Survey Time

[James Palmer]

Right.  It's half past three in the morning, I'm bored, I'm writing an
essay on Yeats, so my mind is naturally turned towards the strange, and
a question has popped into my head.

What kind of experience of/opinions on 'the occult' in Real Life do you
all have?  I'm interested to see whether there's a higher proportion of
'believers' here than elsewhere in RPG's. 

Personally, I know a lot of 'occult' and 'pagan' types, from pretentious
Wiccan teenagers through to manipulative group leaders using
pseudo-religion to make everyone play their petty little power games
through to big cuddly woolly jumper wearing middle aged pagans through to
people of various cultures for whom what we would consider mondo weird
shit is just a part of everyday life through to people who practice
magick, but don't take it seriously.  

My two favourite examples, either of whom is worth stealing for a game; 
Peter Kwok, a Chinese restaurant owner, linked to the Triads, who also
happens to have fifteen years training in divination techniques and feng
shui, and Gordon, a charmingly sceptical Scot who cheerfully describes
most of his fellow pagans as practicioners of "bitchcraft" and will
happily point out in the middle of a Druid meeting that it was all made up
by George Gardner, but who happens to have undergone a full-blown shamanic
revelation ("which we stole from the Injuns, aye, but that's the oldest
tradition of Wicca - stealing any custom that isn't nailed down")  in
which he discovered that his patron animal is - the toad.  His answering
machine now goes "Helloo, this is Gordon the Toad speaking ..."

I've seen a couple of weird things myself, but nothing I couldn't explain
as dreams or fears.  Good friends have told me about considerably weirder
stuff.  I don't believe in magic; I do believe in the human imagination
and the two Convenient Jungian Excuses of synchronicity and intuition.

How's everybody else feel?  Any pagan-types out there?  Does anybody here
actually practice 'magick?'  Has anybody advanced to the Fifteenth Level
of D&D and been taught the Real Spells yet, like that nice Mr. Chick says?

James

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"Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger." 

- W.B. Yeats, "The Apparitions"