Magick for materialists

[ciphergoth]

(This is something purplerabbits and myself have thought for a long time, and I just got to writing up in an LJ comment. Copying it here with minor edits 'cos I'm interested to know what people think.)

I think I'm generally acknowledged to be a total screaming materialist and skeptic about magick, superstition, gods and so forth, and as such I'm not sure I see a reason why you shouldn't do a ritual to change the way you feel about something, if you think it might work.

It's not necessarily a step in the question of believing in all that - it's a willing suspension of disbelief, in order to do things to your head from a sideways angle that aren't always easy to do head-on. Our heads are full of irrational things, some of them undesirable, and you can't always make them stop doing their nasty work by saying "stop that, it's irrational!". You can use ritual and suspension of disbelief to turn them into something you can visualise, something tangible, and you can address them on their own territory.

The liberating thing about this, of course, is that you needn't invoke Innana, or Ganesh, if you don't want to - if it will work better, you can invoke John Lennon or Santa Claus.

When Alison and I decided to stop dithering and commit to running BiCon 2002, we did a ritual to mark the occasion - she found two blue smarties and two red ones, and we solemnly ate the red pills together...

Comments

[mrph.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not terribly dissimilar to some of the things said/written by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison (unsurprising, as I assume Morrison's Invisibles was the inspiration for your Lennon reference?) - although Morrison seems to have more recently changed his position on such things.

Alan Moore's said at least once that he views his deity, Glycon, as a peg to pin assorted mental tools/exercises on, rather than a 'real' entity. I can't remember if that was in writing or on a CD, but I'll see if I can find specifics. I don't believe he's contradicted that statement since then.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I assume Morrison's Invisibles was the inspiration for your Lennon reference? - yes indeed.

And the Santa Claus reference comes from a ritual actually performed by people from the IOT (ie the Chaos magick folk). That side of what I'm saying is by no means new - you can also find it in stuff that Phil Hine has written. But I also know that many people who do magick that way are not materialists. What I haven't seen before, and I'd be interested to see, is someone coupling that with an explicit, straightforward, unambiguous statement of belief in orthodox philosophical materialism.

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

If I ever pick a deity, I think I'll make it one that doesn't sound like a brand of windscreen washer fluid...