Ok Ravyn, I'll check him out, but I warn you... If he makes up or even just uses any personal nouns starting with the letter Z, I'll have to assume he is full of shit. I think you can understand why, smart woman that you are. Should I proceed?
Spells, Wiccans, and Witchcraft
by SpunkyChick 90 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Ravyn
sure go ahead Sixy, even if you don't go for what he says, it is entertaining in a geeky-lab-nerd kinda way. I am actually very contemptuous about what most people today call witchcraft. I am not usually considered a white witch and even tho my husband calls me a 'buglight'--I have as many people who hate me as i do who love me I think. because of my opinions. I was a Satanic Witch(as in atheist---not ritual play acting) first, and it flavored my practice.
Ravyn
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lawrence
Ravyn-
Dug your poem! When I was in Richmond VA., I read my poetry collections at the Henry St. Gallery, Foreign Mission Board (Southern Baptist Convention), Artspace Gallery (12 years), and at the Pope Gallery. Wild VCU folks, unabashed sober; then the wine and beer flowed. Joyous, POWER!
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rem
put that kind of energy out there and it will do something. And no matter what the white-lighters believe...it does not come back on you if you don't attract it.
We have contradictory claims here. If magik is real, then it should be testable and these contradicting views should easily be cleared up. Somehow I have the feeling that replicable experiments will be lacking. Anything about this 'science' published in a reputable research journal?
rem
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rem
Oops, double post.
rem
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Ravyn
here is a relatively objective article about Austin Spare:
by Mark Pilkington -Fortean Times
< < < Spare produced three books of magical writing and drawing, Earth Inferno (1905), The Book of Pleasure (Self Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1913), which contains the core of his philosophy, and The Focus of Life (1921). At the heart of his cosmology lies the Kia, the state of 'inbetweenness' or 'Neither-Neither' that might be equated in the language of mysticism with the Ain Soph of the Kabala, the Tao, even Jung's Collective Unconscious: it is the one truth, the source of all manifestation, what, if you like, was there before the Big Bang. The other key element is Zos, the human in body and mind, which also served as Spare's magical name. As Nevill Drury puts it, Kia is the Primal Energy and Zos the human vehicle for receiving it.
A firm believer in reincarnation, Spare felt that each person's past lives, in a variety of human and animal forms, were retained in the subconscious. This could be tapped into, allowing one to observe and communicate with the many embodiments of the self that dwelt there. It was such inner journeys that inspired the fantastical menagerie of creatures and semi-human figures visible in so much of his art.
"Know the subconsciousness to be an epitome of all experience and wisdom, past incarnations as men, animals, birds, vegetable life, etc., etc., everything that exists, has and ever will exist."
Spare sought ultimately to pass back through the various levels of being until he had reached the very end, and so the beginning, the Almighty Simplicity. At this point he would be united with the Kia in an eternity of bliss. But, crucially, he also found that by tapping into the energies of these beings, through a method he dubbed "atavistic resurgence", it was possible to attain immense power.
""A microbe has the power to destroy the world… If you were to dismember its limb, the mutilated part would regrow, etc. So by evoking and becoming obsessed or illuminated by these existences, we gain their magical properties, or the knowledge of their attainment."
Spare is said to have used this technique to do all sorts of wonderful things: lifting heavy objects, mind reading, manifesting hideous thought forms, even magically procuring a pair of slippers for one startled gent, the Hon Everard Fielding (an associate of Bligh Bond [See FT143:40].
The thinking behind the process is complex, but essentially Spare felt that one's desires could be focussed and embodied as sigils, ideograms composed of words and phrases that encapsulated a wish. These potent symbols were then hidden or destroyed in order to banish them into the subconscious. For example a sigil to acquire great strength was drawn thus:
Key to the technique is the action of propelling the sigilised desire into the subconscious. For this to happen the mind must be blank, devoid of all rational thought, images or desires, the practitioner entirely without ego. It was vitally important to forget one's initial desire, allowing it to take root, grow and eventually become real: "When conscious of the Sigil form (any time but the Magical) it should be repressed, a deliberate striving to forget it, by this it is active and dominates at the unconscious period, its form nourishes and allows it to become attached to the sub-consciousness and become organic, that accomplished, is its reality and realization."
