David,

Most scholars in the humanities and social sciences have abandoned the notion that anything can be studied from a purely objective perspective, because we all bring a unique constellaton of personal factors to our research: gender, age, race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation -- just to name a few.  While we should strive for neutrality, pure objectivity is impossible.

I am puzzled by your implication that one cannot be both an academic and a practitioner in the context of a magical working or ritual.  Identity is not essential; it is shifting and complex.  We all participate in multiple identities at once; why should these two be mutually exclusive?  To answer your question more specifically, naturally if I am doing a magical working or participating in a rite, my will must be focused on the end I want to achieve.  This doesn't prevent another part of me from watching what I am doing so I can later report on it.  In magical terms, this is similar to the feeling one experiences when one leads a guided meditation or trance journey for a group: one is partly in the trance journey and partly monitoring the energy of the group.

I don't experience this as separation from practice; I find this divided self as natural as breathing.  A part of me is always watching and analyzing whatever I do.  That may be an artifact of growing up between two cultures, but I suspect many people experience this and are comfortable with it.  In ethnographic disiplines, we strive to teach practitioners to acheive this state.

I have interviewed numerous magical practitioners (upwards of 100) in my academic work, and have found that most were perfectly able to express to me the results of their workings in terms I could understand.  What is more ineffable is the ecstatic experience; but having experienced that myself in the course of my academic study of Paganism, I was better able to comprehend their experience.

Best,
Sabina

Sabina Magliocco
Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge
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From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Mattichak [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 11:16 PM
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Subject: 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. An academic must approach a practical working intending to acquire some results either negative or positive. 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

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Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:06:13 -0700
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FW: [JFRR] Fairy Tales: A New History (Bottigheimer, Ruth B.)
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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



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From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Mattichak
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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?



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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]>

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:[log in to unmask]]> On Behalf Of David Mattichak
Sent: Thursday, 22 September 2011 11:47 AM
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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