Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Talking about alchemy in Christian cant

On one of the forums I occasionally read, I ran across someone talking about the fact that the mysteries, Orders, and alchemy are warped by the fact that they have been poured though a Christian matrix. And I just rolled my eyes.

I have read comments by this person before. They have an ax to grind. Basically, if you do not completely abandon the material of the last couple of thousand of years and go directly back to ancient Egypt, then you are doing it wrong.

For them, Golden Dawn is a step backwards. I can only read so many of their posts before I start to mutter, "Why is this person posting on a Golden Dawn forum?"

But this is the type of person who in two hundred years are going to be complaining that the mysteries, Orders and alchemy ended up being filtered though a pagan/Wiccan matrix in our time period. It does not matter if we are warping the system or not---what matters is that we are not worshipping and working in the Golden Age mode that they believe was the height of perfection. They believe that at some point in time, the mysteries were perfect and everything done since that time is a corruption of the mysteries.

Where is a time machine when you need one? I would like to send people like this back to their Golden Age.

Now I will admit that they do have a point. The times of a magician does color how they describe things. So yes, the mysteries, Orders and alchemy have ended up being described in Christian terms. Give us a few years, and initiates will be talking about these things in terms of paganism and Wicca, and someone will be upset because of that.

And it will not matter one bit. At the core of these disciplines are certain constants and it does not matter how you clothe them. That is one of the reasons that they are called mysteries. The body of the mysteries does not matter (except to the individual tastes and background of the magician); the spirit remains the same.

1 comment:

Robert said...

can't argue with that.