The Book of Enoch tells of ancient fallen angels teaching what might today be called magic or folk medicine or root work or whatever a particular culture calls such things. The angels who taught such things were severely punished by the Lord of Spirits (God) for doing so. Look how far these teachings have mingled into societies, passed down from ancient times to today. Magic is not just about practices but about the thinking behind those practices. An angel, fallen, condemned by God, taught the cutting of roots. Look how magic today uses roots cut to human form to emulate a person and try to cause effects to happen based on the likeness similarity between root and person. Perhaps this is what was taught by the angel. Hermeticism is a word for magic which was in use five hundred years ago in Europe. It included Alchemy. It also included what seems to have been incorporated today into modern medicine and pharmaceutic industrial thinking and practices. The modern counterpart of the magic thinking of sixteenth century Europe and Britain might be mingled with modern medicine. Scientists claim it is all about fact-based and evidence-based studies but the thinking that goes into the devising of the studies seems to carry forward to our times the thinking of magic centuries ago which seems to be the same kind of thinking found in magic today, such as is found in many cultures around the world. How often a medical technology uses likeness as a strategy. A vaccine is like the bacteria or virus being fought. An animal is used to study a drug based on a likeness of a feature of the animal to a corresponding feature of a human. Commonalities are sought out. Assumptions are made that equalities of effects correspond to equalities of features. Science uses facts discovered but it also requires that scientists adopt certain ways of thinking and these ways trace historically back to ways of magical thinking still very much present in various cultures. We might do well to ask: How far does God’s condemnation of magic, and the fallen angels who have introduced it, extend into our modern medical health technologies and ways of thinking? The Lord Jesus’ famous lesson of the Good Samaritan shows how a kind and responsible person acted to help and injured man using techniques devoid of medical thinking and drugs. No drugs, just pouring onto the wounds of wine and oil and wrapping with simple dressings before kindly and wisely taking the victim of crime, not to a place of medicine and magical thinking and drugs but to a place of common hospitality and daily care. Eternal life thinking must replace magical thinking, if we are to follow Lord Jesus the Christ, being freed from sins that lead to deadly punishment by God and punishment beyond death.
