Quick Announcement

If you live in the Cincinnati area, be sure to check out the Greater Cincinnati Pagan Pride Day. It's happening May 2nd, from 11 AM until sundown at Sycamore Park in Batavia. I'll be there, running the children's activities (wand making and runestaves), so stop by and say hello.

Skepticism? What's That Good For?

As is my pedantic wont, I'll start the answer by defining the term. Skepticism is defined on Dictionary.com as:

1. A doubting or questioning attitude or state of mind; dubiety.
2. Philosophy

• The ancient school of Pyrrho of Elis that stressed the uncertainty of our beliefs in order to oppose dogmatism.
• The doctrine that absolute knowledge is impossible, either in a particular domain or in general.
• A methodology based on an assumption of doubt with the aim of acquiring approximate or relative certainty.

3. Doubt or disbelief of religious tenets.

This is all well and good, but it's not precisely where I'm going with this. A more commonly understood meaning for "skepticism" is what is known as scientific skepticism, which is a critical "examination of claims and theories which appear to be beyond mainstream science" (to quote Wikipedia). Scientific skepticism relies on a rigorous investigation of claims to establish validity and (rightly, in my opinion) holds that exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. The idea is that if you're going to claim some knowledge or discovery that flies in the face of everything we currently understand about the subject, that's fine. But if your claims aren't testable and aren't reproducible, it is possible - just possible - that maybe you haven't revolutionized the field and the "scientific establishment" isn't trying to suppress your discovery to retain a stranglehold on the masses. Maybe you're just, in a word, wrong.

But what, in the name of Eris, does this have to do with the occult?

The answer isn't a hundred percent straight forward.

Magic and mysticism have a bit of a checkered history with science. The kind of history where Science hopes nobody sees those old Spring Break in Cabo pictures that it put up on its Myspace page back in the day. Nowadays Science is more respectable, and has largely put all that behind it. But every once in a while Magic and Mysticism show up in town, drunk and horny and needing a place to crash for a few days. If Science lets them stay it usually ends up broke, hung over, and the proud owner of a nasty and suspicious rash. If it doesn't, it looks like a jerk and everybody gives it crap for not helping its buddies out.

Here's the thing: occultists frequently - not always, but frequently - are in the position of making extraordinary claims. Scientists want to see proof for those claims. Verifiable, reproducible proof. Then, if the results claimed can be verified and reproduced, they want to look and see what the mechanics are behind those results. Just because something works, doesn't mean it works for the reasons claimed.

I'm not down on magic or mysticism. Obviously - I'm writing a blog called "On Occult Philosophy", after all. I do directed meditation and spellwork, and I believe in spirits and Gods. But I am tired of the New Age willingness to try justify questionable (and even outright absurd) beliefs through pseudoscience and bad science.

There is wonder and majesty in the universe, and science is the tool that has given us the greatest insight into how it works. Take some time from your quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore to study the new discoveries and new lore as well.

After all, if you're probably not bleeding yourself to rebalance your humours when you get sick. Take advantage of the newest discoveries and blend them with what works for you from your current practices.

You might just learn something new.

Ben Kenobi was right

So I just finished reading an article called Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain, originally posted on NewScientist back in 2007, which covers six different weird games you can play with your brain. Some of my favorite details are that:

1. You are blind about 3 times a second, due to the fact that your brain attempts to edit out jerky eye movements between images. You don't notice because (a) those moments of blindness are milliseconds long and (b) your brain will extrapolate from image to image and essentially "make up" what it thinks would have happened during the blindness. (Oh, and your sense of hearing does the same thing.)
2. You have a body-wide network of proprioceptive sensors that monitors your awareness of your own body. These sensors can be tricked, making you think parts of your body are stretching or even that things that obviously aren't part of your body really are.
3. Pendulum dowsing, no matter what you may think of dowsing as a magical art, is a functional way of interacting with your subconscious. And your subconscious is something of a racist jerk.
4. You most likely will not notice dramatic changes to your surroundings, as long as you are either distracted at the moment of change or the change happens quickly enough (or, oddly enough, slowly enough), or if you become focused on something else.
5. You can and will make up memories. And you will believe those memories are genuine.

The point? Does there really have to be one, beyond "hey, isn't this cool"?

Do You Really Want A Break Today?

We're talking about egregores today. Egregores, and a satori moment I had while talking magical theory with my wife last week.

