(UA) The Problem With Magick

[Bryant Durrell]

Stacy Stroud writes:
> >Markleford Friedman writes:
> >> But what about other schools?  Without a "videotape grail", or a patron
> >> Ascendant to follow, other schools would see a mindboggling variance between
> >> practitioners.  One reason for my problem here is that there is no
> >> cosmological support behind these schools: there's no "patron god" or
> >> "primal element/force" behind them.
> >
> >That's an interesting contention.  I'd actually been thinking that
> >every magick school is defined by one of the archetypes.  Pornomancers
> >are the obvious one, but I can easily imagine The Sot, The Historian,
> >The Daredevil, and so on.  And if this is the case, things start to
> >suddenly make a lot more sense...
> 
> Indeed.  But we don't have the full story yet.
> 
> Dirk Allen's street-level city description does state that "old-school"
> magic went away and the new stuff came along just because the Clergy wanted
> it that way.  But that's just Dirk's opinion, and has been contradicted by
> theories presented by the authors themselves on this list (e.g., that the
> old schools are like dead languages with no more "native" speakers, and
> (post)modern folk have too much trouble wrapping their minds around ancient
> or medieval viewpoints to bother trying to study those "languages" when
> there's hot new slang available as well).  Also, the section on creating
> new schools of magick implies that anyone can latch onto a new pathway to
> power just by being weird and obsessive enough, with no founding archetype
> required.  (Though maybe the first person to do that *becomes* the founding
> archetype rather than a mere magician.  Who knows?)

Yeah, all quite true.  I don't think I have The Answer, I just had some
random thoughts.

Here's another random thought:  sometime around 1900, the archetype
known as The Innovator ascended.  Soon after, old school magick began
to fade away... 

(See also Greg's comments on the effect the Naked Goddess had on the
occult underground.)

-- 
  Bryant Durrell [] durrell at innocence.com [] http://www.innocence.com/~durrell
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  "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
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