Room service
By Psyche | April 2, 2010 | Print This Post | E-mail This Post | 8 Comments
Edited by Dave Evans and Dave Green, Ten Years is a collection of academic essays inspired by Hutton’s groundbreaking work. Hidden Publishing provided me with a copy for review, but of course this necessitates first reading Triumph. And so here we are.
I’m finding it a fascinating read, and certainly as important as the hype that surrounds it has suggested. At the moment I’m still in the pre-Pagan stages of its history, covering the Golden Dawn and high magick, and this particular quip from Hutton seems a rather accurate summation of how magick is often approached:
Traditional scholarly magic was at basis an elaborate way of ringing for room service.1
The reference is in regards to the Holy Guardian Angel, commanding spirits and demons, and much of the ritual work that was reintroduced in the occult revival at the turn of the last century.
It struck me that work with the Goetia
How relevant is this observation today? In seeking experiences with entities outside ourselves, are we only “ringing for room service”?
Footnotes:
- Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
Psyche is the editor of Plutonica.net and the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, Psyche also operates a tarot consultation business, Psyche Tarot. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, Tarot World Magazine, among other magazines, and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity (Megalithica, 2008).
Psyche's website is http://www.plutonica.net.
If you are seeking experience with entities “outside” yourself, you are just “ringing for room service.”
Hutton’s making the point that Levi and the Golden Dawn enlivened that sort of ceremonial magic by yoking it to personal development, the psyche, our “insides.”
The next turning in magical practice (IMHO) comes when a true experience of theurgy obliterates the whole outside/inside dichotomy.
[Just found your blog per Catherine Beyer, looks great and I'm excited about posting, and maybe submitting!)]
Welcome to the blog!
Levi remained very much a Christian, his belief in God and spirits placed them outside himself; Mackenzie’s emphasis was on the psychological, rather than spiritual model (see Frater U.:D.:’s excellent “Models of Magic“).
The Golden Dawn, at least in its inception, seemed to balance between the two, many believed that gods and spirits were very real and potentially very dangerous, and emphasis seems to have been placed on more psychological-style workings.
The interest for me here is that it touches upon the (often unasked) question: why do we practice magick?
Interesting notion, and totally relevant…I have known a lot of these sorts of magicians, who measure their ability by how many and how powerful the entities they summon are. The British occult revival was so powerfully founded in British sensibilities that its sometimes hard to see where the cultural influence begins and ends.
A Rosicrucian blogger I read notes that the calling of the HGA is often deeply misunderstood, and all most magicians end up doing is conversing with astral thoughtforms (which may or may not contain influence of that magician’s Higher Will).
Stephen Flowers makes a distinction between Goetia (magicians who observe rites, appeal to external deities and entities as their own beings) and Mageia (magicians who fully understand that all things are the one thing, and therefore, only use evocation to focus on their connection with the Higher Will). Probably not the opinion of all, but I found that it sat well with me.
I wonder how literally “astral thoughtforms” is taken, as well? Does this blogger believe their sentience arises from the stars? Isn’t all contact – human, spirit or goat – filtered through oneself?
Myself, I, like most magickians of my acquaintance, float somewhere between the two extremes of these definitions of Goetia and Mageia, depending on the day, the entity, and the communication.
But I do hope I use my experiences for more than ringing for room service.
I think Dion is onto something with the British thing… Victorians were unbelievably entitled and classist.
To be honest, I think our entire community is maybe missing a trick but under-emphasizing just how important Victorian sensibilities were in the development of modern magic. London was at the centre of the greatest empire the world had ever known… There was a fascinating sense of entitlement about the beliefs and practices in the empire (particularly India and the Middle East). They were just sort of absorbed as curia. It’s how we ended up with Theosophy, Crowley’s appalling Egyptian translations… The whole thing. It’s based on the belief that the entire world can be subsumed underneath the Victorian intellect -and used for its own purpose.
“Ringing for room service” is hopefully more of a stab at these particular pompous individuals rather than an indictment of evocation in general. (I say this without reading the book, of course.)
Historian Alex Owen looks at this in The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (my review here), and Dave Evans’ The History of British Magic After Crowley (my review) looks at the effect of reverberations carried forward in today’s occulture. So, it is looked at, just not by most magickians revising Magick 101 rites.
The best stuff I read today tends to come from the historians.
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