Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
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Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
Well, I personally liked it, because I have a very similar approach in my understanding of the spiritual-phisical world. Although I am not a Xtian.
ReplyDeleteI liked the part of "condensantion" specially
Nah... you're cute when you're geeky and boring.
ReplyDeleteP
ROSM seemed fine to me. I didn't see it lacking anywhere.
ReplyDeleteNot dry so much as somewhat redundant for the regular reader. But that was just my take on it from a very post1700 worldview... ;) sentence was my be
ReplyDeleteActually, that one line was the only beef I had with the post. Yes, modernism and plurality can lead to very irresponsible and ignorant behaviors - but I feel it's a bit arrogant to believe that before 1700 such behavior wasn't around at all. We see few surviving records/documents of the failed attempts and strategies from that period - and I'm pretty confident that most of those would be just as boneheaded or insane...
EKB, I agree quite a lot about people being boneheaded in the pre-18th century. I've read a 50th of what I would need to of the Renaissance stuff to know what was boneheaded flakery, and what was of value. I find that a lot of the stuff coming our of Rudolph's court written by the alchemists, for example, is highly suspicious and quite silly. Perhaps they were the ones who could afford to explore hair-brained ideas, while the rest of the magicians stuck with what ehy could find with working precedent because they were too poor to experiment or something.
ReplyDeleteApologies to all for the seeming incoherence in my previous comment. For some reason, the touchpad in the laptop seems to be picking up on my thumbs as I type and processing them in semi-random ways.
ReplyDeleteThen again, I choose to embrace the glitch and immanentize the eschaton...
On subject: Rudolph's alchemists are a good reference to compare to modern angelic channeling. Were I bit more in the mood, I'd switch citations on a couple of quotes and see if anyone would notice. However, what I was thinking of was the processes described in texts like the Malleus Maleficarum and how, when taken apart a bit, describe Hellenic & Neo-Platonic magic as well as the expected wortcunning. It almost seems to take a deliberate effort to see the "positive" theurgia of the practice as devil-worship - but that's what happened...
But boring - nope. Party on, dude.
I found this take on things to be very "Rosicrucian", if you know what I mean. No. Not boring in the least. I know I'll have to read it several times to pick up all the allusions and undercurrents.
ReplyDeleteSure, there are repetitions of things you've said at other times, but it's always illuminating to see the same things taken apart and rearranged into a new pattern.