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Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley via Tumblr
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English magician who called himself “the Beast of the Apocalypse.” He claimed to be in touch with astral realms and beings, including his guardian angel, with whom he allegedly conversed with.
Emphasizing the two different spellings, he made a distinction between purportedly real magick and stage magic.
A bisexual, Crowley’s methods often entailed sex, garbed rituals, and blood sacrifice. This scandalized some and attracted others. Believing (or perhaps just saying) he reached the highest level of spiritual attainment, Crowley took a dim view of those who pegged him a black magician. He, in fact, sued Nina Hamnett, an artist, for describing him as black magician in her book, Laughing Torso (1932). However, Crowley lost the case and was plunged into bankruptcy.
Perhaps revealing the subconscious hypocrisy of the era, the judge who ruled against him spoke thus:
Crowley’s books remain somewhat popular today, especially within some circles of the New Age and contemporary Gnostic movements. And the British, in particular, uphold him as an important figure.² However, some see him as embodying all the worst characteristics of the upper class Victorians; that is, a racist sense of superiority mingled with a fascination with people of color.³
Whatever the case may be, it seems doubtful that Crowley reached the highest high of spiritual attainment. One can’t help but compare to Jesus, who patiently endured slander, flogging and murder to prove a point—namely, that there’s more to life than what’s down here.
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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley
² In 2002, a BBC poll described him as being the seventy-third greatest Briton of all time.
³ wiki/Aleister_Crowley, op. cit.
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Glamour
Macbeth and Banquo Meeting the Witches on the Heath, Chassériau 1855 via Wikipedia
The root of the word glamour (or glamor) comes from the Scottish glaumour (a corrupt form of grammar) and the French grimoire.¹
Glamour originally refers to knowledge of the occult, such as the questionable art of black magic found in the Middle Ages. This could have involved magical spells cast by witches to make ugly persons or things appear beautiful.
Interestingly enough, the three witches in Shakespeare‘s Macbeth (1603 and 1607) proclaim that the young Scot will become Thane of Glamis.
While there doesn’t appear to be any strong etymological connection between glamis and glamour – especially since the first (surviving) written appearance of the English word glamour is 1720 – it’s possible that Shakespeare is playing on known words² that hadn’t yet been written. Or possibly he was intuiting future usage (after all, many creative geniuses do seem to get glimpses of the future).
Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!”³
While this connection might seem a little far fetched, maybe it isn’t. Scholars suggest that the three witches use their otherworldly wiles to subtly tempt Macbeth through prophecies of worldly power and glory.
While the witches do not tell Macbeth directly to kill King Duncan, they use a subtle form of temptation when they tell Macbeth that he is destined to be king. By placing this thought in his mind, they effectively guide him on the path to his own destruction. This follows the pattern of temptation used at the time of Shakespeare.4
In any case, Macbeth’s worldly success didn’t do him much good. He ended up beheaded and his name became “a hotter name than any is in hell.”5
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¹ “glamour | glamor, n.”. OED Online. December 2011. Oxford University Press.
² Just as modern writers make a play on, for instance, history and herstory.
³ http://nfs.sparknotes.com/macbeth/page_58.html
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glamour_%28presentation%29
5 http://nfs.sparknotes.com/macbeth/page_208.html
Related articles
- Macbeth and self-control (literarylew.wordpress.com)
- Opinions about Macbeth (summercheng3udotcom.wordpress.com)
- Leads make annual festival’s ‘Macbeth’ worth seeing (pbpulse.com)
- Cross Roads of Desire (shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Tempest) (nonzerologic.wordpress.com)
Magic
"The Golden Bough" by J. M. W. Turner via Wikipedia
Broadly speaking, magic is the use of supernatural power to cause an effect on or gain knowledge of people, souls, animals, vegetation, objects, the elements and events. Magical procedures may involve elaborate ritual and are variously directed towards the past, present, future and afterlife or some combination thereof.
A distinction is usually made between white and black magic. White magic is allegedly intended to help people. Black magic is revengeful with the intent to harm others and thus more clearly evil.
The celebrated anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1938) made a primary distinction between sympathetic and contagious magic.
