For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

Dialectical Magick

I have to thank the folks over at the Coffee Shop for the excellent article entitled Socratic Marx, which discusses this letter from Marx which was published in the Tucker Anthology The Marx and Engels Reader as: For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing (1843).

This is one of my favorites short radical writings by Marx which expresses exactly what revolutionary thought is, philosophy in action. It is here we find the essence of Marx's revolutionary thought, and the phrase For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing, was not lost on me when I first read this thirty-five years ago.

It is this letter which was to turn the entire socialist movement on its head, that communism is not just an extension of socialism it is something else, something different than existing socialism and social democracy. I have highlighted in bold those ideas which struck me as crucial so long ago, and remain embedded within my philosophical outlook. And this essay has not just influence me, it has influenced other radical thinkers like Raya Dunayevskaya, it is in this essay we find mention of the idea of her Marxist Humanism [1].

Out of the broom closet

I had forgotten how important the ideas in this essay had been in building the foundation of of both my view of libertarian communism and what I would later call dialectical magick; a historical materialist interpretation that magick[2] has acted as a ‘ruthless criticism of religion’ and of science/scientism. It is the original Libertation Teleology.

"The whole socialist principle in its turn is only one aspect that concerns the reality of the true human being. But we have to pay just as much attention to the other aspect, to the theoretical existence of man, and therefore to make religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism."

As Marx says in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Karl Marx (published in the same journal; Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in February, 1844) “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”. I have included an excerpt from this below his letter to Rouge.

Magick historically fulfills this prerequisite, it has functioned both as a practice[3], gift economy, and a social movement that acted as a "reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. "

Marcel Mauss; shows this in his Outline of a General Theory of Magic, which is still relevant today, the centennial of its publication. While not as well known as his The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, the General Theory of Magic postulates that magic is different from religion and not only pre-dates it but represents a social function that is essentially anti-authoritarian and based on an economy of self consciousness of production. Just as The Gift shows that this magickal economy is not one that produces exchange value but a communist exchange, those with surplus exchange it with those who do not have it by holding a potlatch.

Mauss further contends that magickal thinking is still with us, and modern physics shows this with its M-theory of String phenomena. Or as Feyerabend says in "Against Method", 1975, "Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit."

Magickal economy is consistent with what Marx called "actually existing communism" in his letter to Rouge. Marx, influenced by the early anthropological work of Lewis Morgan, saw the gift economy as essentially communist. It was an economy based on magick and mediated by the shaman, as in later periods communal society would be mediated by witches, cunning men, wise women, etc.

In the gift economy the shaman reflects social power of both the status quo and its other. They can be insiders, leaders in the community or outsiders, those exiled from the community. In either case they act to make acceptable to the community 'the other' such as homosexuality and gender bending (the bardache) which Edward Carpenter, the English socialist and gay advocate, documents.

THE SHAMAN IN THE CAVE

Les Trois Freres, France

“The Shaman/Trickster appears in the cave paintings of the Early European Tribes, about 18,000 about years ago. Warriors don't appear until about 9,000 years ago. Kings appeared even later. It appears historically that the Shaman/Trickster came a lot earlier, perhaps even before the cave painters appeared. The Shaman/Trickster is closely tied to hunting, and hunting and gathering were the origin of human society, maybe 50,000 years ago. The warrior and the king are possible only after the development of cities. “ THEORIES ON THE NORTH AMERICAN TRICKSTER

Magick in practice is mnemonic, it is a remembrance of mans development of tool making and technics, the subconscious memory that labour altered our consciousness. The tools of magick, the cup, the pentangle, the athame, the wand and the sword are mnemonic symbols of the development and transition of the human from the dominance of the world of nature, into nature’s transformer, the magi. The invocations and the evocations of magickal chants are the voice of humankind speaking of and to the names of the natural world as it are transformed by our labour. [4] As the world changes so do the deities, the reifications of the world made in the image of man. Or to put it another way "That which is mostly observed, is that which replicates the most."

“Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world,” as Marx says in his introduction to his Critique of Hegel below. And we could add that man also makes science, and that magick which originates science[5], as it does religion, it continues to be a different form of science, natural science as opposed to technic based science of capitalism.

And as Frazer says in the Golden Bough; "So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has been one of the roads by which men have passed to supreme power, it has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thraldom of tradition and to elevate them into a larger, freer life, with a broader outlook on the world. This is no small service rendered to humanity. And when we remember further that in another direction magic has paved the way for science, we are forced to admit that if the black art has done much evil, it has also been the source of much good; that if it is the child of error, it has yet been the mother of freedom and truth."[6]

We can see within the modern Occult movements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries this dialectic of religion and politics, of liberation and oppression played out in the microcosm of secret societies and the macrocosm of mass movements for social change which includes the neo-pagan and witchcraft revivals that are occurring today. We can see it in the popular response to Harry Potter novels by millions of children, for whom magickal thinking has not been repressed. This is not mere mysticism, but as Freud called it the ‘return of the repressed’[7]. Magick has influenced much of the modern revolutionary movements, from the time of Byron and Shelley (called satanic poets by their contemporaries) through to Surrealism, the beat poets such as libertarian communist Kenneth Rexroth and even Situationism, just as it has broadened our understanding of early human communities through the sciences of sociology and anthropology.

In the information age the return of magick in the 20th century , at the height of capitalisms ascendance its technological transformation of society, shows that the alienation of production and its reification into commodity and consumer, satisfies the individuals need to create meaning and power out of powerlessness. Magick functions not only for creating meaning and power for the individual, but to bring individuals back into contact with each other as creators of community; it answers the need for the village and commune in the midst of a mass consumer culture.

If we are to understand magick as part of the revolutionary movement, we must discard popular conspiracy theory notions of it and apply dialectical and historical materialist theory to it. This then is the challenge that dialectical libertarians face. The study of magick has long influenced revolutionary thinkers[8], as well as reactionaries[9]. The reactionary thinker sees the Occult as competing secret societies vying for power[10], the libertarian communist, sees magick as humanities gnosis of ourselves as self conscious creators of our world as Joseph Dietzgen[11] contends with his theory of Cosmic Dialectics.

Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher

M. to R.
Marx to Ruge

Kreuznach, September 1843

I am glad that you have made up your mind and, ceasing to look back at the past, are turning your thoughts ahead to a new enterprise.^[22] And so — to Paris, to the old university of philosophy — absit omen! [May it not be an ill omen] — and the new capital of the new world! What is necessary comes to pass. I have no doubt, therefore, that it will be possible to overcome all obstacles, the gravity of which I do not fail to recognise.

But whether the enterprise comes into being or not, in any case I shall be in Paris by the end of this month,^[23] since the atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity.

In Germany, everything is forcibly suppressed; a real anarchy of the mind, the reign of stupidity itself, prevails there, and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin. It therefore becomes increasingly obvious that a new rallying point must be sought for truly thinking and independent minds. I am convinced that our plan would answer a real need, and after all it must be possible for real needs to be fulfilled in reality. Hence I have no doubt about the enterprise, if it is undertaken seriously.

The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. For although no doubt exists on the question of “Whence,” all the greater confusion prevails on the question of “Whither.” Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Therefore I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dézamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis — the private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines — such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. — arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle.

And the whole socialist principle in its turn is only one aspect that concerns the reality of the true human being. But we have to pay just as much attention to the other aspect, to the theoretical existence of man, and therefore to make religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism. In addition, we want to influence our contemporaries, particularly our German contemporaries. The question arises: how are we to set about it? There are two kinds of facts which are undeniable. In the first place religion, and next to it, politics, are the subjects which form the main interest of Germany today. We must take these, in whatever form they exist, as our point of departure, and not confront them with some ready-made system such as, for example, the Voyage en Icarie. [Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie. Roman philosophique et social.]

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal. As far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state — in all its modern forms — which, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the demands of reason. And the political state does not stop there. Everywhere it assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal function and its real prerequisites.

From this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore, it is possible everywhere to develop the social truth. just as religion is a register of the theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state is a register of the practical struggles of mankind. Thus, the political state expresses, within the limits of its form sub specie rei publicae,[as a particular kind of state] all social struggles, needs and truths. Therefore, to take as the object of criticism a most specialised political question — such as the difference between a system based on social estate and one based on representation — is in no way below the hauteur des principes. [Level of principles] For this question only expresses in a political way the difference between rule by man and rule by private property. Therefore the critic not only can, but must deal with these political questions (which according to the extreme Socialists are altogether unworthy of attention). In analysing the superiority of the representative system over the social-estate system, the critic in a practical way wins the interest of a large party. By raising the representative system from its political form to the universal form and by bringing out the true significance underlying this system, the critic at the same time compels this party to go beyond its own confines, for its victory is at the same time its defeat.

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be — as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion — to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. This is a work for the world and for us. It can be only the work of united forces. It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are.

Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Karl Marx in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February, 1844

For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.

The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths”] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

For Donalda Cassel, Larry Gambone, Jane Leverick, Sam Wagar

FOOTNOTES

---

[1] communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle

[2] The use of Magick with a 'k' comes from Giambattista della Porta (aka John Baptist della Porta) (1535-1615) Natural Magick , Published in 1558 in Italian and then in 1658 in English. ( In this wildly popular series, now expanded to 20 books, della Porta claims the natural world can be manipulated by the natural philosopher through theoretical and practical experiment. He describes ways of beautifying women, tempering steel, counterfeiting precious stones, identifying natural magnets, and forming new plants and animals.) Natural Magick predates Aleister Crowley’s use of Magick spelled with a K, though he is credited with popularizing this spelling.

[3] Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

In one sense Magick may be defined as the name given to Science by the vulgar.

[4] Mircea Eliade's The Forge and the Crucible (1956) asserts that the ancient art of alchemy begins in the bronze age with the forging of tools, and that western systems of initiation into secret knowledge originate in this era with the metal crafts guilds and secret societies of smithy’s.

[5] Astrology is the mother of Astronomy, and Alchemy is the mother of Chemistry as historians of science like to say, but Alchemy is also different from chemistry in that it postulates that the observer affects what is observed, which is the quantum theory of Schrodingers Cat, and that the observer is transformed in the process.

[6] Definition and Theorems of Magick , Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley

[7] The Return of the Repressed The strange case of Masud Khan, Robert S. Boynton, The Boston Review

[8] William Godwin, the Lives of the Necromancers, 1834

[9] Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1833

[10] “the history of the world is the history of competing secret societies” Mumbo-Jumbo By Ishmael Reed which deals with Hoodoo and the spirit of Jazz Age which 'jez grew' in 1920's America to create a black autonomous culture. A very funny work on conspiracy theories in the vein of Robert Anton Wilson/Bob Shea’s Illuminatus series.

[11] Joseph Dietzgen Internet Archive, also see: Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism

What is MagicK? Aleister Crowley Explains

ENCHANT

Concerning the unexpected similarities between magicK and psychology in the work of Aleister Crowley

NOTHING UNEXPECTED ABOUT IT

During a time when the prevailing concept of magic was starting to be regarded as a mere spectacle; as a series of tricks and illusions meant for children, multifaceted British occultist Aleister Crowley got to be known as the Last Great Magus of the West.

Crowley was a member of many secret societies, including the renowned Golden Dawn, a place that harbored members as brilliant as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, and where he got to learn the Hermetic corpus of Western magic, especially what is known as Salomonic magic (derived from King Solomon’s method, and supposedly used to summon the spirits that helped him build his temple).

Salomonic magic, often referred to as black magic, posits a complex system for the invocation of angels and demons, and for achieving changes in nature by operating through them. This is the sort of magic that is often represented by the use of spells, incantations and rites.

The enochian language, or “language of the angels”, the Kabbalah, the Goetia, the sigils and other oracular systems such as the runes, comprise the theoretical basis for articulating an intention and its operative resonance in nature. Curiously, however, all this arcane science did not figure into what Crowley himself considered true magick —if anything, he encouraged his pupils to learn all the theory they could only to get rid of it later. For him, magick was fundamentally a psychological system meant to conduct human will towards a complete command over his individuality.

