Goetic "Demons"
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The idea comes from Crowley's excellent discussion in his edition of The Goetia.
Without claiming that this view is either correct or incorrect, or either complete or incomplete, either useful or unuseful, etc., it's important to mention that this was written in 1903, in Crowley's brief areligious materialistic phase, and is a brilliant expression of that particular point of view.
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There is the old hermetic axiom, "as above, so below". Many, myself included, view the universe/astrology as a reflection of the human mind. A person chooses when to incarnate at a time when the stars align with their mind. When doing Enochian magick and Geotic, while they can be viewed as external forces, at the same time they can be seen as reflections of the mind. Jerry Cornelius mentions this a lot in his writings.
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i've heard both theories, that they are manifestations of your subconscious, and they are actual entities that exist on another plane of reality..
i don't know what i believe, what i do know however, is it works.
and thats all i need to know.
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My theory is that when we are able to answer whether it's external or internal we don't see any difference between those concepts.
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i agree sophia, I agree..
mysticism. a wonderful concept
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I'm not exactly sure how a Goetic spirit is all that different than some human being I might bump into at the local store.
Of course the obvious that humans have a solid, autonomous, corporeal existence that persists over a duration of time, where as spirits are appear are more ephemeral and depend upon on the psychology of the magician.
However, if you cut down to the actual sensory input we receive from another person, its just sound vibrations, light patters, various chemical oders and pheromones, etc. We never encounter a person, as a whole, but rather we abstract the notion of a person, from the various disjointed sense data we do encounter. By intuitive leaps, guided by our learned associations (learned a great deal by trial and error) we build a complex semantic network. The raw data (syntactic information) "come to life" when our brain interpret and infuse them with semantics. Not just people but all things, are not things at all, any an every changing array of sensory inputs which is mostly changes in electrical potentials in the nerve endings.
One result of the semantic system is language, that is symbolic thought. We can use symbols that represent clusters of sensory data, and even symbols that represent other symbols in different contexts.
Lets not get too deep here.
What I am saying is that just as we never encounter anther human being, but yet we project a sense of person-hood upon the ephemeral sensory data that are presented to us by direct and indirect contact with that person. So too, in a ritual can we train our minds to project a sense af person-hood onto events that occur in the ritual space. The Ephemeral fluctuations of incense smoke take on not only the appearance of a spirit but also a personality.
The way parameters of that personality depend upon the mind of the magician, as well as the source material used to prime himself for the ritual, and the elements of the ritual itself.
Even though the spirit is a great deal a construction and projection of the magicians mind, it also relies on elements that are either random or not directly under the magicians control, thus unlike talking to an imaginary friend, who rarely takes on a life of his own, A spirit has a degree of freedom to act.
Since the spirit is so closely linked to the magicians Psychology, these autonomous actions the spirit takes, have a feedback programming effect on the magicians mind. By commanding the spirit to obey, it trains the mind not to stray too far from the WILL of the magician, in the area that spirit represents.
Thus calling upon a spirit concerned with drunkenness, like a satyr, each time the Satyr makes an excuse to drink, or finds a loophole from ones command, one can then chastise the spirit, and gain control over alcoholic spirits, rather that allowing them to take control over your life.
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I find it important to add that the above fully and with more specific detail describes spirits and the process of evocation, without need to summon supernatural entities, mystical gobbledy-gook, or strange new worlds, that must be accepted on faith.
There is nothing that I wrote that is not subject to validation by science. Cognitive science and neural biology, being 2 hard sciences, and Psychology, anthropology, and sociology, being 3 soft sciences which can validate these claims.
Science will never discover a mind that chooses to incarnate itself by astrological data, because its absurd and not just wrong, but competely backwards to speak of such hokey tripe, when we should make an endever to reform magick as a hard science, not to defamate it further by wallowing in the muck of supernaturalist hogwash.
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@Froclown said
"I find it important to add that the above fully and with more specific detail describes spirits and the process of evocation, without need to summon supernatural entities, mystical gobbledy-gook, or strange new worlds, that must be accepted on faith."
Magick can be psychoanalysis and vice versa; however Magick is not psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis is not Magick. Each has its own symbol/jargon set, and each has its own "rituals". Not everyone responds to either system in the same way. You say "we should make an endever to reform magick as a hard science" - this is already what science is. If all Magick is for you is "psychoanalysis with gobbeltygook" then go find some therapy more suited to you (or NLP or something).
