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The occult and magic

Lark

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Jun 21, 2009
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Well, there's a lot of God haters and athiests on the forum so I dont expect there will be but are there any believers in the occult and magic around?
 

r.a

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if we are all vibration, and vibration creates sound, then everything is sound. so if sound is creation, and speech is the primary tool in magic, then every time we speak we are performing magic.
 

Amargith

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*raises hand*

Proud Treehugger here!


Proud pagan here :yes:

Ohh, any chance you're of the Norse Tradition?

Odinist? Asatruar? Norse Wicca? Heathen?

Feel free to refrain from commenting if that's too personal a question :)
 

Amargith

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Ha, kewl! :D

Trad Hedgewitch, here, I work with the Norse Trad myself ;)
 

BerberElla

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I would love to believe in it the way I did when I was younger, but I've never seen anything, nor felt anything amazing the many times I did dabble in it, so I don't.

It was so much fun back when I did believe lol with my daydreaming imagination, the chance to believe that some wicked book I read, might have a real version of itself in this world was an almost magical feeling in itself.

My willingness to believe in the unseen faded when my belief in a deity did.
 

tinkerbell

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Occult is a huge filed, some of it may believable others not....

Occult is just a term that classifies probably 2 dozen systems within it... a fair few of the those systems inter-relate....

Numerlogy, relates, to Tarrot, relates to Astrology, relates to hamonic stuff etc.....

Druidisim can involve magic, but then magic can also be stand alone etc.... And we've nto talked Alcamy ;)

Hence even to evaluate some of the areas in any depth take a lot of time.

From the outside world looking in, I practice astrology, which is far more analytical than almost all of the other subject.

The world looks down on Occult subject but there is much the world at large can learn from them, many aspects of medicine have truely bizar origins. I'd be interested to see how far light and magnetic therapies can take people etc.

If people looked at modern western medicine rationally, they would see that most medicine is practice on the premis of "we dont' know why it works it just does", most medicines supress symptoms not treat the problem (easter medicine is different), it's quite scary when you scratch the surface
 

Mole

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My willingness to believe in the unseen faded when my belief in a deity did.

Yes, for some the fading of belief in a particular deity tends to led to the fading of belief in the supernatural.

When we can no longer suspend our disbelief in a particular deity, we are less inclined to suspend our disbelief in any deity.

There was an interesting exception in Australia and we found that quite a few of ex-catholics became communists. It was plainly the substitution of one faith with another.

But with the invasion of Hungary and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall, the line to Moscow went dead.

However with the decline of Catholic Religious Orders most of them adopted the belief in Social Justice. It was plain they could not quite give up their belief so they transferred it to Social Justice.

I think the problem is that they couldn't give up their institution and so they found a new way to perpetuate it. And they have been remarkably successful as Social Justice is the ideology du jour. Even our Prime Minister, an ex-catholic, believes in Social Justice.

I keep telling them that although we have Courts of Justice in Canberra, equal to the best in the world, there is not even one Court of Social Justice.

And so it is impossible to go to Court and ask for Social Justice. And I say that Social Justice is the kind of justice you have when you are not having any justice.

And in fact Social Justice is dispensed as charity to the poor.

And it is the well-off who dispense charity at their discretion to the deserving poor.

So for institutions, belief is a moveable feast - a kind of magic pudding.

And the more you eat of a magic pudding, the more there is.

And we shouldn't be surprised as magic appeals to the child in all of us.
 

BlackCat

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I dabbled in this stuff, but got bored with it.
 

Snow Turtle

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I'm interested in the stuff. I've heard stories that I'd like to explain, but haven't really had any decent scientific explanatins.

There's a psychology essay I will be doing in the near future on the topic of gender and belief. It's said that females are more likely to be believers of paranormal than the male population.

But what I'm much more interested in is if there is a correlatin between those who experience lots of dejavu and the belief in paranormal. (That's my own interest anyway rather than the university assignment.)
 

Valiant

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Interested in celtic religion and traditions, Cernunnos mostly.
I read some occult stuff every once in a while, but while I think it is interesting...
No, I do not believe it is real.
Nature is a force of its own, but I don't think strange rituals or the like wearing odd garments chanting in some made-up language will change anything.