Crowley recognized that the invocation of entities through magick was an inherent part of our psyche. In his Introduction to Lemgeton Clavicula Salomonis he explicitly states, “the spirits of Goetia are part of the human brain.”

He named his system “Thelema”, which means will. And will, as in Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, is at the center of his model of nature. Intention, just like concentration or directed flight, is one of the most recurring themes in Crowley’s vision of magick.

Magic, as he explains, is the “Science and Art that provokes Change in conformity with the Will”, and that “all intentional acts are acts of magic.” So, like Schopenhauer, Crowley noted that will had the agency to merge with the primordial flow of the universe —So, in order to act upon nature all that was needed was to channel that will together with intention.

The magus maintained that human beings, by nature, have the capacity to produce changes in their environment, and that the only requirement to prompt this was to follow one´s own path; that is, to do as we wish. In his book Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley explains:

“Anyone who is forced from his own course, either through not understanding himself, or through external opposition, comes into conflict with the order of the Universe.” He goes on to say that “Magick is the Science of understanding one’s self and one’s own situation. It is the art of applying this knowledge in action.” It seems almost as if his definition of magic could have come from a psychology manual on the importance of self-knowledge.

The secret of Crowley’s system, based on individuality and self-knowledge; or better, on the practice of individuality and self-knowledge, lies in the belief that the individual is a microcosmic image of the universe (or of God). Therefore, if someone applies this understanding by using his intention, he will be using the intention of the universe.

This is, perhaps, how magic operates.

Wiccan Vets Face Discrimination

Widows Sue Over Wicca Symbol

The widows of two Wiccan combat veterans sued the government Monday, saying the military has dragged its feet on allowing the religion's symbols on headstones.The Department of Veterans Affairs allows military families to choose any of 38 authorized headstone images. The list includes commonly recognized symbols for Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, as well as those for smaller religions such as Sufism Reoriented, Eckiankar and the Japanese faith Seicho-No-Ie.

The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, is not on the list, an omission the widows say is unconstitutional.

Wiccans worship the Earth and believe they must give to the community. Some consider themselves "white," or good, witches, pagans or neo-pagans. Approximately 1,800 active-duty service members identify themselves as Wiccans, according to 2005 Defense Department statistics.

The lawsuit was filed by four plaintiffs: Roberta Stewart, whose husband, Nevada National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart, was killed in combat in Afghanistan last year; Karen DePolito, whose husband, Jerome Birnbaum, is a Korean War veteran who died last year; Circle Sanctuary, a Wisconsin-based Wiccan church; and Isis Invicta Military Mission, a California-based Wiccan and pagan congregation serving military personnel.

It claims that the VA has made "excuse after excuse" for more than nine years for not approving the symbol and that by doing so, it has trampled on the plaintiffs' constitutional rights of freedom of speech, religion and due process.

Circle Sanctuary and Stewart began calling in 1997 for the VA to allow the symbol's use.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington, D.C.-based group representing the plaintiffs in court, is seeking an order compelling the VA to make a decision.

"After asking the VA on a number of occasions to stop its unfair treatment of Wiccans in the military, we have no alternative but to seek justice in the courts," said the Rev. Barry Lynn, the group's executive director.

So much for Americas Faith Based politics, we know which faith groups the Bush regime and its military support; WASPs.

Heck Eckankar is not even a religion it is a phenomena of the seventies, a makeover of Theosophy in the tradition of Lopsang Rampa.

Wicca is far older religion and more established, even if modern day Wicca began in 1954 with the publication of Gerald Gardners High Magicks Aid, when the British Governments removed witchcraft from the criminal code. Until then, like homosexuality, witchcraft was considered a hanging offense.

Of course the pentagram is controversial because Christains fear it. Conservative Christian Boycott of the U.S. Army

It is also used by Satanists.Hence the confusion. Though Satanism is also recognized as a valid religion by the U.S. military as is Wicca. They are two distinct religions.

This article talks about 'white' witches, there is no such a creature. That was is a myth out of the Wizard of Oz. You are a Wiccan or pagan or not. Nothing black or white about it.

Black magick is a racist term, used to differentiate between African based religions such as Voodoo, Santeria and European (white) Magick. If one uses white and black magick in a modern sense by Wiccans it is sometimes to differentiate themselves from Satanists. But in reality the terms mean negative or harmful magick versus useful or good magick. A hangover from the ninteenth century but that is an issue for another article.

The cheeky Aleister Crowley defined the Black Brothers as being the Catholic Church and their infernal rights. He had even a lower opinion of the Pentacostal evangelicals who allow themselves to be possessed by trickster spirits.

See:

Magick

Paganism

Witch

Occult

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Curses!

It appears though that Wicca has made it into the Big Leagues in America. As in Major League Baseball. Not so strange since most sports types are superstitious and after all witchcraft and magick is commonly used in Soccer.

Garner can’t find right voodoo doll

Looking for a way to slow down Chicago Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano, Houston Astros manager Phil Garner decided to try voodoo.

“I’m confused,” Garner told Chicago’s Daily Southtown. “I went online and looked for my voodoo guy and I’m going to have to pick one and try to get it. Most of these curses are against lovers … I’ve got to find one that puts a curse on a baseball player.”

Of course there are other ways to curse a ball player.

“It wasn’t voodoo. I stayed away from the voodoo. I can’t go into the details. I’ll just have to tell you Wicca (a form of witchcraft),” Garner said to the Houston Chronicle, explaining his latest plan.

But Voodoo ain't Wicca. The former does claim on occasion to use curse magick the latter says it doesn't.


Voodoo is Black Magick, as in originating in Africa, while Wicca claims to be White Magick, as in Eurocentric.

A Witchcraft suppression bill, currently being drafted by the Mpumalanga legislature, has struck fear into the hearts of South Africa's witches, who fear the dark days of medieval witch-hunts may soon return.

The bill, leaked in June to the South African Pagan Rights Alliance (Sapara), threatens to undermine the freedoms and rights of a religious minority by criminalising and prohibiting their right to exist and practise their religion, says Sapra convener Damon Leff.

