A History of Magic

So lately I have been feeling like I need to commit myself more firmly to reading and finishing books. So I have taken upon myself the slightly off-kilter choice of reading The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi, translated into English and with footnotes by A.E. Waite (yep, as in the famous Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, that guy). What with all this talk about the death of David Foster Wallace, I have had to resist the urge to go out and read some of his stuff, or at least make another attempt at Pynchon's behemoth Against the Day. But it's okay. My will is good.

Lévi is really an Frenchman named Alphonse Louis Constant, writing in the mid-nineteenth century. He writing style bears a lot of the stylistic tics I associate with that period by way of Marx: a circumlocutory style that talked around a subject without through line or goal, that manages to encompass its topic without elucidating it, and totally bereft of conclusion, instead relying upon bald, unsubstantiated statement or opinion*. It's really an horrible, horrible approach to approaching a non-fiction topic.

About that non-fiction topic. Lévi believes vampires exist. Vampires, dude. Among other things. There is actually something quite exhilarating about reading an old book that believes thing nobody does today. It's like traveling back in time and finding yourself in a another universe as well. I suppose I could spend all my time trying to debate Lévi's worldview and form one of my own in opposition to it, but at the moment it's enough to simply enter that world and get a taste of it before returning to my own.

More troubling is dealing with Lévi's worldview. It's kind of weird, because one doesn't usually think of magicians in these terms, but Lévi is very "traditional," in a sense. He thinks that hierarchy in knowledge is necessary for a properly functioning society, that it is not possible for the people to all be fully informed, and metaphysical knowledge must be held by a select few. However, this doesn't mean that he thinks all hierarchy is good; he thinks it's easy for it to be corrupted, and has no real suggestions for how to make things function better (at least not yet), beyond believing that those in possession of have the necessary training to use it wisely. Constant was Catholic, and a failed priest, so this view is probably a mixture of the support for the priesthood as a source of divine knowledge and of Transcendental Magic's approach to magical initiation.

Lévi also seems to have a pretty old idea of the roles of the sexes. He talks much about how Goëtic, or Black Magic, is magic used outside the proper priestly initiation and thus most magicians and all witches really are trafficking with the devil. I was kind of expecting some kind of defense of people that had been persecuted as witches throughout history, but no, Lévi seems to really seem to think these are women who don't know their place. He also has a chapter, albeit a short one, devoted to the sacred power of virginity and chastity, and it seems to go without saying that men just be chaste, but women need to be virgins. There is also quite a bit on how evil spirits, incubi and succubi, are drawn to and created by repressed sexual energy and bodily emissions (that's some old-school terminology right there). Basically sexual energy is tied up a lot with bad things and evil and stuff, and there is definitely a gendered component to it all.

I am still trying to figure out what Lévi's basic view of things is, but there is a lot of talk of the Astral Light, which isn't precisely light but seems to be the building block of physical reality, and also the form of spirit (you can definitely see here the building blocks of the connections people draw between magical thinking and quantum theory). This Astral Light, however, is tied to the serpent from the Garden of Eden somehow, and is juxtaposition to some other force, with is the more "divine" force. And the Devil, in the section on him—well, Lévi isn't really clear on what the devil is, precisely, although he seems dismissive of the conception of the devil as an actual figure and seems knowledgeable of the origins of the character of Lucifer Morningstar. But the personage of Lucifer Morningstar is somehow connected to the idea of the Astral Light, the source of it, so the Light seems somehow tied to "evil," as, to a certain degree, magic itself, or Black Magic, which seems to be manipulation of Astral Light in such a way that it corrupts the soul and make it hard to communicate with God, somehow. (I wish he would spell this stuff out clearer, I feel more like I am hunting and pecking for little bits of information from a cloud of verbiage.) This seems to be basically consistent with Lévi's opinions of mediums, which is that they are people whose souls are so tied up in knots that they draws other spirits to them like a whirlpool, and thus should be avoided by the rest of us.

It's weird. Lévi was a magician, yet he seems to have a very low opinion of most magicians, and not in an egotistical sense. I suppose at some later point in the book Lévi will will give a fuller account of Transcendental Magic and how this relates to other occult phenomena; I'm only around halfway through, after all.

*Though the work is translated by Waite, the style seems to carry through the specific level of word choices; it's more a matter of construction than diction. However, it probably exists on the level of word choice as well. Waite's various footnotes, incredibly useful, as they often correct Lévi's errors—and yes it is a bit annoying reading a book knowing you might be getting the wrong information—are much more direct and concise than his translation of Lévi's French, leading me to believe that his diction in translation is more a manner of capturing Lévi's tone than exchanging it for his own.

Planting Seeds, People, Just Planting Seeds.

It appears that over at Cogitamus, Neil's website for the The Palin Truth Squad is moving up the ranks of the Google search, so I thought I would post a link for it, to help it along. I think that does something. That's what a Google Bomb is, right? I am so poor at this.

Anyways, hope this helps.

RIP, Rick Wright

Rick Wright, keyboardist for Pink Floyd, has died. I am listening to "Great Gig in the Sky" as I type.

I haven't really been listening to Pink Floyd much in recent years, but I was really, really into them in high school. I bought every single one of their studio albums, which is quite a feat, considering I wasn't using drugs. So, this seriously bums me out. He wasn't really prime mover in the band ever, but after Syd got kicked out, he was the bands main space cadet, and was responsible for all the really trippy, childish songs, songs like "Paintbox," "Remember a Day" and "See Saw," that lent the later incarnation of the band some of their earlier vibes. And of course, he wrote "The Great Gig in the Sky," an absolutely superb song about death with no words. Not trippy or childish at all, just eerie and beautiful.

