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'Foreign' Magic

  
 
Quantum
23:46 / 20.09.07
I've noticed that it's relatively common for occultists to adopt practices which have a flavour of the 'exotic' about them. I'd like to distinguish this from cultural appropriation, where you steal a culture's magic wholesale, but I think they're related.
What I'm talking about is the adoption of an unfamiliar practice, made glamorous by the unfamiliar trappings and language, like the weekend hippy who name drops Vishnu or the Vanir or Venus to justify their new age beliefs.

I think there's a tendency in people to be attracted to the exotic or unfamiliar, and in my experience it's much more likely for someone to be attracted to a magical practice or cultural concepts that are from far away or long ago rather than anything that smacks of the familiar or mundane.

For example, when I was working in the magic shop (in the south of England) people were more likely to buy a book on Italian Witchcraft or the Chaldean Oracular tradition or Feng Shui than traditional English folk magic.
I don't want to say people should stick to their ethnic magical group (if I do then kill me please) but there's a taste for the exotic which can't be ignored. Several of the best magicians I know work in fields they weren't born into and do outstanding groundbreaking work, but what I'd like to discuss is the attraction to the unfamiliar for it's own sake- why is it cooler to do spells from distant lands? Why will people take up a practice from a thousand miles away or a thousand years ago instead of what's on their doorstep?

Why is magic from far away or long ago so attractive?
 
 
Papess
23:51 / 20.09.07
Why will people take up a practice from a thousand miles away or a thousand years ago instead of what's on their doorstep?

The Kingdom Hall? The Catholic church down the way? The Synagogue? None of them will have me.
 
 
petunia
00:15 / 21.09.07
Why will people take up a practice from a thousand miles away or a thousand years ago instead of what's on their doorstep?

'Long ago' = 'Tried and tested'
'Far away' = 'Not what i grew up with, so i'm able to approach it without loaded knowledge'

For me, Zen makes sense as a choice because it just makes sense. I don't go for the traditional zen, so i can't say i play into the mystique of the foreign spirituality (tho that may well have attracted me to start with). I approached it because what i read about it clicked. It's not from a thousand miles away, it's from right here, inside of me.

I bring that 'foreign' tradition (quotes because it seems pretty universal, and writing a country to it seems absurd) right here. It's this air in England that i breathe, it's these European trees that i commune with.

I would hope that anyone else's spiritual/magical choices are spurred by the same feeling - it's the inside that tells you what's yours. I don't see the need to locate a practice in any place or time once it has become yours, apart from a storytelling perspective. As soon as you start using something properly (or it starts 'using' you), it comes home to wherever it is and original development of knowledge of a skill/method becomes irrelevant.

Much like asking 'why do people always pick Japanese cars?', it's whatever works for people.

But then there is a definite Mystique in the foreign. Like you point out, people avoid the Mundane, the Here.It's been common practice throughout the history of humanity to try to negate real life by valuing the Beyond, the Glorious etc. So for many people, magic and Spirituality are aimed square at avoiding Actual Real Life as it happens here and now. If you chose magic/spirituality as your opium, then it makes sense to dream up as foreign a practice as you can. The buddha never had to wipe his arse, you know?

Also, as Olu said, Christ never worked it for me and native pre-Christian faiths had pretty much zero visibility in my hometown and culture.
 
 
This Sunday
00:50 / 21.09.07
I've tried to dip into my Euro-descended roots for magick/world-approach but I end up a babbly confused mess, put some effort into exploring buddhism and various other efforts from around the world, but whether it's Japanese or something even from another Native tribe, my brain locks up on what appear to be very basic concepts for some other people. Then I go back to the Tsalagi stuff, which seems sensible and workable to me.

I know much of my approach is probably coming from time-tested long-ago stuff, but it feels intensely contemporary and fresh.

I get the impression a lot of people are unhappy with the practice they are born into, at least those with a distinctly christian background, and that it's an escape out of that feeling of opression (?) into something that some feel they can half make-up and others honestly believe in and find functional in a structured but less opressive way. Maybe. It's the half make-up folks who grate on me, but I don't see any problem jumping ship from a religious/spiritual framework, as opposed to a politically or costume-based frame. I would like to believe - and basically do - that there is some functional material in christianity or in attempts even at new methodologies.

Neither old nor foreign are really virtues, those.
 
