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Overview
In these talks, written and presented to a variety of audiences between 2001 and 2010, John Michael Greer explores the forgotten history of occultism and its unexpected possibilities in our time.
From practical methods of occult training to the politics and metapolitics of magic, from the shadowy world of Victorian sex magic to the alchemy of initiatory ritual, from the complex origins of modern Neopaganism to the approaching twilight of Neopagan pop culture and what comes next, the talks collected in this book seek to inspire curiosity and reflection, not to set out an ironclad case for this or that point of view.
This book is an extraordinary insight into the life and work of a working magician and occultist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781912807024 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AEON BOOKS LTD |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2019 |
| Pages: | 210 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A magical education
I'd like to thank all of you for being here. We have a lot of stuff to cover, and probably everybody in this room will be offended by at least one thing I say during the next hour and a half. That can't be helped. I've studied and practiced magic for thirty years now and taught it for nearly twenty; I've seen a lot of very capably done magic during that time but a lot more that was, well, pretty feeble. I've drawn a few conclusions from my experiences, but of course, your mileage may vary. Take what follows for whatever it's worth.
In a world that's still giddy over J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, talk about a magical education carries a certain amount of baggage but it also has an important lesson to teach. Rowling's tales of young witches and wizards at school have reminded a lot of people in the magical scene that magic is something that has to be learned. This is a point that some mages these days have tried to avoid facing since it's a lot easier to decide that you already know it all, or that your inborn magical talents are all you need. Sounds great, but as any craftsperson can tell you, raw talent isn't worth all that much unless it's developed through training and practice, and the people who think they know everything are generally those who know the least. It's a mark of people who actually know something about magic — or any other craft — that they're aware of just how little they actually know. For that reason, I don't think it's out of line to talk here about how to get a magical education.
I want to stress the last word. Today's magical community has plenty of technically competent mages. I'm also going to talk about how to become one of those, in case you don't happen to be one already. But we have a shortage of educated mages — mages who can not only do magic, but who understand what they're doing and can not only teach it to others by rote but explain it to them so they can understand what they're doing. We do have some. Given the obstacles in the way of getting a real magical education these days, it speaks very well of the passion and commitment with which so many of today's mages pursue their art. But we don't have as many as we ought to, and some of the barriers that interfere most with the growth and development of the magical community come from that fact.
If our society were less terrified of magic, there would be schools of magic in every large city, and people who wanted to become mages could register for classes and come out the other end as competent and well-educated practitioners of the magical arts. There are some projects heading in that direction right now, and some people are hard at work trying to make that vision a reality. For the time being, though, most of us who want to become competent and well-educated practitioners of the magical arts are going to have to do the job ourselves. Even if you're studying with a teacher, or belong to a coven or a magical lodge, or have the chance to participate in one of the schools of magic I've just mentioned, you still have to do a good deal of the job yourselves. Education is lighting a lamp, not filling a bucket, and every teacher knows all too well that the best teaching in the world won't do a thing for a student who isn't willing to take responsibility for his or her education.
I mentioned a moment ago that there are obstacles in the way of getting a real magical education these days, and I want to discuss two of those right now. Those of you who know your way around the Cabalistic Tree of Life may recall that the path through the Veil of the Sanctuary leads past two fierce guardians: Death and the Devil, or in more prosaic language, the potentials for disastrous imbalances of force and form that beset the would-be initiate on his or her way to mastery of magic. Well, there are two guardians flanking the path to a useful magical education in modern culture, too. They're not quite the same as the ones on the Tree of Life, but they're every bit as fierce, and I'm sure everyone in this room knows people who have fallen victim to one or both.
The first of the guardians is the many-headed monster of fantasy fiction and media magic. That's a tough one to face because most people who get involved in magic in the first place do it because something in the image of magic in our culture's entertainment media struck a chord somewhere deep. I speak from personal experience here. At age ten, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be Gandalf. Try telling that to your school guidance counselor! When I stumbled across my first-ever book of Golden Dawn ritual magic a few years later, I flung myself into it with all the rapture an overenthusiastic teenager can manage, which is saying something. It took me years of study and magical practice, not to mention additional maturity, to really notice the fact that magic in novels and movies is not the same thing as the magic that actually works here and now, in the only world we actually inhabit.
I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but magic isn't whatever you want it to be. Some things work, and some things don't. Traditions of magic around the world have settled on remarkably similar collections of technique — I've had the chance to talk shop with a Shinto priest, and we both discovered that Shinto esotericism and Druid Revival ritual magic have a lot more in common than either of us expected. That's because certain things, certain processes and techniques and odd corners of human neurology, allow you to bend the universe of human experience to your will more effectively than others.
