-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and
Multiple Personality Disorder
Craig Lockwood©1993
CompCare Publishers
3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100
Minneapolis, MN 55441
612.559.4800/800.328.3330
ISBN 0-89638-363-6
255+pps — out-of-print/one edition.
-----
A very interesting and excellent book.
Om
K
--[6]--
Chapter 6
A Matter Of Magick
"For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, 1968
Saying the "right thing," an important element of all ritual magic, is not
just a matter of repeating words. Before all else, the novice, initiate,
follower, or apprentice of the shaman, witch, sorcerer, or adept must learn
magic's complex language.
"Naming," notes anthropologist T M. Luhrmann in Persuasions of the Witch's
Craft, "is often associated with magic: there is the sense that a name gives
power over its object."
Magic's ritual and linguistic roots are prehistoric. Archeological evidence
suggests that many basic magical beliefs and elements of rituals and ritual
language go back to the great "Earth-goddess" cults and "Earth-centered"
spirituality.
In ancient Greece an Earth-goddess cult probably predated the
invasion of the Hellenes, an Indo-European tribe. Greece's Demeter may have
owed something to that pre-Greek deity. Elements of earlier ritual human
sacrifice were rejected during the later period. Some scholars suspect they
may have survived in secret.[1]
The goddess was worshiped under the names of Ge, or Gaia, Demeter, Ceres,
Terra Mater, Bona Dea, Cybele, Ishtar, Atargatis, Hecate, Herodiana, and at
least a dozen more in continental Europe and the British Isles.
"Magic," the word in English, is derived from magoi, a special caste or tribe
of ancient Persia who were recognized as specialists in ritual and religious
knowledge, and were sometimes associated with the cult of fire.
As mentioned earlier, modern practitioners of ancient magical traditions have
appropriated the spelling "magick" for clarity.
Magic served many masters and many functions—ancient medicine and science
among them. Magic worked in the material world, but ancients believed
invisible forces governed it.
Thus it was the magus who sought to control these forces, and gain knowledge
of them, in order to predict the future or influence material-world events.
While magic was born of Paleolithic parents, it became the sophisticated
child of increasingly advanced cultures—our own included. Few societies today
exist without magic.
In most languages the word for magic defines well-known functions and
institutions revolving around 1) medical magic (healing), 2) black magic and
sorcery, 3) ceremonial magic, 4) religious magic (spiritual), 5) occult
sciences and theosophies, 6) paranormal events, and 7) magical cults and
sects.[2]
Individual societies tend to place an overriding emphasis or value on one or
another of the above magical provinces. But what magic is proves far less
definable.
Marcel Mauss, a renowned French social scientist, attempted a general theory
in 1903. His ideas appear in the 1972 book A General Theory of Magic. Emile
Durkheim, another brilliant social theoretician of the same period, spent
thirteen pages setting out a theory of magic in his 1915 book The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, but never mentioned it again. Durkheim took the
position that magic derives from religion.
In The Golden Bough, published in 1960, Sir James Frazer says "sympathetic
magic" is based on the association of ideas, while Bronislaw Malinowski, a
remarkable and prolific anthropologist and ethnographer, states in his 1954
Magic, Science and Religion that magic builds confidence in situations of
uncertainty, exerts social pressure, and illustrates the "action function" of
language.
Theodore Adorno, using a Marxist conception in his article "Theses Against
Occultism and the Stars Down to Earth," published in the 1974 spring issue of
Telos, describes magic as a projection of "commodity fetishism" and the
occult as an "alienating" force in an "oppressive" protofascist social order.
He called occult wisdom "the metaphysics of dopes," seeing the thrust of
magic aimed at "narcissistic" satisfactions, and subject to the "constant
appeal" of "anal regression," disparaging the notion that weak, uneducated
people with miserable assets can somehow triumph by rearranging them.
In his 1946 book Religion, Its Functions in Human Life, Knight Dunlap
observes that "magic, science and religion, are all praxis, aimed at doing
something." Praxis was originally a Greek word that meant ritual.
