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I often have noted here on Augoeides that religions who claim to be opposed to magick use magick themselves, all the time. The simple act of praying for a particular outcome is exactly the same as what we do when we call on deities to accomplish particular things, and in some situations that can involve intercessory entities like saints and/or angels. That's magick, and as far as I can tell the only reason religions are opposed to magick is that they want to uphold their monopoly on it.
But here's a really weird story out of Phoenix, Arizona. Apparently, Roman Catholic ritual isn't just magick, it's basically Harry Potter magick. That is, one wrong word and it doesn't work. I have noted on a number of occasions that this isn't true at all about ceremonial magick, horror movie tropes notwithstanding, so it's surprising to find it in the Catholic system.
A Catholic priest has resigned after a church investigation found he performed invalid baptisms throughout most of his more than 20-year career, according to Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix. Father Andres Arango, who performed thousands of baptisms, would say, "We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." But Olmsted explained the words "We baptize" should have been "I baptize" instead.
"The issue with using 'We' is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes," Olmsted wrote in a message to parishioners posted last month. The error also means that because baptism is the first of the sacraments, some people will need to repeat other sacraments, according to the diocese webpage for frequently asked questions. CNN has reached out to the diocese for comment on other sacraments.
Arango resigned as pastor of the St. Gregory Parish in Phoenix as of February 1. "It saddens me to learn that I have performed invalid baptisms throughout my ministry as a priest by regularly using an incorrect formula. I deeply regret my error and how this has affected numerous people in your parish and elsewhere," Arango wrote in his own message on the site.
I guess he needed to say it levio-SAH, you know? This seems to me to be a pretty fine distinction. We-singular has been used by royalty for a very long time, and isn't Jesus supposed to be the King of Kings in the Christian system? That would certainly imply that the word doesn't necessarily have to connotate the community. "We" could also refer to Jesus doing the baptism and the priest making the motions. For example, I use "our" in the elixir rites even when it's just me working, because "our" still refers to myself and the conjured angel.
My guess is that this isn't actually a magical problem, but a bureaucratic one. I am highly confident that any Thelemic baptism I might perform would be an effective ritual even if a few of the words weren't the same as the official script. Real magick is actually pretty tolerant that way. Spirits can read surface thoughts, after all, and divine your intent, and this is just as true if not moreso with respect to deities. In fact, in the Christian system, Jesus as one member of the trinity is officially omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. So there's that.
This demonstrates a big problem with the idea of trying to standardize magick - and I say that as someone who has devoted a fair amount of time to developing modular templates and so forth for both Thelemic and Enochian magical work. As with anything, it's possible to go too far and the real test of any operation should be whether or not it works and how impressive the results are. While I do understand that "works" is a difficult thing to measure with a ritual like baptism, it seems to me that it's ridiculous for a single pronoun to negate the whole thing.
6 comments:
I often have noted here on Augoeides that religions who claim to be opposed to magick use magick themselves, all the time."
Why don't you take it up with the book-of-shadows-thumpers who tell me "There's no such thing as Christian magic, how dare you pretend there is."
Honestly? Because when you get down to it I do not see much in the way of content in the news to riff on.
It is absolutely, undeniably, irrefutably true that Christian magick is a thing. All of the classical grimoires are Christian. The original Golden Dawn was Christian. Reuss even originally described the OTO as "Gnostic Neo-Christian" at one point. The modern OTO is Thelemic, but "Christian magic" is exactly where even we came from.
So the idea that there's no Christian magick isn't even offensive, really. It's just incredibly ignorant. Even Crowley understood that there was magick in Christianity, and thanks to his upbringing he absolutely hated Christianity.
This is plain stupid!
OMG THOSE CHILDREN ARE DOOMED FOR ETERNITY!!! Because the priest who baptised them didn't recite the words WE wanted him to recite?!?!
Just goes to show how the church are a bunch of narrow minded imbeciles who care not for the spiritual wellbeing of people, but to impose and maintain control over the masees, imo. And I'm saying "the church" in general because you can find this kind of moronic behavior here in mostly orthodox areas too.
Alas...
Matthew 6
"1 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."
So what's the point of listening to those morons?! :D
Well, this actually make perfect sense if you view spiritual traditions as being either (primarily) either Ceremonial or Ritual.
In a Ceremonial tradition, a practitioner is Authorized by a lineage and must perform the rites of the tradition perfectly or it is ineffective. For instance, a Catholic Priest performing an exorcism.
In a Ritual tradition, a practitioner may be Authorized or not, and will customize the rites once they understand them. Any mistakes can be looked at as informative about the ritual.
Most of us are really Ritualists. Before we get all smug because we know the rite will work even if something is changed, and what is going on inside is all that matters, consider this: A Ceremonialist can claim that they are working in an unbroken tradition that may go back thousands of years, each rite has been performed, each mantra has been recited *the exact same way* thousands, millions or even more times and builds power over time.
There can be a lot of power in a Ceremonial tradition, think about Tibetan Buddhism for example, before we dismiss this way of practicing the art.
"Before we get all smug because we know the rite will work even if something is changed, and what is going on inside is all that matters, consider this:"
Just to be clear, I am saying nothing of the sort. A Thelemic baptism and a Roman Catholic baptism are not the same thing, so I technically have no idea if changing a word will make the ritual ineffective or not. It seems very hidebound to me, which is basically my point, and is entirely subjective.
I also absolutely do not believe that "what is going on inside is all that matters," especially the "all" part. I've been writing for decades now about magick as a technology that works in particular ways, because that's literally how it works. "What's going on inside" is part of it - that is, your consciousness is a significant variable in magical practice - but arranging words, symbols, and motions are important too.
Here would be a really interesting experiment if it ever could be done, though it probably can't be for some pretty straightforward reasons. Compare people baptized using the standard version and people baptized using the one word difference. It's really too bad that "success" is so hard to measure in the case of this particular ritual that the results would most likely be meaningless. But that would be the test, right there, to determine how much of a difference it makes.
The lineage holders of his tradition determined that the rite was done incorrectly. That is all that needs to be said. To judge the effectiveness of the rite when you are not a member of the religion, is simply wrong. You don't have a dog in this fight. If a group of Tibetan monks had to retake refuge because the rite had a minor flaw, would you have an opinion? It is easy to beat up Christians, but in this case it is unwarranted. Go after the book burners, they deserve it.
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