Sigil thread

[fomenter]

Allow me to reiterate:  "Sigilmancy".

Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww!

You can't make shit like this up.   

[BabylonHoruv]

Allow me to reiterate:  "Sigilmancy".

Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww!

You can't make shit like this up.   

You can if you're me.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Allow me to reiterate:  "Sigilmancy".

Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww!

You can't make shit like this up.   

You can if you're me.

Um, yeah, dude.  You go.   

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Allow me to reiterate:  "Sigilmancy".

Yeah, pretty much.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Allow me to reiterate:  "Sigilmancy".

Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww!

You can't make shit like this up.   

Occultimadghiquimancy.

[Faust]

you are perpetuating that dogmatic meaningless but ohhhh so DEEP AND MYSTERIOUS occultism that renders the psychology of this stuff inaccessible and useless to everyone who isn't into that obnoxious vanity wankfest.

Okay. Find some easier terminology.

Ok, first off sigilmancy:
The Placebo effect and other stories.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I love how occult detractors always mention the placebo effect as if it dismisses the whole thing. Thing is any serious occultist will agree with you. We know it's the placebo effect - that's why it works! It's like looking at a car and saying "Ah but that's just the internal combustion engine doing that - the car isn't actually moving"

Now STFU or I'll turn the lot of you into fucking newts! 

[Cait M. R.]

I love how occult detractors always mention the placebo effect as if it dismisses the whole thing. Thing is any serious occultist will agree with you. We know it's the placebo effect - that's why it works! It's like looking at a car and saying "Ah but that's just the internal combustion engine doing that - the car isn't actually moving"

Now STFU or I'll turn the lot of you into fucking newts! 

BRING IT ON

[Faust]

I love how occult detractors always mention the placebo effect as if it dismisses the whole thing. Thing is any serious occultist will agree with you. We know it's the placebo effect - that's why it works! It's like looking at a car and saying "Ah but that's just the internal combustion engine doing that - the car isn't actually moving"

Now STFU or I'll turn the lot of you into fucking newts!  

If you read back you would see thats NOT what I am doing. I'm trying to extract a very real and power mental tool from shitty circlejerk dogma. I'm pretty certain that the placebo effect is the name given to the manifestation of  possibly the most overlooked and useful healing tool there is.

Now STFU or read the entire context instead of picking out a word

[P3nT4gR4m]

I was pretty clear on where you were coming from actually. Just backing up your point. The STFU wasn't directed at you but the rest of the thread in general. Just a setup to the "turning everyone into newts" gag, really. I totally agree with you - both the terms "placebo" and "all in your imagination" are hints at the most powerful psychological mechanisms we have at our disposal. And people will use them to dismiss. It really is funny as fuck and it's all the asspipes who think they can turn people into newts or control teh weather that made it all possible.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It really is funny as fuck and it's all the asspipes who think they can turn people into newts or control teh weather that made it all possible.

back in the height of summer, when everyone was freaking out about the grape harvest drying out, they got a big bunch of the local tribes together and did a rain dance.

strangely enough it fucking pissed down the next day. then went directly back to scorching. :foil:

Psych.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Playing the devils advocate in support of occulty terminology:
Much of the occulty terminology predates the psychology terminology referring to the same thing, and some of that which does not is still geared towards people who don't know the psychology terminology. Having a set of jargon that refers to the same thing as another group's entirely different set of jargon is not a phenomenon limited to the occult -- unless you want to be super-literal about etymology and define anything with a weird set of terminology as occult because the terminology hides the meaning (in which case, chemistry is pretty damned occult).

If you know the psychological terminology and you know the occult terminologies, you can generally translate -- a lot of the stuff is one-to-one or almost one-to-one. PD has its own occult terminology -- the Law of Fives doesn't refer precisely to confirmation bias, but to a combination of confirmation bias, placebo effect, and several other things (by the separation used in psychology terminology), though it's only ONE thing by RAW's version of the thinker-prover model; in magic, it is split up even more than in psychology, but it's split up differently.

Additionally, there is some validity to having an entirely different terminology set for 'magic' than for psychology. Mathematical notation is very different from most programming languages, despite the fact that typically most of the same things are represented, because while math is descriptive programming is active -- programming is applied mathematics, and applied things have different concerns than non-applied things. 'Magic' is not psychology, per-se, but applied psychology (applied in a fundamentally different way than a therapist would apply it -- though Jungian therapy might be closer).

[Cramulus]

I'm not going to get back into the old and boring discussion about whether or not magic is real or whether or not magic is stupid.

