(UA) The Problem With Magick

[Timothy Toner]

-----Original Message-----
From: Bryant Durrell <durrell at innocence.com>
To: UA at purpletape.cs.uchicago.edu <UA at purpletape.cs.uchicago.edu>
Date: Thursday, February 11, 1999 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: (UA) The Problem With Magick


>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...

Well, that might be simply a problem of putting the cart in front of the
horse, so to speak.  A person can't become an archetype unless there's a
consensus out there in the collective unconscious that an aspect of humanity
hasn't yet been addressed, and that this guy is the very embodiment of that
unexpressed aspect.  It's thus possible to ascend without consciously trying
for this goal.  You just have to stumble upon a zeitgeist in progress, and
get swept up in the change.

Now one could say that every adept is an embodiment of an archetype, but is
that really so, and if it's true, is it _desireable?_  Sure, magick should
take a single-minded effort, but the underlying difference lies in the fact
that all magick is founded on paradox, the dynamic tension between the adept
and the universe around him.  Power comes from that tension, and as Pirsig
mentions in _Lila,_ we as a species simultaneously respect and revile the
iconoclast for the tension he or she brings.    We need change, but we fear
it because of its very nature.  Because of this dual nature, not all
archetypes will necessarily be iconoclasts, and thus not all schools will be
modelled after archetypes.  Some archetypes will simply be the status quo,
and, I'll venture, they'll be the most pervasive.  But we as a culture also
seem to have the imp of the perverse shoved right up our asses.  SO much of
our lives are hypocritical, paradoxical justifications.  And, to steal an
idea from Greg that he shared with me at GenCon last year, it's only going
to get worse.  With the explosion of media outlets, all the secret lies
we've founded our society on will be laid bare.  PLanes, considered the
safest way to travel, will begin crashing seemily every day.  We'll ignore
the statistics, because, well, we know that numbers can lie, and all of that
will DO something to us.  Certain, essential paradoxes will be rendered
moot, like Zeno's Paradox, while simple truths will be twisted into
paradoxes, like giving an inmate a shot of antibiotics to stave off an
infection, so that he'll be well enough to execute a week from now.  There's
gonna be a lot of tension building, and someone's going to find a way to
feed off of that power.  And who's left holding the bag?  The archetypes, of
course.  See, I agree one hundred percent that ever school needs an
archetype as a founder, but I can't see as it's possible.  Boom.  Paradox.
Power.

Maybe it's a little of both worlds, actually.  Maybe some schools used an
ascended archetype as a role model, using his or her iconiclastic nature and
anecdotes from the life to explore more fully the depths of the central
paradox which fuels the magick.  Or perhaps an adept recognized that a
school of magick had larger issues at stake, and that by plunging into the
theory, discovered its essential nature, and thus ascended.  Both are very
possible, but is one a "royal road?"  I don't think so.  In fact, it seems
that the very concept of paradoxical actions yielding powers dictates that
the least likely possibility will tend to create the greatest result.  At
the very least, it seems to keep the OU on its toes.