Philosophical Considerations when Approaching Ritual

[solxyz]

Let me just say to this point Anlgophone magic hits a snag in how they think of Western mythic liturgy. It’s easy to look at the language through a post-Enlightenment lens and assume it’s proposing Cartesian dualism, and prompts the idea that reality is split into two totally separate realms.
Deeply authentic Western liturgy is deeply sacramental and doesn't treat the physical world as something to escape. It uses physical things like water, oil, flame, breath, gesture, voice - as vessels through which meaning is expressed. It is embodied.

I’m a big fan of sacramentalism, and I would like to expand on this point a bit. It is not true, as the typical modernist worldview has it, that the world we experience is a collection of meaningless material objects onto which we project meanings that are ultimately subjective. That notion of a world of meaningless objects is an abstraction from the world as it presents itself in experience – and hence the only world we actually have access to. Things, as they present themselves in experience, are full of inherent meaning and symbolic resonance. When we sit by the ocean, we are transported by a sense of profundity, because the ocean is in fact deep – it’s physical depth and it’s psychospiritual depth are not separate facts. Depth isn’t just a numerical measurement in an arbitrary direction, depth as we experience it comes to us with a meaning.

When we are living in a fully embodied way, we encounter a world that speaks. Ritual then is matter of working with those meanings, weaving them in the same way that we work with the meanings of words when we speak. You might say that ritual is a poetry of embodied meaning. This is perhaps what I find so compelling about ritual: that it is makes the meaningfulness of things more explicit and requires me to engage more fully and overtly with the structures of inherent meaning of which my life is woven.

However, I must note that the mind-body troubles in the Western experience, although certainly heightened by Enlightenment developments, in fact go back much further. The Enlightenment really just deepened fissures that were already in place, going back to Plato, and these confusions have had an active role in the western occult tradition, going back at least to the rise of Renaissance Hermeticism.

I think, for more secular folks - and I started there too - this is where a framework like Dual-Aspect Monism might help.

Anyway, Phenomenology is not bad, and it is trying it's best to get back to embodied experience itself. But if we only analyze embodiment through left-brain, theoretical categories, we risk accidentally abstracting the experiences we're trying to partake in. Dr.Iain McGilchrist calls "left-brain re-representation" , where they end up doing the opposite of what Phenonomeolgy intended and treat lived consciousness as a static subject of intellectual debate.

While I more-or-less agree with the general thrust of Dual-Aspect Monism, that mind and body are two sides of a single coin, my problem is that it is still a theoretical construct that seeks to project a picture of an aperspectival reality. It also remains speculative, while phenomenology is descriptive. I think it is dual-aspect monism, far more than phenomenology, which risks becoming a left-brain trap in which we play out a conceptualized simulacra of our experiential reality. Phenomenology’s virtue in this regard is that it remains an examination of how our experience actually presents. To engage in phenomenological thought requires going back to that embodied experience again and again and as directly as possible - which isn’t to say that there can’t be such a thing as pseudo-phenomenology in which one learns how to do a little dance with the terminology without actually attending to what it intends to point out.

But we don’t need to have any battle of pet ontologies here. We’re clearly getting at pretty much the same thing. And I’m a big fan of McGilchrist. Everyone should read him.

3. Thus far, however, we have been discussing philosophical aspects of how ritual is done and how to engage with it, but we have said little about what our purpose should be in doing ritual. This is a more difficult subject for me to talk about, in part because I’m not fully happy with any other system. But in short, it is an opportunity for us to connect with (1) our depths, which exist in multiple strata including our relational constitution/interdependence, and a pre-personal root of being, (2) our potentialities for being more fully alive/more powerfully embodying the wisdom of the way of life, (3) other beings in their depths. I hope to come back to this subject soon.

 

[The Wizard Tim]

Ritual.

Ritual work is powerful work indeed.
I am a fan of crafting my own rituals based on the needs of my community.
I often start with Druid based blessings of peace to the four courners, I very frequently offer smoke, water, fire, and earth to those corners as well, to their corresponding directions.
Summoning directional guardians that I have worked with for decades is always a comforting and familiar aspect to my ritual work, as is wearing specific ritual attire, and cleansing before conducting a ritual.
I like to freeform my ritual work as well, having a loose base for how I want the ritual to go, usually I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, I don't always have a topic or statement of intent for my work, quite often as you have written, my ritual work is just to explore the "depths, wisdom [and] beings" in my sphere of influence.
The outcome of my ritual work is that I usually feel more human and more connected with earth around me, I feel more in line with what I am supposed to be doing for myself, my family and my community.
Thank you for sharing your words here.
-Tim

 

[L’chaimGoldberg]

One of the theories I’ve seen in books is that magical rituals and religious rituals are basically a type of reenactment, and the priests or magicians are “assuming the god form”.

obviously this is heavily influenced by modern thought and modern hermetic magical traditions like thelema and theistic satanism, LHP, etc.

