Why do some people spell magick with a K?
The reason for the two spellings — on the internet — is that computers need differing spelling to distinguish between two files. Some time back in the early 1990s, the usage of “magic” for stage magic and “magick” for mystical-ritual-supernatural practices was adopted by general consensus. This newsgroup, alt.paranormal.spells.hexes.magic, is one of the older in usenet and was created BEFORE the magic-with-a-k spelling rule was agreed upon. Later, alt.magick and its derivatives were created with a ‘k’ to avoid confusion with stage magic. “Magick” is a spelling popularly associated with Aleister Crowley, yet the spelling precedes him by hundreds of years. As he used it, however, the word did not relate to magic, but rather to Crowley’s own personal form of spirituality. Tom Schuler (duo@teleport.com) supplied this quotation from Crowley’s writing that explains why Crowleyan “magick” is actually about spirituality, not “magic”: “In my third year at Cambridge, I devoted myself conscious