Sympathetic magic is the belief that one event causes another, so the magician imitates a desired outcome. A positive example would be painting animals on a cave wall in the belief that this will enrich the hunt. A negative example would be believing that a barren woman is the cause of a blighted crop.
Contagious magic is based on the belief that things once in physical contact or proximity continue to have a magical connection after they’re separated.
The most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut. This superstition is world-wide.¹
Another distinction is made between magic and religion. As Joachim Wach (1898-1955) suggests:
Religion differs from magic in that it is not concerned with control or manipulation of the powers confronted. Rather it means submission to, trust in, and adoration of, what is apprehended as the divine nature of ultimate reality.²
However S. G. F. Brandon says this is a biased perspective:
…such attempts generally rest on a priori definitions of the two entities concerned.³
Sociologists also point out similarities between magical and religious rituals. However, structural similarities do not necessarily entail equivalence.
We could, for instance, say that Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and New York are both big cities. Each has roads, buildings, people, movie halls and markets. But anyone visiting these two locales will be struck by their differences.
While an outsider may think that religious and magical rituals look the same and bring about similar results, to believers (on both sides) the numinous results differ dramatically. Modern magicians often say (or imply) that religious ritual is just an empty shell, cut off from any spiritual meaning it may have once had. Meanwhile, many contemporary religious persons shun magical rituals, often saying that the result brings about a kind of dark, gloomy, heavy and obscuring spirituality that is the work of evil.
Search Think Free » Abyss , Archetypal Image, Aztecs, Beowulf, Crowley (Aleister), Divination, Druids, Faeries, Frazer (Sir James G.), Glamour, Hero, Holy, I Ching, Justification, Kabbala, Numinous, Numinosity, Occam’s razor, Odin, Paranormal, Power, Steppenwolf, Taoism, Tarot, Ticket, Unction, Witch, Zombie
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¹ Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden Bough. 1922. http://bartelby.org/196/7.html
² Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions, ch. 2, Columbia University Press (1958), cited in The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996.
³ Dictionary of Comparative Religion, ed. S. G. F. Brandon, New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 1970, p. 418.
Related Articles
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- Most cultures have strong ideas about what kind of magic is “women’s magic” and what kind is only for men. Is there any basis for any of these distinctions, outside of cultural mores? Anything an aspiring sorceress should do differently from a sorcerer? (strategicsorcery.blogspot.com)
- My Chaos Magic Re-look (strategicsorcery.blogspot.com)
- 4E Ritual- Empower Magic Item from Big Ball of No Fun (bigballofnofun.blogspot.com)
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Sheldrake, Rupert
I almost changed the world today by PhotoGraham
Sheldrake, Rupert (1942 – )
Former Cambridge biochemist raised in a British Methodist family whose overall work attempts to integrate scientific and spiritual issues.
In Seven Experiments Which Could Change the World (1994) Sheldrake outlines low-cost experiments that he encourages readers to perform.
One experiment deals with ESP perception as a form of ‘looking.’ Sheldrake asks why we perceive somebody looking at us from behind or even at some distance (e.g. through a window).
Sheldrake suggests that some type of perception other than everyday eyesight is involved.
This idea is followed up in Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999).
In keeping with this hypothesis, his subsequent book was called, The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003).
Sheldrake has recently conducted controlled experiments on telephone and e-mail precognition. He found significant results suggesting that people knew when others were about to call them on the telephone, with a sample size of 63. A similar kind of precognition was also found with e-mail, with a sample size of 50.
Most recently his website asks: Have you thought of someone who then sends you a text message? offering a link for visitors to report their observations.
Sheldrake continues to publish books containing his interviews and dialogues with other notables in the New Age / Holistic Health circuit, along with replies to numerous critics who say he’s lost touch with recent theories in neurobiology and, indeed, abandoned science in favor of so-called magical thinking.
Not all scientists are at odds with his views, however. The late physicist David Bohm said Sheldrake’s ideas were in keeping with his own about an implicate and explicate order.
For more on Sheldrake’s theories, see Morphic resonance, Morphic fields and Morphogenetic Fields.