Anyway. If I see it, I will believe it. Open-minded but not sold on the idea.
 

kyuuei

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I do believe it exists, and it is used. I delved into it, to the point of practicing with it, to try and understand the mechanics of it all while I was creating a theory for myself. It was great stuff, with an interesting following. It opened my eyes to a lot of things.
 

Katsuni

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There's alot of things in the universe we can't currently explain through our limited understanding of backwards engineering things.

We are essentially trying to piece together the laws of reality, starting with the end effect, and figuring out from the effect, whot the cause was. With how complex reality is, we're not doing so hot.

That being said, things such as god, reincarnation, magic, demons, alternate dimensional planes of existence, extraplanar beings, these are all possibilities.

In fact, *EVERYTHING* is a possibility... it just boils down to how PLAUSIBLE these things are.

Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's likely.



With that in mind, however, I do feel that there are alot of things out there that just make more sense with additional forces beyond whot we currently are aware of; be it magic or a force of energy that may not be as easily detectable as the four primary forces, there are just some things that make a bit more sense if we assume that 'magic', in some way shape or form, exists.

Does that mean that it absolutely does? No.

Does it mean that the vast practitioners of these things have any clue whot they're talking about? Heeeeeeeeeeell nooooo.

Seriously, virtually all self-proclaimed wiccans have nooooooo clue whot their 'religion' is about. Honestly, it is a religion, at it's core, if yeu actually read through the stuff fully. But virtually noone does that. Most just hop on the band wagon, or want to 'cast magic spells zomg!'.

Same with most other modern day pagan religions sadly.

Fact is, even if magic's real, most people are just wannabe's.

I can't tell for sure whot exists and whot doesn't, really. I can only go by whot makes the most sense in context with the information I have at hand. With the evidence that's been presented to me so far in life, I believe there's a good chance of SOME kind of higher being that vaguely resembles a god out there, whether it's just one or a dozen, who knows. Whether it's even a sentient, cognitive being or a mechanical aberration, even that I can't tell yeu.

The same goes with magic and the occult; there's enough indications and evidence pointing towards it 'likely' having some vague basis in truth. I doubt the vast majority of it, as most of it's just people who don't understand whot they see, but there are some aspects which I think may have some merit to them.

That being said, I would never consider "magic" to be... well... 'magical'. Not in the sense of "zomg it just magically happens!", but rather a very methodical, controllable force or energy of sorts, which we just don't happen to have much contact with, nor knowledge or ability to manipulate at this time.

For the sake of argument, one can pretty much claim gravity is essentially magic by these standards; we know it exists, but uhm... there's no particles, no transferable energy, no forces, no waves, no evidence of HOW it works... it has no discernible limit, as it stretches out infinitely in all directions, without any point at which it reaches absolute zero... it has no limit in which it diminishes in effect either; a mass of X will always produce a pull towards it for an infinite duration; even electromagnetics involves diminishing returns as the electrons are transferred... the other three forces eventually weaken as their energies are used, but gravity... doesn't. And we have no idea why. We don't even know HOW it does anything... stuff gets pulled towards it by some 'force' but we have no evidence of HOW it does this.

Flat out, gravity is magic to us at this point in time. We have no evidence to the contrary.

As such, there's a great number of things out there we don't understand, and may never understand. "Real magic" may just be one of them. I doubt it's magical in the traditional sense, but I can see complex laws of force applying in ways we don't understand, in a way that would essentially fit all criteria for 'magic'.
 

Feops

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Yea.... it's just less accetable science

I don't mean that magic is a type of science. I mean that anything people think to be magic has a perfectly rational explaination... but perhaps one that we don't yet understand.

'Magic' is about perspective, illusion, perhaps even trickery.
 

tinkerbell

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yes I kind of ment the same, we just haven't normalised it yet...

I'm a firm beleiver that a fair amount (although DEFINATELY not all), will be provable in time

Accupuncture, we can prove it works but can't prove why or how
 
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