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Why We Practice Magic

press.princeton.edu

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Re: Why We Practice Magic

#21

Post by sandspar »

epiccoleman wrote: post #15

I recently discovered the Weird Studies podcast (which I love), and it sent me down an interesting rabbit hole around "magic." Weird Studies covered a book called "Sex Secrets of the Black Magic Experts" (title is meant to be jokey, not serious), which outlines a sort of modern approach to thinking about "Magic." It doesn't advocate for magic in the sense of literally believing that some ritual or invocation has some…

A theory of why Sufism is popular is that it gives its followers pleasurable feelings (spinning in circles causes pleasure). Similarly, it seems like revolutions gain followers by offering pleasurable feelings too. Forbidden fruits are a great source of pleasure. For example, being attracted to someone of the same sex used to be a forbidden fruit. Then people said that the forbidden fruit is actually OK, and that led to a revolution in civil rights. Right now we have a couple of nascent forbidden fruit revolutions. One is based around becoming stupider, basically: doing psychedelics, believing in magic. The other is based around finding the truth, basically: reading about genetic differences between populations.

Re: Why We Practice Magic

#22

Post by skybrian »

troq13 wrote: post #19
skybrian wrote: post #10

The bit about science not being elitist needs a caveat: anyone can try things and make observations, but that doesn't mean other people will believe them. Being trusted as a source of observations and getting them generally accepted is a social process. Consider nutrition, exercise, anything health related. How many people were in your study? Even then, there's no guarantee. Many papers are ignored. For some things,…

Science is much older than that. The modern peer review process (as a way to decide which papers get "accepted" vs "rejected") began no earlier than the 1960's.

Yes it is much older, but wasn't early science done by elite amateurs? The Royal Society, etc.

Re: Why We Practice Magic

#23

Post by gradientsrneat »

epiccoleman wrote: post #15

I recently discovered the Weird Studies podcast (which I love), and it sent me down an interesting rabbit hole around "magic." Weird Studies covered a book called "Sex Secrets of the Black Magic Experts" (title is meant to be jokey, not serious), which outlines a sort of modern approach to thinking about "Magic." It doesn't advocate for magic in the sense of literally believing that some ritual or invocation has some…

> check out "Liber Null," for example

Oh boy. I skimmed the beginning and end of that book, and the author presents some rather... skewed moral sensibilities around sex (See for example "The Red Rite" near the end of the book).

I guess these counter-culture esoteric/religious movements don't necessarily improve on the human flaws of Christian priests.

Re: Why We Practice Magic

#24

Post by epiccoleman »

gradientsrneat wrote: post #23
epiccoleman wrote: post #15

I recently discovered the Weird Studies podcast (which I love), and it sent me down an interesting rabbit hole around "magic." Weird Studies covered a book called "Sex Secrets of the Black Magic Experts" (title is meant to be jokey, not serious), which outlines a sort of modern approach to thinking about "Magic." It doesn't advocate for magic in the sense of literally believing that some ritual or invocation has some…

> check out "Liber Null," for example Oh boy. I skimmed the beginning and end of that book, and the author presents some rather... skewed moral sensibilities around sex (See for example "The Red Rite" near the end of the book). I guess these counter-culture esoteric/religious movements don't necessarily improve on the human flaws of Christian priests.

Yeah, please don't read my mention of that book as any kind of endorsement, more like a "wow, look at the wild shit this guy wrote."

I think a lot of the Chaos Magic stuff is written in a spirit of playfulness (though there's plenty of plain dumb stuff too), it's kind of the characteristic of that "movement" in magic to play freely with tropes from every imaginable system and mix them in weird fashions.

Re: Why We Practice Magic

#25

Post by FrustratedMonky »

marnett wrote: post #12
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentence trips you up? ""Not many academic philosophers discuss magic, however, five centuries ago, prominent Renaissance philosophers, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), wrote extensive treatises on the topic"" I think you'll find a lot of people would breeze past this and not debate commas and semicolons. You are correct, by the lette…

I agree it isn’t going to trip many up, but also agree that the standards of writing coming out of an education institution should be grammatically correct.

Sure.

But this is super low bar mistake. I would bet 90%+ of general population would not know this was an error at all.

But, what is prevalent today, is to pile scorn on to educational bodies. So to take a really minor grammar error, in a rather small and niche paper, and extrapolate to a condemnation of the entire institute, is really obviously politically motivated.

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