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"the Art" ?

17:28 / 29.01.03

I've been thinking about this for awhile. Back in renaissance and pre-renaissance times magick was often referred to as 'the art'. what this implies to me, is that magick is the art that ties all others together. indeed, before the neccisary differentiation of aesthetics morals and science, most exloratory fields of human endevour had a magickal quality to them, the people who did them were often considered magicians, and often functioned under a meta symbol system that derives from esoteric knowledge. Most of the major innovators of language and science and philosophy were considered magicians at one point or another.

I guess I'm thinking of hermeticism here, and maybe modern conceptions of holistic thinking. now that every strand of science and art has been taken seperately and plumbed to it's depths, I see the way forward as exploring how all the fields of knowledge come together.

For myself, I find the writings of da vinci, and more recently the integralism of ken wilber very helpfull here. It's been ages since I fired off a sigil, but I still think of myself as a magician, because it supplies the metadynamic that ties everything else together.

Reasearch into complexity theory is going this way for instance, but they're hampered by having to reinvent the wheel. I find myself wanting to fax these guys off a copy ofthe emerald tablets of thrice-great hermes.

I just wanted to throw this open for everyone. I notice the various forums on barbelith tend to keep to themsleves to exetent, and I wonder what might be gained from consciously lowering those barriers in thinking.

17:44 / 29.01.03

If your magick does not permeate every thing, that is, if there is anything that to you is not magickal, then your magick is limited.

17:45 / 29.01.03

Conciously lowering those barriers would probably result in psychiatric institutionalisation. One step at a time dude.

19:15 / 29.01.03

"The Art", perfect word for Chaos Magick since its all cut-ups, collage, cutnpaste, naking things up on th espot, building youre own mythologhy, plagiarizing from all kinds of direction and just and just lowering barriers, hell even destroy barriers!

Doesnt all "real" magicians break down the barriers you talk about? What would be the use magick being just magick and not part of anything else? And magick just melts in perfectly in with modern physics and evolution theory and stuff.
Were closer than ever to something like the renaissance "The Arts"...

00:24 / 30.01.03

I think I know exactly what you're talking about. (Or, I have completely misunderstood

)

I'm honestly not all that familiar with classical occult theory, but Da Vinci's habit of connecting all sorts of things together--and, importantly, having his studies tied into his life, not separate (going by the jokes and shopping lists alongside natural and artistic studies in his notebooks)--has been a HUGE influence on me. My current magic practice isn't sigilization or invocation or anything with the usual mystical trappings; it's all about thrusting my hand into my brain and rewiring everything, consequences be damned. I'm doing it with journaling and mindmaps and NLP instead of candles, but if radical conscious self-change isn't magic, then I don't know what is.

06:58 / 30.01.03

VM: Interesting thoughts.

I was reading about John Dee recently and I found myself wondering when science became the more mechanistic set of disciplines that it is today, rather than a grand synthesis held together by the Renaissance man. Perhaps it was simply with the spread of industry and technology - science becomes about production and making sure machinery functioned properly, rather than a "human-scale" endeavour?

I followed this up with reading Francis Yates - she seems to suggest the demonisation of the Hermetic "man of knowledge" happened as a result of the counter-reformation. Maybe the two trends go hand in hand? Total guesswork on my part, as I'm quite ignorant about history, much to my shame, but I'd be interested to hear anyones thoughts on when and why science diverged.

As to the relevance of those ideas now, I dunno, I feel we've got to much information to unify it all - I think they called it "option anxiety" in post-modern theory, paralysis caused by too much choice, too much info - just think of the net. I certainly think that lowering barriers to thought could be a useful exercise but doesn't everybody do this anyway? My favourite magickal authors (for instance) seem to be drawing from a huge knowledge base and a range of discplines, just as my favourite filmakers could be said to be drawing on magickal themes, amongst many others.

Hmm - having written that, I think I may see what you mean a bit more - are you talking about the way in which we tend to identify more with one area than another and this limits explorations? Where would we get to if we investigated without ideas of being a magician or a scientist or whatever? Is this what you mean?

19:01 / 30.01.03

well, I guess i'm sort of making a call for a more all-emcompassing synthesis in magickal practice. I tend to think that the magick of today is the science of tomorrow, which history certainly bears out.

I'm just wondering if maybe our culture ( barbelith at least if not the whole world at large ) is ready to make that kind of a definitive shift in perception towards a kind of magic-holism that can unify the fields of art science and morals in a fruitfull cross polination.

