Greetings!
>
>What I've been turning over is this: What should academics
>appropriately expect vis a vis resources when non-academics put those
>resources to uses that serve in non-academic contexts?
>
>In regard to folklore resources, let's say that two non-academic groups
>end up creating two different reconstructions of a magical endeavor.
>The groups both rely on the same academic resource material, yet their
>reconstructions are markedly different.
>
>A non-academic book offering 100 spells for love and money made easy is
>not the same a a book offering 100 similar spells translated from
>Classical Greek. What should academics expect if the author of the
>former taps the latter?
Whether scholarly (as in the case of John Dee) or not (as in the case of
100 spells for love & money made easy) the world view and approach of
the magician or occultist the is not academic. However it is the task of
the academic studying magic to try to understand that world view and
approach.
These are issues that I have been thinking about as I have just started
to publish magical texts. The ethos is to preserve and present the texts
in a manner that is entirely sympathetic to the sometimes complex world
view of the writer. Hence, whilst the books may be of interest to
academics, they are definitely not academic books.
My best wishes
Ben
--
Ben Fernee
Caduceus Books
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