 
EmberLeo
06:25 / 21.09.07
Hmm, well, I suppose my work with the Vanir qualifies as Long Ago and Far Away, but it also qualifies as ancestral, as would anything I did to follow the Celtic pings. It being old isn't what gets me - in fact that often frustrates the heck out of me. It being far away doesn't register - I've always been concious of being both born and raised in California, and descended from a mix of Northern Europeans.

So I guess the question becomes why Umbanda? That doesn't have as much of the Long Ago, though it definitely DOES have Tried and Tested.

For Far Away? Hmm... Well, I couldn't do Santeria, which has more following nearby, because they happen to be much more traditionalistic. I do feel pulled more to the Lwa as per New Orleans (and similar States-influenced) Voodoo than I do to the Brazilian stuff, but the Brazilian style house is what's available within that larger wavelength.

So... Um... I can address how I, personally, ended up with what seems to be Exotic Stuff on my doorstep, but the answer, ultimately, is that I'm attracted to the less exotic aspects of it, and took my nearest option along those lines.

I do think that there's some element of... how to put this... A metaphor: Why draw Dragons instead of Horses? Horses are right there. Dragons aren't. Why not draw what you know? Because if I draw Dragons, nobody can tell me for sure that I did it wrong.

--Ember--
 
 
Katherine
07:41 / 21.09.07
I think partly it has to do with the stories/myths for some beliefs. A fair few of the foreign ones are more easily available than ones closer to home, not to mention usually more colourful and dramatic but then that could be the lure of the exotic talking.

Also as a child I was told more stories from foreign cultures than I was my own, thinking on this I guess it's the amount of stuff there which is there for children and accessable. I do think we are influenced in part by stuff we have grown up with, if you think about the bible stories are set in foreign lands as well.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
07:54 / 21.09.07
Quantum, some points:

Firstly, cultural appropriation is more complex than "stealing a culture's magic wholesale." Secondly, I think it might be helpful to give closer scrutiny to how - for the purposes of this discussion - one defines "exotic" or "unfamiliar" - as well as "long ago" and "far away". Is Italian Witchcraft really that "far away"? Is, say, John Dee's Enochian system - "long ago"?

...people were more likely to buy a book on Italian Witchcraft or the Chaldean Oracular tradition or Feng Shui than traditional English folk magic.

What do you mean by "traditional English folk magic" here? Does the Golden Dawn system count? Or Chaos Magic, for that matter (both historically recent and rooted in solid post-Enlightenment European thought)? Druidry? Gardnerian Witchcraft?

You seem to me to be assuming that just because someone is, say, UK-born, then they will "naturally" have some predisposition towards this "english folk magic" (whatever that is) hence your question why do people go for the exotic rather than the obvious? But I don't think it is obvious. As shockoftheother pointed out in the Praxis thread:

One thing that's rarely addressed is the status of most of us as converts, in that we did not grow up thinking in magical terms, and the way in which this conversion takes place.

Generally, I think it's fair to say that in the UK, there isn't actually an obvious and easily accessible quintessentially "english" approach to magic that people are ignoring in favour of, say, Feng Shui or Core Shamanism - if there is one at all, then people have to look, and look hard for it. We're actually more familiar - generally speaking - with aspects of South Asian magical practices than say, Cunning men got up to in 19th century Yorkshire, because South Asian concepts been blending into European culture for the last two hundred years or so (albeit often being wildly reshaped in the process).
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
08:18 / 21.09.07
Well, shrugs of helplessness really. If you're an Anglo and you're not really drawn to mainstream Christianity, there really is only long ago and far away. I mean, my native religion is Roman Catholicism. Please.

While there are elements of surviving traditions that can still be picked up and worked with, if you're from the UK or elsewhere in Northern Europe and you want a coherent nonChristian spiritual focus you basically have one of three choices. One, you can enter one of the various modern traditions that are appearing nowadays (tho' most of them at least pretend like they're based on long-ago, far-away, or both). Two, you can look to the religions of other cultures, which inevitably puts you Far Away. Three, you can scratch around for the traditions that existed on or near your own Northern European turf before Christianity, which takes one to Long Ago since you have to go back a fair bit. (If you're an American I guss you have option 4, which is to see if you can find a way into the local spiritual traditions, something that raises a whoooole lot of issues. But I'm not an American.)

The other thing is (and this is me speaking as a voices-in-the-head person), long ago and far away are not as long ago and far away as they once were. Long ago is yawning and stretching, and you may find yourself running into it as it potters down to the newsagent in its pyjama trousers. Far away has a flat in London and it's opened up a couple of caffs. Older beings are remembering themselves. Personages from other traditions are tapping English magicians on the shoulder. What you end up doing depends on Them as much as you.
 
