Doing rituals while being atheist

[Debbie]

Thank you!! I read a lot about Michael w ford and I read many times he is an atheist? Has anyone else read that that? I'm not judging Michael w ford but Anton lavey was an atheist so the point I'm trying to make an I do apologise as I'm not very good at explaining what I'm thinking ,but what is the point of doing rituals to deity's you don't believe exist? What would someone get from that is what I think I'm trying to say as for it would be like going to church and not believing in jesus or the holy scriptures!! Feel free to reply to me on this because it does really baffle me

 

[motzfeldt]

I might be wrong but wasn't LaVey a theist in private? As in, his Church of Satan waffle that he sold to the public was an atheistic ideology, but he himself in his own life was a theist.

Anyways, to answer your question, you can be an atheist while practising magic. Think of it as the Star Wars universe (I hate to use pop culture analogies but in this case it's right). There are no gods or deities, but jedis and siths are capable of wielding The Force. The Force being a psychic energy that permeates life and can be wielded for power good or bad, but just because this magic psychic energy exists in the Star Wars universe doesn't mean there are gods. Atheist magic is the same. There's a psychic energy beneath the surface of the material world that can be tapped into and used. All the deities and stuff that people do rituals to are simply symbolic, and these symbols have a powerful effect on your psyche, which in turn produces magic. Basically "It's all just psychology bro" but has a real world impact.

I don't really belong to that line of thinking. I do believe a lot of magic is the psychic energy (ether) we tap into and that a lot of it is psychologically powered, I do think that many occultists, at times, overestimate the influence of deities and spirits instead of the true power of their own mind. At the same time I'm not an atheist, I do believe in intelligences that are far more ancient and powerful than humans and exist in other planes of reality.

 

[HoldAll]

It's one of the principal features of chaos magic that belief (in gods, religions, ideology) is nothing but a tool and can be chosen and discarded at random. I myself am not so convinced about this ploy but I have to say that I find myself chronically and congenitally unable to believe in any god at all, so the best I can do is try to fervently play pretend, which can feel phoney at times... When I do the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, for example, I imagine YHVH to be the demiurge, not some god I'm supposed to be subservient to (which rubs me all the wrong ways); it's some kind of Gnostic compromise. I could imagine myself venerating some Greek gods though as I have no beef with them as with the Christian god but they're more like mythological archetypes to me. Anyway, chaos-magic style sigil magic (and certain other methods) do without any god-bothering, so religious belief is not strictly necessary to do magic, in my opinion.

 

[Vandheer]

Here is the thing, at least in my experience, all that matters is the end result.

Eg: This ritual will provide me protection. Thats all I care about. What spirits are called upon in the rite doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they didn't exist. As long as I get what I need what do I care.

Evication would be one exception to this, of course.

doing rituals to deity's you don't believe exist?

Perhaps it would help if you thought them as personified forces instead of spirits.

Even if none of this is working out there is still fun to be had with hypnosis, placebo, shadow work, etc.

 

[Galahad]

Theism and atheism both arise from the same place. They are, in the proper sense, reasonable statements/beliefs and are necessarily outward looking, towards the material world, which is precisely what reason deals with. A theist (especially one with an Aristotelian theology) looks at the world and makes the intellectual leap that God must exist, an atheist looks at the same world and makes the intellectual leap that God doesn't exist. Nothing qualitatively separates these statements because they both come from the same level of consciousness. The tool that the theist and atheist are using to make their assessments, reason, is the same (though there are millions of theists and atheists who hold their beliefs unthinkingly - these people are sleep walking and their views aren't reasoned). The presumption of both is that reason is somehow the only measure of truth.

However, reason is actually only one of many faculties of the human psyche and it's a pretty lowly one. Reason is excellent at collating data. It can tell you which neurons are firing in which parts of the brain in response to pleasant external stimuli. It can't tell you what being in love is actually like as an experience. The same applies to mysticism. Reason is not an adequate tool to assess those experiences because it can never grasp their qualitative nature. Reason works with quantity, not quality (there's an interesting parallel here with the Demiurge as geometer vs. the True God).

This is a long way of saying that whatever intellectual positions a magician "identifies" with, it really doesn't matter. A wise magician sees things like theism/atheism as the very shallow end of the pool. The Sufis reveal the shallowness of these potions by playing with the Shahada: "There is no God... but God".

As for how those who think of themselves as atheists view invoking gods; they approach them as Jungian archetypes or patterns. In much the same way that dressing as Batman might help a child to feel more powerful, these magicians use archetypes in controlled ways to take on their characteristics. I should add that theistic magicians see this in the same way although they might feel that there is something metaphysical behind the archetype, something that exists outside of the psyche of the magician.