The draft, titled the Mpumalanga Witchcraft Suppression Bill 2007, states in its introduction that it is "to provide for the suppression of witchcraft in the province".

In Chapter 6 it states any person who "professes a knowledge of witchcraft or the use of charms" or "for gain pretends to exercise or use any supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment" shall be guilty of an offence.
One of the major causes of the Western pagans' upset, according to Leff, is the failure of the bill to recognise the doctrinal and ethical gap between Western pagan and some forms of traditional African witchcraft.

And according to Vos, by lumping the two religions together the bill has overlooked how differently they approach the issue of ethical responsibility.

"While in rare cases (some in Mpumalanga) murder has been committed to get hold of human tissues, such as hearts and genitals for muti practices, the furthest a Western pagan would go is to collect human hair and nail clippings," he claimed.

Another serious criticism Western pagans in the country harbour is the bill's stereotyping of witches and witchcraft as being harmful and dangerous to their community.

The bill defines witchcraft as "the secret use of muti, zombies, spells, spirits, magic powers, water, mixtures, etc, by any person with the purpose of causing harm, damage, sickness to others or their property".

Leff has asked the Mpumalanga advocates to replace it with the definition: "a religio-magical occupation that employs the use of sympathetic magic, ritual, herbalism and divination".

AIDS, Witchcraft, and the Problem of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

As an epidemic of AIDS sweeps through this part of Africa, isidliso is the name that
springs to mind amongst many in the epidemic’s path. To the extent that this occurs, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS becomes also an epidemic of witchcraft. But the implications for a witchcraft epidemic are quite different from those of a public health crisis, at least as such things are conventionally conceived in western discourses of social and political management.

In this paper I will examine some of the implications of interpreting HIV/AIDS
infection as witchcraft and ask what they might mean for the legitimacy of public power in post-apartheid South Africa. For when suspicions of witchcraft are in play in a community, problems of illness and death can transform matters of public health into questions of public power, questions relating to the identification and punishment of persons deemed responsible for bringing misfortune to the community, that is: witches.

So instead of using pins in dolls to curse his opponent perhaps Garner should have found a witch who was good at casting Lucky Mojo Spells.

Like this guy.

Wiccan Wins Lottery

Wiccan instructor Elwood "Bunky" Bartlett says a New Age book store made it possible for him to become an overnight multi-millionaire.

The Maryland accountant, who claims to hold one of four winning tickets sold for Friday night's estimated 330 million dollar Mega Millions jackpot, says he made a bargain with the multiple gods associated with his Wiccan beliefs: "You let me win the lottery and I'll teach."

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Manifesting has a dark side

DO WHAT THOU WILT, SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW

The Conversation
July 17, 2024 

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Have you tried manifesting? It’s hard to escape on social media – the idea that you can will what you desire into reality through the power of belief. This could be financial success, romantic love or sporting glory.

Singer Dua Lipa, who headlined Glastonbury festival in June 2024, has said that performing on Friday night at the festival was “on her dream board”. “If you’re manifesting out there, be specific – because it might happen!”

Manifesting gained popularity quickly during the pandemic. By 2021, the 3-6-9 manifestation method was famous. A TikTok viewed over a million times, for instance, explains this “no fail manifesting technique”. You write down what you want three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon and nine times before you go to bed and repeating until it comes true. Now, content creators are explaining countless methods to speak your dreams into reality



But the idea that if you wish for something hard enough it will happen isn’t new. It grew out of the self-help movement. Some early popular books that peddled this idea include Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich from as long ago as 1937, and Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life from 1984.

No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

The trend really took off with Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a book published in 2006 which claims you can bring about whatever you desire through the power of manifestation. It has sold more than 35 million copies and boasts many celebrity fans. Drawing upon the “law of attraction”, Byrne proclaims: “Your whole life is a manifestation of the thoughts that go on in your head.”

Manifesting as an intellectual vice

But there is a dark side to manifesting. Popular trends such as the 3-6-9 manifestation method promote obsessive and compulsive behavioural patterns, and they also encourage flawed thinking habits and faulty reasoning.

Manifesting is a form of wishful thinking, and wishful thinking leads to false conclusions, often through the inaccurate weighing of evidence. The wishful thinker overinflates their optimism about the likelihood of a preferred outcome. In philosophical terms, this kind of thinking is called an “intellectual vice”: it blocks a rational person’s attainment of knowledge.

Manifesting urges people to dream big and imagine in detail everything they desire. This sets people’s expectations unnaturally high, setting them up for failure and disappointment. It’s arguably a form of toxic positivity.

If you believe your own thoughts have the power to create reality, you may end up downplaying or ignoring practical actions and the efforts of others. You might manifest by saying: “I attract positive things to me”. But in doing so, you may not notice or credit the role of luck, chance, privilege and circumstance in explaining why some things happen and others do not.

Logical errors

Manifesting leads to logical errors. Someone who practices manifesting – and who finds that something they manifested comes true – is likely to attribute these desired outcomes to their prior hoping or wishing. But this does not mean hoping was the cause of the outcome. Just because one came before the other does not mean it was the cause: correlation does not imply causation.



Manifesting journal. Mallika Jain/Dupe

If you believe the power of wishing for something results in what you want coming true, you will disproportionately attribute your mental activity with causal efficacy over other causes.

For instance, if you study hard for an exam and achieve a good grade, you might end up attributing this outcome to the daily mantra or repeated affirmations you said leading up to the test, rather than crediting the effort you put into studying. For your next test, you might keep on manifesting, but study less.

And when a hoped-for outcome does not occur, you might find yourself accounting for it in positive or fatalistic terms: the universe has something better planned. The negative outcome becomes additional evidence that you should still think positively, and so you won’t change your approach.

While it may seem initially appealing, manifesting may also encourage victim blaming: that if someone had thought more positively, an outcome would have been different. It also fails to encourage people to make backup plans, leaving them vulnerable to luck and circumstance.

Manifesting is very self-involved. The wants of the manifester are central to their focus and the use of their mental energy and time.