 
Saturn's nod
08:18 / 21.09.07
Generally, I think it's fair to say that in the UK, there isn't actually an obvious and easily accessible quintessentially "english" approach to magic that people are ignoring in favour of, say, Feng Shui or Core Shamanism - if there is one at all, then people have to look, and look hard for it.

Really? That's not my experience (but I usually wonder if I can find a place in the discourse of 'magic' at all). I guess I inferred from the power of the indigenous folk myths I encountered in childrens' story books - lots of dreamtime stories and other aboriginal myths from australian, african, and U.S. relatives! - that the indigenous relationship was essentially a magical one and started to consider the folk elements in my experience as magical encounter. But I was growing up in a rural situation, on a small holding, growing veg, tending fires and so on, and participating in thousand-year-old rituals with the village community, maybe that's atypical. I wonder though if it's just unnoticed rather than not present?

There's so much to hand in the myths of Britain: not only the traditional 'matter of Britain': Parsifal, the Lady of the Lake, Arthur, in the romantic myths, but the old stories about the trees and herbs and stones that exist on these islands. There are dozens of plants and animals sharing the situation you live in, even in town; mosses, fungi, insects, bacteria and so on as well as the more obvious leafy plants and warm-blooded creatures. Many of them have a place in old folk stories and I find them teaching lessons when I pay attention.

I'm interested in this question because I look at for example Eurovision entries from Britain which seem strangely divorced from the folk heritage which I see being drawn upon effectively by other nations to create good performances. It seems both close at hand and obvious to me, so I boggle at why it's being shut off and what has caused that, but I'm hearing that it's not obvious to others. Perhaps I under-rate the depth of my engagement, or the luck of my circumstances.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
08:18 / 21.09.07
Sorry, x-post.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
08:44 / 21.09.07
But I was growing up in a rural situation, on a small holding, growing veg, tending fires and so on, and participating in thousand-year-old rituals with the village community, maybe that's atypical. I wonder though if it's just unnoticed rather than not present?

It is kind of atypical, yeah. I mean, I was fascinated by British folklore while I was growing up, and had a natural interest in plants, fungi and animals.

But I couldn't have said that it really hung together in a coherent way; it was all patchwork, gleanings; there was no sense that I could utilise it as a spiritual focus. It's starting to come together for me now, of course, since I have a framework within which to operate, but that framework was not apparent to me while I was searching. I mean, it's there, but you're estranged from it, it's not presented as something you can live, it's all "and this superstition was even being reported as late as the 1950s, ho ho." Or you get sold a crap version of it, Bowdlerised at best, Disneyfied at worst. And this is a country kid who grew up in suburban-verging-on-rural areas, was given Morte D'Arthur and The White Goddess to read, and got to run around in the woods a lot. What about someone who grew up in a high-rise in Croydon? Other kids certainly weren't into the stuff I was into, I can tell you that.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:09 / 21.09.07
Well I practice Voodoo, but I'm an English magician. That probably seems a bit weird, at first glance, but I have a hugely multicultural spin on what it means to be English. For a start, go just two generations back in my own ancestral history and you're in Scotland on the one hand and you're in Italy/Sicily on the other. And that's just two generations back. I don't think you can really talk about "English culture and tradition" without recognising all of the other cultural influences that have formed it and continue to. I'm fairly certain that the events of the Old and New Testaments did not take place in and around Tunbridge Wells, yet the influence of Christianity has shaped our culture for thousands of years.

An anthropology Phd randomly told me the other day that there was strong evidence for trade routes, and therefore most likely some level of cultural exchange, taking place between the British Isles and North Africa from before the Roman conquest. I don't have a source for this, I'm afraid, as it was a pub conversation, but it's food for thought when you consider the magical landscape of this country and the various influences that have shaped it over the centuries. Some more hidden and overlooked by history than others.

