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[Been meaning to post this for over a week now, but couldn't get it finished/right - I realise though that not posting long posts you want to post just because you're a perfectionist is shit, so here goes.]
I think the Temple is, just round about now, potentially getting to a really interesting point in its development. I'm going to be really pretentious now and number the next few bits of my post.
1.
Let's start with the assumption that there was a time, in Barbelith's early stages, when the dominant or most promiment paradigm could be said to have been a sort of pop chaos magic, which was at the front of the general Barbelith consciousness partly because of a comic book called The Invisibles, and partly because of other things that had influenced said comic book.
So it was all sigils, superheroes and pop stars as 21st century deities, magic as corporate methodology, 23, 11. Hindsight can be a cruel ex, but even now it's not hard to see the appeal of this approach, really. Accessible and often light (where one might have expected obscurism and pomposity - not that these were absent, but, y'know), relatively quick and easy to use, fun, results-based, shiny, sexy, with the slight possibility of making a profit. It all seemed very much of its time and of the zeitgeist - magic as just another useful, interesting, mildly esoteric but ultimately quite throwaway technique for doing cool shit on a day-to-day basis, with (semi)plausible, relatively unthreatening explanations, seemed to crop up in lots of other fiction at the time. Of course the problem with things that seem of their time in a good way at the time, is that they can still seem of their time five years later.
2.
My interpretation is that in the last couple of years, the standard of the critiques of the above approach in the Temple forum, whether relatively restrained sympathetic critiques or full-on casting-out-the-moneylenders stuff, have been of a much higher quality than the defences of the same. They've been better written, and crucially, they've also seemed like a welcome, refreshing change.
The previous paradigm - all that "invoke Neo to help you cross the road, by which we mean the Neo who lives in your head! wank over this picture of Zatanna to get laid! 23!" stuff - had started to seem a bit shallow and dilletantish, a bit too quick and easy, too "take it or leave it". Now, I don't want to slate it entirely - see above - I think that actually there are good arguments that can still be made for all that kind of stuff, and it's not the fault of pop chaos magic itself that a lot of the people who are into it are wankers (see Shaftoe's Rule #23 - No Band Is So Good That They Don't Have Shit Fans - by way of comparison).
The point is, partly through over-familiarity with that stuff, partly through some lazy expressions of it, and partly through a natural cycle of change, people started to become a bit more receptive to the idea that magic should be big and scary in a good way, even if it was only in the way art, or human relationships, can be big and scary in a good way. Magic as something that demands commitment, that rewards study and practice, that has deep roots in the past and in tradition, that can't be explained, that does challenge people, that is bigger than you - a lot of the best writing in the Temple in the past two years or more has been advancing the argument for that kind of magic. I very much doubt I need to name names.
3.
So what I mean by an interesting point in the Temple's development is that we've now got to the point where the new approach to magic (which isn't new at all, of course, outside this context) has become known/recognised to many people on the board. I'm thinking in particular of regular posters who contribute heavily elsewhere, but who don't tend to post much in the Temple, probably because they don't consider themselves to be magical practitioners, even if they have an interest in the subject. Now, I reckon - and this is just a theory - that during what we might call stage 2, above, these people felt very supportive towards what has been posted that challenges the paradigm described in stage 1 - maybe they even felt it was something that should be defended and nurtured and encouraged (I know I did). However, now, there's a significant body of work, as it were, in the form of posts by people including but not limited to (okay, so I will name names now) Gypsy Lantern, Mordant Carnival, and Seth. So maybe what's happening now is that some posters are now familiar enough with what I'll call Big God Magic (for want of a better term) that they're starting to see ways in which they want to critique it, while simultaneously feeling that Big God Magic has been nurtured enough and can now be expected to stand up to such critiques. I think Money $hot's thread has been the flashpoint for this.
(I had a conversation with Gypsy Lantern recently in which I ran this theory past him, and he pointed out that if little more than half a dozen people suddenly stopped posting in the Temple, it could and in all likelihood would revert back to stage 1. This is true and slightly complicates/problematises my theory. However, Gypsy also agreed that he no longer feels as if he's writing in such an oppositional ways anymore - i.e., the initial "what about looking at it this way?" or "I am for a magic which x y z, which is probably news to you all" stage has passed to a certain degree. Generation Hex arguably fits into this theory a bit like a Trojan Horse, with lots of 23s and chaospheres daubed on its flanks.)
Yet more to follow. |
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