This book allows the possibility of conscious and purposeful action within the sphere of the miraculous or, in the terminology of the tradition it has elected to use as its referential base, conscious and purposeful manipulation of intent. This means that it surmises sorcery as existential option. Having read the above, many visitors to this site will sigh, smile, shrug or otherwise express their scepticism, and click out.

No one, however, when reading Dickens, seems to have a problem with the fact that he was, like most writers in the Western cultural sphere, a Christian and believed that God had died on the cross and then risen to life again three days later. We absolutely do not mind pondering the moral choices of his characters although they were all based on Christian tenets. No agnostic or even atheist claims that a believer in God such as Einstein had no business being a theoretical physicist. In fact, we do not even think of the Christianity of Dickens or the unquestionable if unspecified religion of Einstein, and yet everything they ever said bears unmistakeable reference to their beliefs. Most great philosophers throughout history, the philosophers who developed notions and systems which any modern thinker must use as stepping stones if he or she is to be taken seriously by herself and by others, have belonged to some religion. That should not and does not bother us a bit.

The key word here seems to be religion. No great writer, painter or philosopher ever claimed to be a sorcerer, and institutionalised world religions generally take a very dim view of sorcery or even prohibit it. They have, however, never denied sorcery as a possibility. One does not legislate against impossible crimes. Is it a crime to swallow an elephant in a single gulp? It is not, and for a very good reason: it cannot be done.

Why do religions find sorcery objectionable? Stemming from the ancient Levantine tradition, the most influential institutionalised religions by and large view God as creator abstracted from its creation (or, rather, the other way round: the creation as removed from God). Any dabbling with the miraculous is therefore seen as disrespectful – impious — appropriation of divine attributes and rebellion against creaturely status. Whilst it is perfectly legitimate for a creature to examine (and admire) the created world, any attempt to influence or alter it at the fundamental level, which, as we shall show, is precisely what sorcery does, must be unacceptable. Worse still, manipulation – or, to avoid any negative connotations the word “manipulation” may carry, let us say “handling” – of intent affects intent itself, implying that it is neither immutable nor biased in favour of the righteous, as anyone with the right knowledge (someone like Chancellor Palpatine, for example) can act with it and upon it. Religions, of course, do not think in terms of intent (which is discussed in more detail in the book) but rather of the creative power of God.

Once a religion becomes institutionalised, its core myth is taken as history, and when that happens God’s acts become historic facts and connotation which points beyond, towards the transcendent, condenses into denotation which points at fact alone. Being of the past, historic facts cannot be sensibly accessible in the here and now, thus cutting off the energising, mystical function of the myth and emphasizing its sociological function instead, particularly as ritual actions are no longer undertaken in order to maintain the present world but to advance towards a future goal: the improving of the created world until it mirrors its creator to perfection.

All our thinking is currently religious thinking because over the millennia of institutionalised religions we have grown accustomed to see the world as an objective reality developing along a timeline towards a future perfection. Far from contradicting this concept, science has naturally developed within its framework and could not have happened, in its present sense, under any other circumstances. Consequently, we cannot conceive of our reality being anything other than unique and objective (meaning that any alternative realities must be illusory), developing along a line of progression according to unchangeable fundamental laws which are ultimately knowable although their first cause(s) may eventually (after a very long and unspecified period of investigation) turn out not to be, which is, as yet, far from being a foregone conclusion.

In contrast, sorcery postulates a constant flux in-formed, de-formed and re-formed by our perception and solidified by our interpretation. Such a proposal carries far-reaching ramifications, even in the world of everyday affairs, if one but stops to think it through. And it is by no means a new proposal, as we shall see in this book. But, unlike the great religious systems, it has never served as a conceptual base for a work which would not have it as its main subject. An Edifice of Intent is an attempt to do exactly that: to ground its discussion of Star Wars and all they represent in the conceptual base of sorcery matter-of-factly, taking sorcery for granted, so to speak, just as Christianity is taken for granted in most published writing in the West, tacitly accepted and not questioned by simple omission rather than by conscious decision. Like Star Wars themselves, it is an experiment.