This has uncomfortable implications for those of us — and remember, I'm talking about myself here too — who grow up on fantasy fiction or movies about magic, and decide we want to be mages just like Gandalf, or Harry Potter, or whoever. That's exactly what we can never be. Novelists or screenplay writers, remember, don't come up with the magic in their imaginary worlds to teach us how to do magic in this one. They create their magical systems and spells as plot engines for the sake of the story. The problem, of course, is that magical systems created for fictional effect usually have exactly that — fictional effects — when you try to put them to use in the world we actually live in.
Here's an example. Quite a few years back, I spent some time frequenting alt magick on Usenet, and I remember one guy who made a plaintive post. He'd wanted to keep his roommate out of his dorm room for a couple of hours, and since he'd been reading Katherine Kurtz' Deryni novels, he'd cast the Wards Major, a powerful protective spell that Kurtz' Deryni magicians use all the time to good effect. Damn if the roommate didn't walk right in despite his spell. He posted to alt magick wanting to know what he'd done wrong. I think someone suggested that he obviously didn't have enough Deryni blood to make it work. Cold but accurate enough.
In the same way, there are a lot of people who try to do Klingon magic, or Darkover magic, or we-can't-tell-you-what-it-is-because-Mercedes-Lackey-will-sue-us magic, and run into the same problem. Here in the world we live in, there's a real shortage just now of matrix crystals, tickets to the Klingon homeworld, and cute telepathic horsies with big blue eyes. Now some would suggest that there's also a real shortage of reality testing, but I think they're missing the point. People turn to fantasy literature and the like because the world that's presented to them by the schools and the media is as imaginary as Middle Earth, and pretty damn dismal into the bargain. One of the things that makes it dismal is that it flatly denies the reality of magic, a reality that's woven into our blood and bones and nervous systems. So when fantasy novels and movies offer a glimpse of the living reality of magic, it's no wonder a lot of people embrace it as passionately as they do.
But that passion has to be integrated into a clear sense of what works and what doesn't in real-world magic. I can raise my hands to the sky and shout Naur an edraith ammen! Naur dan i ngaurhoth! until my face turns blue, and I won't be able to launch firebolts from my fingertips the way Gandalf did. But I can study a proven system of word magic, learn how to shape sound with my voice so that it sends changes cascading through my nervous system and the minds and bodies of the people around me, and get some pretty remarkable effects. You can also do as some Chaos magicians have done and borrow symbolism from fantasy fiction — but you'll notice that those Chaos magicians combine the fantasy symbolism with distinctly nonfantasy technique, which they got from solidly proven magical traditions. So the many-headed monster of fantasy can become a source of inspiration and enthusiasm in magical training, and if it's handled carefully, it can also become a source of evocative symbolism. The problems come when it's treated as a source of accurate technical knowledge.
But too many people flee from that guardian only to fall into the jaws of the other. Plenty of would-be mages become disgusted by the fantasy, the make-believe, the dress-up games, and role-playing that too often disguises itself as magical practice in the occult community these days, and they decide to look for real magic, proven magic, magic from some historical period where such nonsense didn't exist yet. Fair enough; but too many of them fall into the opposite trap, and come to think that the only way to do real magic is to limit themselves strictly to some tradition or system handed down from the distant past. They become the prey of the other fierce guardian of the path, the hobgoblin of authenticity.
Now historical authenticity is a very good thing if you're a historian. If you want to know how mages practiced magic in the Renaissance, or in the Middle Ages, or in ancient Greece or Mesopotamia, questions of authenticity should be near the very top of your checklist. This is particularly true because there's a huge amount of fantasy fiction disguised as history in the magical community, an endless torrent of grandmother stories and claims of ancient lineage used to bolster magical systems that date from the mid-twentieth century when they weren't invented last week over beer at the local pizza parlor's all you can eat night. But when you want to know what sort of magic you should practice here and now, authenticity is irrelevant.
That's also an unpopular thing to say these days because a lot of people are very deeply invested in being authentic this or traditional that. There's a real ego boost in being able to claim that you're a real Hermeticist or Druid or traditional Wiccan or whatever, while anyone who doesn't fit your definition of authenticity is a fake. Some people become so addicted to the ego high that you'll find them barging onto one Yahoo group after another, where they can parade their superior knowledge and tell everyone else how wrong they are. But even those who don't fall victim to this sort of galloping idiocy lose something crucial by an unthinking worship of authenticity. If historical authenticity is all that matters, then creativity is bad; innovation is bad. And a tradition that abandons creativity and innovation is dead. You may be able to keep the mummified corpse on display like Lenin in his tomb, but eventually, the makeup is going to wear off and people will realize that what you've got isn't a living tradition; it's a corpse.