Georg Luck, a German scholar, offers a functional definition in Arcana Mundi:
"Magic" may be defined as "a technique grounded in a belief in powers located
in the human soul and in the universe outside ourselves, a technique that
aims at imposing the human will on nature or on human beings by using
supersensual powers."
Luck points out that the single structural difference between magic and
religion is prayer. While praying and giving thanks for something is
conceivable in some forms of magic, and common in others, there is no praying
for forgiveness, nor is there "consciousness of sin." Sorcerers don't
recognize sin. They consider their practices above morality and laws.
In his Cultural Anthropology Handbook, anthropologist Frank R. Vivelo,
attempting to separate religion and magic, agrees in principle. "The
distinction I use is whether or not an appeal is made to a supernatural force
or deity." Vivelo notes that "magic involves action that is based on the
assumed ability of an individual or an object to produce desired effects in
nature or in people."
Magic produces the effect directly—minus any third-party intervention.
In Stolen Lightning, D. L. O'Keefe offers the only comprehensive, detailed
general theory of magic available in the English language. Though a
nonmagician and a skeptic, O'Keefe is quick to point out that magic is "first
of all a universal human idea, a concept so widespread and distinct that it
is almost a 'category of the human spirit,' like time, space, and mass."
Defining how "magical" a given action is perceived, however, is dependent on
viewpoint, and eventually, on outcome.
O'Keefe observes that magic in this sense tends to be "social action," and
that a "magical element may be present in much social action." He wonders if
there isn't something "basically magical about the nature of human action?"
Magic and Cultural Development
Magic comes in many forms and shapes, but it is always wrapped in a variety
of cultural attitudes. Some "magick" is magic only insofar as it uses forces
we don't yet understand. One century's magic may be another's electricity.
Certain magics are only "magical" in that their results fool us. An example
of this is illusion-the stage magician's type of magic, legerdemain.
Then there may be undiscovered physical forces that a society or culture can
manipulate successfully through some form of magic, but cannot fully explain
or comprehend. Modern practitioners of "magick" favor this explanation,
pointing out that this may explain cases of shamanic healing, faith healing,
and certain psychotherapies.
Last are those magical results that are, as O'Keefe says, "self-fulfillingly
obtained or obtained only because we agree they are."
Still, doubt persists among those who don't believe in magic that it is
somehow unreal, without any actual effect. Thus psychologists today speak of
"magical thinking" as though magic had no efficacy. This overlooks the
obvious fact that magic is first and foremost a "social action," and is far
from illusory.
Developed cultures, it seems, somehow develop magic—with and without a "k."
When uncontrollable forces damage a society's cultural fabric, magic may be
the only remaining functional system available for people to cling to. In
this "social action" sense, magic appears as a coherent choice.
Victor Turner studied the Ndembu, a loosely organized, unstable, matrilineal
semitribal society in Africa. In Schism and Continuity in an African Society,
he theorizes that, as a result of "political regression" and other mitigating
factors, the Ndembu's fragmented social structure had somehow regressed.
Turner observed that the Ndembu seemed to lack any theories and built no
cosmologies. They had no structured religious systems and few myths. They
massed physical symbols and material in their communal rites and rituals, to
which they then assigned "intersecting associations," with words. The whole
then created a "forest" of "reiterated symbols."
Rudimentary witchcraft was the only magic the Ndembu possessed. Primitive
witchcraft, it is generally believed, precedes a developed system of magic.
Aside from witchcraft, the Ndembu had no other developed system of magic.
Functional magical ritual generally involves the putting together of words
into sentences and then linking them to symbols. The Ndembu, it seemed,
hadn't quite developed or ha somehow lost the ability to "say the right
thing."
Speaking in Magic
Magic, with its attendant ritual, symbols, and language, may have been the
vehicle that allowed humans to first distinguish themselves as individuals.
With magic, humanity was able to develop systems of knowledge because systems
of knowledge demand articulated consensus—saying things right, giving things
names.
