuck. Groups like the Ordo Templi Orientis still use his framing to describe the intersection of ritual, psychology, and will.

Much of what he was reacting to came from the centuries before him. The Enlightenment tried to tidy up the world by separating science from superstition. Alchemists, who once blended experiment with symbolism, were rewritten as foolish dreamers while chemistry was crowned legitimate. That cleanup job left a mark. Even today, people often assume alchemy means only turning lead into gold, missing that it was also about turning confusion into understanding. What I call “pragmatic alchemy” is partly an attempt to reclaim that balance—to treat metaphor and experiment as partners instead of rivals.

So what’s at stake in choosing “magick” over “magic”? It’s more than a spelling preference. Naming is a form of creation. Each word we choose draws a circle around what we think is possible. When I write “magick,” I’m signaling that I believe transformation isn’t limited to chemistry labs or churches. It happens in the mind, the heart, the habits we build, and the stories we tell. Every word we use casts a shape on the world. It’s worth asking: which ones shape yours?