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To: alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.pagan.magick
From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva)
Subject: Re: definition--High Magick vs. Low Magick--opinions please
Date: 14 Sep 1997 12:18:56 -0700
49970914 aa2 Hail Satan!
squeegee@your.third.eye (G Leake):
# A local neo-pagan woman did this show on modern western Ceremonial magick,
why shouldn't a ceremonial magician do it instead?
# and she defined high magick as being ritual/ceremonial magick, and low
# magick as shamanic.
this is one perspective, though I think it is a conflation of categories
typically employed. this is not to say it isn't valuable, depending on
one's meaning, but generally it is awkward given what is added below.
# She says that is the consensus in the magical community.
is there such a consensus? more often I have run across the notion that
"high" magick is any endeavor which attempts mystical/spiritual ends,
"low" magick (often 'magic') being confined to gross material matters.
we've got two categories we're throwing around here:
(1) high/low -- sometimes associated with elevation,
as in the case of 'high/low german', 'upper/lower
egypt', etc.; sometimes related to classes;
sometimes conforming to a cosmological scheme
('high' => closer to the 'divine'); and sometimes
correlating with a class distinction in that
it relates to bodily centers or cakras (the low
being focussed on worldly, sexual, acquisitive
concerns, the upper being intellectual and/or
more 'spiritual').
typically the individual making the discernment
places hirself on the 'upper' end of the spectrum
and thus gives support to the notion that 'high
magick' is most accurately associated with a kind
of taxonomizing, intellectual elitism than anything
else. occasionally you'll get the odd Satanist or
or endarkened witch who is hip for the 'low', natch.
(2) ceremonial-scripted/shamanic-intuitive --
neither is it a given that the ceremonial is always
a scripted affair, nor is it necessarily true that
shamanic rites are completely intuitive, though it
does seem to be a prevalent attitude amongst the
practitioners of each semi-ambiguous grouping.
the terms themselves extend into one another.
there are meanings for 'shamanic' which include
what many ceremonial mages do, for example. and
there are rites which some shamans do that should
properly be described as 'ceremonies'. usually
those who make this division have simplistic
notions and mean to imply a kind of 'theater-play
versus intoxicated drum-rite' division.
# ...Georg Luck's idea in his book Arcana Mundi ... the ancient Greeks
# defined theurgia (high magick) as any magic meant for divine union,
# goetia (low magic) as any magic performed for selfish reasons.
# What do you think?
I think that proceeds from an outmoded paradigm of Ptolemaic, geocentric
cosmology, in which Terra sits within a batch of rotating concentric
spheres, She being the 'lowest' while the uppermost is the most 'divine'
or 'spiritual'. fairly anti-terran and ascetic per my experience.
generally I find an inversion of this to be more tasty, though both
models are of course incomplete. the inversion goes something like this:
'low' magick is more connected to the divine (material) realm,
whereas 'high' magick centers on the ravings and obsessions
with figments of imagination seeded by star-demons aeons ago
to enslave the human race to their chieftain Jehovah.
tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva)
--
(emailed replies may be posted);join the AMT syncretism!!;call: 408/2-666-SLUG!
see http://www.abyss.com/tokus; "Clement of Rome taught that God rules the world
with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan." - CGJung
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