Hello Richard
Interesting - but complex - can you expand a little on your thesis -
(the original essay is available online)
Are you comparing magick to poetry ?
It would be a comparison that seems most in tune with our history really -
(bardic magick and all that)
and poems are odd things - so talismanic -
you cannot judge the meaning of a poem by what the poet had for breakfast??
So understanding of religion by examination of biochemical processes
in the brain is another doomed 'reductionist' project ??
Someone once commented on Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein that it
didn't look like her -
his reply was that it would come to look like her - which is a kind of
magick that occurs in the world not in the mind of the artist??
'love and do what you will'
mogg
btw: i think some people in the psi lab at edinburgh were
trying to do some experiments using tarot readers
- but suspect the results were feeble.
: ) .....................................: )
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-----Original Message-----
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Richard Ramsay
Sent: 15 December 2005 18:56
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Golden Dawn Questions
I think that it was Brian J who said, 'The devil himself knows not the mind
of man.' But, as lawyers, let alone as human beings, we infer the person's
state of mind from their words and acts. Otherwise we should never be able
to convict anyone for the more serious offences as the legal maxim actus non
facit reus nisi mens sit rea requires a 'guilty mind'. Surely, it is more
likely that we can deal with a subjective state of mind than posit an
objective one.
I presume that whether a person is the best judge of their own state of mind
is an aspect of the 'intentional fallacy' that W K Wimsatt and MC Beardsley
discussed decades ago in The Verbal Icon.
Best wishes,
RR
In an email dated Wed, 14 12 2005 11:10:34 pm GMT, Al Billings
<[log in to unmask]> writes:
>No, there is no such thing as true knowledge of the mental state of another
person (we can debate whether you can know your own state truly or not
another time). You can only know what people report and what you can
observe. Anthropology 101.
>
> Al
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Patric Gavin
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 3:07 PM
> Subject: Re: Golden Dawn Questions
>
>
> On 12/14/05, Al Billings <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> You can't measure the effects of ritual on people. You can only record
their verbal reports of effects. I'm sure all of us who are practitioners
have met people that claim all sorts of things.
>
> I'm sorry, but this sounds like a statement that borders on assuming
that there is no such thing as psychology.
>
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