What i see a lot of is fields turning inward on themselves and becoming warped. magick turned in on itself becomes empty ritual and superstition, art turned in on itself becomes degeneracy, morals turned in on itself becomes disengaged nihilism, or gnostic enervationism.

It's only when we ask what magick has to say about art, and science, and vice versa that these areas come into their full potential.

19:55 / 30.01.03

is it possible to put a spell on yourself without your conscious awareness? fascinated by this barbelith concept in the invisibles which i have not read yet. i "accidentally" found this site while surfing on memes.org. i am currently working on a comicbook that is loosely inspired by actual events in my life. as i progress through the story i find the fictional events i create actualizing themselves in my life. like a hologram or fractal. curious...

chaos magick huh? i myself never got into any institutionalized or organized form of spirituality. i created my own relationship with the universe by taking bits and pieces from all over. freestyle voodoo i calls it.

and then last night while recording some music over at a friend's place, he decided to put in the dismal dana carvey "film" the master of disguise. carvey's character is pistachio disguisey, a green nut. green lights and clothing everywhere. the all-seeing eye is everywhere. pistachio is a level one disguisey. the higher level disguiseys can physically shift their shapes and have been using these powers for the good of all mankind. the "plot" involves a character named devlin bowman who is paying a disguisey to use his powers to steal rare items such as the liberty bell and the appollo moon lander. all this amidst fart jokes, dance numbers to pop hits and pathetic attempts at lampooning movies. did a little etymological research on the word pistachio. pistis came up which reminded me of pistis sophia. i dunno. just one of the many examples of the exponentially increasing level of subjective(?) surreality in my life.

was it einstein that said something like there are two ways to see the world? one is that nothing is a miracle. the other that everything is a miracle.

20:14 / 30.01.03

What your talking about kind of reminds me of "Aeonics", the models that some magicians come up with to discuss historical changes. Pete Caroll has one in "liber Kaos" if I remember correctly, where he suggests we're heading into a more magick-positvie age. I don't know, I think this is a very interesting exercise but it never really struck a chord with me. Too vast and general. and fundamentally improveable one way or the other - trying to make sense out of the excess of information around us, rather than anything "objective" whatever that means.

Further to that - I'd say that most magicians do develop a synthesis anyway but this is on a personal level. I've got my own framework of ideas which I tend to view things through, but I recognise this is very much a product of my subjectivity and not likely to be shared by others, that's why I'd be wary of proposing a unifying principle. I agree with you though it would be interesting to view other subjects through a magicial lens, but I've idea how you'd kick this off.

Maybe the respective disciplines have differing aims anyway and can't be sythesised? You might want to check out (downloadable here for a couple of quid), which is largely about the differences between science, religon, art and magick.

Be interested to hear more on this subject.

18:07 / 31.01.03

well, I think increasingly, the emphasis, especially in science and philosophy, is discovering universal patterns that connect. indeed, complexity theory, crytography, semiotics, and most other highly abstract areas of specialisation, rely heavily on the abilty to recognise and define patterns across multiple fields of data. This is really the core skill of magickal practice as I see it, and examining the writings of scientists who have come to similar conclusions, one sees them adopting a kind of magick holism very much like what I'm talking about. The difficulty of arriving at that the other way is you inevitably either have to invent or more often find a mode of synthesis, be it khabbala, taoism, or zen bhuddism.

I often wonder what it might be like if magick thinking were a part of the ciriculum from the outset?

20:26 / 02.02.03

I often dwell on the crosses between mystical and religious practice, artistic expression, psychology, cognitive theory, computer programming, logical structures, escoteric systems, and mathmatics. Fun for my brain. Through crossing disciplines, a more complete picture of human experience is understood. But in a way, magick is just extending this lot to include physics.

Crossing disciplines in this way is inherently an abstract form of thinking. Art is a product of abstract thought and imagination, so it is apt to call the work of the magus Art. Further, to extend this work to cross all disciplines, known and unknown, to gain a complete picture of reality itself, can only be seen then as the highest expression of Art, aptly then called "The Art".

Bugger. Kindly excuse my unusually flowery linguistic patterns today, I've been reading Crowley lately and he's infecting my language filters a bit. This is what happens when I close a chapter and immediately try to write something without first digesting something heavy in fart jokes to clense the pallate.

18:00 / 03.02.03

nothing wrong with flowery language once in awhile. I do get tired of the constant stream of irony and sarcasm. If magick cannot be the home of personal authenticity and sincerity, then where?