Thanks, Sabina! Desperately writing trial lecture and thesis presentation at
the same time. Should have learned to manage things a little better after so
many years. On a lighter note, Per Faxneld and I are almost done on a second
anthology of Satanism studies for OUP. So many things come to fruition,
always on top of each other. 

All the best,

Jesper. 

-----Opprinnelig melding-----
Fra: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] På vegne av Magliocco, Sabina
Sendt: 22. september 2011 22:31
Til: [log in to unmask]
Emne: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] SV: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy
Tales: A New History (Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)

Congratulations, Jesper, on your achievements!

BB,
Sabina

Sabina Magliocco
Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge [log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jesper Petersen
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 12:08 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] SV: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy
Tales: A New History (Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)

David,

Beautiful answer from Sabina, not much to add, except this. You (David) seem
to assume that academic understanding *must* be congruent with the
understanding of the participants themselves. This is surely the goal of
much ethnography. But as a scholar of religion, my understanding often goes
counter to the self-knowledge of what I study, as does any outsider
perspective. Here, I really don’t care what practice feels like. I don’t
have to murder anyone to study murder, I don’t have to become a Nazi to
study Nazism and so on. As a matter of fact, being a murderer or a Nazi
might preclude me from drawing sound conclusions.

Methodologically, we have to discern at least two phases in an academic
study – OTOH an engaged and insider-saturated, and OTOH a distanced and
analytical. While the two are interrelated, they shouldn’t mix.

Oh, and one more thing:  “An academic must approach a practical working
intending to acquire some results either negative or positive”. Why? How
about we approach workings to understand how the participants construct
meaning, or how they communicate with each other, or how they appeal to
science and tradition in their ritual? Or just because it gives us a
perspective different that texts and interviews? In other words: Our intent
might be quite different from yours and not on the same level (results).

Best,

Jesper, PhD in nine days (hopefully), yet just hired as an associate
professor.



Fra: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] På vegne av David Mattichak
Sendt: 22. september 2011 08:16
Til: [log in to unmask]
Emne: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History
(Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)

Sabina;
I agree that the two worlds can overlap, before I undertake any practice I
study it first but I am not a scholar so my study is intended to end in
practice. That practice leads to personal experiences that cannot be studied
on a purely academic level simply because they are subjective. So where is
the line where academic study leaves being objective behind and becomes
practice. When you participate in a practical ceremony are you doing so as
an academic or as a practitioner? Does your academic interest in the subject
introduce a lust of a result? My practical experience has taught me that
magick has to be performed without the lust of a result, a magician hopes
for an outcome but cannot expect one. Couldn't this separation from the
practice have an influence on the viability of the actual practical
operation being studied? Even if that result is only to find the necessary
justification to satisfy the people that are paying for it.
I fully support anyone that wants to take up this difficult and often
dangerous study on any level but I have difficulty understanding why anyone
would want to restrict their study to just academic ends and I wonder how
truly objective an experienced magician can be once they have worked magick
themselves. Perhaps the most productive route would be to teach practicing
magicians to express their findings in a format that is acceptable to
scholars. It is the theoretical and methodological training that makes a
magician too perhaps it lies with scholars to understand the difficulty that
many operating magicians have with expressing their accrued knowledge on
this very difficult subject.
Thanks for your very interesting and enlightening answer David G Mattichak
________________________________
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:06:13 -0700
From: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History
(Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)
To:
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]
UK>
David et al.,

There seems to be an assumption here that scholars and practitioners are so
different from one another that there can be no mutual understanding – or at
least, that a scholar could never understand a magic-worker.  First, I want
to point out (as has been pointed out many times before on this list) that
there are many academic scholars of magic who are also practitioners.
Presumably, their magical experiences equip them to understand magical
practice both as insiders, from an insider’s perspective, and as scholars,
from a more theoretical or analytical perspective.  Many of us are
comfortable with that shifting, contextual, dual perspective.  We all
participate in different social worlds, and adapt to them relatively easily,
so it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine how a person could feel comfortable
and be effective in both worlds.

In the case of scholars who are not practitioners, you ask whether an act of
devotion (let’s broaden it to any spiritual practice, for the sake of
argument) can truly be understood by an outsider.  It depends on what one
means by “truly understand.”  At one extreme, it’s possible to say that no
human being can ever truly comprehend the experience of another, and that
therefore no real dialogue about human experience, or between people, is
practicable.   But there are enough similarities between and among humans
that I don’t actually think this is the case.  With some empathy,
imagination and training, I believe human beings can indeed reach some kind
of mutual understanding beyond the mere surface.  In my disciplines, which
are anthropology and folkloristics, methodological training aims to make the
ethnographer the instrument of research, to take her/ him into the cultures
of others in order to make them understandable to outsiders.  While this
process is by its very nature flawed, if I didn’t believe it were possible
on some level, I wouldn’t be doing it.

