The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

*excuses self to go get his lighter back*

Exactly, knowledge is power.  There needs to be an evaluation, IMO, of when it is appropriate to share and not share.  I tend to lean toward being open, but it can depend on the subject and the parties involved.  This is not just for magick, but for everything really.

Everybody starts somewhere. Even Gardner and Crowley.

.. I think it's imprudent and unkind to treat students of the occult like foolish children. If a person makes a mistake, s/he will learn from it. If a person comes to deplorable ethical conclusions, that's not something we can control. This person is not your son or daughter. Threads like this so often take a forbidding and paternalistic tone, and I find it troubling. You're certainly within your rights to state your own ethical stance. But I am equally within my rights to advise the OP on the subject of his interest, without judging him.

And as for grimoires being available for anyone -- the answer to that is *no*.  In the modern West, where basic literacy is near-universal and there's fairly widespread access to language instruction and information in general, and the books themselves are not hard to get, it may seem that way.  But the Western ceremonial magic tradition is, as I said before, a product of historical periods in which education was limited to a very, very small number of people -- the elite of the elite.  Books themselves were, until the 19th century or so, expensive, precious objects, and most people couldn't read them at all.

Well, if you put it that way, since I think that Western ceremonial magic, especially as commonly practiced, is both racist and sexist, just like the Western culture that it reflects, supports, and reifies, and since I have a problem with both racism and sexism, I think a beginner who wants to pursue it should not be asking a group that includes me for their opinions.  Because I will damn well tell people that I think their approaches are scummy.

That is not always true.  Physical death allows for no learning from ones mistakes.  Pyschological destruction allows for no learning from one's mistakes.  Mental crushing allows for no one to learn from their mistakes.

You mention that many grimories were made for anyone, with that I disagree for many present material but unless one was initiated or indoctrinated into the specific school they didn't get the unwritten parts that went with it.  It's sort of like looking a Modern Wicca, there is plently written about it and how to do it but it's the so called inner court teachings that are missing which changes it.

You might read the initiation items I have but come away with the wrong material or incomplete material and understanding for what is not written there is as important as what is.

What Darkhawk said.  To add to that, in my world, magic is not some super-special category that is somehow isolated from broader socio-cultural issues.  I am a folklorist, and it is my job to think about how specialized discourses, like magic, reflect and operate within larger cultural paradigms.  It's how I think, and it's built into the requirements of my profession.  Magical systems do not drop out of the sky fully formed from the gods; they are created by people in specific times and places who have absorbed particular attitudes about the nature of the universe and humans' (and categories of humans) place within it.  If you can't be bothered to understand that cultural context, then you'll only ever have a shallow understanding of magic.  And for those who think in terms of cultural codes and paradigms, Marxism (or more accurately, some of the concerns of Marxism) is totally relevant to discussions of shamanism:  the types of questions asked within Marxist thought about classes of workers and real/imagined values of exchange are pretty directly relevant to how the category "shaman" works within the societies that have them.  

And as for grimoires being available for anyone -- the answer to that is *no*.  In the modern West, where basic literacy is near-universal and there's fairly widespread access to language instruction and information in general, and the books themselves are not hard to get, it may seem that way.  But the Western ceremonial magic tradition is, as I said before, a product of historical periods in which education was limited to a very, very small number of people -- the elite of the elite.  Books themselves were, until the 19th century or so, expensive, precious objects, and most people couldn't read them at all.  One of the very, very basic things about the circulation of knowledge in culture is that there are certain groups of people who are considered "trustworthy" -- that is, their class/education/age/gender/etc. means that they can be trusted with knowledge, as opposed to the hoi polloi.  (Look up the history of the the nude in Western art -- what was fine for bourgeois educated men to look at was often hidden or restricted for the lower classes, so as not to "enflame their base passions"; bourgeois sorts were credited with rationality and self-control that entitles them to look.)  Grimoires are DELIBERATELY part of that mindset --they are often intentionally obscure, in order to keep the "unworthy" from understanding them.

Owen Davies is the foremost historical expert on these traditions, and his books engage with exactly all that stuff that you find so irrelevant, like the class system and gendered attitudes of the cultures that produced them.  This stuff does not exist in a vacuum, and I think it's both shallow and unethical to pretend otherwise.

If someone is afeared of the power of a total stranger on the internet to say things and doesn't do stuff as a result, they are too weak-willed to learn a lick of magic.

You're the one assigning random strangers on the internet tremendous oogety-boogety powers.  You explain it to yourself, as it's your manufactured problem.

The rest of us are just having conversations as social equals.

I see you've avoided answering my question. No matter. Quid pro quo, I think you're the one absolving yourself of responsibility. I think we can leave it at that.