Likes2Read wrote:We have to also remember that not all ancient writings are complete. By design, sometimes an ingredient or a step was withheld, and only initiates were allowed to know what the full instructions were.

Kind of like how Aunt Betty never gives her exact recipe for that cake everyone loves, so no one else’s attempts will measure up to hers, lol.

But when the ancients lived in times where you could be killed for practicing some of these things, it’s understandable that they’d be very circumspect about what kind of knowledge they were putting out there where untrusted strangers could see it.

Thats true. There were many blinds in those texts.

Likes2Read wrote:We have to also remember that not all ancient writings are complete. By design, sometimes an ingredient or a step was withheld, and only initiates were allowed to know what the full instructions were.

Kind of like how Aunt Betty never gives her exact recipe for that cake everyone loves, so no one else’s attempts will measure up to hers, lol.

But when the ancients lived in times where you could be killed for practicing some of these things, it’s understandable that they’d be very circumspect about what kind of knowledge they were putting out there where untrusted strangers could see it.

Was told by somebody that one of the reasons for the backlash was due to people being angry or jealous at the elitism behind the secrets being withheld. Some of the knowledge was only accessible to Kings, Pharaohs and so on. They used it to their own benefit etc.

Do you think this thread’s findings of physical/earthly magick is a good starting point for understanding how it works?

I mean you can try to picture if physical magickal schools coexisted alongside mental, subtle, astral, etc.

The alchemists were the last surviving school of this type of magick, and were given the benefit of not being labeled magick users by those who hired them. The people who hired them also did not want to be labeled as using it either if associated with those behind the persecutions. So it was probably ideal to be disguised as say like ‘just scientists and science work here, nothing to see now move along’.

But later on when their use was ‘exhausted’ some places banned them, labeling the alchemists magick users once again as they did with the other schools that were destroyed by persecution in theory.

Likes2Read wrote: Kind of like how Aunt Betty never gives her exact recipe for that cake everyone loves, so no one else’s attempts will measure up to hers, lol.

I don’t even know if Aunt Betty is real or has cake, but now I want some.

-well I mean the basics atleast. Cause if we have that we can rediscover this school of magick from ground up again.

If the texts themselves were incomplete or the magickal parts destroyed/hidden leaving only the parts now used today in some of ‘science’. Then that opens a range of possibilities for what they could have based themselves off, talking the work involved that had the metaphysical aspects and more.

Did certain spirits or deities possibly help them uncover that path?

Also why is there an overall feeling/idea that ‘Wizards’ (Alot of the times most likely used to refer to those who dealt in physical world-leaning magick, e.g. some people who built pre-industrial automatons) were less feared than the counterparts from the school of magick known as ‘Witches’ during the persecution?

I thought alchemy was more of a mental practice which used physical transmutation of elements as a metaphor for transmuting the self.

So, it is really difficult to tease out what past experiences were of more dramatic magick throughout history, often because there was a fair amount of time between an event and its being recorded. Like the spell to set your enemies on fire could easily be just a way to describe what we would now call science. Or it could really have been mystical or supernatural somehow, depending on how you view the Veil and its possibly varying levels of thickness. It is truly impossible to know.

However, from a historical standpoint, it is the most sound thing to assume they were doing “science” and, to them, it felt like “magick.” This is because in historical matters we have to assume that if we don’t witness a given thing now in the natural order it’s not likely to have occurred then.

However, I think the ancient Egyptians were onto something on this front. To them, magick was woven throughout all of life—both seen and unseen. Anything that occurred was inherently magick. The practical effect of this was that EVERYONE was practicing “physical” magick at all times—good health, good crops, etc. The only magick that was bound up in the priests and the pharaohs was what we would call “high magick” or ritual magick. Because the pharaohs were the Gods or their direct representatives imparted with some part of their power or essence—the exact permutations of this varied over time, and its a LOT of time to work with. They, in turn, delegated much of this work to the priests. This high magick would be more concerned with the unseen world. Given that anyone who wasn’t a pharaoh wasn’t likely to even be able to access that non-physical stuff by dint of not being personally and intimately identified with the divine, there wasn’t necessarily a need to move from physical to high magic for a really long time. Non-royal access to things like temples didn’t develop for a REALLY along time and, predictably, was kept to the upper classes for quite a while as well.

So, in a way, the development went counter to how you are envisioning it—at least in that civilization. Everyone had access to charms and spells for physical magick, but less physical concerns were the prerogative of the elite. Which makes sense since the elite would struggle less with the bare necessities of physical existence than others would.

Which leads me to two points. First, history is not a monolith, and the same is true for the history of magick. We have not see one global trend from more to less physical magick. The stress on the physical systems of magick tend to (but don’t always) follow along with the difficulty of meeting practitioners’ physical needs and a given culture’s focus on their importance. So today’s surviving primitive” cultures still do physical magick, but the medieval church would have been more into the ritual end of things because of the vileness of the Flesh.