If you rely solely on mental power to achieve your desires, you will not succeed. Try to consider the various factors that support and resist your goals. Finally, remember that sometimes the thoughts we think are imaginative, fictive, fanciful or fantastic. It is enriching and positive that in many cases, our thoughts do not come true.

Laura D'Olimpio, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Birmingham


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

HOW MANY THELEMITES DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB

NONE THELEMITES ARE NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK

Starandsplendor.comwww.starandsplendor.com/2019/09/09/manifesting-intention-making-the-magickal-link/

Manifesting, intention & making the magickal link - star + splendor

Sep 9, 2019 ... Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. Castle Books ... aleister crowleychangeintentionmagickmanifestationshadow work. By Ami.

Web Results

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Manifestation 101 — Or How You're Performing Magick Everyday ...

Jul 2, 2018 ... First things first, let me clarify that I'm using the word Magick as defined by Aleister Crowley (I don't neccasarily agree with or endorse ...

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Does Thelema teach about manifesting, using our Will and ... - Reddit

Feb 15, 2024 ... It prompts us to begin with self-perception, self-mastery, personal discipline, and theurgy (the union with the divine) workings. Only after ...

Faena.comwww.faena.com/aleph/what-is-magic-aleister-crowley-explains

What is Magic? Aleister Crowley Explains - Faena

Crowley recognized that the invocation of entities through magick was an inherent part of our psyche. In his Introduction to Lemgeton Clavicula Salomonis he ...

From Pagan Animism to Alienation

How Monotheism and Capitalism Create Disenchantment

by Bruce Lerro / November 13th, 2022

LONG READ

Orientation: the politics of the sacred

The word “pagan” is one of those words that has been worked over by monotheists and secular rulers so that it has many meanings, mostly  negative. This has been the case except for the past fifty years when Neopaganism has made a comeback, thanks mostly to the women’s movement. In his book Being Pagan, Rhyd Wildermuth writes that:

Being pagan means being of the land, rural villager, rustic. In modern terms, being a peasant or being a country bumpkin as opposed to the city (39) …

Rhyd tells us that Frankish or German people were called “heathens” by missionaries, meaning “dweller of the hearth”. Heathen lands were the most uncultivated places not suited for large-scale farming such as moors, scrubland and sparse forests.  This land is better for small grazing animals like sheep and goats or for hunting small game. Because of the lack of large scale land productivity, politically it tended to remain independent of urban control far longer than other agricultural people who became dependent on cities.Heathens also more easily resisted Christianization and were made fun of by Christian and urban people because of this resistance.

In addition, my own stereotypical picture of pagans is that we are:

• Materialistic
• Overly sensual
• Have sacred presences that are carnal and undignified
• Violent
• Racist (heathens or Nazi’s)
• Uncivilized

Rhyd writes that when people ask him what being Pagan means he points to the flooding, the droughts, the melting icecaps, the extinctions and the plagues in the world today. He writes that in pagan animist societies people took care of the land because being an animist means everything is alive and nothing is inanimate. If we lived as animists, terrible ecological circumstances would never have been possible.

When the Christians strove to take over Celtic lands, they created stories by which old pagan presences were conquered, driven out or demonized by magical or miraculous means. The stories of Graoully, Coulobre and La Tarasque are examples and these stories were widespread in France, Spain and Germany.

Scope of this article

Rhyd Wildermuth in his book Being Pagan outlines a high contrast between our alienated existence in monotheist, industrial capitalist society while taking us back in time to when we are not alienated, in pagan animistic societies. He does not specify what kind of societies these are. My best guess is he was mostly talking about hunter-gatherers, various kinds of horticulturalists and simple, small-scale farming societies. He contrasts differences in how time and place was conceived. He shows us how the treatment of the land, including fruits, vegetable, trees, plants and animals was radically different in animistic societies

One of his most interesting contrasts was how the body and mind were thought to be related. He points out that in industrial capitalist societies the mind drives the body. In animistic societies bodies drove minds. More on this later. In current times, those who are monotheists believe they have a soul that transcends death. What did pagans prior to monotheism think about this? For them, connection to the ancestors was part of the same ecological networks that connects us to rocks, rivers, plants and animals. Today, at least in Yankeedom, ancestors don’t matter. What happened and why did it happen?

Rhyd says that pagans do not believe in the supernatural. But if pagans populate the sacred worlds with gods, goddesses, earth spirits and ghosts how can they not be supernatural?

Years ago Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that language is an organ of perception. If animists think that everything is alive, how does this translate into language? We will see how it affects the proportion of nouns and verbs used, along with the proportion of tenses to indicate the past, present and future.

Because we live in a global age, all sacred traditions have to face the problem of mixing. Monotheism has been impacted by globalization, but Christian monotheism in Europe has a clear developmental trajectory: Catholicism and Protestantism. For pagans the problem is deeper because Neopaganism has had about 150 years of eclecticism. Its history has been broken up, gone underground and resumed. Should Neopagans mix with native traditions in the United States or in African societies? Should Neopagans incorporate Shintoism? Some say this is “cultural appropriation” while others say mixing traditions has always been part of polytheism.

For most of this article I will be analyzing the book Being Pagan. However, I will also be adding my own material to fill out his argument, and hopefully make it better.

Process “becoming” philosophy vs being “static” philosophy

When verbs become nouns

Rhyd points out that every known language has two primary kinds of words: nouns and verbs. They also have two secondary categories, modifiers, which are adjectives and adverbs.

• A noun is the name of something specific
• Verbs describe actions
• Adjectives describe a noun
• Adverbs describe an action

He points out that languages spoken by indigenous peoples and by ancient cultures use more verbs than nouns – especially animist cultures. Modern languages like English and French, both products of monotheism, employ more nouns than verbs. In addition, every language has a certain proportion of words devoted to describing tenses: the past, present and future.

For industrial capitalist societies, once the present is over it becomes past, and pasts are connected to things like documents, statues, relics. For animist cultures, everything is alive and moving. The present tense is part of a never-ending act of becoming. For Western monotheists today, there are people who personally are lost in the past or the future. The inability to concentrate on the present is so bad that people take meditation classes to force them to live in the present. Animist cultures have no problem living in the present.