Magical speech, unlike ordinary speech, is a technological language that
seems to derive from magical praxis—the magical "right way" of doing/saying
things. Each magical system develops a ritual language that is specific to
its way of conducting magical business.
Western Mysteries lodges, who use elaborate ceremonial magic, design their
rituals around language rich with symbol and classical reference. Wiccan
"white magic" (or earth-based magic-magic in a healing form) and "black
magic" may use some of the same language, but the intent is very different.
Though they may stand in circles, chant, and use altars, today's white
witches and black-magic sorcerers operate in very different moral and
lexicological dimensions.
Bronislaw Malinowski notes in Argonauts of the Western Pacific that among the
Trobriand Islanders, some of the most magically oriented people in the world,
magical speech has "striking eccentricities," such as "Siya hill on top of
Takuna the woman / My mother sorcerer, myself sorcerer."
Ethnographic studies confirm that magical speech in any culture is usually
scripted with a traditional introduction and conclusion. Inflection and
intonation are dictated by cultural tradition.
Magical speech sometimes combines nonsense syllables with archaic words,
neologisms, repetition, and pedantic enumeration. Onomatopoeia and
alliteration may be combined with repetition. Chanted or sung in a
range-limited fashion, the effect is often purposely hypnotic or
trance-inducing. What does magical speech sound like? Each age and each
magic has its own voice. In his Pharsalia, translated by Georg Luck in 1982,
Lucan, the nephew of the Roman Stoic and playwright, Seneca, attempts to
convey the speech of a Thessalian witch, a consummate sorceress attempting
with a spell and potions to reanimate the corpse of a stain soldier.
Finally her voice, more capable than any herb of invoking the powers of hell,
first uttered inarticulate sounds that seemed completely different from human
speech. You could hear the barking of dogs in that voice, the howling of
wolves, the moaning of the restless owl and the screech owl that flies by
night, the shrieking and roaring of a wild beast, the hiss of a serpent, the
sound of waves beating against rocks, of forests in the wind, the thunder
that detonates from a cloud—all these noises were in her voice. Then she
wrapped the rest in a Thessalian spell, and her voice reached as far as the
Tartars:
"Furies! Horrors of hell! Sinners that are tortured! Chaos ... Persephone,
who hates her mother in heaven! Hecate, third personification of my own
goddess who enables me to communicate with the dead without speaking ... who
feeds the savage Dog with bits of human flesh! ... Listen to my prayer!
"If these lips of mine that call you have been tainted sufficiently with
crime, if I have always eaten human flesh before chanting such spells, if I
have often cut open human breasts still full of life divine and washed them
out with warm brains, if any
baby could have lived, once his head and inner organs were placed on your
dishes—grant me my prayer!"
Black magic, past or present, can't be accused of understatement.
Elements of Magical Style In The Study of Religious Language, Anders Jeffner
notes four styles of sentences he ascribes to religious observance: 1)
"expressions," 2) "statements," 3) "prescriptions," and 4) "performances."
O'Keefe, commenting on Jeffner's magical sentences, notes that "expressions"
consist of "a few words of emotion or intention thought to have a mystical
effect," as in Shakespeare's MacBeth: "Double, double toil and trouble: Fire
bum and cauldron bubble!"
"Statements," according to Jeffner, are propositions, often repeating
something from myth or tradition." Thus when Aleister Crowley, author and
sorcerer, demands, "Hear me; and make all Spirits subject unto Me." Or
cajoles, "With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus ... I flap my wings
in the face of Mohammed."
"Prescriptions" are typical of wish-magic. They may be used to "detour and
expropriate" certain religious values for magical results: "There is no law
beyond Do What Thou Wilt!" as Crowley impugns.
"Performative" sentences are the most typical of magic. These are statements
that create an opening by themselves. "I vow that..." "You are thus named..."
"Be thee healed!"
But most potent of all in Jeffner's scheme are a form of deadly performatives
he calls "power prescriptions." These change a social situation by creating
what is prescribed and then cursing it. "We curse this man!" "Bring down
hell's fury on his soul!" These kinds of statements typify black magic.
