From: eddie@hermes.oit.unc.edu (Edward M. Averett)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Unity
Date: 14 Aug 92 23:13:37 GMT
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In article <1992Aug13.202445.3813@linus.mitre.org> m23364@mwunix (James Meritt) writes:
>Has anyone put together a synthesis of the things that work?  NOT what beliefs,
>rituals,... the various magicks have in common but what parts that do something
>are held in common?

A good question: 

Yes, several folk have. .mostly it can't be written down, and it's hard to 
write about it as well.  Words have definite limitations when it comes to 
magic (the lesson of the Magus), and are ultimately ambiguous. 

Working with someone a bit to be able to experience what they do can be a 
good way to become sensitized to doing magic.  Picking up the initial 
initiation can be done also by hard work and sweat at any of various yogas,
religious practices, pure faith, or a traumatic experience.  Working with
others can be nice, but you can do it alone, or mix them, which is what I 
prefer.  

I practice in a variety of different fields, what most of the folk on this 
list might call western ceremonial magic, a good bit of eastern taoist 
sorcery, shamanic work, and agrarian pagan stuff (mostly with friends). 

However you spell it, magic, once you start, is pervasive in your life. 
The universe I live in is a magical one.  Any good physics course is a 
good pre-requisite for demonstrating this, as a few people have recently 
pointed out.  When you come to realize that All the models that people have
of our physical universe are convenient illusions that we have adopted
to obtain certain consistent results in our so-called everyday lives at 
the expense of making them "everyday", then one can truely begin to See.

Everything you know is wrong.  Nothing is true, Everything is permissible.

************

There's been some criticism of the use of the newsgroup in using Mr. 
Aleister Crow-ley's book Magic In Theory and Practice as a basis for 
terminology and discussion here.  Well. it IS alt.magick.  Not alt.shamanism
or alt.pagan or alt.taoist sorcery.  In addition, Mr Crow-ley is certainly
the largest single influence on western cultural magical styles in the last
hundred years.  He is the revealer of previously so-called secret information
about the whole European magickal community of the turn of the century. He 
has provided an incredible amount of background, and he was the catalyst for
much more.  His writing, as full of pedantic bullshit, outright lies, humor,
shock treatments, etc, ad lib, ad nauseum, as it is, is still worthy of 
serious study, especially a couple of his books like M in T&P. .. 

While I doubt that he was the Prophet of the Aeon, as I suspect he wished, I 
am willing to give him credit for being the Herald of a new age.  Indeed 
though he once said that history would prove whether he or Yeats was the 
better poet (disparaging Yeats), and it has, but not as Uncle Al imagined -),
it is much more likely that his legacy will eventually have more of an 
effect on the study of the boundaries between fields that the majority of 
people like to keep separate, religion, philosophy, our understanding of 
our relationship to our physical universe.

Since I've read more than I probably wanted to of his works, if anyone who 
hasn't would like a list of what I think is worth bothering with, and what
can be safely let to the adventurous, I'll be happy to discuss it for a bit.

I Don't think that we need to stop our discussions with Aleister though, 
it's merely a good point of beginning.  But whether you "like" him or not, 
(kind of a silly question in my perspective), trying to discuss *magick* 
and ignoring Crowley is kind of like discussing *psychotherapy* and ignoring
Freud and Jung.  You're gonna miss out on a lot. 

However, I suspect in general that for those of you who think that you 
are going to actually learn anything useful on this newsgroup about doing
magic that you will more profitably spend your time "doing" magick and less
time asking how.

So why do I read this group?  I see it much more as a social forum for folk
who are generally working alone, and want to be able to talk about the 
recent past or current aspects of the general state of the Art. ..a point of
connectivity in the net of our universe.

Since I'm already here, and rattling on a bit, I'd like to comment that a 
Lot of the volume of discussion here lately appears to have devolved again
to long point-by-point arguments about semantics and nit-picking over the 
meanings of words and phrasing.  It's really inevitiable in a word forum 
which is dealing with attempted descriptions of things which mostly can't
be expressed in words, but the group seems to go through phases of degree
with this, and we seem to be in a heavy one now.

Well, enough for now. ...
				eddie@legba.oit.unc.edu
From: cal@otter.hpl.hp.com (Colin Low)
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 07:52:48 GMT
Subject: Re: Magical Power(book)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.