Ultimately, Voodoo as I practice it (which has more in common with the New Orleans approach than anything else) is all about place and ancestors. I honour the Seven African Powers and Les Mysteres, the Gods of Africa. I honour the Holy Land of Guinea and the Holy City of Ile Ife, the cradle of the mysteries. I honour my magical ancestors, named and unnamed: the Snake Priests and Two-Headed Doctors, Voodoo Queens and Pythonesses, who have carried this tradition from the heart of Africa - long ago and far away - by many and varied circuitous routes, to these shores. Their work, their lives and their experiences in this City have shaped the living nature of Voodoo as it exists in London. I honour and raise a glass to all of that. But none of this is the idealisation of a mythic golden age. There is cruelty, oppression, barbarity, greed, ignorance, pain and suffering in the story of how African magic came to be practised in England's green and pleasant land. You can't pretend that didn't happen. To honour these traditions, you have to take that on board, which is not the same as allowing yourself to drown in self-indulgent white guilt which doesn't help anything. I love and honour my African spiritual ancestors with all of my heart, and I will do my level best to express these mysteries to the best of my ability in my life and work as an English magician.

There is no getting away from the fact that I am an English magician, regardless of my blood ancestors or the ethnicity of the ancestor magicians that have bequeathed me the framework I operate within, I'm practicing on English soil. I grew up in this culture. Voodoo is about place as much as it is about ancestors, and all places have their spirits, their magic and their mysteries. I'm from Newcastle, that's my hometown, and those are my colours. There is magic there which I draw on. I have my places of power and deep connections to the landscape of my home. I've lived in London for ten years, and I have intense relationships with many places in the landscape of this City on both sides of the river. I've lived and breathed magic at these locations, crossroads, boneyards, woods, secret wild places, haunted buildings, sacred churches, old monuments, dicey parts of town. This is the heart of my magic. When you pour rum for Papa Ghede in a London boneyard, you may be looking at the Mysteries through a Haitian lens, but the dead of Lewisham are not going to speak to you in French Creole (or maybe one or two of them will, such is the nature of my City). Don't go looking for tropical woods in English forests, different powers have their sway who need to be tipped a nod and will reveal secrets of their own if you know the right language. More than anything, I've only been able to learn that language by studying diligently at the foot of one of the remaining great cultures who haven't forgotten.

But England is not exactly quiet on the magic front either. Culturally, magic has been stamped out in the west. We have been told that there is no such thing. It doesn't exist. Fairy stories and make-believe. From the Reformation onwards into our post-Industrial age, there have been concerted efforts to step away from a "belief" in such things. But magic is not about "belief" at all, so much as a means of relating to the mysteries of nature, consciousness, our bodies, our emotions, our planet, our universe, and the multi-faceted kaleidoscope of experience that is the human condition. By stepping away from these processes of understanding and strategies of action, and consigning it all to the waste-bin of historical fancy, we're denying ourselves the tools that we need to halt this blind and headlong rush to extinction and environmental disaster that various pessimistic voices would have us believe awaits around the corner.

But for a country that, on the surface of things, doesn't believe in magic and is actively opposed to this mode of thinking - it does have the habit of churning out magicians and continually driving a discourse on such matters within a culture where that discourse is largely scorned and unwelcome. I think that's pretty amazing really, when you think about it, so I honour all of those guys. What would the international magical landscape look like without John Dee and Edward Kelly, the Golden Dawn magicians, the Theosophical Society, Aleister Crowley and his crowd, Dadaji, Dion Fortune, Austin Osman Spare, TOPY, the Chaos magicians of Leeds and London and elsewhere? In a very real and pragmatic way, this is my tradition and these are my magical ancestors. I am very much indebted to all of these people who have kept the mysteries active and alive in my country, in my City, in centuries when such things have been totally unwelcome and otherwise edited out of culture and history - or occulted, if you like. Fucking hell! What an accomplishment is that! Buy them a round of drinks and raise a glass.

I honour all of these different strands that have brought me magic. Nothing comes into existence without a backstory, and everything we know today has its roots somewhere in the past. What we might romantice as "long ago and far away" was at one point the living reality of our ancestors, on whose shoulders we stand. The backstories of human lives tend to be extremely complex and convoluted, and the history of magic is no different, because these mysteries have been treasured and transmitted to us through the medium of human lives. Real human beings, who lived and loved and died, and left us their glimpses of magic. We take these glimpses and widen them into the contemporary moment through our own practice, so that the fires and passions of the mysteries burn brightly for a time, maybe bright enough so that after we're gone, someone else will be able to take something from the embers and start a fire of their own.
 
 
Unconditional Love
12:23 / 21.09.07
Well its all here now in one form or another, nothing ever really goes away, just adapts and survives, and id question the idea that people convert to magic and do not grow up with magic, alot of very early child psychology has a huge amount in common with magical practice, before alot of the social scripts have taken any real root.