Similarly, students of history are in staggeringly overwhelming agreement that “witches” were persecuted more than, say, alchemists because of an elitism in which misogyny played a MASSIVE role. Folk magic was disfavored both because those understandings of the Bible forbade “witchcraft” but also because those same understandings forbade women from holding personal power.

Secondly, if we take the view that magick is seamlessly part and parcel with the physical and natural world, we start to experience it throughout all of life. That can be a very rich experience! And is a very spiritually satisfying way of looking at things and practising. But we don’t even have to go that far to see that physical magick is still alive and well today. Folk magick and spells affecting health and the body are still very prevalent and are absolutely physical magick. Cursing someone with impotence (a great voodoo favorite) is not categorically different from trying to bewitch fire, although quite a bit less reliable than using the laws of chemistry to develop a flamethrower to use on your enemies.

It is all woven together and exactly the same substance. Whether or not you view it as a magical experience is, at bottom, only relevant to an individual’s personal experience of spirituality. Birth and death are magick, and they will continue without us doing any naval gazing about what it all means, but we certainly can grow spiritually richer from the practice, up to a point. The filter through which different humans view all these things changes over time and takes on different flavors, but nothing fundamental about nature or magick itself has *necessarily* ever changed.

This is why i like viewing magick as the art and science of causing change to ocure in conformity to will. It makes it more mundane in my openion.

quantumflux wrote:I thought alchemy was more of a mental practice which used physical transmutation of elements as a metaphor for transmuting the self.

Most interpretations for that came after the 1600s/1700s or when materialism started to take hold it’s said (Not to disagree but I asked somebody and they said). Before that many texts talked about actual transmutation but research shows it’s both. I would be talking about alchemy from Paracelsus’, maybe ancient and the medieval tradition. It is possible to make potions, they are known as spagyric tinctures in traditional alchemy and require astrology.

There is a substance that can transmutate some metals into what’s called ‘alchemical gold’ within the eyes of their tradition and those who see it as that (Which people claim is a special type of brass) for example maybe. However it’s not seen as ‘gold’ by chemist standards because they define ‘the one true gold’ as according to another factor.

Some of the things used in chemistry today were tools or methods that were discovered by lab/practical alchemists. Take Isaac Newton for example, he was one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_New ... lt_studies

”Some practices of alchemy were banned in England during Newton's lifetime, due in part to unscrupulous practitioners who would often promise wealthy benefactors unrealistic results in an attempt to swindle them. The English Crown, also fearing the potential devaluation of gold, should the philosopher's stone actually be discovered, made penalties for alchemy very severe. In some cases the punishment for unsanctioned alchemy would include the public hanging of an offender on a gilded scaffold while adorned with tinsel and other unspecified items.”

Wizard wrote:

Likes2Read wrote:We have to also remember that not all ancient writings are complete. By design, sometimes an ingredient or a step was withheld, and only initiates were allowed to know what the full instructions were.

Kind of like how Aunt Betty never gives her exact recipe for that cake everyone loves, so no one else’s attempts will measure up to hers, lol.

But when the ancients lived in times where you could be killed for practicing some of these things, it’s understandable that they’d be very circumspect about what kind of knowledge they were putting out there where untrusted strangers could see it.

Was told by somebody that one of the reasons for the backlash was due to people being angry or jealous at the elitism behind the secrets being withheld. Some of the knowledge was only accessible to Kings, Pharaohs and so on. They used it to their own benefit etc.

There are folks out there who believe this is still the case TODAY, where there’s an elite, behind-the-scenes ruling class none but the other elite ever see, and they share elite metaphysical knowledge that the rest of society is not privy to.

I’m not saying I buy fully into that concept, but the theory has definitely been put forth.

Do you think this thread’s findings of physical/earthly magick is a good starting point for understanding how it works?

I mean you can try to picture if physical magickal schools coexisted alongside mental, subtle, astral, etc.

I falter sometimes when processing these topics, as in my head, I don’t parse magick into these categories. Either the magick provides the intended result, which often can be a tangible result of some kind, or it doesn’t. But to me, it’s all like different facets of the same huge gem, not several separate gems sitting side-by-side.

The alchemists were the last surviving school of this type of magick, and were given the benefit of not being labeled magick users by those who hired them. The people who hired them also did not want to be labeled as using it either if associated with those behind the persecutions. So it was probably ideal to be disguised as say like ‘just scientists and science work here, nothing to see now move along’.

The best part is, in those days, alchemy WAS regarded as a valid branch of science, not as a covert way to do magick under the noses of everyone else. Some of the most respected scientists of their day (Sir Isaac Newton, as a prime example) pursued alchemical studies as science. Only when later generations started to regard alchemy as bogus did they shunt all his alchemical studies aside, attempting to sweep it under the rug as though it never happened, and highlight his other scientific work in more respected fields of endeavor.

Likes2Read wrote:I falter sometimes when processing these topics, as in my head, I don’t parse magick into these categories. Either the magick provides the intended result, which often can be a tangible result of some kind, or it doesn’t. But to me, it’s all like different facets of the same huge gem, not several separate gems sitting side-by-side.