At Earthpages.org:
- Articles relating to search string, Sheldrake
On the Web:
» Kayzer (Wim)
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Ticket
Parking Ticket by Sarah
Ticket
In urban legend some magicians, shamans and spiritualists use the word “ticket” as slang for an alleged type of metaphysical punishment or retribution that might result from boundaries being crossed or from other kinds of transgressions.
In the song “Suffragette City” pop musician David Bowie uses the word “ticket” to denote a potential punishment to be meted out in response to another’s undesirable act:
“Don’t lean on me man, ‘cos you can’t afford the ticket.”
As with much of Bowie’s material, there’s much room for psychological, social and metaphysical interpretation but, in this case, it’s doubtful that Bowie is portraying magico-spiritual instead of the more ordinary forms of retribution. However, his lyrics sometimes seem to connote several levels of potential meaning by virtue of his creative genius and, in the 1970′s, perhaps catalyzed by the use of mind-altering substances.
If this sounds like a bit of stretch, recall that Mexican shamans who speak of different metaphysical realms or grids of spiritual power have been using hallucinogenic peyote for many years, this being popularized by Carlos Castenada with The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) and subsequent works. » Space Oddity, Shamanism
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Witch
Witch
The word witch comes from the Old English wicca (male) and wicce (female).
From his study of African witchcraft, the anthropologist E. E. Evans Pritchard distinguished witchcraft from sorcery: Witches are physically born as such while a person may become a sorcerer later in life.
Both are traditionally associated with evil.
In legend witches use magical spells and potions to work their malice. Legends also tell of good “white witches,” as found in shamanism or fairy tales.
European witch hysteria became so pronounced in the 14th century that mass witch trials began in 1397 in Lucerne.
In 1326 Pope John XXII responded to Dominican pressure by proclaiming witchcraft a heresy.
In 1486 two Dominican monks wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches or Witches Hammer). The book was a grisly, perverse ‘manual’ on how to identify and force confessions out of suspected witches, who in most cases were deemed guilty before their arrest.
Statistics reveal that in Essex of Southwest England 91% of the 271 accused of sorcery from 1560 – 1680 were women.
The Church could legally claim the land and economic holdings of convicted witches. Some believe that in convicting so-called witches, perverse clergy were more interested in worldly than spiritual gain. Most of the condemned were vulnerable women and therefore scapegoats–the poor, the single and those deemed unattractive or different.
In this regard, Carl Jung says the persecution of witches in Europe and North America was a mass projection of the shadow.
Witchcraft today has become a complicated phenomenon.
Many recognize it as an alternative religion. Aspiring women witches join covens and many practice what they believe is white magic.
A variety of commercial occult products has grown alongside the modern practice of witchcraft.
The idea of the ethically ambiguous witch has also been popularized and, to some degree, normalized through film and TV productions, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In the TV version of Buffy, the character Willow originally uses witchcraft for the good but becomes consumed by a quest for magical power and eventually allows evil to dominate her.
Although many religious fundamentalists might deplore such an apparently ‘evil’ program, the TV series closes with Willow regaining her humility (and humanity) by allowing love to enter into her life again.
» Ancestor Cults, Archetypal Image, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Glamour, Haensel and Gretel, Latin, Lewis (C. S.), Macbeth, Madness, Neo-Paganism, Odyssey, Psychosis, Scholarship, Walker (Barbara G.)
On the Web:
John Paul II revived the Inquisition» http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2006/11/john-paul-ii-revived-inquisition.html
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Wach, Joachim
Wach, Joachim (1898-1955)
Influential German Christian scholar of religion who held a position at the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1955.
Wach asked important questions about the study of religion.
For instance:
- Are researchers able to understand the essence of a belief system that they, themselves, don’t believe nor participate in?
- Do researchers simply articulate some kind of marketable fiction that has little bearing on the intricacies of what really happens in the religious lives of so many unique individuals?
- Conversely, are researchers able to discern a common thread among apparent differences in religious phenomena?
For Wach that common thread among humanity is the tendency toward religion, itself.
