BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Temple >

Why raise spirits above humanity?

  
 
Unconditional Love
14:27 / 25.04.05
Is it possible to work magic from a purely human perspective, unfounded within a frame work of spirits. one notion would be for example that myths and pantheons act as metaphors for unconscious processes. another idea would be that perhaps that human beings have an innate energy which can be moulded by the practitioner.

Why has humanity turned to outside forces for reverence?
is this in someway like a child needing parents?
do we worship gods and goddesses because it reflects our own individual psychology?

are we perhaps using a modelling system similar to those presented by nlp? could assuming a god form be as simple as that?

does it reflect a lack of control we feel over our environment, becoming a sustitute form of power, and percieved control.

or is it pure escapism to fantasise away the realities of everyday living?

why raise spirits above humanity? why is magic often percieved as an outside force that needs to be invoked, or somehow gained? rather than say an internal human function which needs no system or cultural ideaology to contain it?
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
15:00 / 25.04.05
Hmm...there is the theory, is there not, that the present state of consciousness is likely a degenerate mutation from the natural Bicameral Mind of pre-agricultural man.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
15:05 / 25.04.05
Sorry that link came out a bit funny.

http://www.neo-tech.com/neotech/discovery/nt3.html

Try that, or look here : http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Very interesting theories.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
15:56 / 25.04.05
The way I see it, "Spirits" are the personification of aspects of our reality, and Spirit-based magical systems are about trying to relate to these components of reality. It's about building a bridge between your own human consciousness and other principles at work in the world.

An altar service for a God of War gives you more of an understanding of those mysteries and the role they play within the world. It's not about raising "the other" above humanity, but about understanding it through direct interaction.

To work within an entirely human focused magical system would perhaps be to the exclusion of all those things in our reality that are not human, and I think that's what a lot of spirit-based work seems to be concerned with.
 
 
Unconditional Love
21:30 / 25.04.05
the julian jaynes stuff is great, very thought provoking, i think burroughs mentioned him in a interview once with relation to language as a virus. also jaynes has helped me understand a little of my own psychology or at least given me another way to percieve it, very insightful.

not so keen on the neo tech stuff, very visionary, but too large and encompassing in its goal for me at present, never the less some more intresting if challenging insights.

perhaps your right about that gypsy, maybe it would remove the element of working with other elements of reality, could you explain more of that,ive had tangible experiences while working with papa gede for example, having a small cooker misdelivered to my address when i never had one or could afford one. it worked really well, but part of me put it down to synchronicity, at the time in the working i recognising death as a force, rather than a state my body would be in one day, and that seems to make all the difference by personifying i could engage in communication and have a relationship with what i percieved to be death at the time.

i am thinking could i find my own death in me for example and work with awareness of my own death rather than personifying it? it seems to be a very powerful force and when combined with hunger and a real need for something to cook with it works vey well, the fear of death propels something from the body perhaps, or perhaps it attracts other aspects of reality?
 
 
Unconditional Love
14:08 / 20.10.05
I am thinking this through again, something has happened in my life that means at the moment for me working with gods and goddesses and similar entities is out of the question.

Shaping Formless Fire: Distilling the Quintessence of Magick by stephen mace, seems like a good direction for me to go in at the moment, blurb from the book follows

*****Magick depends upon no abstract philosophies, and doing it requires neither devotion to any god or demon nor knowledge of the True Keys of the Mysteries. Instead it is a technique for recognizing and manipulating psychic energy, both within the psyche and outside it, and for acquiring the mental skills we need to do this effectively. If the details of this technique can seem involved, well, the psyche is a complicated instrument, and psychic energy is slippery stuff to deal with. We must learn to manage it within our psyches and also to split it off so it can act independently to produce the "meaningful coincidences" we require.

