I was talking within the specific lens of "movie style magic"... things like throwing fireballs around and stuff, as per the question of the original poster. But I do agree that for things that are more subtle than a brick to the face, magic is still as effective as it always has been. It's the flashy stuff that got a hard nerf by societal changes.
Did anyone ever really throw pulsing spheres of qi, fling great balls of fire, &c? "After action reports" are a genre of fiction, as Hume subtly hinted.
I don't know, but I want to believe we live in a world where stuff like that at least used to be possible. Maybe it's just the long-lost adolescent dreams of a recently 30 y/o man longing for a life better than the one he has...
Forget the used to be. Nothing says one cannot work to bring back flamboyantly manifest magick. Or if something so says, it were worth while finding out.
Alan Moore wrote a very interesting essay on the subject of nostalgia in magic (and other things) called "Fossil Angels".
Will have a look. One wonders about the efficacy of nostalgia as an emotion in magick. "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," and all that.
A good example of the supernatural portrayed as the natural in fiction, with lots of occult overtones, is the TV series 'Sapphire and Steel'. In this series, nostalgia can be a dangerous weapon allowing THINGS to break through from outside. The first adventure has a book of nursery rhymes triggering present day re-enactments of the origins of the rhymes.
You mean like Satchel Paige said, "Don't look back: something may be catching up"?
My point is not that they don't exist, my argument is that these things are natural things that we have no idea how they work. If you assign them to the supernatural as an explanation, then you have two things to explain instead of one, and one of those 'explanations' boils down to 'a big boy did it and ran away'
Excellent point. The "supernatural" seems be popular among those for whom the natural sciences are daunting. Too many big words, maths, 'n s***. I am one of the science-challenged and fess up: my incapacity to master a topic does not justify me in positing a parallel "higher" universe accessible only to "sensitive" adepts like myself. As Bertrand Russell (in)famously opined, "Postulation enjoys all the advantages of theft over honest labor."
Jesus Christ technocrat? One more reason to excoriate all things Nazarene.
"This is Jesus Christ, inventor of the first telephone. If you have invented a SECOND telephone, please leave a message after the beep."
The sources really is experience, divinity and spirit itself and a bit of Alex Grey's painting "The Cosmic Christ". Lemme find the painting:
Well, not really, as, putting aside things like people doing their magic over video conference, no technology needs to be involved to do magic.
Yeah true. I'm not here to preach I'm here to LEARN. So my observations might not go hand in hand with the public, but atleast it's my own experience and world how weird it might even be. But good point about theory will have to think about that for a moment. Because in science there are always first established a Theory -> Observation -> Change of theory according to the observation -> New Experimental Observation, so these things never change so a very important point. This should be applied to magick also if you are into it so that you scientifically go through them.
I'm totally with you there, and it's what I've spent thirty years doing - reconciling magic and science
I'm just here on 21 yearsI'm totally with you there, and it's what I've spent thirty years doing - reconciling magic and science
But always had a scientifical standpoint in this hellhole called a shamanistical initiation.