Theodore M. Ludwig further notes that
Wach repeatedly takes up the question of the “objectivity” of the interpreter, whether one who is not a committed believer can understand a religion, whether historical distance helps or hinders understanding, and the like. His position is argued at length: the scholar can by “bracketing” his or her own views enter into understanding of another religion, sometimes presenting it even more completely and accurately than believers can. But there must be, Wach argues, an empathy or sensitivity for religion on the part of the scholar, otherwise there can be no understanding.
Theodore M. Ludwig, “Review: Joachim Wach’s Voice Speaks Again” in History of Religions, Vol. 29, No. 3, Feb., 1990: 289-291, p. 291.
Wach is extremely interested in religious experience. As such he defines the term Ultimate Reality in terms of a personal experience, an approach not unlike that found in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy.
Although it wouldn’t be politically correct to do so today, Wach differentiates religious from magical experience.
Religious experience is a continuous (with intermittences) response to a “powerful, comprehensive, shattering, and profound” experience of Ultimate Reality that must simultaneously involve the hierarchical elements of intellect, affect and volition, and which leads to definite and imperative action.
By way of contrast, Wach says that magical experience is a mere series of “unconnected thrills,” this perhaps paralleling Sri Aurobindo’s notion of ‘vitalistic’ energy which, for Aurobindo, stands definitely lower on the ‘quality scale,’ if you will, of interior experience.
Wach’s definition of action seems quite forward thinking in that it includes acts of contemplation, a perspective that we’re just getting glimmerings of today in our so-called enlightened age.
In differentiating contemplation from slothful indifference, Wach notes William James’ Christian pragmatism: “Our practice is the only sure evidence even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians” (Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions, Joseph M. Kitagawa ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958: 31-35).
One must ask, however, if even the so-called indifferent sloth is, in fact, doing some form of spiritual labor, if perhaps unwittingly.
This notion of different types of work, visible and invisible, echoes the Greek pre-Socratic Heraclitus’ conviction that
Even sleepers and dreamers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.
Heraclitus in Philip Wheelwright ed., The Presocratics, Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1982, p. 79.
» Energy, Holy, Magic
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Abyss
Abyss (Greek, abyssos, Latin abyssus). Myths about an abyss or bottomless pit are found in most cultures.
In Judaism the abyss lies deep within the earth, a place where evil spirits of the dead are banished (Job 32:22, Psalm 6:5, 143:7).
In ancient Greece the majority of the dead retire to a gloomy underworld, an abyss of “shades” where they endure punishment for worldly sins.
The ancient Greek idea of heaven is not well developed. In fact, only a few heroes pass on to the favorable Blessed Isles. After the 5th century BCE the belief that the dead reside among the stars appears. But this still radically differs from the concept of heaven as forwarded by Jesus Christ.
In Hindu lore, a popular version of the Ramayana epic portrays the heroine Sita being consumed by a great opening in the earth.
The Druidic tradition tells of evil foes falling down into bottomless caverns.
The biblical Satan is bound by an angel and cast into a bottomless pit (Rev. 20:3).
Mircea Eliade notes that myths about “binding” evil beings are quite plentiful.
New Testament (NT) accounts of an abyss refer to a hellish region from which a wild beast emerges to temporarily destroy prophets after they have completed their mission.
The Abyss in the NT is likewise described as a prison for evil spirits (Luke 8:31; Rev 9:1-2; 11; 11:7-8).
Interestingly, Victorian Fairy imagery is replete with watery underworlds inhabited by ghoulish beings, amidst which fairies are protected from harm by dwelling, often sleepily, within a sort of magical cocoon.
In the Beowulf myth, an evil water-troll is slain in her underwater lair by use of a magical sword discovered by the hero, deep under the water’s surface.
More recently, the invention of the bathysphere and the submarine opened the door for pulp fiction and numerous Hollywood “B” movies about underwater horrors.
An underwater abyss is also found in the science fiction film, The Abyss.
Sci-fi also depicts the abyss motif in outer space. In several episodes, Star Trek Voyager’s Captain Janeway stands perilously above an almost bottomless cylinder within a Borg ship.
Likewise, Star Wars‘ Luke Skywalker perches on a ledge over an abyss in the evil Emperor’s Death Star. And the more recent Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace is replete with strange subterranean beings.
