RE: Belief in magic
November 28, 2017 at 4:39 pm
(This post was last modified: November 28, 2017 at 4:40 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(November 28, 2017 at 4:19 pm)Astreja Wrote: Yes, I did at one point have that very book -- Mine was a large blue tome with gold lettering. I had a few of the rituals memorized as well. I was in my early 20s at that point.Big fucker, wasn't it. Mine was black and gold.
Quote:The Abrahamic underpinnings of the Rosicrucian system, though, never sat well with me. As with other religious and quasi-religious practices, I couldn't get myself to believe that I was dealing with real beings on the other end of the line.Well, they peppered it heavily with egytian pomp and costume..that's gotta count for something. I don't think that it would be strictly accurate to say that the rosicrucian system is explicitly abrahamic or that they believed that there was an actual being on the other end. The notion seems to have been that all religion was an outgrowth of primal forces which could be drawn down - to use the terms that wiccans would adopt, as the "godhead" into oneself. The ultimate goal of the progression from neoephyte to praetor was..as in buddhism...a quest for personal enlightenment or elevation to a higher plane of existence. The rosicrucians simply didn't seem to think that sitting around cross-legged breathing intently was going to get them there. More that the prevailing cultural paradigm was decidedly abrahamic and the point of ritual being to evoke a union between the divine and the mundane....the evocative nature of communal belief is a powerful tool. This might also explain all the egyptian paraphernalia, as it was wildly popular at the time.
Gotta get people into the mood...you know? I guess their system was kindoff stuffy. I mean, there's orgies...and ritual drug use......they could have rolled with that (as the OTO allegedly did). Ah, missed opportunities.
Quote: (Subsequently spent some years exploring various types of Buddhism and then had an intense but short-lived fling with Norse polytheism before realizing I had been a de facto atheist the whole time due to inability to put faith in any of them.)I'm still in my running fling with -all- of the worlds mythologies and magical systems. I often find myself thinking that "putting ones faith" in the gods of these narratives is completely missing the point of them..how about you?
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