Anyone who has experienced facing an angry person's verbal wrath knows the
frightening impact ordinary nonmagical words can have. When such anger and
rage is linked to someone who has great political or social power, the fear
factor is intensified. If the receiver of wrath lives in a culture in which
magic is the norm, and the invective is delivered by a sorcerer using magical
language, the impact can be devastating.
"Voodoo death" is a scientifically recognized, well-documented, verified fact
in cultures as widespread as Europe, Haiti, Africa, Polynesia, Melanisa, and
Australia. Countless cases of it exist in the anthropological literature.[3]
Voodoo death was so commonly reported by scientists earlier in the century
that it has since passed out of the realm of debate.
Sorcerers among Australia's Aborigine carry giant lizard bones. If the
sorcerer points this bone and recites a death spell, the person on whom the
spell was cast will always sicken, and almost always die. Records of public
health departments in Australia confirm case after documented case.
While the bone is merely a prop, a symbolic means of transmission, the impact
of a fatal psychological shock to the sympathetic-adrenal system is the real
killer. Just as faith can heal, fear can kill.[4]
Ritual gesture combined with ritual language trigger the psycho-physiological
response. Therapists treating MPD patients who claim ritual abuse backgrounds
report making this uncomfortable discovery. Mixed with the horror-movie
symbols and descriptions, they also encounter specific ritual language.
Often this language is delivered by someone the ritual abuse survivor
believes has magical power and great authority. Survivors frequently claim
that fear is intensified by the ritual mutilation and killing of a small
animal such as a rabbit, guinea pig, or hamster, or, as some claim, a child.
The survivor identifies with the victim-small, helpless, defenseless.
Mind-Control Magic
"Scentific" sorcery in the hands of late twentieth-century ritual abuse cults
takes on distinctive attributes. Caves and subterranean grottoes are used as
places of magical conditioning. The crude use of pain and psychotropic plants
are on the way out; labs, electro-shock, and sophisticated drugs are—in some
"circles"—in.
Specialists treating multiple personality disorder are reporting with some
consistency the use of electro-shock coupled with melodic and percussive
sounds to induce trauma-structured dissociation. "Triggering mechanisms,"
which activate dissociative responses in patients, are apparently varied and
amazingly elaborate.
Therapists who have encountered this phenomenon offer clinical confirmation
that certain words or phrases will produce swift behavioral changes in their
patients. Well-known case studies document reactions ranging from violent
abreaction to sudden and deep sleeps.[5]
Disbelievers such as Drs. Underwager and Coleman assert that these are
nothing more than highly suggestible patients responding to subtle clues
subconsciously given by their therapists. The ability to be hypnotized,
according to the FMS theory, goes hand in hand with MPD, thus invalidating
these examples.
Though it may be true that, on occasion, therapists have inadvertently, or
even advertently, implanted suggestions in highly suggestible patients—the
volume and variety of these reports make understanding a therapist's motives
difficult.
What would motivate dozens of therapists to hypnotically implant false
memories in hundreds of patients? Where is the logic? Are therapists anxious
to run the risk of violent physical assault, self-inflicted trauma or
mutilation, or attempted suicide from their patients?
Or is it possible that patients who engage in this kind of behavior may have
been trained in some way, for some unknown reason, to react in this manner?
Remembering Georg Luck's working definition of magic as "a technique that
aims at imposing the human will on nature or on human beings by using
supersensual powers" may offer a clue.
Anyone who has undergone any basic military training knows that response to
drilled command soon becomes automatic. At the command "advance" or
"forward," unhypnotized, fully conscious troops will run toward enemy fire.
This requires no great dissociative ability on the part of the individual
soldier.
There's no mystery here, just conditioning.
MPD patients, in the event that they're not all being induced by a grand
conspiracy of therapists bent on creating a high-effort/low-results-oriented
patient base to further erode their personal earning power, appear to be
exhibiting the effects of mind-control conditioning.