If I had to choose a flavor of occult beverage, I much prefer the newer stuff. Sigilization, automatic writing, egregores, servitors, that kind of crap is NEW. It's not part of an aleister crowley personality cult, and it's not old world reconstructionism.

Wiccans are so fucking concerned with the "historical roots" of their practice that they forget they're in a religion from the 1960s. I just got into an argument with someone who thought that angelology had no place in wicca, because angels have hebrew /abrahamic roots and not celtic roots. I found this totally laughable - your religion was assembled by someone trying to do Crowley's act, but didn't have the balls to take it to the finish line. (I think Gerald Gardner is basically one part crowley, one part ivan stang - he's a mystic / huckster) Wicca is a random pastiche of stuff which sounds like prechristian witchcraft. Who the fuck cares if some of your beliefs came from a different part of the world than your other beliefs? Are Older beliefs more valid? why does that matter in any way?

Austin Osman Spare, Phil Hine, & Peter Carroll decided that the occult should be something other than trying to replicate the superstitions of prescientific people. So they focused on coming up with new techniques - stuff which would later be better understood in the context of psychology and marketing.

If there's any real magic in this world, I think it's the wizardry done by marketers and politicians. They shape our reality in a really tangible way. At their root, sigilization and corporate brand management are very similar practices.

There's nothing supernatural about the idea of a collective intelligence. Corporate executives and H.R. managers have a keener understanding of egregores than most chaotes. These are just different models for understanding the same idea in different ways.

But the occult still has this old-world pointy hat connotation. When many people think of magic, they either think of Gandalf, or neckbeards and crystals. So let's get rid of that old terminology and focus on the important parts. Like the strange and startling level of influence that symbolism has on our lives. We don't need the occult to understand these things.

once again, my view is best expressed by the Art of Memetics:

...if magic is to continue to evolve; it has to evolve with the technology of the time, while also using that technology in ways that most people will probably never think of. The magician is a person who fits into any time, any space, and does so by choosing to take on the available tools and cultural mindsets and use them to achieve what s/he desires.

Magic was once a much larger field of study.  Over the years most of the ideas that were once confined to magical theory and practice have been isolated and reformulated in different fields of study.  Magicians are left guarding only a few nuggets of practical application that remains unique to magic.  For the most part, interaction with essences generated from patterns, the manipulation of belief to alter subjective experiences, and non-local action of thought and will are all that remain solely under the banner of 'Magick' and even these few ideations are being carted away into other disciplines.   So why not just study those other disciplines?

We feel there is still value in the study of magic; in particular the language system that has been built up dealing with subtle connections, forces, and objects of the psyche.  We believe that with grounding in the theory and experience of causing the improbable to become possible, an individual becomes empowered to reverse-engineer the hyperreal world of post-modern discourse. 

We believe that magic is much more than sleight of hand or sleight of mind, and know that what has been carted away into the sciences of harmonics, of chemistry, of quantum physics still haunts the spectral core of this abstraction labeled sorcery, magic, thaumaturgy, mojo, hoodoo...  and in precisely the same way, magic haunts sciences, both hard and soft.  One doesn't need to dig far to find elements of wizardry in neurolinguistic programming or psychology.  We do not react directly to the world but rather the world as it is filtered by our nervous system's habits of punctuation. We break down the world according to what we expect to find, how we move indicates what is important to pay attention and what our word systems point out or hide. This is what Kenneth Burke refers to as the terministic screen, and is very similar to what Robert Anton Wilson meant when he discussed Reality Tunnels in his work Quantum Psychology

so like, tl;dr version;

I haven't done a "ritual" in years.
But I do consider postergasm a form of "magic", if that word even means anything.



*Cram puts on his robe and wizard hat*

[Richter]

I was pretty clear on where you were coming from actually. Just backing up your point. The STFU wasn't directed at you but the rest of the thread in general. Just a setup to the "turning everyone into newts" gag, really. I totally agree with you - both the terms "placebo" and "all in your imagination" are hints at the most powerful psychological mechanisms we have at our disposal. And people will use them to dismiss. It really is funny as fuck and it's all the asspipes who think they can turn people into newts or control teh weather that made it all possible.

Kind of like science fiction vs. science fact.  Science fiction will always be gradoise, impractical, but look cool as all FUCK, while science fact will be boring, methodical, but get shit DONE.

[fomenter]

it's all the asspipes who think they can turn people into newts or control teh weather that made it all possible.

"not"  those asspipes sit around masturbating and telling each other how cool they look madjique robes, while remaining virgins into there 40's

the  people responsible for explaining,exploring and understanding the self transformational stuff (placebo effect) that you are really looking for tend to be a lot less lame than that..