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Skeptics, Mad Bastards, Sensitives, You

20:06 / 18.08.03

a good informal essay which deals not only with yer standard pagans (IMHO) but some of the people you may know here and elsewhere.

Shanghai Quasar

22:05 / 18.08.03

A pinch of salt? I think I'll need the whole shaker for this one. Matter of fact, maybe we should toss in a bottle of pickled newt eyes. That'll help it all get down.

01:05 / 20.08.03

The "Mad Bastard" sketch sounds like it's lifted from a biography of Aleister Crowley...psychic energy attacks from people who used to be friends. Ha ha.

I don't like that he presumes the final level is acceptance of inadequacy. Perhaps that's success in his non-Pagan eyes, but some people just might go past Mad Bastard and into something far more interesting.

I'm of the opinion that everybody is a sorcerer, Pagan, Wiccan, Discordian, Gnostic, or not. "Energy" is all around, whatever we want to call it. Everybody is a Mad Bastard, but like the article hints, sometimes Mad Bastards can get along by pretending to agree with each other.

13:00 / 20.08.03

Honestly, it is damn accurate in this location and the self-defined traditional wiccans we've got around. I know some of the people he's talking about, and also the ones excluded / admitted to have hit the elusive "Grown up." Yeah. They're that bad.

So pinch of salt, yes. Handfuls, even. But I wonder how many adepts went through part of this, deep in the bits of their past they're embarrased by and hide the books in the bottom of their closet 'cause they don't want to admit to owning them or give them to anyone else for fear of influencing anyone into that stupidity. I did in high school, and I'll admit that in the vaguest of terms...

18:05 / 20.08.03

Honestly, it is damn accurate in this location

I'm sure it is, there's tons of this in London and pretty much everywhere else, but it's just a spectrum of what you might refer to as 'the occult community' though isn't it. A significantly visible, vocal and annoying one, but it's not as if everyone involved with magic must somehow accord to this trajectory. Surely this is silly.

There's just as many clueless fuckwits hanging about in occult circles as there are anywhere else. You're always going to get a paranoid nutter quotient in something as odd as magic, doesn't automatically mean that there aren't plenty of clued-up people approaching this stuff from more solid perspectives.

I don't think the majority of people who post here fit into the 'dumb-ass pagan' straw-man category that this essay deals with. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of magical discussion forums on the internet that do fit this category, but at the end of the day, that's why I don't read them - it's the reason I read barbelith.

19:41 / 20.08.03

the article does admit that everybody does not belong to the schema. in high school my friends acted this way and that put me off magic for years. this and the resemblance that neo-paganism had to religion and anything to do with religion I would not go near.

20:20 / 20.08.03

And the moral of the story is:

Magic is for fools! Stay in school!

Please.

What a twat.

22:49 / 20.08.03

and then I got over it, agnosticism still intact.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

23:18 / 20.08.03

Jeeze louise, people, get a sense of humor.

Sceptic over here, cruising through Mad Bastardville a couple of times a week and occasionally popping into Grownup Town to buy groceries. I reckon that if we're honest, we can all see a little bit of us in some of these thumbnail sketches.

Shanghai Quasar

00:17 / 21.08.03

You won't think it's so funny when the fifth dimensional spooks overrun this dimension because I wasn't out there, putting my ass on the line for you people. Day in and day out.

No respect, I tells ya. No respect.

Besides, I can't be a Mad Bastard. I've never even been a Wiccan or Neo-Pagan ceremony. To tell you the truth, I always thought those Pagan sorts were a little... out there.

Now, if you don't mind, I'll be off recharging my spirit gun.