Aloha,
>On 11/7/2007 at 3:29 PM jason winslade wrote:
>In my first class, I bring students in through an
>'initiation ceremony' where they get a first-hand experience of how power
>and mystery work, as well as in/out group politics. I also have them
>memorize an 'oath' which is actually a reverse acronym for one of the
>course goals - and see if any of them can solve it by the end of the term.
>Many of them do because they've learned how to think, read and act like an
>occultist.
I think that, overall, this approach probably does give students a sense or
what occult ritual is, how it works, and how occultists look at the world.
One of the by now well-established and widely-practiced traditions of
American
Neo-Pagan Craft--New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn--began
as a class-related project undertaken by a group of San Francisco State
College
students in 1967. They put together a ritual focused on re-creating a
witches'
sabbat. They based the ritual on generally available published
sources--historical,
critical. speculative, and literary--and on their own sensibilities.
So far as I know, even though the original project was, by and large, arty
and
playful in character, the ritual quickly assumed a deeper occulture
implication
and powerful magical efficacy. The movement and material they had created
grew and prospered.
More intriguingly, the NROOGD movement quickly gained legitimacy and
authority within the greater Neo-Pagan movement in the U.S. While there
may have been some disputes early on, there was in fairly short order no
telling doubts that groups of like-minded practitioners could bootstrap a
*real*
Neo-Pagan Craft tradition--like NROOGD--into being.
NROOGD provided an important example and model for the development of
Neo-Pagan Craft. Lots and lots of little offshoots have followed a similar
path of creative adaptation of sources and bootstrapping it into the
magical
realm.
Do you suppose that your teaching ritual and all might give rise to an
actual magical movement or tradition?
[This sort of turns around the initial question of this thread--teaching
doable esotericism in schools. Because here's an example of teaching
about esotericism in school--with no intent for it to be doable--turning
into a vigorous current of occulture.]
Musing Occulture & Its Adaptations! Rose,
Pitch
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