In psychoanalytic terms, Freudians see the abyss as a symbol of the mother’s womb or the tumultuous forces of the instinctual id.
Jungians tend to regard the abyss as an archetypal image of the collective unconscious.
Regardless of which school one subscribes to, in the most general sense a fear of total destruction seems to coexist with a potential for victory over, and order arising from, the dark chaos of the abyss.
As Rod Serling put it in the close of the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter” (pictured above), in which apparently normal American neighbors go beserk during an atomic bomb scare:
For civilization to survive the human race has to remain civilized.
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Alchemy
Alchemy In everyday usage the word alchemy describes a psychological interplay among people.
Its etymology points to the actual practice of alchemy–derived via Arabic from the Greek chemeia.
Historically, alchemy involved the heating and mixing of chemicals and mineral substances with a view toward artificially transforming base metals into gold.
The ancient Greeks in Alexandria around 300 BCE practiced the art, as did the Arabs and Chinese.
During the Middle Ages numerous shams posing as alchemists arose in England.
Few realize that Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) wrote on alchemy. His writings remained unpublished in his lifetime.
The theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) also wrote on alchemy.
In the sixteenth-century the Swiss physician Paracelsus wrote extensively on alchemy.
Poet John Donne claimed “some can finde out Alchimy” in the Bible.
C. G. Jung says alchemists not only transformed substances but also practiced a psycho-spiritual technique. Jung claims that, because of the alchemists’ intimate relation to their work, the transmutation of substances paralleled their psychological development.
Raw sulfur (prima materia) was transformed into gold (the philosopher’s stone) through various boiling and chemical treatments. Thus baser aspects of the psyche were likewise transmuted to a higher state.
This involved stages, culminating in a ‘mystical union’ of the man’s anima and woman’s animus archetypes within the self, which Jung suggests are universal.
In medieval Europe twelve alchemical stages were associated with the twelve astrological houses of the zodiac.
Discounting the many historical frauds who knowingly faked the creation of gold in order to profit from aristocrats, for Jungians the alchemical quest is a personal search for immortality necessitating a sequence of a psychological deaths and rebirths.
For Jung these are not merely symbolic because positive and negative psychological states accompy each stage in the process.
Depth psychologists and some mythographers tend to see the mythic theme of dismemberment and restoration (exemplified by the Egyptian Osiris) as a parallel to the alchemical process.
The Romanian scholar of religion Mircea Eliade maintains that the alchemists quickened the natural pace of geological change–that is, they were altering time.
Eliade is not so much referring to the subjective experience of time but rather to cheating the laws of nature. Transforming raw elements into refined forms (such as carbon to diamond) requires precise geological conditions and a definite duration. By quickening the process, Eliade says the alchemists overcame a natural process and thus mastered time, itself.
Eliade’s view here seems confusing and perhaps underdeveloped. A similar type of argument could be presented in the context of buying a fast food burger instead of farming, slaughtering cows and cooking the meat for oneself. One might say that Eliade is merely playing word games as the nature of time is not truly altered in either instance.
While the alchemical process perhaps accelerates the geological rate, the Jungian Marie-Louise Von-Franz claims that the numerous stages in alchemy follow their own temporal logic, representing general phases in a process of psychological transformation.
Although often painful, Von-Franz says the alchemical stages cannot be quickened. The mythic and yet subtly visceral ‘boilings’ and ‘dismemberments’ of the psyche undergoing these transitions must be patiently endured, with the ultimate hope that maturity and wisdom – what the alchemists call the elixir of life – will eventually rise from the fire.
Jung also extends the metaphor of alchemy by likening the dynamic of human relationship to chemical interactions. Accordingly he wrote a piece called “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925). » Bhagavad Gita, Magnetizers, Ramakrishna (Sri)
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Animism
a couple of large spirit houses in the woods Originally uploaded by doctor paradox
@ mae wok
Animism The belief that natural objects like rivers, mountains and trees, as well as animals and people have a spiritual, animating principle.
Sir E. B. Tylor developed a theory of animism to try to explain the origins of religion.
Tylor believed that so-called primitive man developed a belief in spirits existing in nature from the actual experience of sleep, dreams and breathing.
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