Fantasy and Belief by Kirby Danielle

Author:Kirby, Danielle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-54362-6
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Revealed worlds and otherworlds

All religions promote the idea of an invisible world, inhabited by various creatures, gods, angels, and devils, which control much of what happens to us.189

Alongside contemporary fantasy and mythology, the other obvious location of intangible realms is within the worlds of religious beliefs and spiritual cosmologies.190 While the particular types of extra-physical realms vary, religions are more or less united in the notion that reality extends well beyond the physical.191 These worlds include not only the cosmologies of traditional Western religions, with their various heavens and hells and spaces in between, but also for instance the otherworlds of European, Insular and Classical heritage.

Interestingly, although Otherworlds exist within many traditions, there is a distinct difference between ancient and mythological representations and Western esoteric notions of planes. In general, this distinction is based in the lack of differentiation between worlds found within mythology, as opposed to the discrete and precise parallelism found within Western esoteric notions of the astral plane.192 The origins of the otherworld as entirely discrete to the physical has been attributed to twelfth-century theosophical Sufism, with a conception of “a phantasmagorical dimension of reality, an otherworld of unlimited variety, where the impossible was real and true”.193 This notion passed through into Kabbalistic thought, and entered Western esotericism through Renaissance esotericists such as Ficino and Paracelsus.194 While I would argue against Merkur in that I suspect that applying the term “otherworld” only to realms non-continuous with physical reality is unnecessarily limited, this distinction between a parallel magical plane and intersecting intangible worlds is an intriguing one. Mythology, if it distinguishes between worlds at all, tends to represent the “other” as continuous. Journeys to the otherworlds occur through the geography of this world; transition between the human and divine spheres of activity are matters of degree, not distinction. The astral or magical plane, on the other hand, is not treated as an extension or expansion of this world, but rather as a precise duplicate with a creative capacity.

Within contemporary magical practice, magicians often refer to a magical plane or level which more or less equates to the astral.195 Such magical planes, be they constructed as singular or plural, are interwoven with but discrete from the physical plane, a “real-but-different”196 reality that is considered to exist well beyond the bounds of the psyche. In a striking parallel to the soulscape of those who soulbond, Crowley asserts, for instance, a plethora of planes premised in all manner of literatures, of ideologies, which somehow exist beyond the purely imaginative, but not within the physical.197

The magician works on a parallel reality or a “subtle plane” where the things of the imagination are real. Just like the computer specialist needs to learn a complex programming language with its own symbols and rules, the magician needs to learn a no less complex language of symbols and equivalences based on elaborate systems of correspondences. By mastering such a symbolic language, it becomes possible for the magician to manipulate the realities on the magical place; and as a result of such activity things will change on the parallel level of the everyday world.

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