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"Stupid" magick, religion and spirituality questions

  
  

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Ticker
19:09 / 12.10.06
That's a very narrow reading of the situation which, forgive me for saying it, could only have been written by a bloke.

I dunno when I first read redtara's bit about refusing the book ordering it stuck in my teeth ('cause I order uncomfortable books). Not that I thought of it as a karmic tie-in at all but I was glad to read her further explination of why she refused it.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:17 / 12.10.06
bold = drink me, italics = me quoting myself, plain text = me now.

I guess my answer is gonna be that such a book is probably as nice, healthy, and pro-sex as any other book on directing movies, the commercial film industry being the liberating and egalitarian funfest that we all know it to be.

Really? You don't think that maybe, just maybe, there might be some special problems with the porn film industry that don't exist in the same way in conventional film-making? Give it some thought, pumpkin, go on.

are you confirming that you believe that refusing to sell it was an act of sexual suppression?

Yes.

Why, exactly? For a start, was this feminist bookshop the only--or even the most convenient--place for this chap to pick up the book? I guess anything's possible in this wacky old world, but one wonders whether Amazon might not have been a better bet. Do you consider this an entirely unproblmatic choice, motivated purely by the desire to aquire the book (rather than, as a f'rexample, the desire to show those hairy-legged man-hating bitches a thing or two).

For another thing, I'm at a loss as to why a book about making films of people engaging in real or simulated sexual activity is likely to be such a vital componant of the expression of anyone's sexuality that refusing to supply it would constitute an act of sexual suppression. A chemist refusing to supply birth control pills, that would be an act of sexual suppression. A mainstream bookseller who refused to supply biology textbooks with a sex-ed chapter, that might be an act of sexual suppression. Maybe even a mainstream bookseller who refused to supply such as The Joy of Sex.

Joyless Exploitation For Dummies, not so much.
 
 
illmatic
19:23 / 12.10.06
I dunno when I first read redtara's bit about refusing the book ordering it stuck in my teeth

Yeah, fair enough, XK. I was writing from the point of view that, I as a bloke, don't experience sexism at anything like the level women do. I can see that a women might have objections to pornography or exploitative depitctions of women rooted in aspects of their very different experience, in ways that might not even occur to me. I don't want my post to seem like "women=obviously hate porn/evil tool of patriarchy". It's more complex than that, I realise.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:26 / 12.10.06
Full disclosure: I am an avid consumer of porn. Sex and porn are absolutely fucking brilliant.
 
 
Ticker
19:35 / 12.10.06
I suspect it wasn't about the product (porn directing manual) at all but about the attitude from the person requesting it. So if a person with a decent manner asked for the book perhaps it would have been ordered.

I'm quite fascinated now that such a book exists. I wonder what sort of strange insights it has?
 
 
ghadis
19:56 / 12.10.06
"Why have these fucked-up situations occurred?" Because some people happened to veer wildly out of control - end of story.

("Why did ghadis feel the need to post such gleefully spiteful shit concerning the imminent death of an old sick writer?" Because ze was drunk on tequila; and afterwards ze was remorseful. "Okay... Why does ghadis feel the need to consume substances that twist hir into such nasty shapes?" Don't even go there.)


Not quite sure what you are getting at here drink me. Don't get me wrong, i don't mind or disagree with what you've written as i think it's a pretty fair summing up of what happned (although i don't think that i'm that remorseful to be honest, that was the hangover talking). I'm just not sure how it relates to this discussion.

Are you saying that it was my own sexual repression that caused my slightly tipsy dig at the cheeky Futurist and his loyal fans, in the same way that it is sexual repression that fuels fundementalists and over zelous socialworkers and makes them hallucinate Satan everywhere?
 
 
grant
20:02 / 12.10.06
This might be a good time to break off a new Ritual Satanic Abuse thread.
 
 
grant
20:38 / 12.10.06
Which is now located over yonder, with copious quotations and excerpting.

Please talk the sexual repression and RSA (or is it SRA?) over there.
 
 
Unconditional Love
20:46 / 12.10.06
Your wrong about one thing pegs you are experiencing sexism on a daily basis from both men and women, just like all men and women, women may well of brought sexism to the fore, and many thanks to them, but many men, and there are alot of us who dont quite fit the typical bloke model experience sexism and being relegated to the outside on a daily basis.

So many therapists teaching people to better conform is not the answer, a total annhilation of the power structure that keeps exsisting models in operation is.

As for the porn industry and prostitution, as many sexually abused men and women end up in these industrys, being exploited for they know not why they sexualise almost everything, a common factor of abused people.

