[Tried to post this as a comment over at Mutato Nomine but couldn't, so I'm posting it publically here instead]
To reply but briefly – I was very skeptical, even embarresed at the religious content of ceremonial magick starting out… but hey, it works. Michael and others have speculated part its power comes from using such heavily charged symbolism.
Also, I’m weary about throwing the baby out with the bathwater… for my part, the concern over religious content is dogma, and thankfully most occult programs either dispense with it or leave you free to create your own. In the case of Christianity, the symbolism was there before the religion.
And at least in hermetic kabbalah, at least as far as I’ve explored it, JHVH and Kether are not the cruel invisible monster of most of Judaeo-Christianity, but closer the Hindu concept of “aum.”
I do see the religious context as a stumbling block for a lot of people – either they are scared off from will brain chanage and designer realities by the regligious content, or they become so fixated with the symbolism that they forget what they’re doing in the first place. I’ll have to look up those Altar Consciousness articles, I sort of forgot about them before getting a chance to read them… I’ve had an idea for “agnostic magic” for a bit now.
Hey, I noticed a few weeks ago that you’re blog’s down… and your e-mail address isn’t working anymore. What’s up?
Both of these are from Zen Werewolf, a while back.
A Burroughs interview about magic:
Possibly not, to perform a certain function, but I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh…. they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page. Klee said that quite distinctly, that the “artist who is called” as he put it, is ahh “attempting to create something apart, that has an existence apart from him and apart from the canvas and that can even put the creator in danger”, which is of course the clearest proof of his difference, its separation from him. I read that years ago and put it down and I was interested to find that ahh, 20 or 30 years later, that I had noted that down. It became of course very much more significant to me when I started painting myself. Yes, all artists are engaged in the supreme blasphemy, of creating life, trying to, some very much more successfully than others, but none of them completely successful. It probably would be a disastrous success. I should say that it would depend upon the degree of his engagement. It could be, certainly, the whole area is dangerous.
The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened? (long PDF about William and Joan’s relationship)
Zen Werewolf has a post compiling some techniques for hexing corporations (are you working on this for the Disinfo book, Zen?). Personally, I think trying to do some work with bargaining with the egregores might be more effective. They’re powerful.
Link
Zen Werewolf says “I’m struck by how similiar Pow Wow is to Hoo Doo, Santeria, or (possibly) Rastafarian – folk beliefs masked behind rituals that mimic the dominant religious form out of fear of persecution.”
Link (via Lycurgus.
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