JackofWands
Wow... What a wealth of information here. I'm not really sure where to start responding, but let's dive in.
I know very little about Thelema, so I enjoyed reading all of the links that Ravenest shared. It's definitely interesting to see how it contains the structural elements of religion and group ritual--as well as individual ritual action, in the form of the meditation and astral travel (possibly not the correct phrase, but the document seemed to me to be describing a similar process, if devoid of literal belief that a practitioner travels on a spiritual plane)--without relying too much on literalism. Thank you for the info.
I've heard the argument of "belief as a tool" before from chaos magicians, and I think it's a really interesting one, although I personally have never been able to apply the doctrine. (And one thing that everyone agrees on is that without belief, magick is doomed to fail.) One question I would ask of you, Ravenest, and of any other magicians of a similar persuasion who are reading this thread: How far does this belief extend with regards to the effects of a magickal working? Do you believe that through the "ritual drama" (beautiful phrase) of magick, you're actually able to effect a change in the outside world? And moreover--more interestingly--do you believe this even when you're not in the act of ritual working? I could see how, for the purposes of a ritual, you would need to wear the mask of belief, but (if this is true) do you abandon that mask outside of ritual and view the world from a more naturalistic perspective, or do you fundamentally believe that magick works?
Coming to this idea of "ritual drama" and approaching religion or Tarot reading as theatre, I think it has interesting implications in light of the various schools of thought on the nature of acting. You have the old school (e.g. Laurence Olivier) of actors who saw what they did as a craft, and carefully selected every gesture and inflection of their voices to produce a certain effect; but later, you have Stanislavsky's method and even the Brechtian model of theatre, both of which had very different views on what the goal of theatre was and how to accomplish it. In this sense, I really like the theatrical analogy, but I think that even so, it leaves a lot of room for interpretation regarding how (and why) one should perform.
I know very little about Thelema, so I enjoyed reading all of the links that Ravenest shared. It's definitely interesting to see how it contains the structural elements of religion and group ritual--as well as individual ritual action, in the form of the meditation and astral travel (possibly not the correct phrase, but the document seemed to me to be describing a similar process, if devoid of literal belief that a practitioner travels on a spiritual plane)--without relying too much on literalism. Thank you for the info.
I've heard the argument of "belief as a tool" before from chaos magicians, and I think it's a really interesting one, although I personally have never been able to apply the doctrine. (And one thing that everyone agrees on is that without belief, magick is doomed to fail.) One question I would ask of you, Ravenest, and of any other magicians of a similar persuasion who are reading this thread: How far does this belief extend with regards to the effects of a magickal working? Do you believe that through the "ritual drama" (beautiful phrase) of magick, you're actually able to effect a change in the outside world? And moreover--more interestingly--do you believe this even when you're not in the act of ritual working? I could see how, for the purposes of a ritual, you would need to wear the mask of belief, but (if this is true) do you abandon that mask outside of ritual and view the world from a more naturalistic perspective, or do you fundamentally believe that magick works?
Coming to this idea of "ritual drama" and approaching religion or Tarot reading as theatre, I think it has interesting implications in light of the various schools of thought on the nature of acting. You have the old school (e.g. Laurence Olivier) of actors who saw what they did as a craft, and carefully selected every gesture and inflection of their voices to produce a certain effect; but later, you have Stanislavsky's method and even the Brechtian model of theatre, both of which had very different views on what the goal of theatre was and how to accomplish it. In this sense, I really like the theatrical analogy, but I think that even so, it leaves a lot of room for interpretation regarding how (and why) one should perform.