NMR ISSUE 5

Astrological Forecast 5
Basic Chakra Work
Closer Look at the Tarot
Editorials
Faerie Poem
Invoking the Quarters
Isis The Great Goddess of Egypt
Letters 5
Malachite
Morphogenetic Magick I
Nascian Wicca Candlemas
Solitary Candlemas Rite
The Oldest Magick
The Other Editorial
The Pagan Bibliophile
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The Other Editorial

By Scot Rhoads

I'm tired of ignorant experts who dismiss metaphysics. There are plenty of things I know nothing about and which I have no interest—that's part of life. But I hope that I don't assume others are fools when I can't assimilate what I've heard of their beliefs into my world view. Fundamentalists who scream devil worshiper at anyone who spells God differently, have always been an irritation, but lately I discovered a new one. I read that an Anthropologist joined a coven to learn of the magic of witches in the U.C.S. Times (v. 5, n. 3). [Also see The Pagan Bibliophile, on page 13, which Scott Cunningham submitted after the first draft of this editorial. It mentions this person's book. Gads, the irony!]

I had high hopes when I started the article, for most of the anthropological research I've seen has been almost respectable. It began noncommittal. A little red flag went up when the author talked about `rationalizing' experiences. A bigger red flag went up when I read that the researcher went to London. [This reminded me of a story I heard a couple years ago: The TV program Eye on San Diego went to Los Angeles to interview `real life Witches' for a Halloween show. When the `real life Witches' asked why Eye on San Diego wasn't interviewing Witches from San Diego, they replied that they `couldn't find any.' Didn't they at least call some of the occult bookstores listed in the Yellow Pages? Perhaps it was a Halloween prank. (Let's scare them all with our lack of responsible journalism!)] Of course, I later noticed that she was doing her doctorate at Cambridge, so I bring this up only as an excuse to print my little story in brackets.

Anyway, my hopes collapsed when I read this paragraph:

Tanya] Luhrmann admits that it was hard not to get caught up with the belief system of the witches. I had very vivid dreams, felt power in the circle, and read tarot cards. For a while I lived on two levels—one part of me would say `Wow,' while the other would check off a little box that said, `This is how people are persuaded.'

The article is short and sketchy; it may not accurately represent Luhrmann's views at all. But the attitude is common. It appears that Luhrmann had her mind made up before she started. The `magic' word may have conjured Hollywood visions, so she dismissed it. How could anyone believe in such a silly thing? Other than wonder, it seems to have made no impression on her that the computer industry and the educated were over represented in her sample. She knew that magic was ridiculous before she started. There could be no misunderstanding; everyone with a TV knows what magic is. But magick isn't something one is persuaded to believe in, it is a model explaining life's experiences—some of which Luhrmann herself experienced.

Luhrmann's problem may be that her magickal experiences were not described in her terms. Call a disease an imbalance of energies or an invasion of microbes, the experience is the same. Either cures work or they don't. If the explanation is more important than the experience, you might dismiss effective cures simply for not fitting into the explanation. Once she insisted that the magick fit into her worldview even before she started to study it, all Luhrmann could achieve is cataloging how people behave. She may share some experience with them, but that dies with her. She can never understand what life is about for these people. She has thrown away an opportunity to expand her understanding of the world beyond narrow scientific boundaries. She insisted upon defining everything from her perspective. She also was unwilling to reconsider many fundamental prejudices. I expect that Luhrmann's research has little to offer.

This seems to be the kind of thing that anthropologist do often (though perhaps less now). I heard that a much research was based on the findings of a famous pioneer anthropologist in New Guinea during WW I. (This is a recollection, I apologize for any errors.) The natives told him that women reproduced through parthenogenesis. This eventually developed into the notion that Paleolithic cultures are unaware of a male role in reproduction. Decades later, another anthropologist was doing supporting research, as scientists are wont to do (though perhaps not enough). He asked the natives if women really produced children all by themselves. They told him they did. Eventually, one of the natives must have taken pity. Taking the researcher off to the side, the native privately told him where babies really come from. The researcher was stunned, though not for the reasons the native might have thought. Anthropologists were so eager to see Paleolithic man as ignorant, that the idea that he didn't understand sex had taken immediate hold.

The same kind of prejudice causes people to see myths (other than their own) as the quaint attempts of primitive ignorants to explain things beyond their puny comprehension. Joseph Campbell finally explained that they address the universal mysteries of life. Because they are in a foreign, people do not see this. Prejudices allow people to imagine that it is with understanding that they pigeon hole myths with ignorant savages. By translating the messages in the myths, Campbell allows us to see their relevance and value.

Similarly, if we can translate the language of magick into that of science, we can find that it has much to offer us. As with any translation, though it may tell us something about the original, there will always be much (or most) of the original lost. If a translation seems compelling to us, it may inspire us to become bilingual. But, in a work of foreign literature, there will be aspects that a non-native will never fully appreciate. This is even more true of a different perspective of the Universe (a paradigm). Nevertheless, the more we open up to new paradigms, the more we can improve our understandings.

A new paradigm is a threat, however. Many people find themselves in the position of Tanya Luhrmann because they see the magickal paradigm as incompatible with, therefore a threat to, the one they grew up with. This is a visceral response. Even when one wants to break out of a paradigm, this response makes it very difficult. One thing that helps is to know that the new paradigm is describing the same Universe as the old. Thus, the old one isn't wrong, just different, lessening the threat. Translating from one paradigm to another can show the overlap of the two. This can inspire one to try to appreciate the new paradigm on its own terms, to try to become `bilingual.'

A new paradigm offers an expanded awareness of the Self and the Universe. But the only compelling reason to pursue this is to help resolve conflicts within the Self. These conflicts arise from the shortcomings of native paradigms. But the conflicts are emotional, and the paradigms are cognitive. To break out of a paradigm, it is helpful to see its cognitive shortcomings as well. These shortcomings have to be clear within the context of the native paradigm or they will be incomprehensible as such. (A Fundamentalist, for example, sees no shortcoming in the idea that the Bible is true because it is the revealed Word of God, which we know because it says so in the Bible. He would first have to accept a shortcoming within the Bible.) This is necessary to overcome the fear of abandoning the comfortable feeling that one understands everything. This is difficult when presented with our society's impressive achievements. Fortunately, we have some convenient examples of the failures of our traditional ways of understanding things.

In the west we use cognitive models to explain the universe. Metaphor tends to be misunderstood—Fundamentalists do this in the extreme (as do those who fight them on their own ground). We are secure in the knowledge that the entire universe is explainable in these terms. But it is impossible to mentally picture anything that behaves like a quantum of light—simultaneously a wave and a particle, (which are mutually exclusive). Quantum physics, a crowning achievement of the west's little cognitive models, can shatter the illusion that our paradigms are the ultimate answer.

Though the benefits of open mindedness are manifest, so are the blocks to achieving it. Many need their paradigms shaken or translations from other paradigms to show them (on a gut level) that other cultures and perspectives have much to offer on their own terms, as they stand. This is the approach I took in my article on the Gaia hypothesis (v.1 n.3). I do so again in an article on the Hypothesis of Formative Causation on page 26. If we can break down society's xenophobia, perhaps we will have more Joseph Campbells and fewer Tanya Luhrmanns.

Blessed Be!