Furthermore, it is no accident that industrial capitalist societies are more “thing”-oriented because they have writing. Writing freezes thoughts into words and words become objects. In oral animistic cultures what people say is more in the service of social-psychological interaction. On the other hand, thoughts have a short shelf life when the conversation is over. With the introduction of writing, language becomes more static and words become things frozen on a page.

Time of the moon

We are all familiar with the calendar and tracking our time in relation to days of the week? But how far back does this go? For most of the history of social evolution it was the light of the moon and its  rhythm of the new moon, half-moon and full moon which set the course, the patterns and meaning of everyday life. For pagans, the moon isn’t only visible at night, but with careful training we can see it is also visible during the day. Activities were tracked according to changes on and during moons cycles over the course of a month. Rhyd points out that the origin of the word month comes from the moon. In terms of tracking human time, at the beginning there was the month, long before there were days of the week.

There is nothing spiritual or supernatural about the moon. The tides come and go twice a day, pulled by the gravity of the moon. The tides sweep in and out daily n rhythmic patterns, twice out twice in, pulled by the moon’s gravity. The moon has different phases. During the full moon or the new moon the tide sweeps further inland and returns further from the shore than at other times. Knowing the phases of the moon is a very practical affair. It tells us when we are more likely to find fish that might be scattered on the shore. All an animist would have to do is look at the moon’s face to know when food might be more plentiful and what the conditions were best for a boat entering the ocean.

Research shows that many animals are more active during the night of the full moon. People sleep later during the full moon and longer during the new moon. Before the invention of electric lighting which enabled humanity to have the night permanently lit, people who hunted did so by using the light of the moon. Early pagans knew which phase the moon was in and they acted accordingly.

Rhyd describes how this impacts him personally:

I always feel my absolute lowest when the new moon is new and just before it is new… Noting how certain things are easiest to complete as the moon wanes, because I know that I am often more tired and feel less intuitive during new moon, I try to avoid scheduling too much for that time and instead try to rest. I find my life much more grounded and anxiety is rarely something that can overwhelm me. (22-23)

Knowledge of the moon only appears as superstitious to people living in industrial capitalist countries because they are those who are blinded by city lights, and the lack of need to hunt and fish for food. They have stopped paying attention to the moon. Until the mechanistic phase of clocks, we scheduled activities looking at the moon as well as the time we go to sleep. We city Neopagans are encouraged to look at the moon, find out where it is and what phase it is in, as well as where it has arisen and where it has set. Like anything else, it takes practice for our eyes to become sensitized to the moon and its movements. In modern city-life these sensitivities are deadened. For us, each night seems like the next and we go to sleep at the same time regardless  of the moon or whether it is wintertime or summertime. We have lost our rhythm.

Cyclic time to clock and linear time

It is not just the moon that waxes and wanes. The yearly seasons change throughout the years depending on the zones around the earth. Plants and animals follow the seasons, going through developmental cycles of growth and death. Different animist cultures follow suit, dividing their cycle of the year according to the temperate or polar regions. Those who have four seasons in temperate zones divide their years into four quarters. The “time of land” tells us when berries or tomatoes are ripest. On the other hand, upper-middle class people living in industrial capitalist societies, especially Yankeedom, have come to expect the same fruits and vegetables to be available all year, regardless of the season.

Rhyd  says the land has character just like human temperaments do. She is gruff, grizzled, hearty, stoic, or lush. The combination of minerals are different in some places than they are elsewhere. She is shaped by the rocks, the wind, the cold, heat and the humidity. Rhyd points out local lands themselves have a unique taste. Whether wild or domesticated, those same plants and animals taste differently depending on the quality of land they are grown and live in. By saying pagans are of the land it just means understanding basic ecological dynamics: how it works on humanity and how humanity works on it.

This natural time was the enemy of Protestants anxious to abolish the seasonal holidays, and capitalists who wanted to discipline workers to punch a time clock and work long hours regardless of the seasons or the phases of the moon. They wanted disciplined workers to accept clock time. In animist time, when people worked, they also slept during the day. Even as late as in early modern Europe, when artisans were given an order by merchants, they took breaks when they wanted to. They controlled the pace of their work. In the early Industrial Age capitalists were insensitive to workers being sick or tired. If they didn’t continue working they would be replaced.

Keeping time has a long history deep into ancient civilizations. They used the sun dials, water clocks and hour-glasses. But these were not precise and they were not used by artisans or peasants. Clocks were used by the upper classes as a luxury item. They were used by alchemists in cooking the elements or by astrologers for casting the horoscope of great political figures. Bell towers were used to remind people to pray or to announce foreign invasions or fires.

In addition, as cities rose and farming declined the drive to see time cyclically waned. Cyclic time was replaced by linear time. Capitalists hate the past because the past is a reminder that their system is historical. Linear time is laid out like a straight line moving from past to present to future. Once the past is over, unlike cyclic time, it never returns. But capitalists need to display the future as always open, and where anything can happen. This feeds into the ideology that any person can become a capitalist if they have the right psychological state.

Becoming Body

One of the most interesting arguments in this book is the relationship between the body and the mind. Rhyd says we do not have bodies, we are becoming bodies. This means that:

• There is no getting out of being a body
• We are becoming bodies. This connects to the difference between process and static philosophy that we touched on earlier.

For example, Rhyd points out that hunger and thirst were not something you were or had, but something you did. Being thirsty is passive state, a condition that needs to be resolved. It is something that has happened to you. On the other hand, thirsting for water is an active state. It is not happening to you. It is something you try to do something about. But then you expend energy at work and you become thirsty again. The body is constantly reproducing itself with needs, satisfaction and new needs.

How we came to have bodies

Just as we have externalized and reified our language, we have externalized our bodies and separated them from ourselves, making them something we have rather than something we are. This negative attitude about the body is not unique to Western monotheism. In the East we hear we are “trapped in the body” or we are “a prison of flesh” that needs to be escaped from. Occultists claim we “are inhabiting different bodies”. Teenage girls “hate their bodies”. To say we have a body implies that there can be a state without one. What’s left? Minds without bodies, a product of patriarchal sacred traditions, not paganism.