Magick is a psychic technology, a collection of observations about psychic energy and the techniques for manipulating it. Shaping Formless Fire presents these with a simple elegance that contradicts the notion that magick must remain a hidden art. There is psychic energy with us and all around us. We use its power to make our worlds, and to master it is to learn how to make the worlds we require. To see it as merely the way we perceive the world is to put ourselves at its mercy, and forfeit its power.*****

This fits with what i have felt and learnt to manipulate from practising chi gung, kung fu etc yet also seems to provide a familiar magickal frame work for me to work with. It also fits in with the everyday acts of magic that i have performed, what some people have termed direct magic.

It raises more question to me about the so called energy models of eastern practices and how psychism may act as a western take on that phenomena. I ve yet to read Shaping Formless Fire so will see how it fits with my own experiences.
 
 
sine
05:28 / 21.10.05
I'm sure I'm retracing old ground here, but...

I'm not sure that one need draw such sharp borders. Look at Jung's notion of the archetype as psychoid in synchronicty, an active symbolic bridge between the subjective and objective - neither wholly "out there" nor "in here", part of us without being exclusive to us, an agent creating physical events (such as, what was the term? "Catalytic exteriorizations"? Something like that. The explosions in Freud's bookshelves.) and encountered in dreams. Archetypes are quintessentially human, they encode human patterns and mythically inform our actions - one might even say they are the building blocks of our identities, yet we are not limited to expressing one or another. Though they held in common, our interactions with them are far from uniform, and we have variable attractions to and sympathies with them. They transcend us, or we transcend them, or both.

Since most of the modern takes on magick assume some form of "direct", though not causal, connexion between the objective and subjective, it isn't hard to assimilate that notion into spirit work. The mystic jumps straight to the realization that if two systems are connected (mind and world), they are in fact one system, and thenceforth assumes a panpsychic unity with the Universe/God. A certain type of polytheist (me) interjects with "that which connects, divides" and treats the bridges as individuals.
 
 
Unconditional Love
11:14 / 21.10.05
For me the main point of import is this, there is no need of culturally defined god/goddess personas to work in this area. Forces may be personified, just as language may be personified, but theres no need for a fixed attribution system, a tradition. Having said that there is a need for a consistent system and structure to work within but that doesnt have to be culturally specific.

For example i have been working with an altar that consists of old parchment a quill a box of pens and pencils and paint brushes, invoking forces of art creativity writing and language to manifest within me and in my life, so far a great success, no need for a culturally specific spiritual structure to make those forces manifest, i recognise that the forces i am worshipping are within me and exsist outside of me in the forms that surround me. It doesnt need a cultural identity to manifest, it requires adoration, focus and concentration.

My point i suppose is this working with forces of any kind requires first and foremost a human being to be there to do so, at the cetre of all magickal/spiritual practice is the desire of a human being to attain, to know, whatever may drive them. There is no god or goddess driving this, no spirit, just humanity, plain and simple trying to understand and attain its ideas of divinity.
 
 
Unconditional Love
11:26 / 21.10.05
Another import thing i have noticed about myself and am trying to attend to is this, as a magician tries to become more magickal or divine, i can see a tendency in myself to become less human in my own self reflection process and also to create an identity that is more in line with the spirits i had previously been working with. Things that are in themselves even as abstarct notions far removed from everyday life.

For me personally abandoning gods, goddesses and spirits is a way to reclaim my identity as a simple normal everyday human being, casting off the expectations of religous institutions and magickal doctrines and being as human as possible, with all my failings, suffering and pain, and all my joy, love and pleasure. These feelings and experiences are common to me and humanity, not to gods, goddesses and spirits.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
11:33 / 21.10.05
I'm not sure I agree with you there, Nephilim. I mean, I completely agree that there doesn't "need" to be a spirit or whatever involved for magic to be performed; I got along perfectly well as a godless sorceror for years. Your altar sounds excellent, and a great way to celebrate and invoke the forces of creativity.

