“On my Fortieth Birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis, I decided it might be more interesting to terrify them, by going completely mad, and declaring myself as a magician. This had been something that had been coming for a while. It seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer, and the problem is that with magic, being in many respects a science of language, you have to be very careful of what you say. Because if you suddenly declare yourself to be a magician, without any knowledge of what that entails, then one day you are likely to wake up and to discover that is exactly what you are.
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic IS art, and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form, IS literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language of magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art, as it about supernatural events. A “Grimoire” for example, “the book of spells”, is simply a fancy way of saying “grammar”. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply “to spell”, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or a writer is the closest thing, in the contemporary world, you are likely to see to a shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or the sciences, were the providence of the shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation is, I think, a tragedy. At the moment, the people who are using shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than trying to wake people up, THEIR shamanism is used as an opiate, to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable Their “magic box” of television, and by their “magic words”, their jingles, can cause everybody in the country to be thinking the same words, and have the same banal thoughts, all at exactly the same moment…
In all of magic, there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The “Bardic” tradition of magic would place a Bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you, That might make your hands lay funny, or you might have a child born with a clubbed food. If a bard were to place, not a curse upon you, but a satire, that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a (extremely) finely worded and clever satire, that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you were dead, people still might be reading it, and laughing… at you, your wretchedness, and absurdity. Writers, and people who had command of words were respected and feared, (just) as people who manipulated magic.
In latter times, I think the artists and writers have allowed themselves to be ‘sold down the river’. They have ACCEPTED the prevailing belief that art, that writing, are merely forms of entertainment.
They’re not seen as transformative forces… that can change a human being, that can change a society.
They are seen as simple entertainment Things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die…
It is not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience WANTS.
If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be The Artist.
It is the job of artists to give The Audience what they NEED.
My career as a magician continues to evolve. Since I, to a certain degree, believe art and magic to be interchangeable, it has seemed only natural that art should be the means by which I express magical ideas. This has found its way into my prose writing, in works such as “Voice of the Fire”, and probably most visibly has found its way into the performance pieces that i’ve done in various locations over the past 8 years. Beautiful little psychedelic artifacts in their own right, which actually capture the kind of narrative journey that we’ve tried to take the readers on as part of these performances; to overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience; to tip them over into a kind of psychedelic state where we can hopefully actually change their consciousness and direct it to different places, different levels, hopefully into new and magical spaces.
When we are doing the will of our True Self, we are inevitably doing the Will of the Universe. In Magic these are seen as indistinguishable; that Every human soul is in fact One human soul. It is the soul of the Universe itself, and as long as you are doing the Will of the Universe, then it is impossible to do anything wrong.
The one place in which Gods and Demons inarguably exist is in the human mind, where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity. Much of magic, as I understand it in the Western occult tradition, is a search for the Self, with a capital ‘S’. This is understood as being the ‘Great Work’, as being the Gold the Alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing that we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The “inner dynamo of us” if you like.
Now this is the Single. Most. Important. Thing. that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet, there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge to, not just IGNORE the self, but actually seem to have the urge to OBLITERATE themselves. This is horrific… but you can almost understand the desire to simply “wipe out” that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually POSSESS such a thing as a “soul”. Such a precious thing. ‘What if you break it? What if you lose it?’ Mightn’t it be best to anaesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure. I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self, and then having to maintain it.
I’ve been looking at the history of magical thinking, and where it starts to go wrong. And, for my money, where it starts to go wrong is “monotheism”. I mean, if you look at the history of magic, you’ve got its origins in the caves, you’ve got its origins in shamanism, in animism, in a belief that everything around you (every tree, every rock, every animal) was inhabited by some sort of ‘essence’, some sort of spirit, that could perhaps be communicated with. You would have had some central shaman or visionary who would have been responsible for channeling ideas that were useful for survival.
By the time you have reached the classical civilizations, you can see that this has formalized to a degree. The shaman was acting purely as an intermediary between the spirits and the people. He was, in his position in the village or community, I should imagine very much like a spiritual plumber. The people in the group would have had their own roles.. The person who was best at hunting would’ve been a hunter. The person who was best at talking to the spirits, perhaps because he or she was a bit crazy, a bit detached from our normal, material world, then they would have been the Shaman. They would not have been the masters of a ‘sacred craft’. They would have simply been dispensing their information throughout the community because it was believed to be helpful to the community.
When you get the actual classical cultures emerging, this has been formalized so that you’ve now got pantheons of gods, and each of those gods have a priest caste, that will act (to a certain degree) as intermediaries, who will instruct you in the worship of that god. So the relationship between ‘humans and their gods’, which could be seen a relationship between ‘humans & their highest Selves’, that was still a very direct one…
When Christianity & monotheism comes in, then all of a sudden you’ve got a priest caste moving between the worshipper and the object of worship. You’ve got a priest caste becoming a kind of ‘spiritual middle management’ between humanity and the divine within itself that it is seeking. You no longer have a direct relationship with the godhead.
The Priests don’t really necessarily have a direct relationship with the godhead.
They’ve just got a book that tells you about some people who lived a long time ago who DID have a direct relationship with the godhead… and that’s alright.
“You don’t need to have miraculous visions. You don’t need to have gods talking to you. In fact if you do have any of that stuff, you’re probably insane.”
In the modern world, "That stuff doesn’t happen".
The only people who are allowed to talk to gods, and in a very kind of one-sided way, are priests…
Monotheism, to me, is a great simplification. I mean, the Kabbalah has a great mulitiplicity of gods, but at the very top of the Kabbalistic diagram —the tree of life—who have this one sphere that is absolute God. The Monad.
Something that is indivisible, you know? And all of the other gods, and indeed everything else in the Universe, is a kind of emanation of that God. Now that’s fine, but it’s when you suggest that there is ‘only that one God’, at this kind of unreachable height above humanity, and there is nothing in between, you’re limiting and simplifying the thing… I mean I tend to think of Paganism as a kind of alphabet, as a language. It’s like all of the Gods are letters in this alphabet.
They express nuances, shades of meaning, or certain subtleties of ideas. Whereas monotheism tends to be just one vowel, and it’s just something like “ooooh”. It’s like this monkey sound. You can almost imagine the Gods becoming frustrated, contemptuous.. that with all this richness of spiritual concepts that are available, why reduce it to one plaintive single note that the utterer does not even understand?
The alchemists had two components to their philosophy. These were the principles of “solve” and “coagula”. Solve was basically the equivalent of ‘analysis’. It was taking things apart to see how they worked. Coagula was basically ‘synthesis’. It was trying to put the disassembled pieces back together so that they worked more efficiently.
These are two very important principles which can be applied to almost anything in culture. Recently in literature, for example, there has been a wave of post-modernism, deconstructionism. This is Solve. Perhaps it’s time, in the arts, for a little more Coagula. Having deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together.
Spiritualism was the natural state of human thinking up until the Renaissance and the subsequent age of reason that grew out of it. Our original way of seeing the world, was as a place entirely inhabited by spirits, where everything had its indwelling essence, where everything was, in some sense, sacred, including ourselves. The age of reason changed all that. While it’s inarguable that Reason brought many great benefits, and was a necessary stage of our development, unfortunately this lead to materialism, where the physical material world was seen as the be-all and end-all of existence, where inevitably, we are seen as creatures that have no spiritual dimensions, that have no souls, in a soulless Universe of dead matter…”
No comments:
Post a Comment