According to Wildermuth, the reasons for this anti-body orientation include the development of Christianity with the separation of the soul from the body. Secondly, Descartes added to this by claiming the mind can be separated from the body. Lastly, capitalism insisted on the discipline of the body during capitalist production to conform to the pump and lever in Early Modern Europe. Later, human bodies are disciplined again as a reflection of the complex machines and the steam engine in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 20th century the bodies of workers were subjected to the time and motion studies of Taylorism.

Ecological networks are bodies

In pagan understanding, everything that exists is in terms of living bodies. Ecological settings are bodies too. Having a body is like seeing a body mechanically, seeing a body as a collection of separate things. Imagining having bodies has negative ecological consequences. Seeing the forest as a collection of separate beings rather than a body leads to:

• Killing off of species of insects
• Hunting too many of the birds and animals
• Felling too many trees
• Damming a river or taking too many fish from a lake which can turn the entire system into something unlivable for everything there

Doing this to our ecology is like removing an organ from a human body and expecting it to work right. It is only possible for us to do such destructive things to the natural world because we do not see it as body, but rather separate things unrelated to each other. Rhyd tells us that:

Over the last 100 years alone, 543 species of terrestrial vertebrates (reptiles, birds and mammals) have gone extinct worldwide, a rate of disappearance that would have historically occurred  over 10,000 years. That is, the rate of extinction is occurring 1,000 times faster for such beings now. (91-92)

Alienation from trees

Rhyd points out that oaks are special trees for pagan people. Oaks are more likely than shorter species of trees to be hit by lightning and are more likely to survive a lightning strike. It is no accident that oaks were associated with the gods of thunder. Oaks also protected other trees from storms and high winds. Many oaks grow very old, outlasting the rise and fall of civilizations. When oaks die they are put to sacred use as shrines or temples by Celtic and Germanic peoples  An oak struck by lightning became a political ritual site, often becoming a place for major decisions. The importance of oaks to pagans was not lost on monotheists who ordered the cutting down of oaks dedicated to Thor to make the conversion of pagan peoples to Christianity easier. The Christians then built Cathedrals from the oaks.

Alienation from other animals

In my diet, much of my protein comes from eating chicken and fish. I know two women vegans who insisted I watch documentaries of what goes on in slaughter houses and chicken factories. I watched part of one and then turned it off. I didn’t want to know my eating habits were linked to so much suffering, but I continue to buy chicken at the supermarket. I’m confident I am not alone. We buy meat in packages at the supermarket but we rarely know anything about the process by which these dead animals arrived there. Rhyd points out that the flesh of these beings:

is processed by machines into forms that would be unrecognizable to people even a hundred years ago. Cows, pigs, chickens live in settings that look much more like factories than the pastoral landscapes. (93)

Contrary to all this, animist views see all living forms to include not just plants and animals, but rocks and rivers are also connected to the ancestors. Animists are engaged in reciprocal exchange of gratitude. When humans killed an animal, they apologized to the animal and made sure that future hunts were conducted in ways that did not thin out the species they hunted. This contrasts to monotheists who tell humanity we have “domain over nature. It is there for us to do what we want”. It is easy to see how this domain would directly link up to the scientific exploration of the 17th and 18th centuries and capitalist exploitation of land through colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The importance of ancestry for pagans

Today, especially in the United States, ancestry is not anything that is taken seriously. For the most part, people can’t trace their genealogy beyond their grandparents. Sure, there is new interest in tracing genealogical trees but in my opinion this is a fad. Whatever value and meaning this has, it is certainly not pursued with the same level of building a serious sacred connection. Most Yankees do not hope to have their ancestors come to them in their dreams, in their homes or giving them direction. Our relationship with ancestors is thin. In part, this is because we didn’t live near them because capitalist enclosures drive communities apart. This has been widened even further in the 20th century by capitalists. Geographical industrial specialization drives people to work in different parts of the country. In addition, the rate of change in industrial capitalist societies is so fast that the wisdom of the ancestors dries up quickly because the world has changed so much between generations. As gaps between generations grow, political differences emerge as to how to handle the change. Ancestry is marginalized as race and class identities replace them.

Pagans on the other hand, because they were not displaced, lived in the same location for many generations and they could trace their ancestors well beyond their grandparents. Secondly, because the rate of change was slow, the knowledge of the ancestors was respected knowledge that did not change much between generations. This means their politics are similar. Lastly, since tribal societies did not have classes and groups, ethnic composition was similar. There was no class or race identity to compete with ancestry. In many cultures a common truth is that the dead speak to us in our sleep.

Scale of pagan presences

According to Rhyd Wildermuth, in most pagan societies there are four levels of scale.

At the bottom and the smallest level there are shrines to the home. On a larger scale there are rituals to the ancestors. On the third level there are community festivals which include arts and crafts. Lastly, there are offerings to a god a few times a year. It’s important to understand that these scales are not hierarchically organized. In other words, the gods do not control the community rituals, ancestors or shrine presences. What is true is that they are organized in terms of the frequency with which they are enacted, beginning with the shrines in the home. In animistic societies when something is strange or has gone wrong, the spirits are not seen as evil but in the wrong place. The job of the shaman is to understand the problem and resolve it.

What happens when monotheism arises? Shrines are marginalized and in the case of Catholicism, replaced by pictures of saints in the house. Ancestors lose their connection to the rocks, rivers, plants and animals along with their wisdom. Community rituals and outdoor places are replaced with patron saints. The pagan gods, whether dragons or giants, are demonized and replaced by a single monotheistic deity.

Are spirits, ancestors and gods internal to us or external?

