[Help] Do Eastern practices count as magick to you?

[lumineth Realm Lord]

I ask this because I've heard that not everyone does. Also, what resources would you recommend? Personally, I have a book on making Chinese talismans.

 

[Keldan]

If you define magick narrowly as post Renaissance Western occultism, you might say Eastern practices don’t count. But that’s a definition problem, not a problem with the evidence. Systems like Daoist ritual and talismanic work, Onmyodo and other Japanese esoteric methods, esoteric Buddhism, and a wide range of Asian folk practices clearly operate as forms of magick. So yes, they count, even if practitioners use different labels and don’t call it magick.

Asia’s haunted places are more openly integrated into public culture. Things like shrines, memorial rites, hungry ghost festivals, ancestor veneration, spirit houses, local temples that handle spirit issues, etc. Because these practices are public and ongoing, that visibility creates more recorded categories of spirit activity.

Many Eastern traditions preserve highly structured baneful methods because ritual specialists remained culturally central for a long time. The key difference is that these practices are often framed as superstition rather than being separated out and branded as magick the way it often is in modern Western occult.

 

[stalkinghyena]

I'm finally reading Demons of the Flesh by Nicholas and Zeena Shreck. In talking about Vama Marg siddhis, they mention one type where the practitioner in the midst of orgasm is able to inflict pain and agonizing death on someone far away. That's the crown jewels right there.

 

[TGalen]

Sure they do! The magical traditions of the east have a vastly different history than ours but the practices can be quite similar. If you're lucky, you could have been born into a situation where those would have been/would be living traditions (like say in japan, with mikkyo and kuji, or daoist magical traditions et al.) instead of what we have in the west. How wonderful is that? Naming is just naming. Magic is magick is whatever follows the same basic underlying structure in the practice.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I would say anyone who denies Eastern practices being magic doesn't really know what magic is.

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

I ask this because I've heard that not everyone does. Also, what resources would you recommend? Personally, I have a book on making Chinese talismans.

Hot take: I think magic as a concept primarily belongs to western esotericism. Indigenous cultures and Eastern cultures have techniques, rituals, and practices that are nearly identical to western magic but I think culturally would not be understood in the same way that we, as westerners, think of magic. I think magic itself comes mostly from Egyptian (as a force) and Mesopotamian (as compelling spirits) roots and without the developments of the west's institutions to kind of drive it into the concept we have of it today these techniques and practices would be considered mysticism, folk religion, or just plain superstition. Thats not to say the practices arent magical. Just that I dont think they have the same connotations that magic does. Communing with and compelling spirits, alternative healing, visualization/visionary experiences/astral practices, deity assumption, plant medicine, energetic bodies, mantras/vocalizations... these can all be viewed as normal mystical, religious, or shamanic/animistic practices in other cultures.

But this is just my opinion.