Comments | heartssdesire: Sinking further in

heartssdesire

Sinking further in

Feb 26, 2008 15:43

I have had way more than my share of sick this year. I'm recovering now from my third bout being down with some kind of cold or flu. At least this one is not as wretched as the fever-and-lung-pain thing I had in January. And I thought I had escaped the plague of PCon.

So I'm at home and have been doing some further readings on the Faery researches ( Read more... )

mythology, faerie

Comments 14

jonathankorman February 27 2008, 01:14:55 UTC

Thanks for the nudge; I actually have a copy of Secret Commonwealth, which I have browsed but not read carefully. Obviously now is the time to pick it up again.

On the subject of how we might think of Hell here, it occurs to me that Lon DuQuette says that the medæval magickian's experience of the gœtic demons as “creatures of Hell” can be read as an exteriorization of the unbalanced forces in one's own Self, which in their church cosmology of course had to manifest as big monsters from the Devil's underground theme park. (Note the ambiguous extent of the Self in this description: Mr DuQuette would say that it really is all in your head ... but your head is a lot bigger than you think it is.) Once one has learned to bring those demons into your service, this is greatly empowering. Like Mr DuQuette, I would say that we can think of these personal demons in a commonplace psychological sense if we wish, but We Who Are Wise In The Art prefer to admit that the forces in place are rather bigger than that. He describes how in his own gœtic ( ... )

heartssdesire February 27 2008, 22:42:29 UTC

That's amusing: "It really is all in your head... but your head is a lot bigger than you think it is ( ... )

jonathankorman February 27 2008, 23:35:08 UTC

this psychological model misses something

Aye. To this point, I was just saying to panshiva the other day:The cosmos is so constructed that the effects of magickal practice will always be explainable as only a change in the practitioner's psyche. Early in magickal practice, though surprising things happen to the practitioner this psychological explanation is far simpler and tidier than believing in spooky æthers, deities, energies, and so forth. As the practitioner continues to work, explaining events in purely psychological terms requires increasingly elaborate justification ... until eventually one realizes that those “spooky” explanations are actually simpler.
More specifically to the question of where this “Hell” place really is, there's the way I understand the tradition in qabalah to say that the Tree of Life is both a map of the Cosmos and a map of the Self. It can be both because each element of the Self-each element of the mind, in the greatest sense of mind-is the way we make contact with that element of the Cosmos. When I get all ( ... )

heartssdesire February 28 2008, 00:49:05 UTC

Yes, I see what you mean now. That is not a purely psychological model and is much more in line with how I see things. I would imagine that all the truly effective maps-of-cosmos are also maps-of-self, and vice versa. This is certainly true of the Feri model.

And actually, now that I say that, I find it easier to grasp where Hell is in the Cosmos than where Færie is!
We are amused. Also, the opposite is true of me ( ... )

Thread 13

ravenshearth February 27 2008, 21:59:29 UTC

Just because it has become a potent force that I have encountered over the past year and because I am hearing echoes of it in what you are sharing I figured it would be worth while to mention Gwyn ap Nudd. Not sure this is relevent to the work you are doing, but I felt the urge to put it out there. A book I have recently read is "Polarity Magic" and I think it touches upon some of the themes you are researching so figured to mention it as well.