The Christian Magician

When I first read about Joseph Smith—about the seer stones, the buried treasures, the talisman engraved with planetary signs—I did not feel surprise. I felt recognition. A magician who sees himself as a faithful Christian. That was the phrase that trembled in my mind, like a thin wire pulled too tight. And in that trembling I saw him again: The Magician. The one that taught me when I was young, the one that I saw as a second father.

I refer to him not by his given name. Not by the name that friends and enemies alike used in whispers or accusations. He will be only The Magician. Because what I am writing about is not formal biography. It is pattern. It is recurrence. It is archetype.

A magician who sees himself as a faithful Christian. Others may see a contradiction. But contradiction is often the surface foam of a deeper current.

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The Magician did not reject Christ. That would have been too simple. Too theatrical. He did not burn crosses or invert them or shout rebellion against heaven. On the contrary, he spoke often of Christ with glowing words. He spoke of sacrifice, of light, of love.

But he also spoke of correspondences. He also spoke of hidden names. He spoke of structures beneath structures, as if the visible church were merely the vestibule to a more intricate architecture. He believed that God had written the world not only in scripture but in complex symbols. And that to read and use those symbols was not rebellion—but devotion. A more dangerous devotion. Because devotion that expands does not ask permission.

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In the description of Joseph Smith—the treasure-digger prophet that founded the Mormon church—I saw clearly what I had sensed but not articulated: the fusion of two impulses. Faith in the religion of one’s birthplace and a curiosity that exceeds the boundaries of that religion.

Smith lived in a world soaked in Protestant Christianity. The Bible was not an abstract authority; it was furniture. It was weather. It was breath. Yet he also lived in a culture of folk magic, divining rods, planetary talismans, hidden plates beneath hills. He did not choose between them. He combined them.

The Magician did the same. He was born inside a Christian grammar within the larger culture of El Salvador. The metaphors of his childhood were angels and devils, salvation and sin. He did not discard them when he discovered ritual circles or esoteric diagrams. He absorbed them and integrated them.

He would say: Christ is the Logos. And then he would draw a sigil. He would quote scripture. And then he would calculate correspondences between planets and psalms.

To some, this is confusion. To others, hypocrisy. To him, it was continuity.

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There is an archetype here. A figure who stands inside the dominant faith of his culture yet presses against its membrane. Not to destroy it, but to expand it from within.

The Magician was not interested in atheism. He was not interested in secular modernity. He was not interested in the flattening of mystery into psychology or sociology. He wanted more mystery, not less. And so, he sought techniques. Ceremony. Ritual. Names that vibrate.

Not because he doubted God—but because he believed God had left many doors unopened.

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When I was younger, I watched him with a mixture of awe and confusion. I saw how others saw him: contradictory, unstable, perhaps even dangerous. A Christian who practiced magic. A believer who drew circles and invoked forces. A man who spoke of grace and of power in the same breath.

But what if the contradiction exists only because modernity insists on separating what was once unified? Before the Enlightenment, theology and magic were siblings. To invoke an angel was not to betray God. It was to request assistance within His hierarchy. To study planetary hours was not rebellion but an attempt to understand divine timing.

The Magician knew this history instinctively, even if he did not always articulate it in academic terms. He sensed that Christianity had once contained a more fluid relationship to the invisible.

He was not inventing something new. He was remembering something old.

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In Joseph Smith’s story, there is will. A will that does not apologize. A will that believes it can receive revelation, that can dig in the earth and find meaning, that can translate what others cannot see. Whether one believes his claims or not, the audacity is undeniable.

The Magician shared this audacity. He believed that experience was not closed. That revelation had not ended. That the sacred was not exhausted by institutional doctrine.

He would kneel in prayer. He would stand in ritual posture. He would oscillate between submission and command.

This is the paradox at the heart of the archetype: the faithful Christian magician is both servant and technician. He bows before God. But he also learns the mechanisms of the invisible.

To outsiders, this looks like hubris. To him, it was devoted participation.

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There is something deeply bold about this figure of the New World. A frontier spirituality. A refusal to accept that the map is complete.

Joseph Smith found plates in a hill. The Magician found correspondences in the land, in folk tales, in ordinary objects.

Both believed that the landscape—literal or symbolic—still concealed treasures. And all throughout Latin America, in villages and cities, one finds similar figures: men and women who pray the rosary and then perform limpias, who light candles to saints and whisper psalms as incantations. They do not see contradiction. They see layers.

The Magician existed in that layered space. He did not feel any need to resolve the tension. He inhabited it.

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When others accused him—gently or harshly—of inconsistency or even evil, he would smile with a kind of tired patience.

“God is larger than your categories,” he once said.

I did not understand then how radical that statement was. If God is larger than categories, then the boundary between religion and magic is administrative, not metaphysical. It is drawn by institutions. Not by the cosmos.

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But there was also danger. To combine Christianity and magic is to walk a narrow ridge. On one side lies fanaticism. On the other, delusion. The Magician sometimes leaned too far toward intensity. His will was strong. His curiosity was relentless. He wanted to know what lay beyond the sanctioned perimeter.

This is the risk of the archetype. The same will that seeks God can also seek control. The same ritual that expresses devotion can become an assertion of power.

Joseph Smith built a church. The Magician built smaller structures—circles of influence, spaces of initiation, invisible architectures in the minds of those who followed him. I was one of them.

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When I read about Joseph Smith’s talisman—the engraved symbol of Jupiter, planet of expansion and kingship—I thought of The Magician’s eyes when he spoke of destiny. Not personal destiny in the vulgar sense of fame or wealth, but destiny as alignment. As participation in a cosmic drama.

He believed history was not random. He believed symbols were active. He believed Christ was not merely a moral teacher but a cosmic axis. And he believed that to engage with magic was to approach that axis more directly.

Was he right? I no longer ask the question in that way. Instead, I explore the pattern.

The archetype of the Christian Magician emerges wherever faith and curiosity refuse to cancel each other out. A man of great will and curiosity. A man who combines the faith of the religion into which he was born with the desire to investigate and practice a magic that exceeds the ordinary boundaries of that religion. He is not satisfied with inherited forms. He wants to test them. Extend them. Penetrate them.

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In my memory, The Magician is both luminous and shadowed. He taught me that belief need not be passive. He also showed me how thin the line can be between revelation and projection, between brave commitment and blind certainty.

But perhaps that thinness is unavoidable. To seek the invisible is to risk misinterpretation. To invoke is to risk misunderstanding. To believe that God still speaks is to risk being called mad. To invoke the messengers of this God to speak through you is to risk true insanity.

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And so I return to the image that began this meditation: Joseph Smith, seer stone in hand, Bible on the table. A magician who saw himself as a faithful Christian.

I see The Magician reflected there—not as imitation, but as manifestation of the same deeper pattern. An archetype that appears in different centuries, different languages, different landscapes. The Christian who refuses to relinquish magic. The magician who refuses to relinquish Christ. Between them stretches a tension that modern categories cannot easily contain.

But perhaps the tension itself is the point. Perhaps the Magician stands as a reminder that faith, when it is alive, does not calcify into prohibition. It expands. It seeks. It risks.

And in that risk—dangerous, luminous, unresolved—there is something that feels closer to the original fire. Not safe. But real.