Plutonica.net was started six months ago on October 31st, 2007, the first post being “[cref 15]“, followed by “[cref 16]” and “[cref 17]“. I’d like to take time to mention a few posts from each month, perhaps highlight some you’ve not read before.

In November, among other things, we looked at 100 years of fringe religion, chaos magick, secrecy and experimented with a series of posts on themed collections of books called Shelf Life – something we may revisit in the coming months.

December we looked at being “beyond the books“, Nietzsche on art, book reviews and a number of news items (such as being among the first to report the sad news that Thelema Coast to Coast had released its final podcast on the 31st.)

With the turning of the year bringing questions of what’s to come, January opened with Continue reading »

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Archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of 17th century rituals involving swans and other birds in the Cornish valley near Truro. Thirty-five pits have been excavated since 2003, containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair and part of an iron cauldron.

The finds have been dated to the 1640s, a period of turmoil in England when Cromwellian Puritans destroyed any links to pre-Christian pagan England. It was also a period when witchcraft attracted the death sentence.

[...] The pits where the contents were intact also contained a leaf parcel holding stones that experts have traced to Swanpool beach, 15 miles (24km) away, an area famed for its swan population. Ms Woods said: “Killing a swan would have been incredibly risky at this time because they are the property of the Crown.”

There was a particularly macabre discovery in one of the feather pits: fifty-seven unhatched eggs ranging in size from a bantam to a duck. They were flanked by the bodies of two magpies, birds that have long been the subject of superstition in Cornish folklore. The organic remains survived because they were preserved in the water-logged ground. Although the shells of the eggs had dissolved, the membrane remained, revealing chicks shortly before they were due to hatch.

Read the full article at TimesOnline.co.uk, “Mysterious pits shed light on forgotten witches of the West“.

Via Abrahadabra.net.

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While we’re on the subject of films featuring Aleister Crowley, ((See “[cref 156]” and “[cref 161]“.) I thought I’d mention a trailer I recently stumbled across for Perdurabo, a short 40 minute film which will form the first part of a feature-length movie.

The film was written and directed by independent Spanish film maker Carlos Atanes and stars Manuel Solàs as Aleister Crowley.

The English on Atanes’ website, Wikipedia entry and IMDB film synopsis is awkward, and all sources lack specific details on the film’s contents.

In time of Mussolini, a mysterious man travels to Sicily looking for famous British magician Aleister Crowley. But when he arrives, he discovers that Crowley has vanished, and into the Abbey of Thelema (the Abbey where people does his True Will) the confusion and the despair reigns. During his stay, he’ll knows the Sexual Magick principles and the thelemic way of life.

- Film synopsis of Perdurabo from IMDB.com

A brief trailer can be seen on Blip.TV here.

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Continuing on from yesterday’s post, Deo challenges the models of magick, and the very value of magick itself:

[...] I believe there is a single kind of argument that can target all of the models. It works like this (and this is basically just a more careful exegesis of the thought process underlying my sloppy essay, and using the concept of the magical models). Either (A) the magical models identify different means to different mechanisms, such that the word ‘magic’ is used to name a loose family of practices; or (B) the magical models identify different means to the same mechanism, such that the reference of the word ‘magic’ subsumes the different models.

In case (A), each of the mechanisms have to be considered separately. You mention in your original post that I use the psychological model to “challenge magick’s value.” The reason that I do this is because it seems to me that using the word ‘magic’ for this approach is arbitrary, or just a reference to *ritual style* rather than to any particular kind of special mechanism: Because the effects of the psychological model are the most easily explained by a non-magical vocabulary, the psychological model is most easily targeted by a deflationary argument. If the only thing that makes the psychological model ‘magic’ is because one uses sigils instead of conventional psychotherapy as the treatment style, then we are not talking about the common concept ‘magic’. And this is an important point: My argument was against the common conception of magic (as one often, admittedly, finds in neo-Paganism), which is as an ontological category. You can redefine magic to escape the arguments, but then is it magic any longer? [...]

Well, there is the fact that it works. Continue reading »

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In reply to [cref 155], Deo asks a number of important questions:

I’m interested in the question: Is there such a thing (ontologically/metaphysically) as magic? The magical models perspective allows us to assume that there is, and it then outlines ways to conceptualize the methods and effects of various systems/ritual styles. With regard to magical models, my question is necessarily less pragmatic: What is the mechanism, if any, that delivers the effects from a ritual framed by any of the given models? Is this mechanism identical with magic? In other words, does magic deserve to be an ontological category? If not, then it’s metaphysically uninteresting and a worldview that lacks it can still be a complete worldview.

This brought to mind a post made by John Crow in his blog Treasure House of Pearls earlier in the year titled “Magic and the Categories of Discourse” where he wrote: “Until about 900 years ago, magic practice was simply done with very little thought as to why it works or how it works. It was just done and it just worked.”

Thinking about why and how magick works is relatively new. The psychological model is favoured by many, especially when explaining it to those outside the circle (so to speak). The question of what we mean when we say “magick” seems even more elusive. It’s a question of meaning.

Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning describes it this way:

The automatic attribution of meaning to things – or the failure to distinguish between them initially – is a characteristic of narrative, of myth, not of scientific thought.

However, Peterson suggests that to trivialize Continue reading »

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