Its intresting, the satanic abuse questions, has actually helped me understand just how real childhood abuse is, and how many people and institutions have a vested intrest in denying it, to keep there personal philosophies and boats floating, you see i am prepared to believe it may not have happened in satanic circumstances, but i would say some form of abuse has happened to create effects that are similar to post traumatic stress, the whole idea that its just a product of an over active imagination is a convinient excuse for apologists that allows them to continue keeping afloat the individuals and institutions that have been known to abuse for years and just shuffled around from church to church and school to school.

People dont want to face this issue because a society is in place that supports the treatment of children as property of society and punishment as the instrument to control that property. Also many people have a vested intrest in keeping there own sickening desires alive passed off as intergenerational sexuality and other such bullshit terminology for child rape.

The Isolation that being a victim of rape creates cannot be believed by those that have never been raped themselves, to further isolate a victim by isolating there rememberence, ie calling it a lie, is typical of those that wish to deny or apologise for acts of child rape.

Child rape is a real issue not an imaginary one, some of the guys i sit with have killed there abusers for those very real reasons, and many others kill themselves because they never recieve any recognition or help what so ever.
 
 
Quantum
21:48 / 12.10.06
Nobody's questioning that child abuse is real or it's devastating effects, but the satanic abuse issue is something else. As Grant says, further discussion there, 'stupid' questions here.
 
 
Unconditional Love
22:34 / 12.10.06
your totally missing the point, the same argument is used by the church to deny priest abuse of children, ie its made up, as do teachers that get away with abusing hundreds of boys for years.

The reason its getting caught earlier is because children now can talk in a climate that is open enough, not to shut them up, and they know its wrong.

The reason it comes back to adult survivors is because they have been taught to lie for so long, it actually gives them the distance to handle the abuse after burying it under alot of lying adult words, and face the truth of themselves.

But maybe i should just fuck off and isolate myself and stop talking and stop asking such stupid questions, yeah?

Sorry mate time to fight for whats right, relentlessly, until all that oppose it are no longer present or changed.
 
 
redtara
23:11 / 12.10.06
But maybe i should just fuck off and isolate myself and stop talking and stop asking such stupid questions, yeah?

No one wants you to do ony of these things, except maybe fuck off, but only as far as here:-

Brand new Ritual Satanic Abuse & Sexual Repression thread, for the use of

Your currently in the stupid questions thread and we all agree that this topic has morphed into a slightly more serious creature. Lets give the subject the respect you obviously feel it deserves.
 
 
Never or Now!
00:24 / 13.10.06
Ici!

Finally I would be very surprised if karma was the blunt instrument you describe in your cause and effect scenario.

I don't think karma is blunt at all - I think it's as pointed, elegant, and relentless as a Russian novel. I also suspect that it is fundamentally the process whereby people are continually tested and evaluated on their adherence to their personal moral code, rather than to any Absolute ethics. Hence my clumsiness: I was trying to imagine myself in someone else's shoes without considering that their deepest values might not be the same as mine. But certainly, if I committed an act which constituted, by my own standards, repressive censorship, then I would consider myself the architect and not the passive victim of a subsequent scene in which I censored myself ("I bit my tongue") while the well-meaning but misguided ideologues who entered my particular space ("one wonders whether Amazon might not have been a better bet") proceeded to drench me in the psychic sludge that I believe results from repression.
 
 
grant
03:09 / 13.10.06
And Dostoevskian karma. Over here now. Thanks.
 
 
Unconditional Love
07:41 / 13.10.06
Apologies to all for the over emotive and righteous postings, had a bit of a crisis last night, thats culminated this morning in a battle fought and won.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:12 / 13.10.06
There was a discussion about the incidents on the UK pagans forum recently where several people who lived around Dartmoor said that the matter wasn't being talked about locally. Curious, eh?

Unsuprisingly it made it into the Daiy Mail- a double page spread, I think. Even more unsurprisingly they ran pretty much the same article again this year.
 
 
charrellz
20:36 / 15.10.06
Anybody know anything about possums (or opossums)? I'm trying to sort out something that happened, but the only symbolic links to possums I can find is that they are occasionally ascribed the trickster role and that One Tail of Clear Hair is the possum trickster of the Catawba (from pantheon.org). Anybody got anything else? It's entirely possible in this situation that the type of animal involved is irrelevant to what I should take away from the experience, but that doesn't seem to feel right.

Thanks in advance for any info.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
09:10 / 16.10.06
This is probably a very stupid question, but does anyone have any idea what a broken silver ring or hoop might symbolise? It's a symbol which doesn't mean anything to me, but for the last... four weeks, or so, I've seen one or more silver rings/hoops with breaks in them, pretty much every day (some of them have been pretty tenuous, like, at work, the other day, a keyring-hoop fell off a keyring, because it was bent out of shape so it didn't close tightly anymore, and lay on the floor. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been finding broken jewelery and things all over the place, though).
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
13:29 / 16.10.06
Possum synchronicity...
 
 
grant
15:56 / 16.10.06
Is that a possum in that picture? Might be an Australian one, but it looks squirrely to me.

