OEITH #216 Near Enemies of Magick

Borrowing from Buddhism the concept of the “near enemy”, we consider how art, history, and psychology may look like magick but can harm our magical practice, exploring: the danger of the near enemy; pity as the near enemy of compassion; art, history, and psychology as near enemies of magick and their detrimental effects; the difference of this approach from Lionel Snell’s approach in SSOTBME; philosophy as a current near enemy that was once synonymous with magick; art as the most insidious near enemy of magick; the legitimate role of art in magick; beauty versus truth; Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; magicians who are artists: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Tommie Kelly; how art and magick can be synonymous; art as a disguise for magick; the different intentions and skill sets of art and magick; Phil Ford and J.F. Martel on M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, and Harrison’s response to this; Philip K. Dick as a gnostic writer and Harrison as an imitator of Gnosticism; Socrates’s expulsion of the artists from Plato’s Republic; my view of history as irrelevant to magick; the roots of my view in chaos magick and Perennialism; defining Perennialism and distinguishing it from Traditionalism; the value of different and multiple paths to truth; the tendency of the historical perspective to situate truth in the tradition rather than in personal experience; the value of tradition as a path to personal experience; psychology as a near enemy and my personal vulnerability to it; the spirit paradigm versus the psychological paradigm; how the psychological paradigm is likely to produce only psychological results; the different dimensions of truth: subjective and objective; the psychological paradigm as possibly occluding the objective dimensions of truth; Jung and the objective dimensions of the psyche; the subjective and objective dimensions of the mind in meditation, and psychology’s pathologizing of the objective dimensions.

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Phil Ford & J.F. Martel (2020). Weird studies Ep. 81. Gnostic lit: on M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart. https://tinyurl.com/2kjpywse (weirdstudies.com). Accessed April 2022.

M. John Harrison (2005). The Course of the Heart. In: Anima. London: Gollancz.

M. John Harrison (2020). The core of the heart. https://tinyurl.com/yeyr3h9y (wordpress.com). Accessed April 2022.

M. John Harrison (2020). I can hear you. https://tinyurl.com/yckfj2wa (wordpress.com). Accessed April 2022.

John Keats (1819). Ode on a Grecian urn. https://tinyurl.com/29z54pjh (owleyes.org). Accessed April 2022.

Tommie Kelly (2021). Art is magick, magick is art! https://youtu.be/TcFVj9NBuJk (youtube.com). Accessed April 2022.

Alan Moore (2016). Art and magic. https://youtu.be/WHxWE-S3nD8 (youtube.com). Accessed April 2022.

Plato (2022). The Republic, 10: 598b. https://tinyurl.com/mt3vybc8 (tufts.edu). Accessed April 2022.