I've just been letting off steam at someone in the Magick forum. A poster wants to use magick to induce someone to sleep with him. Stripped of the niceties, that seems to mean that he wants to affect her mind by subtle force majeur, and constrain her to do so.
Magick has a long tradition of love potions and so on, so it sort of slips by, where otherwise it might not.
But it got me thinking about something which may have a more general application than thinking about magick, which to many people is a load of hooey:
Instrumental (goal orientated) Magick is usually thought of as a kind of dodge, a way of evading obvious physical causalities - find a lost object, get a job, make or find money, whatever. But here it seems to be a way of avoiding ethical causality and consequence.
Why? Partly, perhaps, because as a slap in the face for conventional, consensus ontology and reality, it's inherently revolutionary; partly because it may just be a load of hooey, and therefore isn't a real transgression; partly because there doesn't seem to be any direct corrleation between act and result (if any).
The first two, at least, seem to be common to other radical and revolutionary positions, and are equally spurious in those contexts as well.
The word is the thing is the action, as any cabalist or media analyst knows well. |
