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Dave;I am not, as you know, a scholar or an academic. By trade I am an al a carte chef so if I indulge in FHG then I am sorry. Really I am just trying to find out what the point of making an academic study of magick would be. I am a practical guy so I look for a practical reason for doing something. As for the idea that you have of me writing essays for school kids I am afraid that you are entirely mistaken. If you had looked into the site more closely you would have seen that the majority of the paying customers are corporate clients and that the writing is usually about putting technical jargon into a readable format for shareholders and executives. I am sure that there are kids that try to buy their homework but at $20-30 per 200 words it will cost them a few hundred to buy a book report. As well as that I don't just get allotted writing jobs, I am freelance, I bid for them. If I am not qualified to write on a topic I won't get the job. My area of expertise in this is around marketing and SEO so I doubt that college kids would ever be interested in engaging my services anyway. And, I sincerely doubt that anything that I would write would pass for schoolwork- surely experienced teachers can detect such a gross fraud? In the end there is one generalization that I know always holds true and that is that anything that costs money ultimately has to justify itself to the people that are paying. All I wanted to know is how does the academic study of magick avoid those expectations from influencing its results? I know what trolls and fluffy bunnies are thanks Dave, and I never take offense at stuff on the web. Life's too short. It is also too short to waste it on arguing. ThanksDGM Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:18:25 +0100 From: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] SV: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History (Bottigheimer, Ruth B.) To: [log in to unmask] Great comments from Sabina and Jesper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29 for a definition of what i meant by Troll Not trying to hound you out DGM, just asking a perfectly pertinent question, its an academic list and you seem to have ignored the advice on how to engage in academic discussion, and it's really rather dragging on, if not getting worse; which implies that you might be here just to stir up trouble, which is a close approximatiuon of what net trolls do. if i'm wrong re trolling them my apologies, but please also be aware that we're here for a purpose and the list is run on academic duscussion lines, which are eplained in the sign-on instructions and have ben reiterated several times and ignoring requests to behave in particular ways is going to antagonise people and/or simply make them ignore your postings, neither of which is productive for anyone (the rather more personal attacks you had the other day from other people might have indicated that matter to you- such attacks are rare here, and that is a measure of how hard everyone tries to get along, but it has to be a two-way process, with all parties making the effort). Anyway, onto topic IMO In *some* cases it *might* help if an academic is also a practitioner; but in many cases it is irrelevant: for example The linguist unpicking the vagaries of John Dee’s Enochian language The neurologist who is investigating shamanic plants (there was a great piece in New Scientist yesterday about Ayahuasca neurochemistry, for example) The archaeologist who is up to their elbows in a Neolithic ‘pagan’ site The art historian tracing the evolution of Tarot design The lawyer tracing witch trial practices in the 16th century Just a few examples Also ‘academic’ covers a multitude of things. Of the academics on this list we have over 400 folk, working in at least 15 academic disciplines (and some in more than one). Some of the academics are practitioners, some not, but there are finer subdivisions. Just because person A is an academic doesn’t mean they academically study the area they might practice in. Drawing on postings here and articles in the JSM, we have had a water biologist who has written about the god Dagon, a child development expert who studies mythology … the list goes on Something that you keep doing here DGM is the ‘fallacious hideous generalisation’ and I am surprised that the list members aren’t stamping on you to be honest; which is probably a measure of their patience and goodwill than anything else. FHG (for convenience and to save typing) are one thing that tends to be an indicator of non-academic thought processes; again some examples: FHG “all witches worship satan” FHG “all journalists are scum” FHG “all copyright is the same” An FHG is often of the form “all X are Y” You might wish to look at the “sumbunall” model- instead of absolutist generalisations this works on ‘some but not all X might be Y” and it allows an escape from black-white reasoning and action, and opens the way to more diverse and penetrating ways of thought and academic processes And even the apparently true FHGs are contingent on new findings: “all swans are white” sure, that was the absolute truth for a very long time, IN EUROPE, until white explorers ‘discovered’ Australia; to the surprise both of the indigenous people who’d lived there for about 30,000 years, and to the *black swans* who graced various lakes and rivers While I was typing this I had a lovely example of relative viewpoints. A Magpie landed on a rooftop opposite my window. A folklorist (of which we have several world leading academics on this list) would be able to tell me a lot about what that might mean on a cultural/mythic level. An ornitholigst would be able to tell me lots about the bird, perhaps whether it was male or female, and based on the behaviour of the bird, what it was up to (it was hopping about in a seemingly random pattern, presumably eating some bugs, or maybe a territorial display, I don’t know), a magician might see that as a symbol of Mercury, god of communications (also a trickster godform) which was lovely timing for writing a long email. Which of those is true? Search me…. If you write like this when working I do rather worry for the customers who buy your ‘plagiarism engine’ essays. Do you have any way to find out what marks they get? Dave E help me raise money for endangered tribes http://www.justgiving.com/shaveDaveshead