------

This is probably a very stupid question, but does anyone have any idea what a broken silver ring or hoop might symbolise?

Will the circle
be unbroken
by and by, Lord
by and by.
There's a better
home a-WAITin'
in the sky, Lord
in the sky.
 
 
El_Cid
22:23 / 17.10.06
I have been experimenting with sigil writing, a la a method close to that described by Grant Morrison.

I don't know that I believe in it. But the idea of accessing your subconscious in this fashion is interesting enough to give it a try for a while.

Last night, I noticed that when viewed at different angles, some of my sigils appear to be written words, mostly nonsensical, and some of which need to be looked at through a mirror in order to be read.

One of the words, "I-Tak" (usually with a dot or small circle instead of the dash) appears more than once, and as you can imagine, the first time I noticed this, I grew a bit uneasy, even with all of my sketicism.

I'm simply curious: Does "I-Tak" mean anything to anybody here?

I drew these symbols while trying to clear my head, and it's very odd that they came out as the same mirror-reversed phrase three different times...especially when I was attempting to draw something new each time.

I suppose you could speculate that I'm simply not very good at this and that's why they all come out that way...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
22:45 / 17.10.06
I dunno what I Tak means, dude, but you want to take your sigil magic a bit further than the doodle'n'wank method. Or quit altogether, either is good for me. It is not all it's cracked up to be and gets very very very boring. I strongly suggest getting hold of a copy of Jan Fries' Visual Magick, which will give you a much more realistic idea of what sigils can and can't do, and open up ways of developing an moving beyond that basic technique.
 
 
El_Cid
23:02 / 17.10.06
It wasn't a "doodle & wank", but I catch your meaning.

I'll the book to the list. Thanks.
 
 
Quantum
17:19 / 18.10.06
You will meet a girl named Kati?
 
 
redtara
12:30 / 21.10.06
I've been reading this thread ( From tiny thought-forms massive gods do grow ... maybe ) and it's muddied a puddle that had been collecting in my head for some time. I am a bit obsesses by money, not in an aquisitive sense but, in it's nature and it's tendancy to be worshiped and the mediating effects it has on human relations and how they appear to go largely unacknowledged. I have been thinking about to what extent money might have become a God and am by no means conviced that this has happened based on the conversation I've read in the thread linked above.

Things that might point to yes, Money has been a growing Godette that has become more powerful in recent decades:-

-Money is an abstract entity, given influence by the combined will of those who use it's influence.

-It has existed within a great many cultures for thousands of years and there are few today, if any, that do not madiate trade uasing it.

-While money has become a necessity for modern life and touches all hands, it grows in power when collected together.

-Those who make the purpose of their lives the aquisition of money (of which there are millions) are described as 'worshipping' money.

-Money has 'needs' that have been most successfully expressed by the neoconservative political agenda that envolves removing obsticles from money, allowing it to gather and multiply (interest) regardless of the resources that are displaced to allow this to happen and the cost in human or ecological terms of this swilling effect.

-The increase in debt experienced throughout the financialy focussed world (as opposed to those parts of the world interested in the backward activity of manufacturing) at all levels from personal through institutional to national, creates a class of various influece and power who must answer to the 'will' of money.

Things that make me think that money does not deserve the status of a God:-

Trouser said; I agree Quantum. I've thought for a long time that one of the distinguishing features of gods/goddeses as opposed to say, thought-forms is that the former have complex personalities .. histories, myths, stories, etc. .. and to varying degrees, they are as least as complex as human beings (if not more so) ... they reflect us. We see aspects of ourselves in them. There's a richness of experience there which I just don't associate with simple thought-forms.

-I feel this is true and can not claim that personally I feel money has a 'personality', there is no persona attached to money which in itself, given it's age and all pervasive qualities, seems a little odd.

-I am not sure there are many rituals you can claim belong to the 'worship' of money. Then again might queueing in a bank count as one? What about pin stripe suits and cigars?

I know this is all very tenuous but, I have a notion that money has a persona like an agent provokatuer keeping it hidden to better influence our behavior and protect it's interests.

I know there are Gods who have money as one of their spheres of influence but, this is not what I am trying to get to grips with. Is there a good case to be made for Money (with a capital M). Has anyone else had any twitches about money and it's apparent mindless influence.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:17 / 21.10.06
Definately. I'm a filthy animist, so this should surprise nobody, but I definately have an image in my head of Money as being a living consciousness--maybe not of the same nature or complexity as a God, but being an individual in its own right.

