I have spent a significant amount of time in the last year reading books on Magick - introductory and otherwise - and noticed something interesting. About 3 or 4 books in, it became obvious that they contained a great amount of information that was repeated between them, very little being truly unique.
Greyer Jane and I have discussed the difficulty she had finding Occult books of any quality while growing up in the 70s, having to wade through bookshelves of dross to find anything worth reading. That problem still exists, I grant, as there are a lifetimes worth of bad Occult books floating around, but the general quality has greatly improved.
No, now our main problem seems to be sifting through generally informative books for the few genuine nuggets of new or even differently explained material. Now, don't get me wrong - I definitely see the upside to having many people explain techniques in different ways. Who knows which one will strike you the best and enable you to gain a new skill, but I believe this new problem has created an insidious new threat to Magick.
Complacency - it's a trite word, but one I feel accurately describes this stumbling block. Now people can pick up a decently written book by someone like Christopher Penczak (and no slight to him, I enjoy his work greatly) and feel they have mastered Magick after they read it. Because they don't have to search out new sources of information to piece together a magickal roadpath like people used to, there is no impetus to seek out new and exciting magick. This problem is exacerbated by the already mentioned problem of redundancy.
Imagine you are self taught, or even have a mainline magickal mentor. You have been practicing for a while and you pick up some books to see if there is anything else to learn and it's the same old stuff over and over. That is going to shut down your desire to poke into some new dark holes or bits under the staircase.
To combat information overload I feel like we need to fight it with organization. Is anyone interested in working with me to put together some sort of listing of magickal operations and the books they appear in, and also pointing out to each other the good bits we may be missing? Or entire epochs of magick we have all missed.
Complacency is the enemy of Imagination, and is thus the bane of Magick.
Oh I would love to be part of that list! I agree it can be very frustrating to read through new stuff and not find actual new stuff. I am a horrible book addict and between 50 cent books from the Goodwill and free books for the kindle, I end up with a fair amount of 'basic' books. I hate to skim books, but I'm getting better at it.
ReplyDeleteI have found that looking outside my personal scope sometimes helps. I have friends and acquaintances who have vastly different interests than I do and have been pointed into new dark corners through those associations.
Also, many years back, some friends and I were in the process of starting a teaching coven, so we were putting together a curriculum. Since then I was also part of an online school teaching staff, both the organization and writing lessons, so have given a lot of thought about this kind of thing, because there is really soooo much that gets glossed over that I think is important and valuable.
What I think makes it worse is that people publishing want to sell books, and what sells is easily digestible beginner type stuff. The more complex and specific things just won't have as wide a market, and so are less desirable for publishing.
I have tried this before. Obviously with the wrong group of people. I am so in! Doc Hava and I have also discussed that you can get good stuff from Anthroplogy texts and accounts.
ReplyDeleteAnthropology rocks! If you will notice, I often mention other cultures as examples, both ancient and modern. I still have lots of my anth books (mostly ethnographies). I don't have nearly enough time to read as I would like to, but I can at least help, especially in regards to anth stuff.
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