The irony here is that an obsession with authenticity is perhaps the single most inauthentic thing you can do in magic. We know one thing for sure about magicians in the past — anywhere in the past: they used what worked. The oldest and most authentic tradition in all of magic is the tradition of stealing anything that's not nailed down and bringing along a crowbar for use on the things that are. Choose any magical tradition from the past, look into its roots, and you'll find a fantastic gallimaufry of sources. There are no culturally pure magical traditions. That's a simple fact of the history of magic. Imposing purity tests on magical traditions may feed people's egos, not to mention fostering ethnic and cultural divisions of the sort the world could very well do without these days, but it's not going to make you a better magician.
The hobgoblin of authenticity is very much an American hobgoblin, and it crops up in a lot of different corners of American culture these days. In the martial arts scene, for example, I've met people who have studied some authentic traditional style, and boast that they do every detail of every form exactly the way it's been handed down to them. Mention that to any of the elderly Chinese guys who participated in the martial arts scene in Beijing or Shanghai before 1949 and they may just laugh themselves into hiccups.
In those days, if you did everything exactly the way your teacher did, it meant that you were a lousy student — you didn't have the initiative or the imagination to adapt the form to your own body, or to come up with anything new to add to the teachings of your style and your kwoon. And yet people boast of that nowadays. In the same way, you'll meet people who tell you with pride that they perform such and such a ritual in exactly the same way the founder of their tradition did back in the 1950s or whenever. What that means is that neither that person, nor their teacher, nor anyone in their lineage has learned a single new thing about how to perform that ritual since the 1950s — and I find it hard to see anything in that worth boasting about.
Does this mean that history is irrelevant, or that we have nothing to learn from the past? Of course not. What it means is that the lessons of the past have to be tested against the touchstone of the experiences and needs of today. As mages, we turn to the past to learn what kinds of magic worked back then. We turn to living traditions in the present to learn what kinds of magic work right now. But we can't ever abandon the need to create, to innovate, and to learn something new, because that's where we'll find the kinds of magic that will work in the future.
Ah, you're thinking, but doesn't that contradict the crabby comments I made about fantasy fiction magic a few minutes ago? Don't the people who take their magic from old Michael Moorcock novels have exactly the sort of creative, innovative approach to magic I'm proposing now? Well, no. The problem with fantasy fiction magic isn't that it doesn't come from some provably authentic ancient source. The problem with fantasy fiction magic is that most of the time it doesn't work — or to be more precise, the effects you can get are a lot more limited than the effects you can get from magic that's designed to have nonfictional results. Fantasy magic isn't meant to work, and in fact, the whole genre of fantasy fiction assumes that magic belongs to faraway worlds, to Oz and Middle Earth and Valdemar — not to the here and now. Ironically, the cult of authenticity makes exactly that same assumption by thinking that real magic has to come from some distant time, some faraway place, some exotic culture — anywhere but here and now. Real magic starts from the opposite idea. Paul Foster Case said it best: all the power that ever was or will be is right here. Right now. And that's why real magic works, right here and right now.
Of course, here we get into circles within circles, since there's always the question of what magic is meant to do. In one sense, the posers in the magical community — the folks whose magical practice is limited to dressing in black, wearing twenty-three pounds of assorted silver jewelry, and leaving books by Aleister Crowley on the coffee table to impress dates — are the most effective mages among us. They know what they want to accomplish, and they accomplish it. It's just that magic can be used for many things other than acting out a social role. In the same way, if your ambition in magic is to identify yourself with the lead character from your favorite fantasy novel, then fantasy magic may be exactly what you want. If your goal is to get that good warm glow of self-righteousness that comes from knowing that you're right and everyone else in the world is wrong, then the cult of authenticity may be exactly what you're looking for.
But magic can do a lot more than that. One of the problems we have in the magical community these days, due to the lack of well-educated mages I referred to earlier, is that too many people have a very cramped and restricted idea of what magic can accomplish. That's not surprising; nearly all of us have grown up in a culture that flatly rejects the idea that magic can do anything at all and measures "doing anything at all" using technology as a yardstick. Magic isn't technology, and it doesn't do the things that technology does. It does different things, and it does them extremely well. Magical work, thoroughly learned and competently performed, can totally transform yourself and your world. It can take problems most people don't think they can ever get past, limits that most people think are just part of being human, wads them up and jump-shot them into the nearest trash can. The problem is that nearly everything in our society pushes us in the other direction.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Magical Education"
by .
Copyright © 2019 John Michael Greer.
Excerpted by permission of Aeon Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
About The Author vii
Foreword ix
Chapter 1 A magical education 1
Chapter 2 Magical ecology 25
Chapter 3 The secret history of Neopaganism 41
Chapter 4 Victorian sex magic 67
Chapter 5 Understanding Renaissance magic 87
Chapter 6 Magic, metapolitics, and reality 109
Chapter 7 Alchemical initiation 129
Chapter 8 Healing through the elements 149
Chapter 9 Paganism and the future 171
Index 197