You can feel it in the air. I heard recently that Goetia is evil because a magician has to make a pact with the spirit to serve the spirit for a number of years after they die.
Must ... control ... fist ... of ... death ...
I hear this shit and I want to kill some stupid motherfuckers. I think more highly of people than they apparently deserve. There's no mention of pacts in the Goetia. Pacts aren't even about service after death when they come up when you're working with the spirits; they're about making offerings. Covenants, like the one between Abraham and Jehovah, that's the kind of thing you get with spirits. You agree to do something and they agree to do something. Usually it's an offering of some kind, like a candle lit on their behalf, or their seal engraved on metal and left somewhere. And most of the Goetic spirits, specifically the ones from the Goetia of the Lemegeton don't require offerings or anything. Most of them LIKE to work with you because it brings meaning to their existence.
Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
It sounds like they're getting the Goetia confused with one or more of the "Faustian" grimoires. Many academics regard those as fraudulent texts written with the intent of exploiting the Faust legend. Some of them require you to make pacts with spirits and so forth not for any particular technical magical reason but because according to folklore that's what Faust did.
ReplyDeleteWell, you just never know what people will come up with, do you?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that it has to do, as much as anything, with people who like to say they're practicing Magic, but really fear such practice. So, they take theire religious beliefs and mysticism, call them "Magic," and go around telling people that they do it the way it should be done, and people who do otherwise are "evil." I'm suddenly seeing a lot of that...