Barbelith Underground > Temple > 'Vibrations', 'Energy' etc.

It makes me think that the magician or mystic is using scientific terminology only to add a glossy sheen of legitimacy to his or her dogma. Or that he or she really doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

As anyone who knows me well will attest, I am no fan of the indiscriminate use of terms such as "vibrations" or "energy" (see this post for some earlier reservations) but having said that, I don't think magicians' use of scientific terminology is always about legitimacy - adding the authoritive "voice" of science, as it were in order to lend weight to wibblings which otherwise would be dismissed out of hand.

I've been doing a lot of reading about magic in the post-Englightenment period, and there's a good deal of evidence hat points to eighteenth-century occultists were just as keen on the science of their day as contemporary practitioners nowadays. Moreover, the distinction between science and magic was, in that period, less hard and fast. Mesmer, for example, considered himself to be a Newtonian and, by all accounts, based his theory of "animal magnetism" on Newton's writings about gravitation. Although he was declared a quack in 1784 by the French establishment, but there was a revival of interest in Mesmer's work in the 19th century and a good deal more investigation by the medical profession, and by the 1840's some surgeons & dentists were using mesmerism as a form on anaesthesia.

The writings of Ebenezer Sibly (an 18th-century doctor and freemason who wrote a couple of major works on occultism and astrology) show that he was as keen on Newton as he was on Paracelsus and strove to unite Hermetic philosophy with the emerging scientific theories of the day. Blavatsky was doing much the same thing a century later - praising scientific theories when they appeared to substantiate her hermetic and quasi-Vedic pronouncements, and sharply dismissing them when they didn't. A case in point is the legendary continent of Lemuria - first proposed by zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864 as a hypothetical land-bridge between India, Africa and Madagascor, taken up by Haeckel as a probable "birthplace" of the human race's ape-like ancestors and then taken up later by Blavatsky as the home of the "Third Root-Race" and used by her as part of her rescue of humanity from "the ignomity of simian descent".

But it's not just occultists using these models - Sir Oliver Lodge, who I referred to in my previous post, was still championing the ether/vibrations theory in the early twentieth century, as was Lord Rayleigh.

Ev - yes, Blavatsky was fond of making flat statements with not much in the way of subtantiation, but that seems to be not unusual in that period - try reading Edward Tylor or Max Muller and you'll see much the same writing style - the Victorians didn't suffer from our contemporary diffidence over making declarative statements.

Quants - I spotted someone on an e-list I'm on the other day saying. "Hmmn - that's the second time in three days someone's responded negatively to one of my posts - there must be some bad energy around." I wished for the spontaneous appearence of Haus but the negative vibrational vortexes around Yahoo obviously prevented him from subscribing.