Conditioning such as this, which requires specific kinds of language, has the
potential to act as a forensic clue. Program-induced behavior invariably
reflects the particular programmer's linguistic patterns, as evidenced by
grammatical or lexical forms.
Rules of Engagement
Societies in which magic is used are sensitive about its use. Each culture
develops an ethos surrounding the use or misuse of magic . These act like
magical rules of engagement.
White magic is an essentially ethical system. Serious Wiccan witches have a
strict moral code they adhere to, as do serious Baptists or Pentecostals. To
use magic means "taking... a great responsibility on yourself and this
responsibility calls for a set of willingly accepted rules."
These rules are "all the more important" because often only the person using
the magic knows if they are being honestly obeyed. Observing these rules
distinguishes "white from black working."
Contemporary Wiccan defines itself as an earth-based ethical spirituality,
replete with a primary code of behavior. "It is a universal principle among
white witches that no payment may be taken for magical work." This would not
include casual divination such as Tarot readings, which "depends on intuition
rather than magick" report Janet and Stewart Farrar in The Witches' Way:
Principles and Beliefs of Modem Witchcraft.
Those who actively practice magic may not all agree that magic is only a
"social action." But most would agree that the social results of magic can be
observably profound. Extensive ethnographic studies in preliterate
societies—in areas as geographically diverse as Africa, New Guinea, Alaska,
and Australia—document case after case.
Magic, as a social or a psychological "action," begets its own reactions.
"What goes around, without exception, comes around," and that's the simple
reason Wiccans don't do black magick.
Wiccans generally believe that those who profit from rituals that degrade or
take life may have the magic backfire on them. For those who accept the
tenets of magic as a practical world view, magical actions have profound
reactions: consequences can be anticipated when the person using the magic
misbehaves.
This belief is emphasized by the one hard rule in Wicca, the Wiccan Rede: An
that it harm none, do what you will, for the good of all."
Deconstruction and the Devil
If, as some people believe, human reality is "constructed" in language,
language can then "deconstruct" it. Language—what we say about how things
are—is in many cases more real to people than actual events. And, at any
rate, without language the concept "reality" would not exist.
Here the sorcerer and the deconstructionist find much common ground. Aleister
Crowley asserts in Magick in Theory and Practice that "there is no such thing
as truth in the perceptible universe; every idea when analyzed is found to
contain a contradiction."
In addressing crimes supposedly associated with satanic cults,
constructionists Richardson, Best, and Bromley write in The Satanism Scare:
"There is no natural phenomenon 'crime'; all crimes are identified through
social processes ... All 'crimes' and 'criminals' are identified through
these social processes, and all other social problems are constructed in a
similar fashion."
Crowley would agree. He says, "Material events are the words of an arbitrary
language; the symbols of a cipher previously agreed upon."
By carefully "deconstructing" the language, and reconstructing it in terms
only they have the power to define, sorcerer and constructionist can both, to
some extent, redefine reality in their terms.
>From a sorcerer's point of view, constructionists engage in an academic
version of spell-casting by invoking certain phrases like "Claim," "culture,"
and "social process," and repeating them with ritual regularity. These
special words are said or written to elicit a specific response from others.
But they prove their point—language, especially magical language, has power.
pps. 59-71
--[notes]--
Chapter 6
1. Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
2. D. O'Keefe, Stolen Lightning (New York: Continuum, 1982).
3. J. Cawte, "Voodoo Death and Dehydration," American Anthropologist 83(1983).
F.J. A. Clune, "A Comment on Voodoo Deaths," American Anthroplogist 75
(1973)
H.D. Eastwell, "Voodoo Death and the Mechanism of Dispatch of the Dying
in East
Arnhem, Australia," American Anthropologist 85 (1982).
D. Lester, "Voodoo Death: Some New Thoughts on an Old Phenomenon,"
American Anthropologist 74 (1973).
4. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1985).
5. Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow.
6. Janet and Stewart Farrar, The Witches' Way: Principles Rituals and Beliefs
of Modem Witchcraft (London: Robert Hale, 1984), 22-23.
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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