Khephra directed me to a recent episode of Greg’s Occult of Personality podcast in which he was interviewed.

It’s subject was the Occult Digital Mobilization, or Digimob for short, a community of occultists which gathers ebooks and other files for distribution in quarterly digests via BitTorrent.

While there is a selection process, its ins and outs weren’t discussed in detail, nor were copyright issues or the moral implications in a wider sense, and they displayed a superficial understanding of how the artist/writer/creator is affected and what the impact is for the larger culture.

Though danced around, arguments for piracy tend to run the same way:

The argument is that a pirated good rarely substitutes for the authentic original. Instead it allows the product to reach populations that can’t afford the original or otherwise wouldn’t have bought it.

The above excerpt is from a book I recently picked up, Chris Anderson’s Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing, a marketing book on how companies are using the concept of free to build their customer base, and how it works. Continue reading »

Popularity: 46%

Over on The Great Tinines, Johnny Rapture asks “Who’s Pagan?“, inviting readers to post their definitions and lists of groups who qualify. I offered my definition, and in the course of discussion cartwheel asserted that:

No distinction between “magic” on the one hand and “religion” on the other has ever been made successfully.

This sounds like a challenge! The gauntlet has been thrown.

Back in 2008 we looked at various definitions of magick, but I still believe Crowley’s remains the most elegant:

Magick is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will.

This simple statement was further clarified by an extract from Magick Without Tears:

Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one’s conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.

This firmly places the onus of on the magus hirself. Whatever model one is using: spiritual, energetic, psychological, cybernetic or meta – it is the responsibility of the magickian to effect change.

Religion, on the other hand, relies on a relationship between the individual and some form of external supernatural power (think Wicca, Sentianism, kaballah).

It’s true, magick can be practiced within a spiritual framework, often in tandem with religion, but it is by no means necessary and conflation of the two is in no way desirable.

cartwheel raised an interesting question. This distinction works for me, what are your thoughts on this?

Popularity: 4%

Uncertainty has come to play a huge role in my life as of late. The whole process entered my awareness during the Plutonica book-club reading of Quantum Psychology. Together we explored many of the exercises that Robert Anton Wilson collected to help us think, “Maybe…” My meditations and personal work have revolved around the issue of uncertainty, as well as our personal and collective strategies for dealing with it, ever since. Continue reading »

Popularity: 1%

Jack Faust brought to my attention the plethora of posts on magickal models lately surfacing. It seems to have cheesed him a bit.

After writing an earlier post for Rending the Veil, I was asked to explain about how a someone could possibly be both a magickian and an atheist and so wrote this piece in the fall of 2009, intending it for the Yule issue. I understand it got lost for a bit somehow over at RtV HQ, but it’s up now.

Frater U.:D.:’s “Models of Magic” essay has been floating around online for a long time, and was further expanded in his 2005 occult primer High Magic: Theory & Practice. It seemed a straightforward place to start, Continue reading »

Popularity: 3%

The comments section for “Sexism in contemporary occulture” and “Gender and the elements” have recently flared up again, and it’s clear that the larger conversation is far from over. If you haven’t read these posts yet, please do and share your thoughts in the comments.

Two new essays have appeared recently on this theme, and they bear a closer look.

In a recent essay on Enfolding.org titled ”Occult gender regimes: Polarity and Tradition“, Phil Hine gets to the heart of what makes so many uneasy broaching the subject in the first place. He writes,

the very act of questioning the inevitability of gender polarity is a radical step – and one which potentially shatters the foundations of the occult implicit-order – itself a reification of the wider gender-order of Western Culture. Gender polarity is often reified in occult texts as an earthly reflection of cosmic or otherwise essential principles – which are held to be inevitable and juridicial (“Laws”). Frequently it is asserted that gender polarity is inevitable because it occurrs on the “higher planes” or is a reflection of essential qualities of deities, archetypes, etc – it is universal and timeless – part of an unchanging/unbroken tradition which has only been challenged very recently…

Hine traces the origin sexual poliarty to Continue reading »

Popularity: 2%