Or rather, a collection of individuals, since people obviously have different ways of relating to money. A guy on the dole has a different relationship to money than a CEO, and they both have a different relationship to money than I do. So the Money-spirit of the CEO might be a certain manner of being, requiring certain forms of worship--banks as temples, workers and the poor as sacrifices, perhaps. Dole Guy's money-spirit would require different interactions: "if I switch to roleys I can make it to the end of the fortight..." would be a sacrifice, willing your giro to please arrive tomorrow would be petitionary prayer.

I've gradually been trying to set up a workable relationship with my money-spirit. I petition it for aid (using hunting money, mostly). I make it offerings on a handy city altar: a junction-box that someone drew a skull on and wrote Dinero underneath. Every so often I dress small-denomination coins in money-drawing oils or powders and leave them on top. If other people leave stuff there I might take it home and see if I can use it in a spell.

My short-term plan is to work with my money-spirit to help increase my own wealth; long-term, I can see my money-spirit becoming a bit of a thorn in the side of some of the bigger money-spirits because my ways of making and using money aren't always going to mesh with their systems very well. I don't know what that might mean for the future of my money-spirit. I think I might need to make it a hat...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:19 / 21.10.06
I've always thought, in less magickal terms, maybe, of money as a separate entity, a non-organic lifeform. So yeah, I can see where you're coming from there.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:19 / 21.10.06
Or basically Mordant's first paragraph.
 
 
redtara
16:12 / 21.10.06
Mordant, I hadn't thought that so much of the fanancial world was so obviously reverential to the spirit of money, however unacknowledged. It so clearly is. How did I miss that, just dim I s'pose...

Do you think it is odd that there is no more formal acknowledgement of money as an entity within the cultures that pursue it above all else. If anything, the more grounded in financial gain a culture is the less likely it seems to have a relationship with the spiritual essence of anything, let alone that which drives it. This strikes me as quite wierd. What about you?
 
 
E. Coli from the Milky Way
07:37 / 22.10.06
Hi people, just want to bring back the topic of 13; talking on it, some people said that it was the number of people on last dinner, or people in sabbath rituals; i pointed out that it symbolizes the number of lunar cycles and the so;

Well, it all could be the same thing; just have ended reading The Christ Conspirancy, by Acharya S, a mind-blowing book wich analyzes Bible from the prespective of symbolic language really talking about astronomy/astrology, and the relation of the gospels to a lot of old pagan traditions. And it works! So, the 12 apostles are really the 12 houses of zodiac, jesus christ is really the sun (as it is too Krishna,Dionisius, Horus, etc), and maybe all that rituals pointed with 13 people are a symbolic perpetuation of this kind of ideas.

This post doesn't give any justice to the superb work Acharya has done in the matter of comparative religion, etymologie. A very good book, i think.

BTW, a curious data explained in the book is that there is a israelian god called "Baal Berith", wich is the "Lord of the Alliances"

Good stuff
 
 
EmberLeo
18:35 / 23.10.06
I have a little book about 13 that's kind of fun. It's called 13: The Story of the World's Most Notorious Superstition, and goes over a curious variety of 13 superstition Americana.

--Ember--
 
 
Quantum
00:30 / 24.10.06
I'll start a thread to discuss it.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
10:45 / 29.10.06
Really really really stupid question.

Is there any place posting in this forum for someone who is basically a rationalist and doesn't believe "magic(k)" exists? Or should i just stay out of it?

I've got a sort of anthropological/sociological interest in religion, theology and religious history, and an interest in mythology and "unexplained" type odd stuff, all of which would seem to be covered by this forum, but i'm kind of put off it by the fact that, well, just about everyone here seems to just accept as fact that magic(k) "works" - is this a Barbelith-wide consensus which i am therefore outside of, or does it just reflect the subset of Barbelith which posts particularly in the Temple? And is the perspective of a "non-believer" at all welcome here?

[really really hopes this doesn't open a big ugly can of worms...]
 
 
Papess
11:58 / 29.10.06
Scientific method applied to Temple

Fictional vs. Real Magic

Scientific Analysis of Ritual Effects in the Lab.

Quantum Physics and Magical Theory

Why Magic?

Why no proof?

Talk to the Cynic.

We can't forget, Useful Techniques for a Well Rounded Sorceror.

I think if you want to reconcile science and magick, you have come to the right place. Barbelith has been trying to do that for years. I am cerrtain there are more threads on this subject. Those are off the top.
 
 
Quantum
11:59 / 29.10.06
Plenty of people post here who don't believe in magic. Feel free, as long as you remember that it's like religion- you might not agree with someone on it but it's important to them no matter how silly it seems to you, and can become an emotive issue. Keep in mind that some people have been in your position and gone on to believe in magic, for rational reasons, and have convincing (for them, actually I mean me) arguments to support their beliefs.

What did you want to discuss? Anthropological perspectives on magic? Why people believe in magic? Actual ritual practice?
 
  

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