Pan’s Labyrinth and Rules of Magic
I recently saw Pan’s Labyrinth and one scene in particular that stood out to me was where the girl was looking for a key and there were specific rules she had to follow and if she didn’t follow those rules, she could die. She did, in fact, break the rules, and the monster almost got [...]
The psychologizing and scientizing of magic aka “Prove it”
I’ve been reading some different posts in the blogosphere about magic, psychology, and atheism, and I’ve been mulling over my response to what I see as a trend toward trying to psychologize and scientize magic in order to make it legitimate, at the expense of writing off other perspectives that aren’t rational and thus don’t [...]
Sped Limt: A Case Study in Entity Evolution
I’ve always found it fascinating how chaos magicians will get rid of an entity when it evolves. We’re told that such an evolution is dangerous, because the entity will potentially get out of our control. I’ve never really agreed with that stance. Why go to all the trouble of creating an entity if you get [...]
Atheism and magic
I’ve noticed with some interest an increasing intersection of Atheism and magic. A number of magicians I know have mentioned they are atheists. I see some of this rise in Atheism as a result of the psychologizing of magic, wherein magical practices and results are explained from a psychological perspective. When such a perspective is [...]
Are you a Traditionalist?
A reader asked me yesterday, after I posted my review of Evola’s book on Buddhism, if I agreed with Evola’s traditionalist views in other areas, because I liked Evola’s work. When I posted the review to Amazon, I’d noticed traditionalism come up as a possible tag, first time I ever came across the word actually. [...]
Esoteric Book Convention day 2 and pictures
I’ve been meaning to post this all week, and finally got to it today. I did go to a presentation on Sunday: Brandy William’s talk on Chaldean Oracles. It was a really interesting talk and gave me quite a bit of appreciation for Brandy’s ability as speaker and presenter. The lighting on that picture isn’t [...]
Esoteric Book Convention pt. 1
I’ve taken some photos today, and will take more tomorrow and do a picture post. So far I’ve really been impressed by this convention. It’s one of the more occult leaning conventions I’ve been to and is focused primarily on scholarly presentations and occult books. I’ve liked the handbound work I’ve seen as well as [...]
The Magical Experiments Radio Show
Today Bill Whitcomb and I recorded our first podcast radio show for Experimental Magic: Is Magic still Relevant. I’ve attached a player on the side bar of the blog, but you can also click the link and listen to it as well. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Experimental-Magic/va/2009/08/16/is-magic-relevant-to-modern-times ShareTweet
Cultural identity shifts
I talked about family identity and individual identity patterns in my last post, but in Outliers, Gladwell also discusses cultural patterns and heritage and how it can impact the way people work together, how well they learn particular subjects. Of course this has all been written about elsewhere as well, but the focus in Gladwell’s [...]
some thoughts on occult culture appropriation
In thinking about it further, I think that part of what bothers me about the video series by “college girl” is that this looks like just another case of someone who’s dabbling in the occult who’s decided to set herself up as an expert, or someone’s who decided to capitalize off of being in the [...]
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- Breaking away from what you've been taught is a sign of growth and personalization in magic and in life.
