In the end I suppose that it really doesn't matter to me whether magick is religion (or if religion is magick for that matter) as it won't change my practice. Perhaps it is a question for serious students rather than for the practical magician, which has been my only real interest in all of this. Thirty years ago when I began studying Thelema and magick I doubt whether anyone was actually studying either very seriously in academic circles and Thelema could hardly have been classed as a religion. Times have changed I suppose.
The amount of interest in occult studies and practices and the academic studies currently underway are a bit overwhelming but definitely a step in the right direction. Perhaps we will never definitively answer any of these questions but at least now we are discussing them intelligently and alternative beliefs have achieved a certain amount of acceptance by the mainstream in society. I can't give an opinion from a studied point of view I can only share what I have learned from my personal experience and I think that that is something of the essence of Thelema- that it can be one thing for one person and another thing to someone else.
For any of you who are interested I have made the results of some of my experiments available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/45113678/The-Key-to-the-Order-amp-Value-of-the-English-Alphabet and I would love to hear what you have to say about it.
Thanks for involving me in such an intelligent and enlightening debate on magick- a refreshing change to the usual bickering that I encounter elsewhere
Regards
David G Mattichak jr
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