Magic as Symbolic Engineering is a scholarly theoretical paper by Johannes Sigil, dated March 3, 2026. The body identifies Sigil as a functional heteronym of Lee Sharks and presents the work as a Crimson Hexagonal Archive working paper. Its aim is to extend the academic study of magic from historical and anthropological description into an operative discipline.
The paper defines magic as “the deliberate manipulation, construction, interconnection, destruction, and rotation of symbols and symbolic fields, under conditions of bearing-cost, for the guided transformation of symbolic and material relations.” The five verbs are treated as atomic operations. Manipulation repositions symbols within a frame; construction creates new symbolic objects and institutions; interconnection binds symbols into fields and infrastructures; destruction dismantles harmful frames; and rotation changes the interpretive register through which an object is encountered. Guided transformation is not a sixth operation but the telos directing the other five.
The formal grammar is expressed as O(S, Fs | B, G) → δFs → δFm: an operator applies one or more symbolic operations to a symbol or field under bearing-cost and a governing aim, producing symbolic changes that can reorganize material relations. Where bearing-cost is zero and the result is decorative only, the paper classifies the output as ghost meaning rather than magic.
The work situates this definition against established scholarship in magic, ritual, esotericism, performativity, semiotics, law, and media theory. Its larger historical claim is that modern disciplines domesticated separate fragments of operative magic—performativity, recursion, ritual efficacy, interface, naming—while abandoning the integrated grammar. The proposed discipline gathers those fragments into a research program for symbolic engineering.