Sacred Magic and the Post-Modern Dilemma

[China Cat Sunflower]

Just another aborted attempt to write about this kind of stuff.

The infernally long quote of my original post was from the Empress chapter of Meditations on the Tarot. Funny, I just this evening read this from the Zohar:

Moreover, we may regard the words, "Let us make man" as to convey this: to the lower beings who derived from the side of the upper world God disclosed the secret of how to form the divine name Adam, in which is encompassed the upper and the lower, in the force of it's three letters aleph, dalet, and mem final.

We already talked about Aleph being the Fool, and Mem the Hanged Man, so that leaves Dalet the Empress. We're ready to make man! Everybody sing...

It's rainin' men, hallelujah...

Chris

[Nick_A]

“But it so happens that in human consciousness one separates the inseparable--in forgetting the unity. One takes a branch of the tree and cultivates it as if it exists without the trunk. The branch can have a long life, but it degenerates. It is thus that in forgetting gnosis and mysticism, magic has been taken separately which, being a branch separated from its trunk, ceased to be sacred magic and became arbitrary or personal magic. This latter mechanized to a certain degree and became what one understands as “ceremonial magic”, which flourished from the time of the Renaissance until the seventeenth century. It was par excellence the magic of the humanists, I.e. it was no longer divine magic, but human magic. It no longer served God, but man. It’s ideal became the power of man over visible and invisible Nature. Later, invisible Nature was also forgotten. Visible Nature was concentrated upon alone, with the aim of subjugating it to the human will. It is in this way that technological and industrial science originated. It is the continuation of the ceremonial magic of the humanists, stripped of its occult element, just as the former is the continuation of sacred magic, but deprived of its gnostic and mystical element.

Yes this is what happens, We've lost the inner understanding of cosmological universal structure and the way parts or fractions of higher wholes are related to even higher wholes and finally to the radiating process beginning with the source itself.

The effort to "know thyself" is the effort to awaken to this experience of ourselves as expressions of a higher whole.

Society has become what Plato described as the "Beast" and as such is limited to worshiping itself as the vine and accepting secularism and its separation from the higher realities making idolaters of beast incapable of experiencing their conscious potential.

I've oftener wondered why people so readily accepted Christendom and magic as being mutually exclusive. Magic and Christianity go hand in hand but Christendom to its shame has killed in an imaginary war with magic. But according to the excerpt it is natural for the devolution of sacred concepts that their intent should turn into their opposite as it did with events like the Spanish Inquisition.