| |
|
I think the issues around this are more complex than a question of 'to talk or not to talk', and it really depends on a persons reasons for secrecy.
In the example posted above, I think you have a situation where people are 'hoarding knowledge' - in the sense of having special secret knowledge and information which makes them feel elite and more enlightened. This, in my opinion, is a misunderstanding of the 'to keep silent' aspect of the magicians green cross code. Particularly now that so much information on magick is easily available over the web, it's just plain silly to adopt this attitude of secrecy with regards to your 'mysterious practices'. Unless you're specifically interested in creating an aura of mystery around yourself, which I suppose could have its magickal advantages for certain things.
However I do think that there are several distinct situations where secrecy concerning what you're doing is a valuable and important aspect.
Personally, there's certain aspects of what I do that I consider to be between me and the spirits. It's not my place to go talking about stuff that is private to me and the spirits, in the same way that it's not my place to go talking about stuff that's private between me and any other individual. To bring back the Mafia Don analogy from another thread, it would be the magickal equivalent of somebody running round town shooting their mouth off about the favour that Don Satanico is doing for them. It's liable to be taken as a betrayal of confidence and could conceivably have a degree of cosmic 'Omerta' attached to it depending on the personality you're dealing with.
Also, I often find that telling a load of people about something (particularly a large number of strangers, such as on forums like barbelith) can break the charge of a working somewhat. The power behind something is dispersed a little everytime I discuss it with someone. I think this is partly weird superstition (which can be an interesting magickal tool/mechanism in itself) and partly connected to the same process observed by chaos magicians of ensuring that you 'forget' a sigil after charging. I think you could make a valid comparison between the expected results of obsessing over the details of a sigil immediately after charging, and the results of discussing your entire magickal practice in great detail with anyone who will listen. I wouldn't discuss the intricacies of a piece of writing I'm working on for similar reasons, as the more I talk about it, the less powerful it feels to me.
I think another valid reason for secrecy is its use as a method for circumventing the ego trap that I think all magicians are probably susceptible to. I think that everyone who does magick tends to think that practising magick is pretty damn cool, to some degree or other. There's always the temptation to name drop the fact that you were summoning the Great Old Ones in the haunted woods the other night, and one of your mates became possessed and gave prophetic messages about pirates and ninjas. It's the sort of thing that gives you a buzz, and the sort of thing that you naturally want to tell someone about, just as you would if you had accomplished an insane snow boarding feat or beaten one of your martial arts instructors whilst sparring.
However, as natural a compulsion as this is, it can act as a bit of a slippery slope and you can very easily get caught up in a situation where you find yourself doing specific forms of magick because it sounds impressive and makes you feel cool. Which I think is OK for a while, but ultimately leads to a bit of a rut where all your magick starts to revolve around ego gratification. Therefore the use of secrecy in these circumstances can get you around this potential conundrum, in that you may be doing mad cool weird stuff every weekend, but you don't ever tell anyone about it and are therefore doing it solely for its own sake and its own merits.
It was a combination of the above which made me unable to post in the magick forum on barbelith for well over a year. However, as I really enjoy barbelith and the social interaction with interesting minds that I get from the magick forum, I've since endeavoured to find a way of talking and writing about magick without ever actually making reference to any of the specifics of my own practice or discussing my way of doing things. And I've found that it's generally possible for me to talk about magick in such a way that it draws on my emotional responses to practising magick but doesn't go into any of the details of practice. To be honest, my main area of working is such an enormous subject and I'm such a complete beginner in comparison to it, that I've got no right whatsoever to go about discussing any aspect of it on an internet message board. However, I can talk about the general processes at work in magick and my own emotional responses to them, without really mentioning my own work, and I reckon it's probably these common processes and responses that are more likely to be of interest to other magicians anyway. |
|
|
