Magickians often seek results first, and ponder theories of why and how later.   We can think of magick as engineering, while parapsychology seems the science behind it.   But parapsychology has its faults, namely that it continues in a vain attempt to validate the existence of paranormal phenomena to the rest of the scientific community.

All sciences must conduct experiments.   Rituals generally do not meet the conditions of a scientific experiment.   Experiments must test hypotheses, so magickal science would systematically test the various occult theories that history has handed us.   Magickal science would provide a means to expand magickal technology in new directions.

Much gets said these days about paradigms.   Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" coined the term paradigm (in its modern sense of 'worldview') in the early 1960's.   A paradigm, according to him, provides a general consensus theory for a science to work from by explaining the phenomena of that science, and by providing a means for conducting more experiments.

Scientific revolutions occur when a science goes into a crisis stage in which no particular paradigm dominates.   Everybody just does their own thing and each has their own theory about it.   Then, someone innovates and produces a model that forms an adhering group of followers.   Over time this model gets adopted by the vast majority of the practitioners of the science.   This occurred in physics first with Newton, and then Einstein. It occurred in biology with Darwin.

It would seem that magickal science lies in a crisis stage.   Magickians have a handful of general theories which they mistakenly call paradigms, and they gleefully talk of paradigm shifts on a personal level.   In addition to these general theories, magick users incorporate large amounts of detail into particular theories.   Thus, the magickal community can not have a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense.   Worse, we can not make progress toward a paradigm without a means of investigating the several theories.   A true magickal science would solve this problem.

Unfortunately, people with a shared interest in science and magick seem like a minority within the magickal community.   Even less have had formal scientific training.   Magickal science would require higher standards of practice than ordinary magickal activity.   It would conduct experiments into the functioning, mechanics, and effects of magick without a desire to have acceptance within the wider scientific community.   his would require its own journals, refereed like any well respected scientific journal.   It would also likely require grants.

Many issues could receive the attention of magickal science.   Do correspondences have universal effects, are they learned, or both, and in what way do they influence the brain?   How can we measure magickal effects?   What if we could measure spirituality, and make that yield useful correlates?   I see so much potential here that I don't know why it hasn't already occurred.

I have never seen a magickal experiment except for those I conducted in college under the guise of psychology.   Those experiments convinced me of the importance of magickal science, but also of the fact that I can't invent it by myself.