You list sociology as one of the sciences that can validate your claims. A sociologist would recognize that the "gobbeltygook" is an important aspect to social bonding, especially when that jargon and ritual connects an individual to a rich history of mystery, wonder, and taboo (Rosicrucians, Templars, Sol Invictus, Pythagoreans, etc).
"Science will never discover a mind that chooses to incarnate itself by astrological data, because its absurd and not just wrong, but competely backwards to speak of such hokey tripe"
No, science will never discover this particular mind, because science and astrology do not overlap completely in their fundamental premises - they are different belief systems and not wholly compatible.
Science is based on faith too and has premises you take for granted. For example demonstrability of a certain result from a certain experiment assumes that the participants (whether they are scientists or atoms) are honest. Whats the guarantee that the universe just isn't performing sleight of hand when under the microscope (as with The Matrix for example)? On a more practical level the honesty of the scientists themselves is often circumspect, esp. given all of the financial pressures in both private sector and academic R&D.
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Its psychology with a purpose. That purpose is the complete transformation of the human race, its biology, psychology, society, culture, and its total relation to the rest of the universe.
Magick includes the revelation of all supernatural and mysticism as tools of control, and the total liberation from those tools.
Magick means abolishment of every form of higher authority, be that Man or GOD. The replacement with total self rule, with information that is not polluted by superstition, and flat out lies.
Magick is the total scientific understanding of ones physical and mental nature, and the keys and tools to use that knowledge towards the Great work, which is the before mentioned total transformation of mankind.
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froclown:
Very well spoken, my thoughts exactly, in theory of Goetic and Angelic Evocation.It's the result, not the science, but the science need be explained.. Then It's definitely the way you described it.
Let me ask you, what was a good Goetic evocation you performed?
tell me about it, let me know what happened -
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There is nothing that I wrote that is not subject to validation by science.
"Science requires observation.
Observation intrinsically changes a situation.
You can go on all you want about what occurs in the brain as the result of various stimuli. But what occurs when you are no longer observing?
Edit:
To clarify a bit : An electron only behaves as an electron when observed as an electron. -
Well the first thing to note here is that quantum mechanics only applies to quantum scale events.
Second, observation does not change anything, only making a measurement, because it order to make a measurement you have to have the thing measured interact physically with a device.
Electrons always act like electrons, no matter if they are measured or not.
Before they are measured, we can not know what they are doing, after they are measured, all we know is what changes occurred in the measuring device. We can only speculate using inductive logic, as to what the electron did that caused those changes in the measuring devise.
Quantum events have strange effects an measuring devices, that are unlike the effects of things we normally encounter, they are unlike the sort of events and phenomena that our brains have evolved to deal with. So we use the tools and categories of thought that our brains are equipped with to try to understand what sort of entity an electron is, based on the changes we observe in measuring devices.
The problem is that the entity we construct to describe those effects on devices, (the electron), is so unusual that it produces effects that our day to day life based brains can only describe using 2 classes of entity. Waves and particles. The electron can not be given full entity status by the brain because it is not equipped to classify wave properties and particle properties to a single entity.
But if you must bring up Quantum mechanics, then a spirit is a diverse collection of events, that the mind condenses into a single entity and projects personality upon. The spirit is a wave of disperse phenomena condensed into a particular being (in the mind) via observations in a medium which acts as a measuring device.
Thus Quantum mechanics supports by hypothesis.
The human being is a fleshy medium which presents the mind with various phenomena that the brain automatically represents as coming from a particular being (the mans personality, spirit our soul).
If the mind sees spirits in mechanisms of flesh, why not also see them is other things. weather patterns, rivers, smoke and mirrors?
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Actually, I choose an electron because it does not have that many attributes involved in its description.
I could have easily said,
A human behaves only like a human when observed as a human.Going back to the electron....
You can say that, when observed, an electron is a negative particle.
Sure, it is useful in talking about an electron. But the statement never tells you anything about what the electron actually is. Science can only tell you what an "electron" is most like to do in given circumstances, not what or why it does what it does.
Also, how do you know an electron acts like an electron when you are not observing it?
Another example:
Me and you could go out to eat dinner. Sitting at the table, I eat my meal with a fork and knife.
