OEITH #105 The Word of the Magus

We listen to Grant Morrison on individuality and Rob Burbea on divinity before venturing into: "soul-making dharma"; what all magicians share; Aleister Crowley's "Liber B Vel Magi"; definition of a magus; Crowley's notion of the word of the magus; the Gospel of St John and the word made flesh; the meaning of logos; the impossibility of meaninglessness; the dilemma of the magus; the silence of the ipsissimus; the curse of having always to speak falsely; how there is no escape from meaning; enslavement by one's own magick or someone else's; Lacan's symbolic order; everyday and magickal relationships to meaning; Darian Leader on the manic-depressive relationship to meaning; "depressive" and "manic" styles of magickal practice; the calling for "closed practices" as a depressive approach to magick; Morrison and Burbea as the manic style versus the depressive; these styles as strategies, rather than as ethical or non-ethical in themselves; magick as the relationship to truth and ethics as the relationship to the good; how practice and ethics can be separated; an encounter with a dodgy guru; how our ethics reflects who we are, not our practice; "cancel culture" as the confusion of goodness and truth; the case of Julius Evola; why the word of a magician cannot make us ethically either better or worse; words of some magi; my personal word as a magus: ελεφαιρο / elephairo ("to deceive"); the appearance of this word in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid; Borges on the gate of ivory; the significance of this word for my personal magickal practice. 

Jorge Luis Borges (1985). Nightmares. In: Seven Nights, trans. E. Weinberger. New York: Norton.

Rob Burbea (2016). Sensing Divinity, https://tinyurl.com/vx9nt8jd (dharmaseed.org).

Alan Chapman & Duncan Barford (2010). A Desert of Roses. Brighton: Heptarchia.

Aleister Crowley (1988). Liber I: Liber B Vel Magi Sub Figurâ I. In: The Holy Books of Thelema. York Beach, ME: Red Wheel / Weiser.

Darian Leader (2013). Strictly Bipolar. London: Penguin.

Grant Morrison (2000). Disinfo Conference Lecture, https://tinyurl.com/e2wvj6fb (youtube.com).