But I think it CAN be a useful technique to imagine the ritual as a creative process, without basically claiming a divine individual’s identity as your own. We see that in Christian rituals where they (claim to) act under the authority of the tribal god and then different individuals, whether it’s saints or Jesus or whatever. We see that in the PGM too, which, while heavily syncretized, has the operator invoking different deities.

I’m a big fan of sacramentalism, and I would like to expand on this point a bit. It is not true, as the typical modernist worldview has it, that the world we experience is a collection of meaningless material objects onto which we project meanings that are ultimately subjective. That notion of a world of meaningless objects is an abstraction from the world as it presents itself in experience – and hence the only world we actually have access to. Things, as they present themselves in experience, are full of inherent meaning and symbolic resonance. When we sit by the ocean, we are transported by a sense of profundity, because the ocean is in fact deep – it’s physical depth and it’s psychospiritual depth are not separate facts. Depth isn’t just a numerical measurement in an arbitrary direction, depth as we experience it comes to us with a meaning.

When we are living in a fully embodied way, we encounter a world that speaks. Ritual then is matter of working with those meanings, weaving them in the same way that we work with the meanings of words when we speak. You might say that ritual is a poetry of embodied meaning. This is perhaps what I find so compelling about ritual: that it is makes the meaningfulness of things more explicit and requires me to engage more fully and overtly with the structures of inherent meaning of which my life is woven.

However, I must note that the mind-body troubles in the Western experience, although certainly heightened by Enlightenment developments, in fact go back much further. The Enlightenment really just deepened fissures that were already in place, going back to Plato, and these confusions have had an active role in the western occult tradition, going back at least to the rise of Renaissance Hermeticism.




While I more-or-less agree with the general thrust of Dual-Aspect Monism, that mind and body are two sides of a single coin, my problem is that it is still a theoretical construct that seeks to project a picture of an aperspectival reality. It also remains speculative, while phenomenology is descriptive. I think it is dual-aspect monism, far more than phenomenology, which risks becoming a left-brain trap in which we play out a conceptualized simulacra of our experiential reality. Phenomenology’s virtue in this regard is that it remains an examination of how our experience actually presents. To engage in phenomenological thought requires going back to that embodied experience again and again and as directly as possible - which isn’t to say that there can’t be such a thing as pseudo-phenomenology in which one learns how to do a little dance with the terminology without actually attending to what it intends to point out.

But we don’t need to have any battle of pet ontologies here. We’re clearly getting at pretty much the same thing. And I’m a big fan of McGilchrist. Everyone should read him.

3. Thus far, however, we have been discussing philosophical aspects of how ritual is done and how to engage with it, but we have said little about what our purpose should be in doing ritual. This is a more difficult subject for me to talk about, in part because I’m not fully happy with any other system. But in short, it is an opportunity for us to connect with (1) our depths, which exist in multiple strata including our relational constitution/interdependence, and a pre-personal root of being, (2) our potentialities for being more fully alive/more powerfully embodying the wisdom of the way of life, (3) other beings in their depths. I hope to come back to this subject soon.

One of the issues with plato was the idea that the physical world is not real, this of course is downstream from the general category of axial age thinking, when it seems traditional pagan beliefs held the invisible (gods, spirits, daimons, elementals, etc) were just a continuation of the physical world. Like they say, your average Greek could walk to the top of mount Olympus but that didn’t mean that they didn’t believe that was a home for the gods.

I wonder if them seeing the world in a continum, “holistic”, as opposed to “physical, mundane” separated from “spiritual, esoteric” isn’t an encouraging factor in the decline of the recognition of magic in modern times. I tend to agree that while Christianity laid the groundwork for the secular materialist era we live in now, at least all Christian denominations believed in angels, demons, ghosts, etc, while the average modern person probably knows instinctively that they exist, but it’s not considered relevant to their daily lives.

 

[The Wizard Tim]

One of the theories I’ve seen in books is that magical rituals and religious rituals are basically a type of reenactment, and the priests or magicians are “assuming the god form”.

obviously this is heavily influenced by modern thought and modern hermetic magical traditions like thelema and theistic satanism, LHP, etc.

But I think it CAN be a useful technique to imagine the ritual as a creative process, without basically claiming a divine individual’s identity as your own. We see that in Christian rituals where they (claim to) act under the authority of the tribal god and then different individuals, whether it’s saints or Jesus or whatever. We see that in the PGM too, which, while heavily syncretized, has the operator invoking different deities.

One of the issues with plato was the idea that the physical world is not real, this of course is downstream from the general category of axial age thinking, when it seems traditional pagan beliefs held the invisible (gods, spirits, daimons, elementals, etc) were just a continuation of the physical world. Like they say, your average Greek could walk to the top of mount Olympus but that didn’t mean that they didn’t believe that was a home for the gods.

I wonder if them seeing the world in a continum, “holistic”, as opposed to “physical, mundane” separated from “spiritual, esoteric” isn’t an encouraging factor in the decline of the recognition of magic in modern times. I tend to agree that while Christianity laid the groundwork for the secular materialist era we live in now, at least all Christian denominations believed in angels, demons, ghosts, etc, while the average modern person probably knows instinctively that they exist, but it’s not considered relevant to their daily lives.

