I don't think magic requires divinity; spending a few years as a chaos magician deeply involved me in the psychological model of magic to the point, sadly, of solipsism.
However, my personal stance at this point (and I speak for myself only) is that life approached only from the head means that I'd be missing out on a lot. So a lot of my (neo)shamanic work in the past year and change has gone more in the direction of interconnections, not just with the spirits that I journey with, but also has promoted a more generally animistic approach to the world. This has been paralleled in my grad work with ecopsychology, in which I am further encouraged to take each action as if the entire world mattered, not just myself. So basically my philosophy in general is typified by John Muir's quote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe".
I find that with magic in specific, while I had very effective magic working from a Chaos magic/psychological perspective, I find now that integrating it with an animistic spiritual worldview gives every aspect of my life more depth. I don't have to go looking for spiritual experiences; I am instead working on altering my everyday state of consciousness so that it is closer to what I used to consider "magical thinking", but with the ability to still interface with my everyday environment.
So no, I don't think divinity is necessary for successful magic. However, for myself, magic--and everything else--has improved qualitatively when I work within an acknowledged web of conscious interconnections, rather than sticking with the more (stereo)typically Western attitude of the rugged individualist.
Should also add--I spent a number of years waffling over whether my beliefs were "valid", because they couldn't be empirically proven/didn't follow existing mythologies/were based a good deal on UPG and personal experience. I finally decided that A) no matter how hard I try, I'm never going to be able to prove my beliefs to anyone but myself, and there will always be somebody who kvetches about authenticity, B) I'm not claiming my beliefs are anything but what they are culturally, historically or otherwise, and C) I am a lot happier and get a lot more out of my experiences when I allow myself to believe that they are true for me instead of worrying all the time whether what I'm doing is objectively correct or not. There's a time and place for historical/etc. accuracy, but there's also a point where you have to stop worrying so damned much about what other people are saying/thinking.
However, my personal stance at this point (and I speak for myself only) is that life approached only from the head means that I'd be missing out on a lot. So a lot of my (neo)shamanic work in the past year and change has gone more in the direction of interconnections, not just with the spirits that I journey with, but also has promoted a more generally animistic approach to the world. This has been paralleled in my grad work with ecopsychology, in which I am further encouraged to take each action as if the entire world mattered, not just myself. So basically my philosophy in general is typified by John Muir's quote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe".
I find that with magic in specific, while I had very effective magic working from a Chaos magic/psychological perspective, I find now that integrating it with an animistic spiritual worldview gives every aspect of my life more depth. I don't have to go looking for spiritual experiences; I am instead working on altering my everyday state of consciousness so that it is closer to what I used to consider "magical thinking", but with the ability to still interface with my everyday environment.
So no, I don't think divinity is necessary for successful magic. However, for myself, magic--and everything else--has improved qualitatively when I work within an acknowledged web of conscious interconnections, rather than sticking with the more (stereo)typically Western attitude of the rugged individualist.
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