Yet I don't think you lose anything by allowing a spirit to be your interface between the forces and mysteries you want to work with. If you take the "godform" approach, where you the magician are merely personifying those forces as a sort of shorthand way of dealing with them, then sure--it's pretty pointless. You're dragging in a lot of cultural baggage that you don't really need.

But if you open yourself up to the possibility that spirits are not merely cultural constructs but intelligences, independant entities with their own personalities, drives and agendas, everything changes. You see everything differently. By forming a relationship with such a being, you introduce the possibility of gaining access to a new and perhaps more potent version of the mysteries that you want to work with, focused through the lens of a consciousness beyond human comprehension.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:48 / 21.10.05
That's all very well, but it depends on what your goals are and what you are actually trying to accomplish within the rather large and varied field of magic. If you are trying to tap into the mysteries of creativity, then yeah, a quill pen and writing paper might be an admirable non-anthropomorphised focus for ritual work and I daresay you will get great results.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in exploring the mysteries of love, romance, sorrow, compassion, and beauty - then I think you'll find that speaking to the personality that is Erzulie Freda will probably be more profitable to your goals than striking up a conversation with a hairbrush or lipstick.

If you want to grasp the mysteries of the Runes and attain a deeper understanding of their powers and secrets, then a conversation with Odin is going to be a must.

If you need to do some heavy work with the spirits of the dead, it is probably worthwhile striking up a relationship with a deity who looks after that territory for permission, guidance and protection.

If you want to learn more about Tarot, you might benefit from speaking to Thoth or Hermes.

I think there can be specific reasons why it is valuable and worthwhile to develop relationships with deities. It is entirely possible to work a humanist form of magic - but it depends what you are trying to accomplish and what your goals are. I would find it rather limiting myself, since I think that there is a damn sight more in the Universe than that which is bound by human consciousness - and the magic that I practice deals in these areas. I think you are likely to get more conversation and personal interaction out of a self-aware anthropomorphised deity that has been around for a few thousand years, than you are out of a hatstand. Which I think is why deities are often represented in anthropomorphic form in the first place. If you personify deity as something that can speak and interact like a human, then it will be easier for humans to speak and interact with it than if you personified it as an abstract concept or inanimate object.

As for "raising spirits above humanity", I think that betrays a load of weird assumptions about interaction with spirits. You don't raise these things above humanity, anymore than you raise what they represent above humanity. Do you raise love above humanity? Do you raise the warrior spirit above humanity? Do you raise fertility above humanity? No. You try to speak and interact with these things and develop a mutually beneficial relationship by which something more is learned about the universe in which you exist. Anthropomorphic personalities makes this easier.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:50 / 21.10.05
Or in other words, what Mordant said.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:04 / 21.10.05
(One small aside: If you want to grasp the mysteries of the Runes and attain a deeper understanding of their powers and secrets, then a conversation with Odin is going to be a must is true, but I wouldn't recommend that an absolute beginner go rushing off to knock on the Old Man's door. Better to get a basic understanding of the runes and the associated pantheon first, so that you know what you're dealing with before you get too involved. If you start to get good with the runes, you'll probably draw his gaze anyhow...)
 
 
Unconditional Love
12:32 / 21.10.05
my problem stems from this, recently ive discovered a traumatic childhood wound, as a result ive started changing and started to heal. also i have noticed other things, the spirits ive been working with for most of my life have made use of that wound to possess and control me at points in my life, they come from both sides of the fence, i largely have a christain perspective on this, they have both been using this wound to control and contort my behaviour in certain situations to there respective advantages. Now i know how i was being manipulated i am more than a little pissed off, and funnily enough these attendent spirits voices have become less and less and started to piss off completely.

leaving just me and my own humanity, thank fuck.Some peace.

My solution is this, i dont want a relationship with any kind of fucking spirit creature ever a fucking again, abusive fucking pieces of shit that every single fucking piece of shit one of them that they all fucking are.

and thats the way its gonna be. fuck god.all the fucks.