First, a little background. An egregore (which may also be called a thoughtform) can be thought of in a number of different ways. You can think of one as a gestalt entity, made up of the collective wills of a group of people come together to achieve a purpose. You can think of one as a truly elaborate sigil, allowing an individual or group to focus Will towards a specific purpose. It could be a separate and distinct spiritual entity, created by one or more individuals to aid in magical work, or nothing more than an arbitrary anthropomorphism of a meme.

Really, from a magical perspective, it can be all of the above simultaneously.

There's a lot more to the subject, obviously, and this barely scratches the surface. Eventually we'll get to information and some of my theories about what they are, but that's not the purpose of today's post. We're talking right now about how these entities interact with us in our daily lives.

We live in an amazingly religious age. Hymns of praise bombard us constantly. Icons and images and enactments of myth are everywhere we look and everywhere we go. The faith determines every aspect of our lives: when we eat, what we drink, what we wear, how we speak, the pursuits we follow, even what we think about. Every day sacrifices of time, of wealth, and of energy are poured into the object of devotion, sustaining and supporting it.

I'm lovin' it.

Save money. Live better.

Citi never sleeps.

These are some of the liturgies of the modern gods, egregores built up over millions of man-hours dedicated to developing and nurturing and growing the corporations. Legally, a corporation is an entity. Magically, a corporation is also an entity. An entity empowered by the blood and sweat and tears of thousands and thousands of employees. An entity with needs and desires separate from those of any single human being involved.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself this - particularly if you work for a corporation. How many times have you heard a phrase used like "this is in the best interests of [the company]" or "the direction [the company] is taking" or even "[the company] is laying off 5% of its workforce"? Contrast this with the number of times that you have heard a phrase like "this is in the best interests of the employees" or "the direction the senior vice president in charge of marketing is taking" or "the board of directors has unanimously voted to lay off 5% of the workforce".

These entities do not care about us. Individual humans are classified by them as either "headcount" or "customer" - which can be understood as "property" or "food", respectively. They aren't evil, precisely, they just do what they were created to do. It's just that what they were created to do is pursue the short-term best interests of (first) themselves, (second) the cabal of high priests that interprets their will, and (third) the shareholders. And that short-term interest doesn't care who or what gets trampled, exploited, or destroyed in the process. If they think about it at all, they decide it's a concern for the next quarter.

So where does that leave us? Well, that depends, to a degree, on your feelings about corporate America and the influence it has over our lives. But at bare minimum - whether you call yourself a priest, a witch, a magician, a neoshaman, a cunning man, or anything else - if you are practicing the art of magic you have taken a step into a wider world. A world where symbols are substance and the spiritual is as important as the material. These entities are out there. Deal with them or contest with them as you wish - but you need to recognize that they are there and you need to be aware of the influence they have on you before you start.

Oh, and the possibility of interpreting the current financial crisis as a Götterdämmerung? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Magic and mysticism, science and skepticism (part one)

In the first book of Henry Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, we get the following quote from chapter 2:

Whosoever therefore is desirous to study in this faculty [magic], if he be not skilled in natural philosophy, wherein are discovered the qualities of things, and in which are found the occult properties of every being, and if he be not skillful in the mathematics, and in the aspects, and figures of the stars, upon which depends the sublime virtue, and property of everything; and if he be not learned in theology, wherein are manifested those immaterial substances, which dispense and minister all things, he cannot be possibly able to understand the rationality of magic. For there is no work that is done by mere magic, nor any work that is merely magical, that doth not comprehend these three faculties.

Now - obviously - this doesn't restrict the practice of magic to the lofty realms of individuals who have earned three or four PhDs in wildly unrelated fields. Magic is a practical art first and foremost - it always has been, and it always will be. It's wired into our brains and our blood and our bones, whether we recognize it or not. It doesn't require any special training to perform, or to get results.

That probably sounds like rank heresy to any number of people, but hear me out.

There's nothing special about doing magic. Pretty much any human being can focus his Will to achieve some goal. If that human focuses long enough then something - call it coincidence, call it synchronicity, call it magic, call it prayer, call it whatever you like - something happens.

And that's magic in a nutshell: causing change in accordance with your Will.

So, then, if magic can be done by anybody at any time with no training whatsoever, why on Earth am I studying the 800-some pages of dense 16th century occultism that is the Three Books of Occult Philosophy? Why would budding magi pursue initiation into the Golden Dawn or the OTO? Why go through the year and a day of training in Wicca or the ADF, or practice the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or the Middle Pillar exercise?

Because - in the same way any person can do magic - any person can run, or jump, or reason. Some people might even have a natural talent for it. But without practice, without training, without the constant striving to improve, you never get better at it.