Yet, when I am at home, by myself I will eat with just my bare hands. How would you know that by observation?The heart of that matter is, you are getting tied up in the language. The mystical gobbbledy-gook is just as pertinent as your scientific balderdash.
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Actually what I am saying is bordering on the Copenhagen interpretation. That is a thing has no existence except when it is observed.
Or rather, there is no thing at all, only patterns of phenomena' which our minds link together, under a logically constructed "entity", which we label with a name to discern one entity from another.
I border on that but deviate slightly, in that I am not saying nothing exists other than mental phenomena. I am saying that the cause of those mental phenomena do exist in some way, but the entities we encounter are constructed models. They are structurally analogous changes in the brain, that represent, but are not the actual events that cause those changes.
Thus, we inhabit personal worlds of sensory data, but everyone is in his one subjective world of constructed symbols. The REAL world contains all subjective worlds and the actual substance which is the cause of the mental phenomena. Including the physical brain which which changes in response to physical interactions and is the source of all metal phenomena and the whose subjective world.
Where we draw the lines and create entities is a matter of personal choice to a degree. Retraining the brain, changes the way we group phenomena into entities.
A river is always new water and made of countless drops, but we call it one river. A human being is countless many different events in out perception, but we say it is one man.
Why then should we not discern a string of synchronicity as having a common source, and developing a language to communicate with said entity. Say a pendulumn or lending our own inner voice to it?
I am not so much saying spirits are real, as that normal phenomena is not as real as it seems. Thus Spirits and human beings are closer to the same order of phenomena.
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Thanks for all the golden material (to this observer) in this thread, especially Froclown!
I think an important thing to point out here that either I or you missed is that a phenomenon's authentic value by observation will be determined by how far into the fabric of the reality of the entity/coagulate-of-information observing it, rather than defining it all in connection to something (holistic/?)objective.
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Alright, I agree with most of what you are saying. It just seems we are drawing a different conclusion. Though I do not like the Copenhagen interpretation - I prefer to think things are not 'manifested' when unobserved (as in, lacking 'physical' substance).
The problem ( I think) is not to get tied up in the idea that they "exist on another plane of reality." That is just something to help you, as magick is allegorical in nature. You are taking something that is a subjective mental phenomenon and objectifying it in order to bring about the ability to observe and interact.
So, whether world W exists or not is redundant. For the sake of ritual R, you put yourself in the mental state of world W existing, where in is contained entity E that is separate and distinct from you. That established, ritual R then allows you to objectify entity E and place them in the triangle so that you can subject it to observation.
By saying, during ritual R such an such activity occurs in the brain, to me, is no different than saying during ritual R entity E is evoked from world W.
In the end, even the changes in your brain are nothing more than mental phenomenon.
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Like with all magick ritual, the mind in mixed with external phenomena, 5=6.
But the whole reason behind my version in that in allows for scientific study as Goetic evokations, via PET scans, EEG scans, MRI, etc.
Also the information we get from correlating neurological data with the ritual can provide an understanding of how the Sigil relates to the result, and thereby provide a method by which more effective sigils can be created.
It can also show what sort of gestures, cognitive processes, and other such ritual elements are most effective, including drugs which may enhance the effects, specific to the spirit evoked.
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Some people prefer to use "seers" during the evocation, while others prefer to do the seeing themselves. The former provides the opporunity for independent verification via description and answers to specific questions. (Unless the seer has the goetia by heart.) The fact that seers can be used throws a kink in some of what has been said.
It might also be important to remember:
Scientist operate in a process of peer review, under which results must be independently verified many times. This process is what gives the results of modern science credence. Scientist who lie don't get far. (Unless they work for a lobbyist
)The study of quantum mechanics involves independent verification of quantifiable data. It has no real bearing on anything else.
Love is the law, love under will.
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@jlpugh said
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Some people prefer to use "seers" during the evocation, while others prefer to do the seeing themselves. The former provides the opporunity for independent verification via description and answers to specific questions. (Unless the seer has the goetia by heart.) The fact that seers can be used throws a kink in some of what has been said.
"That was not something I was aware of.
As for PET , EEG, MRIs etcetera : I do not see that really assisting in anyway. I could be wrong, not going to know until it is done.
Though I would be interested in seeing how this works out :
@froclown said
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Also the information we get from correlating neurological data with the ritual can provide an understanding of how the Sigil relates to the result
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