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From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva)
Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.pagan.magick,alt.pagan,talk.religion.misc
Subject: OSISight: Magick and Gods
Date: 18 Jun 1997 12:24:10 -0700
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[from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: one star in sight <robin@winternet.com>]

On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Bantik wrote:

> This discussion only serves to reinforce an opinion that has been 
> growing ever stronger in me over the past couple of years. Personally, I 
> can't understand the fact that in Thelema, the GD, and many other systems, 
> one is instructed in the practise of divine magick but separated from the 
> divinities involved by a barrier of unfaith. 

There is a difference between packaged faith and learned faith.  The
former is what most people are handed with the official rituals of the
dominant culture and are forbidden to question.  The later arrises out of
direct experience much like you reported.  The difference between these
two kinds of faith are crucial, and point directly to the source: on the
one hand.. well, empty promises and on the other personal Gnosis.

> Now, I'm sure many of you 
> are thinking of responding with that tired "one-god-many-faces" argument; 
> while that looks great on paper, it obviously doesn't always work. This 
> entire thread has ariesen from the dissatisfaction many people are 
> experiencing from the use of alien mythologies.

Every mythology is alien way down at the core where you touch it directly.
If someone handed you a most excellent mythos complete in every way to
supplement your magical 'instructions' you'd be far the worse off than if
you had to reconcile the flaws with your personal experience and undergo
that very ordeal where your hard won beliefs become examined, questioned,
discarded or exalted.

> I felt the same way several years ago as many of you do now, when I 
> considered myself spiritually a Satanist while ritually dabbling with 
> Qabalistic divine magick. I couldn't reconcile the contradiction of hating 
> God the Creator and yet using his name as ritual glue. So I left behind 
> the whole damned system and started building my own from the ground up.

See that is my point.  Even with your new found 'faith' (which I would
rather call 'belief') all your hard earned conclusions are still as likely
as not to be just another set of contradictions to the next guy.  The
reconciliation and reforging is where it's at.

> Somewhere along the way, circumstances began arranging themselves such 
> that certain entitities, whom the "plug-and-play" magickal systems use as 
> nothing more than cardboard masks for tired old archangels, began to be 
> real for me. Over time, strangely and unexpectedly, I began to feel faith 
> growing in me.

Your personal experiences and beliefs began to replace the mere concepts
with fleshed out living breathing Knowledge.

> Now, applying the strategy of actively seeking out the divine and 
> praeternatural in the worlds around me, I'm for the first time gaining 
> direct experience of things that in the past I had only read about. And 
> it all makes more sense from the inside.

I don't think the most perfect mythos available is going to make that kind
of 'inside' sense unless you go inside and look out.  "Faith" (to me)
means not bothering to dive down and see whats in->out there, but rather
just accepting something that is supposed to fill that for you with a nice
package.
 
> My point: if you're going to practise divine magick, then nurture some 
> form of faith. Otherwise, leave the gods out of your rituals. They're 
> tired of just being metaphors.

Where would you be without thoses mirrors?  Maybe a metaphor is better
than no God at all.  I think it's like training wheels. A prop to pacify
until you unmask the God thats lurking under all those conceptions

93!

Robin
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