[UA] Old groups and power

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Michael Dinowitz <mdinowit at i-2000.com> wrote:
> So your basically saying that there's some point in
> time that divides the 'old' magic from the new? So a
> modern Jew studying the lore of his tradition has no
> chance of doing what his teachers could do? 

My take on it is worse than that.  Being a pessimistic
old skeptic, most of the magic you find in grimoires
and even kabbalistic sources doesn't "work" and it
never did.  At least, it didn't have the really snazzy
effects modern boozehounds and pornomancers can
acheive with much less effort.

I mean, someone getting swallowed by a wax alligator
more than ten centuries ago could have been a hoax or
an early form of some Egyptian minister's obsession
with wax or alligators or swallowing people.

Maybe, just maybe, praying or adding up numbers in odd
sequences or boiling your uncle in a pot or erecting a
"cone of power" has some effect on the ether or the
astral plane or even the stratosphere, but it seems
pretty minimal and, in the light of what may well be
the end of the world, pretty irrelevant.

So it's a matter of efficiency, then.  You can gather
moss in a cemetary or tie six knots in a string and it
might not go off because it has to be a certain kind
of string and some old alchemist forgot to mention it
or a printer's error left it out of the Rosicrucian
training manual.  And there's lots of stories of
saints floating and regular people waking up weird
places and being invited to steal food off other
people's tables by foxes.  Maybe these were early
adepts or lies.

It's probably only going to matter to avatars of the Scholar.

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

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