Sunday, January 30, 2011

From the Stray Thought Bin - "The Believer in Magic"

For the believer in magic, words are just words with no substance behind them. Yet he wants his words to be something more and so he takes them as the substitute for substance. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well it depends on how you define magic. The modern Western occult/Pagan communities use a number of definitions. Aleister Crowley spelled it magick to differentiate it from stage illusion. He was a fan of Taoism so you could look at his using the word magick as a substitute for the word Tao. In other parts of the overall community there are those who consider the word the thing itself. For them 'spells' manipulate space-time events by manipulating words. I believe these may be the people you refer to in the article. Of course there are other definitions.

Bruce Kodish said...

Actually Steve, my statement about the believer in magic, was mainly definitional. I was thinking of the kind of individual ensconced in empty verbalism, not the devotees of "Magick" whom you are talking about, although it's possible that at least some of them are ensconced in empty verbalism too.

Anonymous said...

LOL! I know some ceremonial magicians. Plenty of empty verbalism. Shame, too, because a LOT of Crowley's work could've come from Korzybski's desk.

Bruce Kodish said...

Steve, you wrote "... a LOT of Crowley's work could've come from Korzybski's desk."

I find that interesting. Would you say more about that?Have some links you could put here?

I'm aware of Crowley mainly through the work of Robert Anton Wilson.