That aside, ive rediscovered myself, and just what it means to be me and be human and the magic of just being human and not trying to be anything else but that. I can enjoy normal everyday life things again, where as before i couldnt. I am considering abandoning everything magickal entirely. books off to the library, and destroying all my altars. filling my life up with techno gadgets,and aborting my magickal self entirely.

But on the other hand , the voice of utility says, why chuck away something thats been useful to you for so many years now, clear house, and make it all on your terms, allow the natural environment in to the point where it isnt detrimental, but why invite anything else thats going to fuck you up and use you again along, not much point in that is there.

So use a mental/force/energy based model, forget entities, forget any kind of religion or tradition. everything i encountered at one point or another found the weakness of that wound within me and started to use it. I need to use my own force, my own strenght, My wound is now my weapon not theres any more.

For me as i stand now everything is humanity and nature first.
 
 
Unconditional Love
12:35 / 21.10.05
the personification angle works really well, this is why i think, one of the most intimate and personal relationships we develope as a child is too a cuddly toy or imaginary friend, religions come along and paste themselves over the top.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
13:10 / 21.10.05
In my experience of it, working with deities and spirits can be fucking hard work, extremely demanding, sometimes exhausting and always challenging. But the benefits are there, which is why I do it. If your experiences are mostly negative and you are not able to find a healthy, positive and productive balance with this stuff - as your above outburst suggests - then I reckon you should probably stop. Leave it alone. Don't go there. Heavy spirit work is not for everybody. It is not a walk in the park. It is not an easy ride. Chill. Do something else.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:22 / 21.10.05
There are times when somebody's suffered such emotional damage that their relationships in general may be unhealthy, and this extends to those relationships formed with discarnate beings, be they independant spirits or aspects of that person's own personality. Until the situation is resolved, that person will tend to find hirself in damaging relationships again and again, and will come to assume that all relationships are damaging by their very nature. (Spirit-work can be very healing, but I think that the person involved must already have begun healing themselves for that to happen.)

Nephilim, a suggestion: Imagine that your post was written by a woman, and replace every instance of "spirits" or "Gods" with the word "men." Do you see what I mean?

I also have to take issue with the imaginary friend/cuddly toy analogy, which I find more than a little condescending.
 
 
Unconditional Love
14:50 / 21.10.05
With the cuddle toy analogy i am not comparing gods to toys, far from it, but i recognise that the mechanism in the relationship is similar, but not the same.

Yeah a big long break is completely in order.

end of story.
 
 
Sammaelhain
05:42 / 26.10.05
I'd add that so far as being manipulated, getting away from the negative relationships will be useful, but won't fix what is broken.

Given the name you're using here, I have to say I find it interesting that you're intently focusing on humanity, or dealing exclusively with human "energies".

Though it's not necessarily related, I thought I'd note that for me, transformative work I did involving the nephilim mythos drove an even bigger wedge between me and godform related magick than was already there.

I see this as sort of a natural expression of the themes in the nephilim mythology.

The fact that you have worked with spirits is going to make it pretty hard to divorce yourself from their presence, I find they migrate toward the ground zero of a magickal operation like moths to a flame.

Your wounds are also, perhaps even ultimately human in nature, and that's something worth considering while looking at your situation.
 
 
LykeX
19:05 / 26.10.05
Forces may be personified, just as language may be personified, but theres no need for a fixed attribution system, a tradition.

A fixed tradition may not be necessary to practice magick, but it does serve a valuable function when relating to other human beings. A tradition allows you to talk to other practitioners in a coherent manner and to replicate other people's experiments precisely.
You can see it a bit like language: if you're only going to use it as a personal system of notation, then you can make it up from scratch, but to have a conversation, you need at least some basic agreement about what means what.
The more your language/system differs from others', the more careful you have to be to avoid misunderstandings.
 
  
Add Your Reply