What do you mean by the PGM? I know not, this acronym.

 

[L’chaimGoldberg]

What do you mean by the PGM? I know not, this acronym.

The greek magical papyrus. The initials PGM come from “papyri greco magica” or something similar to that.

 

[The Wizard Tim]

I've never read it.
Thank you for sharing that with me, I'm always excited to go explore documents people reference when I am not familiar with them!

 

[MorganBlack]

my problem is that it is still a theoretical construct that seeks to project a picture of an aperspectival reality. It also remains speculative, while phenomenology is descriptive

I am really enjoying the conversation but in this new thread I like to ground my end of the conversation in my own practice. I am a GV magician and can only speak relative to my own practice, and I dislike totalizing models. That said...

The onging work of restoring experiential authority in modern occultism requires shifting the center of gravity away from online debate and back to direct operational practice.

I would say my description of the daimon that shows up is descriptive - as well those from other magicians. This is what in formal epistemology is called called Direct Realism, Direct Acquaintance, or Non-Propositional Knowledge. The effects of interacting with them - however we think of them - are the effects, are what they are, no matter how I describe it. I just promise not to lie about what I've experienced, much of which was quite intially shockling to me. They can still surprise me, which find delightful.

Dual-Aspect Monism can work as a useful model desciring the lived experience of brujos, sorcerers, mystics, shamans, and magicians over thousands of years . It uses modern language that gets past our Inner Reddit Neckbeard.

We can't just declare anymore 'It is all God,' (Or 'comes from God.') or 'The Neoplatonic One,' - we'd be laughed out of the academy. To then have any tenacity to protest these old models are more useful than many have been lead to believe, only turns into an awkchyually Reddit-style forver-debate with people who don't actually have any real experience in spirit evocation or sorcery, and no skin in the game .

In game design there's a known player phenotype - using Richard Bartle's taxonomy of player types - known as a 'Killer' or 'Griefer.' Their only motivation when playing is trying to break the experience for everyone else. They really don't care about the quests, art, lore, exploring the game world, or mastering the system. Their only win-condition is breaking the magic circle for everyone else. That is it. They derive their complete and utter enjoyment exclusively from disrupting the immersion of players who are actually engaged in the work.

Modern online occult spaces are infested with the exact same pheotype:

online griefers who treat traditional metaphysics, theology , and philosophy not as a living maps for practical operation, but as a open-world arena for intellectual harassment. When an operator shares a direct, phenomenological encounter - or references a working model like Neoplatonism, or traditional spirit hierarchie - this sets off an alarm bell to summon the the griefers. They don't bring any field notes, will injerect language ,lies, and other bad-faith foolishness in an effort to radomize the disuccsion, shit-talk verified results, or try to sow confusion by deploying hyper-intellectualized, left-brain pedantry to drag the conversation out of lived experience and into endless, sterile meta-commentary.

We need to slaughter our Inner Reddit Neckbeard:

We seek useful descriptions, not explanations.

We all know the saying, if modified slightly to be more accurate: 'The left-brain map is not the territory.'

We can usefully critique Dual-Aspect Monism for being a 'theoretical construct' only if we take it as a singular, totalizing explanation. But before then, to dismiss it out of hand is a classic left-brain maneuver. The left brain loves to pretend it can stand nowhere (or everywhere at once) to deliver an objective 'explanation' of reality.

This shift in stance between inside and outside the circle is what keeps the magician's work alive. Inside the ceremony, total immersion and opertaive literalism give the right brain its full weight, allowing the encounter to take place on its own terms. Outside the ceremony, metaphor protects the experience from turning into dogmatic, left-brain literalism or a rigid, totalizing theory. The map stays a map, the territory stays the territory, and the work retains its power.

David Foster Wallace in 'This Is Water' he points out that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones hardest to see because we are too busy analyzing them. Wallace says theragedy of modern intellectuals, is that e become locked inside our own head-centered abstractions. We mistake our intellectual commentary about life for the act of living itself. And I agree.

Left-brain abstraction operates like an internal echo chamber. If you spend your time trying to "explain" it all hyper-theoretical frameworks, you end up playing an endless game of intellectual navel-gazing

We really do not need a grand, overarching theory that pretends to view reality from a left-brained godlike, aperspectival distance. What we need - and what McGilchrist and Wallace both advocate for - is attunement.

Seeking useful description does not pretend to explain why the universe is constructed a certain way from the outside. It an attempt form a language to pay better attention from the inside. The moment a framework like Dual-Aspect Monism becomes an abstract explanation, it has outlived its usefulness. It;s been reduced to just another piece of intellectual noise.

And let us all pity the Reddit Neckbeard Griefer for a momment.

In both traditional Neoplatonism and historical Catholic theology, daimons (or angels/spirits) function explicitly as the administrators and executors of Fate, Providence/Ananke. So maybe some people are just Fated to forever be Neckbeards - and be stuck in a demiurgic, locked-down sub-quantum hellscape of their own making, in all the worst Gnostic ways.