That makes two of us, for sure.
ENTRY #12
Today I used for the first time Archer’s ritual from The Magick of Angels and Demons. And it was way easier than I thought it would be. I’ll be performing this ritual again, many times, I suspect. Also, I performed the ritual on another person’s behalf. That was interesting.
Now, for something entirely different:
Hypothesis and conjectures on the topic of magic, Plato, money and atehism.
What a salad of stuff, am I right?
So, going to basics: Plato, in his famous allegory of the cavern, said that men sees shadows on the wall and thinks that’s existence. The goal of life, therefore, is to go outside the damn cavern and take a look at what is projecting those shadows in the first place.
Also, he said (and I can’t remember where, for the life of me) that there are three degrees of existence (not sure if that’s the right verb in English) The imitation, like a paint or a photography of a chair, at the lowest. In the middle, the chair itself. And above, the idea of the chair, the concept of the chair, its essense, or what’s the same, WHAT THE THING IS. I can break all the chairs in my house but I never can destroy the idea of the chair.
Now, this looks like something that has nothing to do with magic, but I think I’m up to something, at least something relevant to me.
So, if there is an idea and that’s the TRUE thing and everything else are lower degrees that can be imitated, destroyed, then what a god (angel, demon, spirit) would be but the idea itself? The world can’t contain anything but the world itself; Lucifer can’t be anything but the idea of Lucifer.
Now, this being said, ideas are indestructible but not for that immune to change. We have the idea of a car (a thing with wheels moved by an artifact), yes, but the details (are we still calling those accidents?) change in order to improve (now we have things with wheels moved by an artifact and seatbealts).
This ever-changing-but-still-the-same concept may explain a thing or two. Why, then, spirits remain the same? Because they don’t. We have a thousand interpretations about every single one of them. Even obscure ones. Everyone explain something a little different. Over the years the grimoires have extended their powers and people perform the rituals and get results. Did they become more powerful over time? Or did we make them more powerful over time? I know for sure we have made cars better over time.
Ideas have power. And idea is the second most powerful force in existence, and that’s not a bad place to be at all. I’ll explain myself: money exists mostly as information. Ones and zeros in databases. Just a little fraction has ever been printed. Nevertheless, it conditions all of our lives. We’re always searching for it. And one person too many devote their life to pursue it. The only thing above it is good old violence. No amount of money (and no amount of magic) will stop a nuke once it has been fired. But we don’t need to go that far away: same applies to fists. The only thing capable of opposing it is more violence. Maybe in the form of a well timed block. But other than that, you can run. Maybe you’ll outrun your pursuer. And you’ll never outrun a nuke.
Now, how does all this get together? Well, in my current identity crisis I’m kind of trying to make sense of things. So what I’m thinking is this: if ideas exists and can change and have power… then those same ideas can be conjured in order to obtain change. We do it with money. And we can do it with other things.
Some very hard math out there tries to explain a fourth dimention and there is a simmetry between that explanation and some centuries old concepts about Asmodeus (in the form of experiences that can’t be proved, of course, but that can’t obey to the math either, since such knowledge is fairly recent). There is a good chance that we’re hitting something in the fabric of reality itself, with magic. And now everyone can claim for my head to be put in a pyke, but… what if magic and math have something in common after all?
I have never understood math as science. It is a language to me. And magic very well may be a language to change reality itself. Because the universe can be described (in a very boring way) with an equation. Now… what if magic can alter this equation?
We’re neanderthals with a very basic grasp of communication. But maybe, just maybe, that’s the whole point. And there is no adult around to teach us.
This is all a bit nuts on my part, I know, and I’m painfully aware I’m doing some mental juggle to try to reconcile magic with my atheism.
Anyway, this is what I believe today. Maybe a year from now I’ll have a different answer.