St Cyprian Doesn’t Care About Your Beliefs
Three people have asked me to take a comment I made on someone’s FB feed this week and make it into a blog post. So here we go….
It all started in a discussion of Chaos Magic, when someone said that they don’t believe in a Christian model or paradigm of reality, so when they want to do St Cyprian work they “paradigm shift” and proceed as if they do believe it. Then then they are done they “shift back”.
The person they were conversing with commented that they didn’t know where this idea that the spirits were gullible came from. The conversation also involved Buddhism and Vodou and whether one would need to code switch from one, but not the other, etc.
This is where I noted the damage that Chaos Magic has done to peoples ability to even talk about magic.
Magic is real and it works like other real things. Your personal beliefs about it are largely irrelevant.
Gravity doesn’t hold true in England but not in India. Its true everywhere because its how things work.
Interdependence might be a concept originating in Buddhism, but to the degree that it s true, it is no less true in Haiti than it is in Tibet. Similarly methods that Vodoussants use in Haiti work just as well for Buddhists as they would for Vodou practitioners.
Some things in magic are of course less like natural laws, and more like laws of a state – something that everyone agrees upon and therefore gets reinforced with real consequences.
These types of laws or rules do change from Buddhism to Vodou, but not because of what someone personally believes or doesn’t believe. Just like you are subject to the laws of the country you are in, you are subject to the protocols of the system you are in – your beliefs about it are irrelevant.
As for magical practice this all gets solved if you think BIGGER and embrace a little humility. More MEGA, less meta…..
Lets run with that example of St Cyprian:
You don’t need to believe certain things to work with St Cyprian, then stop believing them when you are done. That is insane.
First: its Hubris to think St Cyprian gives a shit about what you believe. This goes for most (though not all) spirits and deities. This concept that religion is about what you personally believe is itself a fairly modern and largely Christian concept.
Second if you think about the immense variance between different types of Christian thought today, then think about how many variations there have been in the last 2000 years, it is dizzying! Now, imagine how those variations multiply when you project out into the world of spirits and deities…. It’s staggering…. or rather it should be Staggering .
To assume your ideas of Christianity are the same as St Cyprians just seems like arrogance to me. So does the idea that you must hold those beliefs. The idea that you can temporarily hold those beliefs, then dismiss them is even more arrogant.
We should all be embracing two important concepts: the Unknown and the Uncertain.
The UNKNOWN: There is not only more to reality than we know, but perhaps more than we can know at this time. It’s arrogance to hold firm beliefs about final states and stages of ultimate reality.
The UNCERTAIN: Even things that we think we have established might need to be re-thought or expanded upon given new information and insights.
Chaos Magic was meant to crack open the myopic worldview of established traditions, to open us up to the panoply of the real. Instead, in the effort to explain all things avoid admitting things that are unknown or uncertain, it just makes the world smaller.