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Magick Without Religion
Since everyone “unilaterally” agreed that I’m not allowed to talk about magick, I’ll leave this as an open question for all comers. Mutato Nomine talks about trying to do magick without getting swept up in religious symbolism and paradigms.
I’m choosing to step around any magical system that reeks of religion (that means anything requiring the names of god written in a circle, anything that interprets reality as a series of concentric circles ruled by angelic beings, etc)
To me this seems like an attempt to go swimming without getting wet, but what do I know? Found via Technoccult who has some additional comments.
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July 17th, 2005 at 3:19 am
you can believe in a system when you are doing spells in that system
you can also belong to other systems or none
you can practice kaballah and voodoo and do yoga and chi gong in your spare time
any paradigm is a whole self-contained universe with its own gods and its own rules
but you can have a metaparadigm in the context of which all of these different pantheons appear as discrete parallel realities too
————–
thats the problem with the wiccans IMHo
they make up their own chants and traditions with zero historical basis or continuity
I don’t know about you but the “spin round spin round lord and lady bless me with your white light up and down” doesn’t give me quite that same frisson or thrill of delving into something with a high voltage charge the way that even the Biblical Psalms do
Theres a reason Christian prayers are more effective than wiccan ones, the entities behind them have been fed with energy and blood and belief for thousands of years by billions of people
whether or not there was originally something on the other side, behind those prayers, there certainly is now!
so why reinvent the wheel
unless you are unusually imaginative and energetic (eg crowley, ao spare, kelley & dee) you will probably wind up with something sort of weak and ineffective that doesn’t work half as well as something with centuries of history
July 17th, 2005 at 4:10 am
wtf??/
This is utter, fucking, bullshit! I mean, if you’re not interested anymore–alright, cool. But it seems that instead of developing your ideas/criticisms about magick further, you’ve let yourself get cut off at the legs.
July 17th, 2005 at 4:15 am
I like what rev. max said. the old magick is like ancient blood-soaked ruins, who could possibly deny that subtle power–there’s just so much more resonance? in my opinion, the only way you could get anything close to that from “your own” mind would be to dig pretty fucking deep into the unconscious.
July 17th, 2005 at 5:01 am
I swear by the works of Austin Osman Spare and the subsequent chaos magic. Just my 2¢. I guess this is why I’ve been so dumbfounded by this whole Gnostic revival thing. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I think it’s grand that Gnosticism is enjoying something of a Renaissance, but I’ve never intermingled any religious sort of symbolism with my workings and I guess it’s hard to compare, but I believe I’m doing fine. Also, it allows me to develop my own thoughts, semantics, and understandings of how and why things work they way they do (according to my results). I think any enriched symbolism may tend to muddy any new, prospective perceptions and interpretations. I understand the power it holds, but part of chaos magic, at least, is learning to be able to channel and develop a personal system that is your bridge between inner-space and the manifest world, for lack of terminology.
July 17th, 2005 at 7:11 am
There are lots of different elements to magic, but one is herbs.
This has nothing to do with established religions but is just
one aspect of living in the world. There’s a lot of dimensions
to this. You can use herbs in straightforward medicinal ways
but their power also goes to more subtle levels. Herbs will transform
your mind and your body if you let them. This is not just with herbs
like weed, but with many of the others. They may seem weaker in effect but if you
use them as a simple (a medivial term for using a common garden variety
herb in large quantities) they will have a profound effect.
July 17th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
Uh, dude… I was joking. It was just a little jab at readers and an invitation to put in their two cents on the matter
July 17th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
“what is magic?” is like “what is art?”, as soon as you start to put a definition on it (and begin to will that definition upon other beings), you lose perspective of the truth of the concept.. IMO…
the works are what count. and you will personally know it when you feel it.
one
human?
July 17th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
To me, it seems like trying to do magick without religion is almost like trying to drive a car blindfolded. You might be able to do it, but why deprive yourself of such a rich resource. I mean it’s the history of mankind! Why toss it out?
July 17th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
How does one measure their effectiveness? I’ve heard a number of people say that Hermetic Magick is more effective than Wiccan, but that’s from the POV of the Hermetic. I’m sure you’d hear the same from the follower of nearly anything that their path is the most effective and beneficial, be it from an idealogue of a form of government, art, philosophy or whatever else you can think of.
Also, what about primitive magick? This was around for no short amount of time before any Judeo-Christian form, does that make it many times more powerful?
I sense thick sarcasm here, or maybe I’m not in my right (or my left) mind. Maybe I’m just hoping, too. I’ll speak as if you were serious, however.
How do we know that following an ideology or religion is beneficial, as opposed to living one’s life autonomously and without following the map of another? It’s like I said in the response to a bit of what Rev max said, what makes what you have “such a rich resource” as opposed to the “blindfolded” (funny you put so one is incapable of seeing clearly) way? Because you prefer it, perhaps? Preference does not give a thing more value except to those who prefer it.
July 17th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
I don’t really prefer anything Chiggles. I’m merely asking questions. And I think you raise a lot of good ones above as well. That’s all I can really hope for at this point. I’m not a (formal) magick practitioner myself. But I am deeply interested in it and in religion. I find myself drawn to religion as a really amazingly deep resource. And I get more out of trying to “figure it out” than to throw it out. Every time I dip into it I come out with something new and valuable and exciting. So it’s hard for me to really understand why other people aren’t as excited by it as I am.
July 18th, 2005 at 3:44 am
I would associate magic with shamanism more than with religion. It’s not to say they’re mutually exclusive, but shamanism holds more akin to magic and its practise. And, according to many, shamanism predates religion to the dawn of mankind which outpaces religion in a historical respect to the development of both the process of magical practise and the interpretive ties by which you bind it.
July 18th, 2005 at 9:10 am
It’s not objective thing, at least not for me. I go by emotional resonance, but that may be too dependent on personal predilections…
July 18th, 2005 at 11:58 am
Fell, what’s the difference between shamanism and religion? Or maybe a better question is: shamans practice shamanism, but what did non-shamans practice in shamanic societies?
July 18th, 2005 at 1:32 pm
Shamanism is a set of techniques employed by people who practice animist religions
Animist religions are generally oral (often preliterate) and experientially based - not based on books but on encounters & visions
SO it a completely different worldview from the montheistic book religions which have bureacracies, committes to interpret texts, etc
The world itself is a text for the animist