The best way to achieve this state of void, Spare discovered, was through sheer physical exhaustion, a highly effective method being the time-honoured Tantric tradition of masturbation. He also utilised a form of yogic meditation to induce a trance state in which his body would become rigid and immobile; this he referred to as The Death Posture, the subject of a number of his drawings.
At a time when much magical practice involved elaborate ritual, an obsession with occult paraphernalia and often ponderous psychodrama, Spare's solitary, shamanic and, on the surface at least, simple techniques must have seemed nothing short of revolutionary. Certainly they are far more in keeping with his own character, as one who rejected the pomp and glory of the Royal Academy in favour of his own rich inner world. His brief experience of Aleister Crowley's Astrum Argenteum order was evidently not a happy one: "Others praise ceremonial Magic, and are supposed to suffer much Ecstasy! Our asylums are crowded, the stage is over-run!" he wrote in The Book Of Pleasure.
As Lionel Snell writes in Exploring Spare's Magic (from the 1987 Divine Draughtsman exhibition catalogue): "If the extrovert wants to become successful he should hang up "I'm the greatest" posters and constantly affirm his desire, while the introvert would do better to blow his desire on a sigil, and then try so hard to fail that he eventually becomes an underground cult figure." While Crowley may be the most infamous magician of the 20th century, his copious volumes of dense writing are read only by the dedicated few, his rituals practiced by an even smaller number of devotees. In the past twenty years, as awareness of his artistic genius continues to increase, Spare's deceptively simple sigilisation process has been adopted and adapted by a new generation of so-called "chaos magicians", and incorporated into art works, the music of Coil (See FT 142)and others, writing and comics, most popularly Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.
Like a buried sigil growing deep in the collective unconscious, Spare's Zos Kia Cultus lives on. > > >
Ravyn
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Ravyn
REM, I am not going to argue with you about this because it cannot be proven empirically. But see the difference between my opinion of it and yours is that I don't care about empirical evidence. It works for me---I don't really care if it works for you. I proved it to myself and if yu want to, you have to do the same. If you don't then it does not matter. Chaos is not bound by law or proof.
I have lupus. It causes inflammations in the joints sometimes. there is a blood test called a sed(imentary) rate that measures the amount of inflammation in a body. The normal sed rate is 12-20, usually running higher in women. I have gone in to a doctor's office and had 80cc of fluid aspirated from my wrist witha sed rate of 2. 'Empirical Evidence' to me is like a laboratory Blood Test---I don't need a instrument to tell me what I can see with my own eyes and experience in my own body.
I can't prove magick to you or anyone else. And to even try would devalue my own experience. I am not 'lawful'.
Ravyn
PS REM--anyone ever tell you that you look like Andy Garcia?
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lurk
"Any legitimate Witch, Wiccan, or Magician " whose them ? the governing body of witches?
Do the "real" witches" do they excommunicate the non ligitimate witches ? I also know a family of "witches" unfortunelty not to sucessfull lol.Its very popular round here with the women .though no ones seems to be actually able to do anything .
witches are very dissapointing since they lost the (old traditional church lead )old hag in league with satan badge.at least they were scary then but now they just go around saying lovely wispy fluffy pink things and spreading love and harmony. yuck bring back hansel and gretel and the freaky old hags in black .this new age stuff is wrecking the spooks and gooks industry.
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rem
Ravyn,
That's cool. I just saw the word science being brought into this discussion. I think we agree that this has nothing to do with science. In regards to lupus, yes, you know what you see and experience in your own body - but only because modern science has diagnosed you with lupus. If science hadn't figured out what it was you would still be experiencing the same thing, but interpreting it a different way. Perhaps you would believe there is a wicked spirit being inside of you instead of a serious medical condition.
No, can't remember if anyone ever told me I looked like Andy Garcia... actually this picture is not so good. I usually get Brad Pitt. ...NOT
rem
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peacefulpete
I met a woman at a bar when my wife and I were separated who was a 3rd generation Wiccan. She invited me to a meeting,it was hilarious. Each half of the group thought the other half was crazy and delusional. She cursed me to not sleep that night when I pointed this out politely, I laughed outloud as she glared and vowed to get me with her craft, I guess I must have wolfbane in my blood. hehe Actually we now are friends, since I called her bluff. She wants deeply to believe witchcraft is not a joke but actually is aware of the facts. Much like I felt as a JW.