Can you do other forms of magic if you practice a folk religion?

[frito]

Like if you are a Norse pagan, does that prevent you from doing chaos magic?

 

[Robert Ramsay]

If you can find a way of combining them together without either seeming false to you, then go for it. Some Chaos magicians would argue that all other magical systems are variants of Chaos magic anyway

 

[Morell]

The only real limit to what you can and cannot do is you. Your faith is still your thing, so you are the one who creates it and one who deconstructs it if it doesn't work anymore or becomes a needless limitation.

So to answer: no, it doesn't prevent you from doing other forms of magic. You choose who you are and what you can do.

 

[Faria]

Like if you are a Norse pagan, does that prevent you from doing chaos magic?

Norse paganism, at the very best (maybe in Iceland?) is still a completely made-up modern thing. The remnants of Norse religion are fragmentary, and cross-pollinated by Christianity. Any resemblances to old style religion are mostly founded on guesswork. So if you're getting anything magical from it, you're already doing chaos magic.

 

[frito]

The remnants of Norse religion are fragmentary, and cross-pollinated by Christianity. Any resemblances to old style religion are mostly founded on guesswork.

Does that include all old style religions? Is that true with Roman and Hellenic polytheism or others that aren't European as well?

 

[Faria]

Does that include all old style religions? Is that true with Roman and Hellenic polytheism or others that aren't European as well?

I'd say yes, but there might be some exceptions. If you mean Greek and Roman, then yes definitely, it will be mostly conjured from second or third-hand sources and put together with a basket of modern biases. Same goes for pre-Columbian American religions, even ancient forms of Judaism or Hindusim. Even trying to replicate pre-Constantine Christianity is likely to be mostly made-up and lacking the context of the original from that era. Bottom line is that if it isn't something somebody's grandparents actively transmit to their grandkids more or less as they received it from their own grandparents, you're going to see revisionist fuckery. And that's fine, but we can't expect anyone to take it seriously as authentic old-time religion. So again, if it produces results, it's already in the domain of chaos magic because the underlying belief system is arbitrarily generated.

 

[CunningWyse]

They are distinct systems and traditions. Keep your traditions separate. Don't try to make Norse chaos magic, it congests the magic. These are systems that work in a specific way. And Chaos magic is not an animist tradition, unlike the framework of Norse pagan magic which is Animist in nature. You can do both, but maintain separate altars.

 

[lumineth Realm Lord]

Like if you are a Norse pagan, does that prevent you from doing chaos magic?

I often have found that doing magick is much like playing Warhammer. People might have their go to traditions, but sometimes they go after another.

 

[aviaf]

Like if you are a Norse pagan, does that prevent you from doing chaos magic?

Yeah, you can. Gods don’t hand out permission slips — that’s human rules.

32 years and counting, I’ve been chasing the mysteries wherever I could find them… Reyn til runa! I actually avoided the Norse stuff for roughly 20 years, aside from learning the runes. Then Odin finally got fed up and dragged me kicking and screaming off the mud-matched path I was on . Shapeshifter, oath-breaker, self-sacrificer hunting wisdom like prey — that’s Odin. Archetypal Chaos. I try to emulate him, calling myself a chaotic heathen, weaving runes and seiðr, Chaos Magick, O.T.O., Ifá, Wicca — into a storm of blood, roots, and chaos. Odin smiles in the whirlwind.

We have records, and an idea of what they looked like, but no one really knows what the old religions felt like. Except maybe Hinduism, which never caved to the Christian War Machine. Everything else? Reconstruction, invention, idealistic bullshit… but somehow, it works. That’s what’s magickal.