Month: November 2012

Cosmology

Despite my suspicion of cosmological certainty, I do believe a good magus should have some kind of basic understanding of worlds beyond our own. Without building or borrowing your own cosmology you may run into difficulty with certain forms of spellcraft.

Necromancy comes to mind as a prime example. If you have some sound ideas on where the dead spend their time, you’re better equipped to contact them. Even if you come to the conclusion that the dead are just kind of hanging around, that in itself is a kind of cosmology.

But building a worlds structure willy-nilly may cause some inconsistencies that could end up being a barrier when you need to add on some new practice. It begs to question why entities of widely varying degrees of power and temperament would all be swirling around some meta-otherworld together. We divide ourselves up by countries and states, cities and neighborhoods. It may be helpful to know an entities address before you go looking for it.

It also makes one of the easier forms of magick, astral travel, much less useful. Much can be learned by travelling to these alternate worlds and speaking with the entities there. My wiccan friend goes as far as saying that it’s the only good way to learn magick. While some may argue that astral travel is nothing more than advanced daydreaming, a good magus knows that the difference between musing and moving is gnosis. If you build a good head of altered consciousness, then the rational mind can relinquish control, and you can truly go somewhere new, unfettered by the guidance of your conscious mind and enter into the uncharted realms of the unconscious.

dreammason:myedol:

Brandalism is a billboard hijacking project taking place throughout England. Over 5 days, 25 artists from 8 different countries displayed their artwork all over the country. The artworks seek to confront the ad industry and take back the visual landscape which we all have to view every day of our lives.


Certainty

To fulfill my yearning for group practice I joined a wiccan group recently formed in my area. The leader comes from a well established circle on the East Coast (Novices of the Old Ways), and much of what they do is based on the teachings of the trio Janet & Stewart Farrar, and Gavin Bone. I like their work, and anyone interested in where modern wicca is heading should pick up their book, “The Inner Mysteries: Progressive Witchcraft and Connection to the Divine.”

As a chaos magician, I also thought that throwing myself into a belief system would do me some good. For the most part, it’s a good fit. The group is open to a variety of practices. Yet….

It chafes me sometimes how sure they are of themselves. For them, the cosmology is set, the worlds are where they are and there is one path through them. There are gods and there are spirits and the lines do not blur. I can’t help but ask, “are you sure?” My own magical practices and beliefs have shifted so much that this kind of resolute belief makes me call bullshit.

The worst part, I can’t tell if this makes me a good magus or a shitty one. My rebellious, critical thinking nature always rails against anyone who tries to tell me there’s only one way. I pride myself in the ability to critically assess anything. Yet, as a chaos magician, shouldn’t I, must I, not throw myself into belief with reckless abandon in order to produce results?

THIS. This conflict holds me back. Well, that and a lack of willpower to practice on a regular basis.

At the peak of the missile crisis, Kennedy estimated the probability of nuclear war at perhaps 50 percent. It’s a war that would destroy the Northern Hemisphere, President Eisenhower had warned. And facing that risk, Kennedy refused to agree publicly to an offer by Kruschev to end the crisis by simultaneous withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. These were obsolete missiles. They were already being replaced by invulnerable Polaris submarines. But it was felt necessary to firmly establish the principle that Russia has no right to have any offensive weapons anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R., even to defend an ally against U.S. attack. That’s now recognized to be the prime reason for deploying missiles there, and actually a plausible one. Meanwhile, the United States must retain the right to have them all over the world, targeting Russia or China or any other enemy. In fact, in 1962, the United—we just recently learned, the United States had just secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Okinawa aimed at China. That was a moment of elevated regional tensions. All of that is very consistent with grand area conceptions, the ones I mentioned that were developed by Roosevelt’s planners.

Well, fortunately, in 1962, Kruschev backed down. But the world can’t be assured of such sanity forever. And particularly threatening, in my view, is that intellectual opinion, and even scholarship, hail Kennedy’s behavior as his finest hour. My own view is it’s one of the worst moments in history. Inability to face the truth about ourselves is all too common a feature of the intellectual culture, also personal life, has ominous implications.

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)