Very interesting discussion, indeed. And very deep humour, Pitch. You shoudnīt walk so much through the tunnels.
I agree with Sabina that scholarship can be a meditation path. I remember the insights, very inspiring and disturbing at the same time, I received when I read Giordano Bruno, for example. But I donīt think when an scholar tries to write a paper or develop an argument is looking for his Guardian Angel. In my case I was looking for my True Will wherever it were. It was not scholarship which conducted me to magic. It were magician which used theories or novels to communicate there discoveries who were talking to me through the excesive rationalist Academia. I remember those first years of insights very contradictories because all the research I did to support those insights were a waste of time. Perhaps I was very young...
Of
course scholarship uses the magical tools which are language and thought, and, in ultimate instance, the creativity. But the goal of Scholarship is the mastering of research in your area and the quest for truth of documents, of phisical things. The success is not inner, but outer. The goal of Magick is the development of the human Self. And this development, depending of the person, can be attained without writing a word or publishing a paper.
About familiars and Guardian Angel, I thanks Professor Segal for his clariffication. I have fount some comments about the familiar by Kenneth Grant in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. He affirms that Familiars are the subconscious powers which are part of the Gods. According to this idea, they could act as entities capable of giving ideas. And the Daimon as the Good Fairy, as P. Segal mention is very akin to the idea of the Guardian Angel, so I am starting to consider that different experiences I had
are related to different entities and some of the could be related to familiars.
De: Pitch <[log in to unmask]>
Para: [log in to unmask]
Enviado: lun,28 marzo, 2011 20:39
Asunto: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FORTHCOMING: WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?
Aloha,
On 3/28/2011 10:34 AM, Magliocco, Sabina wrote:
Wait a second Pitch. I agree with all you say, except for when you write that "scholarship is not an Order, Lodge, Temple, Trad or Path." Well, not in the literal sense. But the argument has been made (By Ronald Hutton, in "Living With Witchcraft" in WDaKA, 2003) that academia is the one public institution with an initiatory three-degree system. Anyone who has got even one academic degree can attest to the fact that academia has its own initiatory rituals and rites of passage, complete with exotic-looking ceremonial robes and arcane color associations.
Yes, academic institutions may preserve those (and maybe other)
attributes.
But I'd insist, even against the likes of Hutton, that academic
institutions are secular and secularized institutions. They may
offer a comfortable habitat for a few magicians and magical
enterprises, yes. But they are not themselves magical
institutions
or institutions focused on the doing of magic. Secular.
Let me put this another way--Imagine if academic Deans and
Chancellors could don those robes and deck themselves in
those meaning-laden colors--and do magic! Would I be the only
one hotfootin' as fast as my feets could run away from that
ivory tower of learning and hellish terror?
[All credit to you, Sabina, I'm having a Lovecraftian vision of
my alma mater right now...Arrggghh!!! The demonic flutes piping
the school's abyssal fight song!!!...The un-human faculty whirling
and slithering, raising claws and tentacles high, screeching their
invocations to the awakening Cthulhu!!!...Wearing the school
Colors Out of Space...!!!! My little remaining sanity draining
away into the whirlpools of unspeakable academic magic...!!!]
Musing All In All, I'm Glad Michigan State Was A Secular
Public University & Not
Hogwarts! Rose,
Pitch
who does acknowledge that there's something twisted
about a "Big Ten" consisting of 12 schools...