The key to understanding the difference between animalism and monotheism centers on where the sacred source originates. For animistic people, consciousness is diffused so that spirits, ancestors and even gods are inside our psyche and project outward. This is based on the unconscious intelligence of the body. Under monotheism, our alienation from the body is an important obstacle to our understanding of magic. As a result, for monotheists both spirits and God are external, objective and have little to do with our psychology

Magic is the unconscious intelligence of the body

Rhyd has a very interesting although strange definition of magick. He argues that magick is the unconscious perceptual wisdom of the body that is constantly reacting to the real world, which we have forgotten to notice in our modern world. Our bodies are constantly steering us in everyday life. When we speak of the unconscious, partly what we really mean is everything that our body knows and senses.

A very simple example is body memory. It is a process by which you find your way through a dark room that you know very well. Another example is being able to drive down a familiar road where your motor skills take you home while you are zoning out on music. Another example is if you are playing the outfield and you know how far back to go for a fly ball just by hearing the sound of the bat. In the case of baseball, that body knowledge has never been consciously processed. We know things we don’t realize we know. A pagan definition of magick is aligning consciousness to the body in order to enact change. Consciousness is the servant of the body. It is the directed focus of the body. Magick means giving attention to what the body is telling us and acting consciously in accordance with it.  Our conscious attention, including our minds or our egos, is not the true seat of knowledge.

Meditation is not magick. Rhyd says:

In most forms of meditation a person stills their thoughts in order to have better control over consciousnessand the ways in which it was directed. (158)

Magick is not about quieting our thoughts in a disembodied way. It is about listening to how those thoughts are related to the sensations of our body.

Eudaemons and genii’s vs the eternal soul and permanent genius

In animistic societies people recognized that benevolent protective presences entered into the person at birth and left the body at death. Even as late as the time of the Greeks such presences were called eudaemons. The Romans called them genii’s and made shrines for them. This was too much commotion for monotheists, and St. Augustine replaced these fluid presences with a noun like eternal soul. Long after monotheism, in 20th century intelligence testing, we have the same noun – like genius – which is permanently attached to the eternal soul. For pagans, people were not geniuses themselves but had a particularly helpful genii to whom they listened.

Left and Right Sacred

In the early days of animism, from hunter-gatherers 100,000 years ago up to the Bronze Age civilization of 5,000 years ago, animists kept to their local identity and did not try to mix cultures. The great civilizations of the ancient world certainly traded enough so that pagan people became aware of other pagan people. Did they keep separate or did they mix? Their answer was always to mix and to synthesize. With the rise of globalization, the knowledge across cultures became even more intense. However, in the last 50 years, Neopaganism arose as part of the women’s movement. Because Neopaganism has a broken and suppressed history rather than a single stream leading all the way back as monotheists do, it has to determine what it will mix and match with. A new problem emerged for Neopaganism as the New Age emerged in England and the United States. A significant number of New Age organizations were small capitalists who have overridden Neopagan resistance to commercialization.  New Age organizers have offered people courses that have drawn from native cultures (from the United States and Africa) and have turned a nice profit. Some native cultures have fought back against this. So pagan mixing cross-culturally has become politicized because of the ravenous nature of capitalists for profits.

There are two tendencies within paganism. Right-wing pagans think that the sacred should be orderly, that there should be separation between the sacred and the secular and the sacred traditions should be kept pure, based on exclusion and supposed genetic ancestry. These are represented by far-right groups who are nationalist, some neo-Nazis. They say white people should only involve themselves with European gods.

The left-wing pagans care less about order and are more interested in continuing the historical paganistic mixing. The socialist wing is very aware of the exploitation of cultural appropriation but they don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They want to trust spontaneously mixing, multiplying and adding. They do not want to keep the sacred and secular separate, but are committed to expanding the sacred into the secular. We do this, not because we want an animistic theocracy, but because sacred pagan life will challenge the capitalistic control over secular life.

What is ironic is the so-called social justice movements that demand that cultures don’t mix because they think mixing is inherently exploitative. Yet they wind up on the same side as the right-wing sacred pagans. They also want to keep things pure but for different reasons than right-wing pagans.

Criticisms

I do not disagree with anything that was said in Being Pagan. However, the contrast between rural tribal paganism and monotheism and capitalism is too severe and some transitions need to be at least suggested. For example, there is nothing said about the city paganism of the Greeks and Romans, the Alexandrians of North Africa or the city magick of Renaissance Italy. At least a few pages of some of the differences between city and rural paganism would have been very helpful along with some references. This is especially important  since today the overwhelming number of Neopagans live in cities.

As I said earlier, the kind of animism described is overwhelmingly tribal. But in between tribal societies and industrial societies are agricultural states where the goddesses and gods predominate. Had this been included, there would be an evolutionary sense of movement from animism to industrial capitalism. As it stands now, Rhyd’s description of alienation would have come about gradually. Without that alienation seems to come out of nowhere. A few  pages about the polytheism of agricultural states would have thickened history and minimized abrupt changes.

Third, it was disappointing to me to have the word “god” introduced along with land spirits and ancestors and used interchangeably. Typically, the word “god” is used to indicate a degree of power that is more powerful than ancestors or land spirits or nature nymphs, yet this distinction is left out. A good example is the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses who were superior to humanity in scope and scale. Why introduce the word god at all unless it was used to refer to something different than other sacred presences?

Fourth, In his book All That is Sacred is Profaned, Rhyd claims to be a Marxist. His purpose is to introduce Marxism to Pagans. But in Being Pagan there is no mention of Marxism. Given that Marxism denies the ontological existence of a spiritual world, it would have been helpful to explain somewhere, either in the preface or an epilogue, how he squares a Marxist denial of the sacred world with the paganism he espouses in Being Pagan, especially in his chapter “The Fire of Meaning”.

Fifth, the definition of magick is limited to tapping into the unconscious wisdom of the body. This is an important addition to pagan practice. But why call it magick? Why not call it “body” knowledge? Furthermore, magick is often defined as changing consciousness through the use of imagination along with saturating the senses though the use of theatre and the art as in “Tree of Life” magick. There is no mention of any of this.

Lastly, ritual descriptions are disappointingly skimpy and it makes it seem as if all pagan rituals are private. This ignores the fact that most pagans practice magick in groups. There should be at least some description of group rituals to see how his animism would be practiced.• First published at  Socialist Planning Beyond CapitalismFacebookTwitter

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.