Occult blinds v occult mistakes

Last night, I was working with *something* and I found myself in the position where I started to debate whether it was an occult blind or simply an occult mistake. Nowadays, the joke is that if you make a mistake duiring the course of writing about the occult, you call it a "blind." This is a modern thing; in the old days, it was different.

In the old days, there was a fine game of concealing important information from the readers of occult books. In theory, you were supposed to learn the basics of the esoteric sciences from a teacher---in other words, you were supposed to serve an apprenticeship. And one of the things, you were supposed to learn was how to spot an blind and how to create one.

Words of warning---under no circumstance are you to believe that I am a member of certain lineages that still practice this style. My lineage (for what it is worth) has NO connection with theirs. The only things we share in common is that masters teach lesser skilled students---nothing more.

For those of you who have never experienced an apprenticeship, it involves washing a lot of glasses, grinding a lot of stuff, harvesting thistles, and generally any other grunt work that your master really does not want to bothered with. It is like being the low man on a construction site and being the go-fer. It also involves a lot of practical and intellectual jokes; it is a great way to become paranoid.

It is in the practical and intellectual jokes that the learning about the occult blinds happen. Think of being an apprentice as being a lab animal of a mad scientist. Or at least, that is the way that my apprenticeship felt. Maybe there are nicer masters out there---if so, I have not encountered them.

Of course, we do not deal with this system today. (I am not sure how I ended up in the system myself; except that was the way they were taught, therefore I was taught the same way. The modern methods of teaching obviously skipped over my masters.)

One of my teachers would allow me to work the rituals exactly how they were written, hence I got to experience first-hand the problems that blinds created. Only later, after many questions about what I thought was wrong, would they explain to me the little secrets that you needed to work the system properly. As I said, it was like being a lab animal to a mad scientist.

I may or may not have picked up this style of teaching---we will see when it comes time for me to teach my god-daughter.

When the secret societies picked up the ball, and the masters were faded out, in theory the secret societies replaced the master-apprentice relationship with a kinder proctor-student relationship. Not necessarily so, as my encounters with Advanced Adept Advisors has indicated.

Unfortunately, one of the problems with the secret societies is the fact that many of the officers can not hex their way out of a wet paper bag, and cannot spot an occult blind if you lit it up with flashing neon lights. And many of them can make it sound like they are experts in their fields, despite the fact that I would not trust them to guess my weight.

Warning---questioning the abilities of the officers of esoteric societies is part of the tactics of the Witch and Golden Dawn Flame Wars. Obviously, I am a bad person who should not be at the head of an esoteric Order.

The reason that many esoteric officers cannot spot an occult blind is that they were sworn to absolute secrecy and are given completely clean and truthful documents. It handicaps them when they encounter materials written in the heyday of blind creation.

Yes, the *something* I was working on last night was the work of someone I know is an officer in one of the esoteric societies. The *something* is a correction of an older text. So is the problem I spotted a blind? or is it a mistake? and does it really matter?

I am not sure about the first two, but I do know the answer to the last one. It does not matter to me. I am going to have to fix it, whether it is blind or mistake, if I intend to use the material. Whether the expert spotted the world of hurt that their version, and the previous versions, would create is unknown to me. I would like to think that if someone spots a really bad blind, and this one will create the exact opposite of what the material is labeled for, that a footnote about possible blinds would be in order.

Of course, that is just my opinion. And you can't trust my opinion. After all, I belong to some bad lineages, been trained by people without authority, and generally hold some opinions that worry those who are superior to me. And I am not above giving a stick of dynamite to someone trying to open a box of corn flakes. I guess it goes without saying that all my writings should be considered blinded.

Why would a pirate dare rob a magician?

Over at Strategic Sorcery (On Pirates) in the comment section, Pallas Renatus wrote "Why on earth would [pirates] risk pissing off magicians of all people? This just seems like common sense to me."

Here is my theory: The pirates do not believe that the magicians can do anything to hurt them.

Heck, the pirates do not believe that the law can touch them. If the mass forces of the law enforcement agencies and the legal system cannot touch them, how can the puny forces mustered by a lowly magician affect them?

Furthermore, they argue that they are not doing anything wrong. In fact, pirates believe that writers and artists should be happy creating new material for them to use and enjoy while not recieving a single penny to offset the time and energy they used to create the work. Even if they believes in, oh say something like, Karma or the Three-fold Law of Return, they would think that it is the creators of the material that are the moral violators and not them.

And most of these pirates have no stake in the outcome of this situation, either as creators or users. They do not create anything that can earn them a thin dime (my proof: everyone I know with a monetary stake in a copyright or intellectual property is a supporter of copyright and patent laws, even if we cannot agree how strong the laws should be). And they are armchair occultists---they are not actually using the material that they are stealing.

It is this last part that makes it especially difficult for magicians to fight back (with a couple of notable exceptations). In previous ages, magicians used to blind their work to prevent it from working correctly in the hands of those people not in their own lineage. Think: Large Booby Trap, often complete with drooling demons to feast on one's scattered remains. The defense that the lineaged working magician were traditionally taught does not work if the person just downloads a pdf and never actually casts a single spell from the work (in some cases, I am not even sure that they actually are reading the works in question).

But note that working magicians are a crafty lot, and there are some interesting magical procedures starting to be developed to cope with this new form of piracy. It is only a matter of time before the pirates realize that magicians are the last people you want to rob, and that we have rolled out a whole new line of customized curses to deal with the likes of them (curses that cannot be removed with anti-virus software).