Scion
Umbrae said:Near the end of the summer (You’ll notice if you stick around long enough), we always have a spate of newbies who ask questions that us older folks find either amusing or annoying.
Umbrae!
I was headed to post about this very phenomenon when I read your post. I think it's the beginning of the school year, schedules open up or online time increases.
That said, Closrapexa's post really resonates. Not because I'm "above" the flaky woo-woo perspective. But because it often seems that these anthropomorphizing posts indicate an instinctive sidestep of personal power/responsibility destined to blunt Occam's edge. Me personally, I'm starting to get tired of the relentless psychologizing of Tarot, but that's me.
I'd like to quote someone who may yank some chains:
Ramsey Dukes has a fantastic book about the utility of living your life AS IF "demons" were literal personified forces influencing every aspect of your life, but the codicil he offers is that if your world is populated with demons and you're aware of them, it is your responsibility to deal with them directly. If cards can have power, then so can any object: from votives to toilet paper. Animism doesn't displace responsibility. Eventually this thinking would seem to lead to subjective Great Chains of Being... because ranking is human nature. I only get irritated when folks don't follow their own arguments to their conclusions.“In this book it is spoken of...Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow.” Aleister Crowley
So I come down in the middle: if your deck gets mad when you try to read with it or the magick chickens aren't squeezing out eggs, then you're going to have to learn how to wrangle those spirits, which may or may not take assertive action. And if it is just paper and pigment, then you're gonna have to find the tools to tap the psychic sap on demand.
As far as I can tell, a magickal worldview is insistently interconnected and always calls into question the hard edges of all descriptive language. And if it helps woo-woos to imagine it external and pragmatists to locate it internally to face that obstacle, either way its "actual" position is inconsequential and illusory. The ultimate challenge of "Magick" is that it's completely personal and subjective. The ultimate test of "Magick" is that it must produce results.
Scion