Many academicians investigating esoteric matters wind up experimenting with
magic themselves.  I think it was the German folklorist Lutz Roerich who in
the 1960s experimented with recipes from early modern grimoires to make
witches’ flying ointment, and wrote a paper about it.  That was considered
an academic investigation.  When I was actively researching the rituals of
San Francisco Bay area Wiccans and Pagans, I not only participated in them,
I designed and led them.  That was well within the purview of academic
research; In fact I wrote about it at length in Witching Culture.

Finally, I want to say that what makes academicians scholars is not so much
the content of their knowledge as the way they approach a question.
Scholars tend to approach things from a particular point of view that is
informed by theoretical conversations about it that have taken place in the
scholarship of our particular discipline.   My disciplines have a specific
methodology and a code of ethics that preclude our using field materials
(e.g. The 3rd Chapter of the Book of the Law, or the Satanic Principles) as
guides for our professional investigations; to do so would mean the loss of
funding, professional credibility and denial of permission to conduct
research from our institutional internal review boards.  At the end of the
day, it’s our theoretical and methodological training that make us scholars.
We are experts at scholarship – but not necessarily at the various things
which we study.

Lay and expert knowledge are thus terms that need to be understood in
context.

Best,
Sabina

Sabina Magliocco, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University – Northridge
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA  91330-8244

[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>



From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]<mailto:[mailto:ACADEMIC-STUDY-M
[log in to unmask]]> On Behalf Of David Mattichak
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 8:10 PM
To:
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]
UK>
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History
(Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)

I do at least try to live by the Law of Thelema including the instructions
of the Third Chapter and find that this system of ethics is almost always at
odds with the western mindset which is very Christian. An academic will be
the product of this western mindset and so even comprehending the truths of
the Third Chapter may prove impossible. And, if someone was to use the
instructions for calling beetles that are in that chapter even as an
experiment, perhaps just to see if it works, then is that still an academic
investigation? Can an act of devotion be studied from the outside with any
hope of genuine comprehension?
Most practicing magicians that I am acquainted with won't even talk about
their magick with someone like myself, a fellow magician, so what hope have
academic students of magick got of getting a straight answer anyway?

________________________________
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:35:20 +1000
From: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History
(Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)
To:
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]
UK>
And also, might we consider the possibility that the system of ethics of a
magician might be different to that of an academic researcher?

Would an academic use, say, the Third Chapter of The Book of the Law as a
guide to their behavior? Would someone, like, say Jesper Petersen who
studies modern Satanism, approve or live by LaVeyean Satanism’s Nine Satanic
Statements? (Sorry Jesper, for dragging you in here).

Can magickal practitioners and academics ever see eye to eye? (I know the
Church of Satan is very anti-academic scholarship).

The Nine Satanic Statements
from The Satanic Bible, ©1969
by Anton Szandor LaVey
1. Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!
2. Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams!
3. Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!
4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted
on ingrates!
5. Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek!
6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for
psychic vampires!
7. Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often
worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine
spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal
of all!
8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical,
mental, or emotional gratification!
9. Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as He has kept it
in business all these years!


From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]<mailto:[mailto:ACADEMIC-STUDY-M
[log in to unmask]]> On Behalf Of David Mattichak
Sent: Thursday, 22 September 2011 11:47 AM
To:
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]
UK>
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History
(Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)

Hi Caroline;
A very interesting question- but when it comes to magic, who is the laity
and who are the experts?
I would imagine that of all subjects magick would be the most difficult to
study as a purely academic pursuit. The instructional books of magick tend
to equip the novice magician with the skills to go about the practice of
learning magick and the results are usually subjective. My magick won't be
the same as yours and neither magicks will be the same as another person's
experience. Without practice an academic may learn a myriad of facts about
magick but will never be more than a layman unless they submit to the
ordeals of learning through experience. This in no way devalues the
knowledge that is accumulated about magick by academic methods, after all
most of modern Hermetic styled magick was created by scholars but it was
only by the trial and error methods of practicing adepts that a real
magickal practice has been established.
A magician makes magick his life. Can the same be said of an academic that
studies magick? Do academics live magickal lives or do they close their
books at the end of the day and that's the end of it. Anyone that has
submitted to the ordeals of learning to do magick will agree that the
experience of magick doesn't stop at the end of a working day but consumes
all of the time and effort that it takes to become a magician. Do academic
students of magick make that kind of commitment to their study? Can anyone
become an expert at magick without any practical experiments and if they do
experiments does their study remain in the realm of academia?
David G Mattichak