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I find this "hardening of the orthodoxies" stuff more than a bit odd to be honest. The idea that all of these young up-coming voices of the future are being stifled by the old wave of occult traditionalists on barbelith who are trying to enforce their rigid orthodox views of how magic should be practiced. That seems a very bizarrely skewed reading of the barbelith demograph from where I'm sitting. Do we actually even have any orthodox voices like that posting on here? Any real hardcore orthodox types from any one particular tradition? They exist - do they ever exist - but I'm not aware that anybody like that actually posts vocally here.
I am committed to a pantheon. I love them like family. But I am not really a part of any formal "tradition", and I am most certainly not a representative of the orthodoxy of any such formal tradition. That's just ludicrous because it's quite the opposite really. I'm a total heretic and pariah, as far as your orthodox traditionalists are concerned. What I do would never be recognised in a million years by most of your orthodox types within the various traditions related to my pantheon. Every time I write anything about my practices I am stepping directly into the firing line of people who genuinely and passionately believe that I cannot possibly know anything at all about what I am discussing because I have not received initiation A in House B of tradition C, or equivalent. I try my best to be as respectful as I can when I'm around people who have much invested in traditional structures and orthodox forms, but I also need to be true to the reality of my experiences, and this means that my position on a lot of things is frankly pretty fucking unpopular to say the least in some quarters.
My practice is actually quite heavily informed by chaos magic, in the sense that it is an instinctive shamanism that emphasises creative expression and direct personal revelation. Nothing I do comes from a book or from an instructor or from a body of traditional lore - it emerges directly from an intense and committed personal practice. That's what I got out of chaos magic, and I took that and ran with it in my own direction.
I've spent a lot of time over the past few years - on barbelith and elsewhere - challenging and critiquing what I see as the received dogmas of "Chaos Magic™", which I see mostly as a weird product of the internet. It's like chaos magic seemed to solidify into a "tradition" itself during the late 90s, in the same way that "Wicca" and "Thelema" are perceived as traditions - which I think sort of misses the point. It won't take more than a google search to come up with a fairly accurate picture of what a chaos magician is supposed to do and believe, the practices they get up to and the perspectives they adhere to. People do seem to buy into this, almost like they are purchasing a costume and all of its accessories from a costume shop. I think it is important to resist and question this sort of phenomena when it seems to be happening.
There's aspects of chaos magic that I love to bits, for instance, the emphasis on one's own personal experience of magic being more valid than the received dogma of tradition. But there's also aspects of this received idea of what Chaos Magic™ should entail that my own personal experiences of magical practice have shown to be problematic or not particularly useful, and which I've rejected. The way I see it, this commitment to challenging and critiquing practices and perspectives in the light of your own experiences is the real jewel of chaos magic, not the freedom to come up with endless variations on the sigil method or the freedom to work with the tellytubbies at the four quarters rather than the Archangels. If I challenge or question something that somebody posts on here, it is not because I am some bastion of orthodoxy trying to keep the kids down and stifle their crazy ways, it is because my personal experiences of a thing have led me to form opinions that might well differ from the established ideas that often seem to inform some of the assumptions that people bring with them to the practice of magic.
If someone tells me that, for instance, IXAT is the god of taxis and can be called on to make cars stop for you, I will generally want to interrogate that and make sure it's actually coming from someone's living experience of working with spirits in the urban environment, and not just something cribbed directly out of that issue of the Invisibles and taken on board wholesale just cos it sounds cool. If someone is talking about magic, and something in what they are saying doesn't ring true to me, doesn't sound like it's based on experiences from their own living practice, or comes across more like an unexamined idea parroted from a secondary source with no intervening thought or personal experimentation feeding into it - then I'll generally respond from a critical standpoint in order to create a dialogue around the problematic area in which alternative perspectives are raised and considered. If this sort of constructive dialogue doesn't take place among practitioners, then we are all just patting each other on the back and congratulating ourselves for constructing a safe space in which our ever more elaborate fantasy lives can flourish. Plenty of places on the internet for that sort of thing. Barbelith Temple is a bit different, which probably has a lot to do with how the Temple is situated in the wider context of the rest of Barbelith, and is not just an occult forum on its own. I like that quality that the Temple has. I think it's really valuable, and that's why I like to post here rather than on the many other occult forums on the internet.
I'm a bit irritated by the accusation that regular long-term Barbelith posters, presumably including myself, are engaged in some nefarious process of stifling all of the young and upcoming voices trying to break through. Fuck off. I'm 32. I've just started getting some of my writing on magic into print myself. I don't currently have any sort of publisher interest in what I'm doing at all. I spend huge amounts of my time challenging what I feel are problematic perspectives on magic and attempting to convey something of my own experiences, and my reflections on those experiences, in a way that others will hopefully find useful and empowering. Nobody pays me to do this. I'm not the fucking spokesman for any sort of orthodoxy or tradition. Everything I write about magic is simply an expression of my own personal and idiosyncratic understanding of "The Mysteries" gleaned from my decade of practice and experimentation in these areas. If you have a problem with any of that, sit down and write your own book. Nobody is stopping you. If you strongly disagree with anything I happen to post on barbelith, make a convincing argument to the contrary. Nobody is stopping you. |
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