Shine on, Richard Wright. We'll miss you.

Two Things

I did two interesting things today, one that felt really bad, and one that felt really good.

The first was the bad thing. Remember a while back when there was reports about how Walmart was screening videos decrying how, if Obama was elected, the fair pay act would allow unions to run rampant, and this would destroy not only poor little defenseless Wal-Mart, but America? Well, see, I work for "The Other Guy," and today I had to watch a video that was basically the same thing. Following in the standard, "the same as Wal-Mart, but classier" approach, it was just a incredibly distorted video about how unions are bad, and are evil businesses (Yes, businesses!) that ruin life for workers. The only reference to recent events was about "coming changes in our labor laws." So no direct references to the campaign or the candidates, just some anti-union propaganda before the election.

If I understood the the basic argument of the video, it was that unions are not able to make them pay you more, and joining them will break up the big happy corporate family that you belong to that pays you minimum wage. The guy across from me snortled and chuckled throughout at the videos epic failure, and at one point, to afraid to do anything overt, I just looked over, and we shared a look: the kind that says, "yeah, this is bullshit." Another guy and I shared a good laugh afterwards, as well. (Op! Just wanted to make sure there was none of those evil unions around the corner!" he said) My heart goes out to you both.

It made me feel bad. I like the work atmosphere there, but now I am going to trust the managers's there a little less.

The other thing was, after coming home and perusing the blogs to the wave of bullshit that has been rising since the Republinca Convention (and will hopefully soon crest), and just being disgusted and feeling helpless about the whole thing, I got a call out of the blue from the Local Obama campaign, asking if I wanted to volunteer. So I did. I spent two and a half hours today calling phone numbers of college students who didn't answer and talking vaguely about politics with the interns. In a way, it was an edifying esperiance, except I think all I managed to was to knock out some pages of people they would not need to call again.

A couple anecdotes, though, that I bring back to the blog world (Sir Charles, ari, are you reading this?): the PUMAs are very real, and Sarah Palin means something to them. All the interns seemed to have had encounters with women, even pro-choice women, who were voting for McCain-Palin, because they wanted a woman in office. One person was even told that "a vote for McCain is really a vote for Hillary." This was not funny to them. One person spent much time talking with pro-choice women, and trying to discuss things with a McCain supporter. Apparently, they don't like to bring up abortion over the phone (I asked, and then was forced to admit it was all outside my area of expertise), so they focus on McCain not supporting the Fair Pay Act. Many of us noted that we had encounter with enthusiastic 80-year-old Obama fans, of both sexes, and I wondered why it seemed to be more the 60 or 70 age group that was so pro-McCain. One woman opined that it's because that age group wasn't tuaght to be "rebellious" like the slightly younger ones were (read those quote-marks as signifying contempt).

But yeah, Pumas: a very real, and annoying phenomenon, people. The grunts have to deal with it day in and day out.

The Last Gasp of the Right

After reading the first little bit of this John Cole post, something occurred to me, a thought that I had had previously, but entirely forgotten about.

In the Democratic party, the base, the people who constitute the solid source of support and votes, are basically Good Democrats, normal citizens who aren't really all that involved in politics, but know which side their bread is buttered on, and show up to vote for them. Then there is the activist, politically inclined types, who are really into politics, and are always threatening to stay home or vote third party, and really claim to have no real oyalty to the Democratic Party itself (*cough*).

But in the Republican party it's basically the opposite, because the base is the Religious Right. That's where they get their votes, not from libertarians or free-market types. There's a huge chunk of the country that is basically votes on spreading an image Christianity across our apolitical culture. And like the far-left liberals, these people don't really care about the republican party itself, they want to republican party to start doing more of what they want, it doesn't, you know. And like the far-left liberals, they have no problem staying home or voting for a third party. They do not care about the party per se, they just care about what it has done for them lately. And in terms of distance from the American Center, the religious right is really just as extreme, if not more extreme, than more on the liberal left.

This basically explains the difference between the two parties, and their approaches to constituencies. The Democratic Part is always balancing between ignoring the left and doing some things in their favor, for the most part seeing how much they can just ignore them to gain swing voters without losing the election entirely by turning to many of the left away. So, the democrats often seem hesitant to embrace their left. Hence them almost never using the word abortion in ads. The right, on the other hand, can't afford to stick it to their fringe, because their fringe is their base. So that's why you get John McCain bending over backwards to court the religious right, because he automatically has no chance without them. I suspect that if John McCain had his druthers, he would be running the kind of moderate, idea-based campaign that he said he would. But the base hates him; he represents everything that they hate in the republican party, and there is an actual chance that they wouldn't show up to vote for him. So here he is turning himself into their ghoul, to protect their votes.

Personally I suspect that after this election the religious right will be done. Obama's triumph will prove once and for all that they are outside the mainstream, and are lethal to electoral success, and they Republican Party will soon dump them wholecloth, and start running on small-government libertarian and civil libertarians. It will be something like the party of Goldwater again. The Religious Right will go back to not caring about electoral politics, and slowly shrink as the combined forces of modernity and liberalism slowly tear their children out of the fold. These people are simply living in an outdated social model, one that cannot really exist in the first world, and the only reason it has been useful to these people—the sense of community, the social programs and daycare— is in dealing with the hardship caused by the party they have voted for. As those causes disappear, their children will drift away, seeing their parents' culture as not one they need to hold onto for themselves, and not worth preserving for posterity.