Hey Gypsy Lantern, there was much power in that post of yours, I could feel your passion through your words. While I certainly can’t speak on behalf of Sypha nor hir penguin deity, I can say that your thoughts bring about a mixed reaction in me. I know to talk of one’s experiences and beliefs about deities is a difficult and personal matter—there’s a reason why there’s a cliché about not discussing religion in social situations. I hope that we can have some dialogue without much friction. Moreover, the last time I tried to talk about this and related matters, it ended up being a little bit of a fiasco for some of the people involved, although granted the style of this thread is vastly different from the style of that other damn thread! It is my hope that we can avoid such difficulties here.
It’s great to hear that you agree that teaching and beliefs are best not followed blindly. It’s my understanding that each magician must face the Abyss alone, without aid, and stripped of all that was believed. In some ways, it seems to me, we can compare so-called “enlightenment” with throwing out the trash that we’ve collected, learned, and hoarded over the course of our lives. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me my bin is cyclically in various degrees of emptiness and fullness: perhaps balancing out to both the proverbial half empty of the pessimist and the half full of the optimist. Funny how that metaphor plays the optimist-pessimist pairing transposed with respect to enlightenment.
Anyway, I very much agree that there is a dialogue between the practitioner and the divine. There is much merit in your words regarding the “divine connection” that certain other individuals have had and the resultant transformations that such connection can often be a catalyst for: something somehow outside or beyond, as you say, “their personality” must be at work in order to alter that personality. I mean, if we “crawl up our own arse”—or that of someone else’s, i.e., we found our temple on the cult of personality, then it seems, in most cases, practically assured that transformation is not the name of our game—no, it seems the cult of personality would cling to its image, reluctant to alter what it must see as perfection.
So I also think that there is a certain truth when you say that “successful magicians ultimately get their own unique personalised [sic.] magickal systems through direct interaction with the Divine.” In my own experience of things, inspiration and resultant derivations, insights, and interpretations do seem to come from something “bigger” than myself. There is a feeling of, in a sense, this “extra component” that you speak of. However, even on the rare occasion that I’ve heard a voice from outside my head speak inside my head—a voice most definitely not my own—I’m not willing to buy into an actual separation between my being and the source of that voice. Put differently, I have difficulties believing in this “objective” nature that you attribute to divinities.
For me part of the difficulty is the imposing—or in another sense projecting—upon whatever it is that is the divine, the label of “objectivity.” While I would tend to agree that there is power and awareness in various forms of the divine, I am not willing to fully attribute this to the conceptions of any deities that we humans have made up—because we have made them all up. To put this a little differently, it seems to me that, whatever the divine might be, it is something that is not confined by the simple human division of “objectivity” and “subjectivity.” In other words, we transform the meaning of “as above, so below” into “as within, so without.” In preserving the structure but shifting the meaning of this occult maxim we see how the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity collapse. Notice also that, like our pessimist and optimist above, we can transpose the pairs in the maxim, but still maintain the structure and the sense that structure carries. That is to say, we can easily contemplate the former as “as below, so above” and likewise for the latter. It is the information that this particular linguistic structure conveys in accordance with its component pairs that, to me anyway, seems more likely to closer approximate an appropriate linguistic expression of the divine.
In this sense it doesn’t seem to matter if the deities we work with were invented thousands of years ago or merely last week (besides, it seems to me that a magician learns to work outside time, so to speak, or perhaps to speak better, within any time) and it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not they have a huge (in numbers) following of people or simply, as you say, our “mates” (besides, it seems to me that magician is on a course to singularity = infinity anyway). Put differently, tradition is something that is not so much as time based and neither is it something that is dependent on wide resources—although it can be both—in this sense “tradition” more represents the properties found in the relationship that the individual has with the divine. While I can’t quote you directly, I get a sense that part of your passion about interactions with divinity is focused on the quality of the relationship. If this is the case, then I think we’d agree that the “empowerment” or whatever, which comes from involvement with the divine, is in the relationship. In this sense, the relationship is not constrained by time nor by expanse—it is wholly in the sincerity and depth of the interaction between the two components of the relationship.
However, I feel sympathetic to your point of view regarding the dictum that we not interact with the divine based on mere whimsy or flights of fancy. Like I’ve dome my best to articulate above, experience with sacredness is in the quality of the relation; thus, whimsy and fancy does create, as you say, “…a high risk of approaching the whole thing with a glib and escapist attitude.” I agree that there is not likely to be much benefit from relationships founded in such a manner. And from this and what I’ve said above about the cult of personality, I feel we agree that “there's little opportunity to radically change your behaviour and personality through developing relationships with these gods - if your personality constructed them in the first place.” It does seem to be, as you say, “not by blithely making stuff up cos it appeals at an imaginative or aesthetic level” that we become genuinely engaged with the sacredness of manifestation. The relationship develops, it seems to me, more as a function of what’s in our heart and spirit rather than what’s in our head or eye. That said, there still needs to be a relation between heart and head, between spirit and eye: each is the temple and tempter of the other, or so it seems to me.
But another way we appear to diverge is in what we are calling divinity. Put differently, you seem to have a certain sense of what is sacred and what is profane that is based upon what the components of the relationship are. That is, where I tend to think it is not so much what occupies the position of “deity” in our relationship to the sacred but how the qualities of such a relationship become manifest in the self’s relation to the other, you appear to place restrictions upon what it is that can occupy the “deity’s” position. Now, like you, I don’t want to be overly argumentative or prescriptive, but this is something that I feel passionately about. It seems to me that distinctions between what is sacred and what is profane are relative to individuals (in groups or alone). In fact, I tend to think that the habitual dividing of sacred and profane into distinct sets of objects (or stuff, or beings, or whatever) is another way to neglect opportunities to change ourselves and our behaviors. Which is to say that I don’t think it is so much what it is that we choose to relate to, but how it is that relate to it; that is, I have no problem with what things we want to relate to in a divine manner, but I agree with you that there is more to such a relation than simply following our fantasies.
In this sense I agree that whatever it is that we are relating to as the divine “…should be bigger than the magician,” and that there can be a sense of this relationship as what we “..go to when…other magic has failed,” but I wouldn’t describe the divine as “the Big Guns for when you need to pull out all the stops,” because that seems to me to distort the nature of the properties of a sacred relationship. That said, I do agree that one of the most important properties of a sacred relationship is that it invokes “…the extraordinary sense of Divine Mystery that can often terrify the living daylights out of you and fill your head with light.”
Let's all try to take it eZ, OK? |
