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I studied science in school. Chemistry, physics, a little geology, a lot of algorithms. Did labs and programming assignments, even published some original research.
You know what I didn’t do? Mix random chemicals and try to reinvent chemistry.
I view spirits as professors. They already know much of how magick works. When they don’t, they help me figure it out. They give me techniques to practice (homework). And we have labs, where I test a technique, verify I’m getting the results they promised, and at the same time, see for myself that their predictions were accurate.
I want to share magick with the world. I want to publish original research. But like school, first I’m going to learn what we already know.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Learning Magick, Spirits
Of course it also shows how different magick seems to be from science as it is conventionally perceived. After all at school I bet you didn’t have people trying to claim your professors were a figment of your imagination or (when being diplomatic) a projection of your unconscious archetypes. :-)
In ‘normal’ science as it currently stands when you want to learn what we already know you ask the professor or read their books etc. In magick you need to learn how to communicate with dis-incarnate intelligences which most people claim do not even exist.
Anyway congratulations on getting back to the book again. Its by far your best writing.
I’m looking forward to the day when there’s an established body of knowledge for magick akin to what we have in the physical sciences. Once that exists, nobody will have to do the equivalent of mixing together random chemicals and reinventing chemistry. Without it, each generation has to repeat the same work over and over again and make all the same mistakes.
Creating such a body of knowledge is one of the reasons that I first got into blogging, and while Augoeides sometimes seems dominated by stories about ghosts or psychics or religious politics, I’ve carried that goal over into my published works. Even though I disagree with some of your assertions, I’m looking forward to seeing your book once it’s finally done. In the end, my hope is that the data will speak for itself.
The more people that write their magickal ideas down more “formally” like this the more likely we are to get to the stage where there are proven, reusable approaches.
There are plenty of challenges to developing magick into a ‘body of knowledge’ (the measurability/instrumentation problem, etc), but it’s going to be hard to interest serious investigators to tackle these without this formalisation first, because only then can we get a ‘critical mass’ of people who have gotten results.
Glad the book is in focus again.
[…] Mike Sententia makes a good, short, post about foundational understanding. I’ve ranted about this for a long time, but he puts it in a short and simple package. We wouldn’t learn science the way a lot of people want to learn magick. […]