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There are zillions of ways to deal with any difficult situation, immediate recourse to magic might not be the best. There are plenty of intelligent talented people who don't use magic (consciously), and they do alright. I use magic as a last resort, and for things when only magic will do what I want to do.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. For me, magic is an integral part of my life and I make no distinction whatsoever between utilising sorcery as a tool to help me accomplish something, and utilising, say, persuasion, or bribery, or lateral thinking. I use whatever tool best fits the task at hand, and whatever tool I feel will be the most effective for getting the job done.
I don't buy into the whole 'magic should only be used for special occasions when you've exhausted every other possibility' malarky one little bit. I respect your opinion, but I very strongly disagree. I don't have time for that sort of procrastination, if something needs to be done and I can see a way of potentially accomplishing it through sorcery, I'm certainly not going to hunt around for some alternative method of doing it just because of some vague notion that sorcery must somehow be saved for special occasions.
I just can't go with this idea of hoarding magic, of keeping it in a box and being careful not to squander any as if it's a finite resource that might run out if you use it too much. I think this idea is rooted in the general individualistic and consumerist perspective that pervades much of western occultism - inclusive of chaos magic - that this thread has highlighted. The concept of the sigil method as some kind of inexhaustible shopping list that can get you something for nothing whenever you desire it - I think we all know instinctively that the universe doesn't really work like that, so we make up these filters such as 'only when you've tried everything else' that set artificial parameters on how we should and should not interact with it.
I think it's the underlying perspective itself that is out-of-whack, you don't have to consider sorcery and your relation to it in these overly individualistic terms, therefore you don't have to arrive at such necessary conclusions as trying to hoard magic as if it were some ever-diminishing secret liquid.
Otherwise you face the temptation to FWACKOOM anyone who gets in your way, build a big tower in the desert and hire minions... seriously though, hubris is an obstacle to the magician more than anyone else- beware.
Yes, you could go the route that leads to a big tower and minions, and many people do in one way or another. However this choice ultimately rests in the hands of the magician - it is his or her responsibility how they respond to power, and it's not connected in any way to some unspoken universal law about when and how sorcery ought to be used. It's a personal choice concerning usage of power, nothing more, nothing less.
The key thing for me, in relation to sorcery, is doing things for your community - whatever you may consider that to be. I'm always banging on about this whenever threads such as this come up, so you must forgive me for raising my favourite spectre again, but it really does put the use of sorcery into context for me.
Magic gives you power, and the power gives you responsibility, so you can either sit at home and hoard that power - as if you're afraid of being corrupted by it - only using it when you absolutely must, or else you can go outside and actively use it for what you consider to be the greater good. I go for the latter option, so it's all about doing stuff for other people at a magical level, taking clients, looking out for how you can contribute to and benefit your community -which might mean doing magic to keep the local library open, or to help your neighbour keep her council flat, or indeed, to sort out a problematic office manager.
You might not make the right call 100% of the time, but at least you are making a call one way or another, and will hopefully learn from any mistakes along the way and become a better magician because of it. Through this process you are seeking to develop the ability to judge when to intervene in something magically and when to leave things to go their own course. If you spend all of your time fretting over whether or not to use magic in the first place, this faculty of discernment is going to remain underdeveloped and you're never going to gain any real confidence in your ability to make the kind of informed judgement that a working sorcerer requires to do his or her job.
By considering sorcery in these terms, in terms of service to a community, you are raising it out of the mire of individualistic consumerism that this thread is placing under the microscope. The sorcery becomes part of a wider context, and your relationship to it then changes significantly. You've got a job to do, you're responsible for looking after a community, it's not just all about you anymore. Therefore any magic that you do for yourself is also no longer just about the accumulation of more 'stuff' for selfish ends. You have this job to do, therefore anything that brings benefit to you and will allow you to do your job more effectively is fair game.
When I talk about 'serving the community', I don't mean in some poncey narcissistic 'it is my divine calling to help these poor people' kind of way. It's simply a response to the power of magic. In my opinion, a healthy response. What are you going to do with it? How does your interest and talent for magic fit into a wider social context?
All of this talk of power and responsibility reminds me of Spider-man a bit, so I'll go with that analogy for now, as silly as it may seem. Spider-man could have easily set himself up in a tower with minions, or he could have remained Peter Parker 100% of the time - only using his extranormal abilities when there is absolutely no logical alternative. But he instead decided to go out and use it on a day-to-day basis to try and make peoples lives better to whatever small extent he may be empowered to do so. If this is considered a squanderous use of power by you, or J Jonah Jameson, or anybody else, well we'll just have to agree to disagree. The geezer spiderman saved from falling of a bridge might think differently, as might the hypothetical neighbour who avoided being evicted from her council flat due to our hypothetical sorcerer's intervention.
Please correct me if I have in any way misinterpreted your opinion or overlooked some important point to your argument in the above.
in GL's example of the bad boss, ridding the workplace of such a toad might be worth the bad karma hexing their arse off would engender. But that way lies the tower, and the minions, and the evil cackling etc...
Not necessarily. Only if you're approaching magic from an individualistic consumerist standpoint to begin with - whether or not you decide to acquire a tower and minions to lord it over is dependant on how you consider the role of magician in relation to the wider social context that it exists within. It all comes down to responsibility, and this power-crazed megalomaniac picture that you're painting is certainly not the only possible outcome, goal, or destination for people who don't believe sorcery should be used sparingly. |
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