MAGICK in THEORY and PRACTICE
“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” Aleister Crowley was a noted and controversial occultist, ceremonial magician and poet. He has been called "the wickedest man in the world" or "The Master Therion" but he remained a highly influential figure over Western esotericism and the counterculture. This book is considered to be the foremost book on ceremonial magic written in the twentieth century and is recommended to initiates. This is a valuable book to anyone interested in occult studies. Excerpt: “This book is for ALL: for every man, woman, and child. My former work has been misunderstood, and its scope limited, by my use of technical terms. It has attracted only too many dilettanti and eccentrics, weaklings seeking in "Magic" an escape from reality. I myself was first consciously drawn to the subject in this way. And it has repelled only too many scientific and practical minds, such as I most designed to influence. But MAGICK is for ALL.” Reviewer 1: "Although this book is but an extensive outline of Aleister Crowley's many books, it gives the reader a fairly solid understanding of why the book was written and for whom it was written, that being anyone and everyone. It also provides diagrams, background information on the many cultures upon which Mr. Crowley relied to formulate his theories, detailed rituals, and a very comprehensive bibliography.
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What Hacker News says
- It is TOTALLY psuedo-scientific new agey talk. That doesn't necessarily negate it's validity. What determines it's it's validity is whether it is a testable and repeatable method to accomplish a result, and whether it can be learned, then communicated / taught to others.
Aleister Crowley said in Magick in Theory and Practice:
"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them."
So, have you studied and received training and tried your own personal practice in pushing up your cerebrospinal fluid / manipulating your kundalini energy / grounding your root chakra / whatever new-agey terms your chosen method uses? Or are you dismissing the validity of these methods without firsthand experimentation because of how other people in your society have trained you think and because you do not like the terminology that they use?
- Aleister Crowley, "Magick in Theory and Practice."I) DEFINITION. Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magickal weapons”, pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magickal language” ie, that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth “spirits”, such as printers, publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.) In one sense Magick may be defined as the name given to Science by the vulgar.The "magickal weapons" of the 21st century are technology, engineering, and computing; a newly emerging "magickal language" is the LLM prompt; we are building new machine "spirits" in the form of ChatGPT, LLaMa, and friends.
