Agreed… The exchange of information can certainly be mutually beneficial.
I can sympathize with this sort of feeling that with great power, must come great responsibility. But is it really true, though? And how are we defining suitability here? It’s clear that morality in the conventional sense doesn’t enter into it, as evidenced by Sinister groups like the ONA and the ToBL who actively promote acts of magickal murder and terrorism in order to further their own goals (which in the latter case include the annihilation of the whole cosmos and all sentient beings within it!) I’ve seen little to convince me that the efficacy of magick depends on how noble or pure one’s motives are in pursuing it. As for the argument of difficulty involved in “zapping” people, it seems fairly simple to perform an effective baneful working of sympathetic magic involving only a poppet and sheer rage. Not quite rocket science, but still sufficiently dangerous in the hands of anyone armed only with the determination to try.
Why, though? What’s their/your fundamental motivation?
Right, and for that matter this whole discussion is somewhat of a moot point, in that the genie is out of the bottle now, and short of a nuclear apocalypse or second Inquisition I don’t see occult knowledge being restricted again to only the elite.
I don’t have any clear answers here; I mainly just wanted to toss around some ideas which have been bouncing around in ye olde noggin lately. This also ties in with the paradox inherent in the idea of Theogenesis, as you brought up: how can we reconcile being able to obtain omnipotence as a God if everyone else around us are also Gods? My power to change my reality as I see fit is only limited by the extent to which those around me can counteract those changes.
In an amusing synchronicity, I just started reading Charles Leland’s Aradia, the Gospel of Witches and came across this little paragraph from the preface:
