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From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva)
Subject: Re: Religion and Defining Magick (Was Catholic Magic is an Oxymoron (...))
Date: 23 Apr 1996 20:56:50 -0700

kaliyuga
49960423 teach masturbation

oispeggy@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (MARGARET MARY-THERESA BROWN, SUNY BUFFALO):
|Catholics often do magick, only they call it prayer.  

I tend to agree with you in the way you mean this, yes.


|Occasionally they call it healing.  

Or other things, I suspect, when it gets into folk magic.


|You (dougg) are correct though, that they do not use it simply to fulfill 
|their own true (personal) will.  

While it is likely true that it is Church *policy* that no Catholic priest
is to use the rite of the Church for his own desires/will, it has occurred
several times in the past that such rituals were available for sale (along
with performing funerary rites for the living as a type of curse, for
example).

Quite beside this I suspect that the Portuguese and Latin American Catolicos
are also RC varieties and wield a fount of charming magical supplies, icons
for particular meditations, sometimes candles for specific spells, etc.  it
is atambiguous as to who is initiating these charms or candle-workings.  I'm
sure the penitent see it as a form of request for the intercession of various
saints (as when selling a house burying a statue of St. Joseph in your back
yard!), yet the way it may be directed within their culture it performs,
speaking somewhat anthropologically, the same function as magic or witchcraft.

(I just paused to put on the radio instead of the spent tape and turned very
haphazardly to a broadcast of what appears to be a Roman Catholic ritual
invokation of the Virgin Mary in a Latin language....hmmmm)


|They use it to further the goals of the church or to accomplish their will 
|-- after it is filtered through their programming regarding what is 
|acceptable to want.  

Some do, though not nominally.  I'm sure it isn't called 'magic'.


tyagi:
|>If you mean 'for the most part' in that the majority of Catholics likely 
|>don't use it this way, then I agree, but this is as likely true for 
|>Thelemites and Wiccans as any general large and stable religious group 
|>such as Roman Catholicism, perhaps only in differing percentages due to 
|>age and generation.
     
|Now, a couple days ago didn't you (Tyagi) post a diatribe about how
|Catholocism had nothing whatsoever to do with magick?  

Yes, Roman Catholicism, according to *its* understanding (which perpetuates
in ambiguity in the public).  fascinating, with this blizzard surrounding me
on all sides about Christianity and Satanism in these newsgroups, that such
an ambiguity may be perpetuated.  Perhaps that is the Great Secret.


|...now you seem to have changed your mind.

I am arguing from a different perspective.  I find it respectful to 
occasionally argue the perspective of a dominant religious establishment
of the West in an effort to ferret it out.  Even doing this it seldom
shows all its teeth.

Got a real good response so far, I thought.  Very interesting, especially
in the light of Cavendish, who makes 'magic' out as a epithet of religious
persecution at points in time.


|So, do you now think that Catholocism has something to do with magick, or not?

I think it is very complex and the way you put it is somewhat ambiguous even
while I know you well enough to figure what you're saying, my Mystress.

You are asking of a relation betwixt two dancing clouds, sometimes inter-
penetrating each other as is their wont and benefit.  The Roman Catholic
Church has seldom associated itself with the *term* 'magic' or 'magick',
even though it was clear, historically, that its members have engaged in what 
an anthropologist would (and still do) identify with magic (esp. 'low').

When it comes to what people think of 'high' magick, a kind of 'spiritual
rite', as they might think it, I think that Roman Catholic priests are
the only ones who perform the Mass, but there are other 'magical' rites
within the Church, such as exorcism, perhaps excommunication and funerals.

I am as yet unsure who has been authorized to perform these things, though
I gather many modern (Roman?) Catholics consider themselves capable of at
least *discussing* such rituals, if not in many cases performing them.  I
don't know of the 'normalcy' of this type of involvement (I suspect it is
deviant), but it manifests in Usenet occasionally.

Mage, act and cosmos are three items of variation which may be considered
in the determination of the qualities of the RC Mass.  This Mass is a very 
special perpetuant of the entire tradition in connection to the Lord and 
Savior.  

Yet the *way* we perceive the situation (cosmology/worldview) will largely
determine the terminology we use in such an assessment, which has been my
focus all along (drawing out the terminology of the Church itself, which I
have only seen in one email to my box and in previous conversations with
friends).

Seen from the perspective of the Church (which disassociates with the term
from what I can tell), it does not in any way include 'magick' or even 'magic'.
These are behaviors contrary to the desires of God, as the Roman Catholic 
Church professes it, the extremists assured that punitive measures for such 
'sins' are destined and necessary.  

The Church might reconcile itself with its chequered past in regards magic 
by saying 'some of its priests may have occasionally strayed from the flock, 
but in the main such evils have been beyond the pale (to use a phrase from 
a witch friend :>).

From a popular occult perspective I notice it is often presumed that the Mass,
as a form of 'transubstantiation' qualifies not for the 'miracle' suggested by
the Church but as a magical act.  However, this is seldom very clearly examined
in the light of the possible cosmologies (theurgic, thaumaturgic) involved
in the discussion (RC, occult).  Perhaps it is a way of taking power *away*
from the Mass to say this, that it is a 'magical act'.  Certainly this is what
centuries of Protestants meant when they associated 'magic' with 'popery'.

In the light of ontological and energetic fluctuation, as I don't yet know 
the DETAILS of the Roman Catholic Mass (only other Catholic) (send me an URL
if you have one, for the blocking/script), I can only guess at the possible 
interpretations I might have should I procure a copy of one of its 
variations.  I'm sure there is some standard of perpetuity.

Yet if God manifests His Son through the miracle of the Mass, then the 
priest who performs it may be doing magic in either 'high' or 'low'
sense, as his is surely the vessel through which the Holy Spirit cometh,
and he may be graced by the finger of God (a qualification of 
its own, though perhaps more mystical than magical), and his is the
initiating and determining will in the transubstantiating, guided by
the Hand of God, presumably.  (Corrections encouraged!)

If the whole 'God' business is a bunch of hooey and they're all just making
passes over cups like any other stage magician, serving as the religious
opiate many Satanists take them to be, then I think they are doing little 
magic(k) at all, merely fulfilling a traditional role, co-opting the 
challenging and deviate.

In the 'herd mentality' mindset (RC as The Machine), the only kind of 
magic which the RCatholic Church engages is the constraining and 
debilitation of its body (the church) and its host (the planet) in a 
horrific and disgusting set of policies deserving of opposition by
every ecological free-thinker (until they be changed).

The first step in opposing them comes in setting them in relief.  This
is what I am attempting to do right now, to say 

		"Ok you RC mages, some of you say you do 
		 'magic(k)' and I'd like to know how your 
		 Pontiff can say what he and the rest of 
		 his potentate may well resolve about the 
		 subject and you still consider yourself 
	 	 a 'good Catholic'."

Are there alot of very red-handed, guilty, sinning Catholics who oppose
their Pope and practice magic in a stand of duplicity?  I may have met 
maybe one or two, but on the whole it seems they fall into one of the 
already-mentioned categories or they get caught in a psychotic and moral
quandry and purgatory.   It can be very messy, and this may be why the
practice is forbidden by the authorities (too potent/dangerous; "don't
cross the currents, Bob!").

tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com
nagasiva
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