My Years of Magical Thinking by Lionel Snell

Author:Lionel Snell [Snell, Lionel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magic, Occult, Philosophy
ISBN: 0904311244
Publisher: The Mouse That Spins
Published: 2017-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

20.4 The problem of doubt

In this chapter I have risked making enemies by taking a dig at the way each culture boldly turns its back on the past culture, and yet retains a hotly-denied heritage from it. So I doubt that I will be very popular when I assert that the biggest problem in a magical culture is that no-one in it really believes in magic.

OK, that is a bit extreme, and it ignores what I have already explained in Chapter 13 about the different meaning of the word “belief”. But I would like to illustrate with two examples.

Firstly, going back to the so-called “sceptics” group: if I had put the same set of questions to a group from the broader magical culture – even a relatively consistent group like hard-core ritual magicians – I would have received a much wider range of answers, revealing far greater levels of doubt. I know of chaos magicians who think astrology is rubbish, while some think it is a workable psychological model but has nothing to do with the physical planets, and yet others who largely accept it. The worth of Reiki, crystal healing, divination, invocation and every other magical topic is an open question to be debated in most magical cultures. Many groups on the fringe of magical culture – such as the advertising community, homeopaths, analytical psychologists or whatever – will even go out of their way to distance themselves from magical culture by claiming disbelief in any form of magic, because they want their own practice to be respected as a science, and not sullied by association with cranks.

Secondly one should listen to the way people converse in a magical culture. Again I will give my example greater penetration by narrowing it to a specific subgroup: one would expect astrologers, at least, to believe in astrology. But in any group of astrologers you are likely to hear statements along the following lines:

“Last Tuesday I nearly forgot I had an appointment at 10, so dashed to get my car and it would not start! I seem to have mislaid the driver’s handbook so decided to call the RAC, only to find that my mobile phone was out of battery…” and so on. The statement ends with: “You’ll never guess what: Tuesday was the very day that Mercury went retrograde! It’s incredible!”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.