MysticG
New
This new blog, The Well of Galabes is quite promising - Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. It's rather long, but well written and insightful. Here is an excerpt:
It’s the cultural layer that stirs up the controversy, because our culture has staked its survival, and more than merely its own survival, on the notion that the peculiar way its inmates construct the world is not the jumble of genetic, collective, and individual patterns that its own sciences prove it to be, but the plain unvarnished truth about the universe, which ought to be obvious to anyone anywhere who pays unbiased attention to the world around them. Thus the only version of history that most people in the industrial world are willing to consider is one that explains how people stopped believing all the obviously muddleheaded things they used to believe about the cosmos, and learned to see the reality that was sitting right out in front of them all along—which, of course, just happens to be the one we construct, moment by moment, as we make our worlds.
There are plenty of problems with that way of thinking about history, but the one that’s most relevant to the project of this blog can be grasped by recalling the last time you saw a cat staring intently at something that your eyes didn’t see. The worlds constructed by different cultures don’t just vary from one another in how they arrange the flurry of disconnected data that comes streaming in through the senses. They also vary in which data they include in their arrangements, which they exclude, what they consider important and what gets dismissed as meaningless. It’s entirely possible for the world of a given culture, at a given era in its history, to exclude utterly a range of common human experiences that the worlds of most other human cultures treat as having very great importance. We know this because the world of modern industrial culture does exactly this—and among the things that are excluded in that world, dismissed as nonexistent and meaningless and imaginary, are the raw materials of magic.
The predicament at the heart of it, though, can be summed up easily enough. For reasons we’ll be discussing in a later post, rationalism suffers from an innate and lethal tendency to lose track of the difference between the abstractions that it contemplates and the universe that those abstractions are meant to represent. That confusion between representation and reality tends to increase over time as the rationalist movement defines its view of existence with more and more precision. It’s as simple as it is inevitable: the tighter the rationalist clenches his fist, if you will, the more of the universe of possible human experience slips through his fingers.
Magic, as I suggested in last month’s post, is the reset button for minds that have allowed their worlds, their representations, to get out of sync with the reality those representations are meant to describe. In all ages, that’s highly useful for individuals; at certain times, which recur with remarkable predictability in the lives of civilizations, that’s necessary for entire societies. We live in such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.
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