How much of magic is actually encultured? and how much is dependent on natural psychology and relationships free of cultural context?
 
 
grant
13:48 / 21.09.07
Gypsy Lantern: that was great.

One thing that caught my eye:
there was strong evidence for trade routes, and therefore most likely some level of cultural exchange, taking place between the British Isles and North Africa from before the Roman conquest.

There were also, a few centuries later, Vikings in Constantinople (where they left runic inscriptions on Byzantine architecture). And Leif Erikson brought a Turk (or possibly a Hungarian) to North America.

And, long before that, there's some evidence (contested, but not dismissed) of Chinese contacts with Olmecs, and (even more tenuously) Egyptian mummies with traces of South American cocaine in their bodies.

So the idea of "far away" might have some currency, but human beings tend to move around a lot. We're always going places and trying to make sense of things over there.

Intercontinental travel isn't a new thing.
 
 
Quantum
18:50 / 21.09.07
Wow, thanks for the great replies everyone.

Firstly, cultural appropriation is more complex than "stealing a culture's magic wholesale." Teh Trouserian

Absolutely, I agree. I did write that at three o'clock in the morning after too much red wine, so perhaps I wasn't at my clearest. I wanted to guide the discussion more toward personal motivations for following paths that aren't local, rather than cultural appropriation which is a big can of worms we can examine elsewhere.

Secondly, I think it might be helpful to give closer scrutiny to how - for the purposes of this discussion - one defines "exotic" or "unfamiliar" - as well as "long ago" and "far away".

I'm thinking stuff from a culture that's probably in a different language, with different assumptions and values, often geographically distant or from the far past, with a flavour of mystery and difference, whatever the exciting opposite of 'mundane' is. I'd define all those terms negatively, by what they aren't- 'not like my ordinary life'. In my mind, anything sufficiently different from what we experience day to day is exotic enough to be attractive. Long ago can be the 1920s or even the 1980s, far away can be Ireland or even the next town. It all depends on what time and place you put on a pedestal.
I don't think it's just magic of course, it's true in all areas of life. Foreign food, dress, and customs are fascinating because they are unusual to us.

You seem to me to be assuming that just because someone is, say, UK-born, then they will "naturally" have some predisposition towards this "english folk magic"

No, I think you're misunderstanding me. I wasn't thinking people should stick to their local trad or we should have English magic for English magicians, I was wondering what it is that attracts people to 'foreign' practice. I think Aunt Beast pretty much nailed it in my opinion;

If you're an Anglo and you're not really drawn to mainstream Christianity, there really is only long ago and far away.

I think that's the core of it, that the cultural dominance of Christianity means that if none of it's flavours are your cup of tea then you have to turn elsewhere (although as an aside I would say that Catholicism for example is from long ago and far away, services are in a foreign tongue etc).

Gypsy, great post, although I do have one quibble; I'm from Newcastle, that's my hometown, and those are my colours
Heh, black and white aren't colours, magpie.
 
 
Sublime Pathos
04:14 / 28.09.07
With Magick we want to step out of the known mundane culture into the unknown. Another culture and another time is the best way to bury ourselves within the other. It's the allure of mystery. It's the attraction of the striptease vs just another nude. All sex is heightened through conflict and that is the effect the mystery religions produce within ourselves.
 
 
Saturn's nod
05:58 / 28.09.07
It's the attraction of the striptease vs just another nude. All sex is heightened through conflict

Offtopic: but, no. This assertion doesn't have any resonance in my experience - quite the opposite, the sexiest thing to me is trust and building a sustainable peaceful future. More than that, your assertion is distasteful as well, given the association with 'sex as conflict' ideas with rape culture. It may be that your particular sexuality is all about conflict, please don't assume that everyone's is.
 
 
Quantum
08:11 / 28.09.07
What Apt said. Also could you explain what All sex is heightened through conflict and that is the effect the mystery religions produce within ourselves means? I don't see how mystery religions heighten sex, through conflict.

Basically, what?
 
 
Unconditional Love
14:08 / 28.09.07
Erm yeah, sex has to be about trust and not conflict in anyway what so ever, this whole kind of battle of the sexes idea is just so damaging to all respective sexualities on many levels.
 
 
Unconditional Love
14:12 / 28.09.07
There is something very wrong with the idea of sex as predatory, it seems like an attempt to seperate sex from love and all the other values love contains.
 
  
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