| |
|
The old ways are sometimes too circunvoluted and unnecessarily complicated. it´s not about creating a sweetened and diluted magick, it´s about doing it more directly
Maybe the question should be rephrased slightly: 'is our approach to magick too influenced by the victorian occult revival?'
I tend to think that a lot of our perspectives and approaches to magick are far far more conditioned by the victorian occultists' ideas about magic than we would care to admit. Even chaos magic, which on the surface of things attempts to throw out all the pomp and circumstance of that era, still tends to adopt a lot of its ideological framework. You could say that Liber Null is like a stripped down version of a Golden Dawn style magical curriculum, for instance.
Victoriana even colours the way we consider other forms of magic. When we think of the Egyptian pantheon we tend to imagine the romantic victorian style re-imagining of that period, possibly with Liz Taylor in Cleopatra garb. Even things like hoary old grimoire based magic tend to come to us via translations done by the likes of Crowley and Mathers.
I'm not advocating that we just pretend that the Victorian era of magic never happened or completely throw out all of these people's work and ideas. But I do think it's worth trying to be aware of the huge influence that the ideas of this period have had on how we tend to operate.
I think a lot of what we might consider 'old' or 'outdated' approaches to magic are actually fairly recent, less than two hundred years old for the most part. I always like to situate Crowley with the modernists, and I think that a lot of his developments in magic can be directly compared to what writers like James Joyce and artists like Picasso were doing in the same period. If you look at the Book of Thoth, it works as a beautiful peice of modernist art as much as it works as a tarot deck.
I think what we're experiencing now in 'the occult world' is the same sort of boredom and dissatisfaction with the post-modernism of chaos magic, that the wider culture is feeling towards post-modern novels and art. There's a sort of vague 'where do we go from here?' thing going on that I think has been building, culturally, for quite a few years. Maybe it's just me, I dunno. I find post-modernism a bit annoying, like a really good joke that you've heard so many times that it begins to grate.
But really, when you look back further than the magic of the Victorian era and its immediate masonic parents, and if you look at the magical systems of other cultures that haven't been so influenced by what we now think of as the 'western tradition' - you start to get stuff that is actually incredibly direct and uncluttered. I think that all magic works along 'shamanic' principles to one extent or another, and all that really changes is the way we talk about it and conceptualise it. |
|
|
