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Any non-ex-christian magicians on here, then?

18:08 / 12.06.03

So Sypha's post got me wondering - are there any magicians here who don't come from a Christian religious background? Any Jewish magicians? Muslim magi? Hindus?

Does the big magician/religious man split only occur in Christianity-based cultures, anyway? Is it, perhaps, a consequence of the Inquisition? How do other major religions approach their magicians - are they persecuted, appreciated, ignored? I'm interested. Let's discuss this.

18:43 / 12.06.03

Well, my old man was a devout aethist. He was a normal working bloke with old school lefty views who viewed religon as "the opium of the people" etc etc. though he was never actively hostile to me,and my weird beliefs. Seemed to just view it as an extension of my general bizarreness. I sort of the stuff I'm intersted in, as filling out the gaps he left out or didn't have time for, him being too busy with earning a living for introspection.

A big part of my practice is Tantra - and there's very much the popular preception in India currently that Tantra is "blackmagictantra" ie. very dodgy stuff, so I don't know how a traditional Hindu would react to me, a whie Westerner nicking the dodgy bits from their culture. Then again, I've read some writers that indicate that up until relatively recently (ie contact with the West) popular religon in india was very much paganism (of which Tantra is a part), certainly on a village level. It was only with this contact with the West that "hinduism" began to have a identity as a seperate entity with its own sacred books and chosen people. You can see Hinduism re-creating itself again at the moment with the BJP and aggressive Indian nationalism.

20:46 / 12.06.03

Religion, what's religion?

Me never!

00:09 / 13.06.03

How do other major religions approach their magicians - are they persecuted, appreciated, ignored?

i think that part of the problem is tied up in the bias inherent to the phrasing of the question, especially in the phrase "their magicians."

you're presuming that other cultures have magicians in the same sense that we do. in other words, you're presuming that there's a cultural role in other societies that bundles together all the practices and functions that magicians do in our society, and that you can map one onto the other as a clean, neat analogue and then compare cultural notes.

it doesn't work that way most of the time. for instance, when i started thinking about your question, i started to think about Judaism, and when i thought about magic(k) and "magicians," i started to think about the radical mystical movements, like the Hassidim, and i was going to post about the hostility that has historically existed between the ecstatic/messianic/mystical movements in Judaism and the more staid Orthodox.

however, then i started to think about Cabala and numerology and all that, which has always been more widespread and more respected in traditional rabbinical culture as well as among the radicals, and i realized that even though i tended to group those sorts of things together when i thought about "magic(k)," my categories are culturally subjective and don't apply cross-culturally.

ultimately, i think that the distinctions we'd have to look at are so culturally specific, and the historical and cultural complexity of each religion so great, that it would be impossible to make generalizations of the type you'd need to make to cram this into an online thread.

10:00 / 13.06.03

The Jews have Hasidim and various mystical traditionis, the Muslims have their Sufis. Hindus have tons of Yogis and Gurus who claim to have supernatural powers. Christians have Rosicrucians and Freemasons which are pretty much accepted amongst average Church-goers (except Catholics), and not looked upon as heretics. Most of the original Grand Masters in my country were priests in the Lutheran protestant church (our national church). Knowing that The Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley sprung from these traditions (FM and RC), I guess we should look at them as the mystical forefather of modern magick. So what is really so blasphemous and guilt-imposing about magick?

11:38 / 13.06.03

So what is really so blasphemous and guilt-imposing about magick?

Perhaps that it allows the individual too much god-like power? Yahweh in particular seems to get the jitters every time (wo)mankind encroaches on 'His' territory cf. tower of Babel. And lo, the Lord doth generally wax sorely pissed-off, and verily doth he smite everyone within a 10 mile radius, and the ones that don't cop the smiting have frogs rain down upon them, and their water supply is turned into an assload of flies or something.

Verily, so much for all that.

16:12 / 13.06.03

Not to mention the historic perspective of anything empowering outside of the Church as being of the Devil!. This is especially true for modern fundies, the sort who like to burn books and go on about how D&D leads kids into Satanism. There's this entire perspective on magick of any sort being Satanic and evil, that frankly is just irritating. However, its so pervasive in western culture, its hard to have grown up without having encountered it in some form, leading one to consider magick as somehow shifty and wrong somehow, if only on a subconscious level.

So its actually a pretty valid question as to the perspective of a magickian who wasn't raised with this influence. However, I doubt you'll find one easily. And if you do, its because they were raised in their own magical tradition which is also the religious tradition of their culture.

So what we're left with is the idea that Magick is "outside" religion, or even opposed to spirituality. Yet, any magickian worth their salt can tell you that magick *is* a religion, and fosters in one a form of spirituality. However, only Thelema goes so far as to admidt itself as a religion, and even then only begrudgingly, for the process is one of escape from the confines of religion to find your own attainment, yet the structure remains one of oppressive dogmatism and social control just as the with the Catholics. Though at least in Thelema one is expected to struggle against it, so that's something.

However still, when one asks what your religion is, can you say "magickian" and mean it? It seems that to declare one's self a magickian is to declare one's self anti-religious, but to persue such a path is a religion, just one of personal attainment rather than dogmatic adherance. There in lies the paradox, for a religion of anti-religion is still a religion, even if one can't easily draw conclusions about the person from the title.

17:36 / 13.06.03

Does the path of religious study have to be considered along the same lines as the path of magickal study? I've always seen them as different, but interacting. While they both deal with spirituality, it seems that there are two (or more) different types of spirituality. The strongest ties between magick and religion seem to have been made, ironically, by the Christian church in its denouncement of magick as "against God".

19:41 / 13.06.03

I was raised by beatniks who never went to church, but had their own form of "religion" which involved food-hoarding and scraming at each other. I mean, hah hah, no, not religious.

"Yoga" is the Hindu word for magick, isn't it? "Atunement," "Unity," etc? I think there's a fine difference, though, between religious mysticism like Sufi and so on, where the goal is to eliminate the self and experience the world in the most objective terms, and what we usually mean when we talk about magick, which is almost diametrically opposed to that.

And, to add a further complication, the Hasidim, the Freemasons, and the Dervishes are all more tribal/political in their goals and practices than mystical/magickal.

09:50 / 17.06.03

Firstly, the magic ( I bloody refuse to add Crowley's poncy little K at the end)/religious division is only a really recent one in Christianity, if you're refering to the belief systems of historical sorcerers. Most of hermeticism, alchemy,and so forth defines itself from a primairily Christain view of the cosmos (much of it being a Christain adaptation ((and often misinterpretation)) of Kabbala). Though certainly the church hasn't ever been overly fond of it, being as it is an odd collection of heretical beliefs, it's still an attempt to understand G-d's creation, and define the spiritual dimensions of the Divine Plan. Ultimately, though, I'm not sure that I'm entirely clear on the definition of magic being used here. If the Hassidim, the Sufis, and Freemasons are all being used as examples of magical practice, then this certainly can't be following the Crowlian "causing the world to conform in accordance to the Will" definition, and instead seem to be looking at magic as a synonym for mysticism. If so, mystics certainly continued within the Christain church within the monastaries, with such figures as Saint John of the Cross, and in fact we find that Christianity at its heart (though this heart is often ignored) is essentially a mystic faith, demanding in its early forms (as can be seen quite dramatically in the Acts) a direct conection with Holy Spirit, which would grant miraculous, magical powers. Chirst Himself uses several magical incantations of His day to perfoms his miracles. I personaly perfer Alan Moore's defintion of magic, in which he describes religions as languages, and magic as the study of linguistics.