I’m writing this on Friday 13th, and so far, my world hasn’t caved in.

Superstition is magical thinking, a causality that is not grounded in reality. We knock on wood, we cross our fingers, we say “Please God” if we hear ourselves state something good is definitely going to happen, as if we are tempting the fates to punish us for our hubris, for daring to sound like a god.
Magical thinking is very subtle, and we all do it to various degrees; scientists are recently discovering that the human brain is predisposed to interpret the world in a magical, i.e. irrational, way. We think in patterns and symbols, and tend to assume that things are what they seem; we follow our intuition, rather than seek conclusive proof. Very few of us are scientifically minded, but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is moot. Scientists are often wrong. Disputes between scientists are often disgracefully childish and irrational. But we need scientific principles to advance. We lose touch with reality and the concrete at our peril.
We are especially prone to magical thinking when we are depressed or in love, or otherwise pushed out of equilibrium. (Try being both depressed and in love, and you’ll believe many more than six impossible things before breakfast.) When we are facing a serious or potentially fatal illness, we can find ourselves turning to the alternative methods of healing, to provide us with the elixir of life. Whereas most such treatments these days do no harm, the risk is that people turn their backs on proven allopathic surgery or chemotherapy as a result of their beliefs.
When AIDS first slew its victims, a significant movement thought, magically, that HIV was not the cause, and that a certain partying lifestyle and/or poppers were the triggers, in a desperate, perhaps unconscious attempt to defy the death sentence that being seropositive threatened at the time. Sadly, this movement took hold in some government circles in South Africa, leading to an unforgivable delay in instigating effective health education policies, and countless people died as a result.
Politics can be magical thinking writ large: witness the American belief that democracy and capitalism can be successfully exported to a foreign country by force to produce a stable, wealthy nation state. Religion, too, is formalised magical thinking; if we live a good life, we will go to heaven, or be reincarnated into a better life. Suicide bombers take magical thinking to the most extreme and destructive extent imaginable.
Jung’s principle of synchronicity is, on the face of it, magical: when events and symbols and dreams coincide with seemingly improbable timing. In synchronous moments, we perceive a different reality to that which is concrete and mundane. It is my belief that when we experience these moments of often absurd improbability, when stunning synchronicities abound that have our synapses glowing with giddy confusion, we shouldn’t take them literally, they are not proof that the dead can speak to us, or that God exists, or we can tell the future or that there are angels or UFOs. We should view them as glimpses of the workings of consciousness, both individual and collective, no more and no less. In other words, these sightings are there to offer meaning, to help us understand in a symbolic way the mysteries of life. But we get into trouble if we take them as gospel, as fundamental creeds, if we change our behaviour because we believe they are “true” in the scientific sense. The challenge is to hold both the rational and the symbolic to be of equal value, not to devalue one in favour of the other.
My love of astrology comes from an appreciation of myth and symbol, a fascination with how our psyches function, that started when I discovered Jung. But I do not believe astrology is a science or is provable scientifically; any more than I believe dreams are real or that Elvis lives. I do not live my life according to astrology, but the understanding it has given me about my life and the world around me has been priceless.
The epidemic of AIDS began at a period of time where groups of gay men were totally uninhibited, indulging in recreational sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ discotheque on a scale never seen before. (The discovery of HIV in 1983 coincided with the beginning of the transit of the astrological symbol for death and regeneration, Pluto, through its own sign of Scorpio, heralding a transformation of our awareness of sex and mortality.) The virus spreads through normal sexual channels; there’s nothing new in a fatal sexually transmitted disease. (But science had fooled us into forgetting.) The extent of promiscuity and drug use by gay men that the disease revealed was an insight of enormous value in itself, a symbol of our collective psychology as important as the scientific effort to find a treatment.
However, in our scientific culture, two things happened. One, thankfully, scientists developed a treatment to prevent the virus being fatal in most cases, in 1996. (Incidentally, just after Pluto had left Scorpio.) But the other was that because the magical thinkers had made the mistake of claiming their theories were factual, the essence of their observations and concerns about how men were behaving have been effectively discredited as being irrelevant. People are still getting themselves infected with HIV and we are still, in a sense, none the wiser psychologically.
Over 25 million people have died from AIDS to date.