On Lore Options

I was going to post this on my site blog but I decided against it. I already have too many essays sitting there; perhaps someone will find this worth reading. In any case this came about after I discussion in which the relative merits of strict adherence to a grimoire were debated. It got me thinking about lore and how much we have lost touch with that way of understanding magick. Everybody is a theorist who wants to find the most useful schema for approaching magick. This is part of a love letter to lore, but because it is very long letter, I will for now post only the critique of the theorist approach. If people find it worth reading the rest will follow.

Part 1

Lore, it is odd. Lore is knowledge and understanding. Lore is also acquired – not given – simply because understanding comes from effort expended in the pursuit of understanding. It is one thing to know that a stone has the power to stabilize emotions but another altogether to understand what that means. The limits and nature of its power are basic, uncomplicated, but the application of that power is requires more from us. To use a strained analogy: we all know fire is hot, but “hot” is limited description of its nature. Fire is not simply “hot”, it is a consumptive force which emits heat and light and which will transmit itself by heat- it expands and does so though what it touches. Understanding that it is not simply “hot” allows you to build steam engines. In the same way “hot” is inadequate and limiting description of fire, so too is it inadequate to say “it makes steam engines”, for it will also cook your food. If you say such and such ritual implement has such and such function you’re not adequately expressing its nature, only describing one fascist of its application. Assuming that something is as simple as it seems or that it falls into some generic category fails to do the object justice. It is also not lore.

Lore is active. Applying an understanding of what you see and know, but it is also the slow acquisition of understanding of the thing. Lore is gained, in my experience, by slow meditation on the observations of something; much time and effort to ferreting out each and every nuance of it. Metaphysically, there are very few things that are simply a thing.

An acquaintance with neo-plutonic thought and its rituals is helpful in acquiring lore. They spent much time and effort learning to navigate the High Plains of Thought where exist all such abstractions that people like to toss around without knowing exactly what they mean. We often use a kind of short hand to explain ourselves and the world and in that we do not err for it has its uses. But it also numbs us to seeing things in many ways. Those of us who use magick separate ourselves from others by virtue of our occult knowledge by which we discern the uses of stone and metal and plants. Is it therefore not so, that understanding of an object will gain us a further separation, this time from occultists who simply use pre-establish correspondence? I hold that it is so. A careful examination of the nature of an object will grant you much understanding. It is important to include people, also culture, in your meditations as people who make lore are as often as not affected by some confluence of their own philosophy and the role some object plays in it.

There is no need to “gather experimental data” as it were because you have the rich and long history of humanity which has done that for you. It is not as wise as it is often thought to mix and match parts of a ritual by random or some hypothesis. I do not like trial and error. It is an approach that eliminates possibilities rather than illuminating them. Try a talisman with this metal rather than the other and see what happens. If nothing happened – as is most often the case with that approach – you have only learned what it is not good for. Learning what it is good for requires you to think about the object. I do not hold that anything more is needed than the object itself and its history. No experiments or systems of classification other than your own. I do not suggest that you toss out your copy of Libber 777 or other such tables. I am merely suggesting that while saying that “gold is the metal of the sun” is convenient short hand, it is good to know what common properties lead people to associate the two. Meditation on gold is easy- get some gold examine its properties, read about how people viewed it, and the effect on those who hold it. Meditation on the sun though, is hard, so alien is it to us, but its effects are very observable and very well known. Pondering the effects and their meaning to those it affects is like pondering the effects of fire heating water.

On the point of Libber 777 and other charts, I would like to speak on how they are constructed because it illuminates my earlier points on philosophy and culture. Systems of herbal correspondence can be one of three general classification systems. The first is an astrological/elemental system where in the physical properties of the plant, part used, locations grown, time to seed, sent, and taste are all considered in classification. The second system is based on each plants effects on the body- most western apothecaries used this system to make medicine up until the mid 20 century. The last system classifies herbs according to long standing tradition. For example, some flowers where associated with temples of Greek and Roman gods seemingly for no other reason than they smelled good and the gods seemed to like them, thus did a god take a flower under their domain.

In the west the astrological element system is most used, but the east also has one. Instead of element they use yin and yang, with expressions in wood, metal, water, air, earth. That system is called Heavenly stems and earthly branches. It looks at parts of an herb or any object and based on many, many criteria places it in a Heavenly stem and earthly branch. What separates the Chinese system from others is that is subjects use metaphysical as well as physical properties to make a set of associations.

These are the classification systems people are most familiar with. Though they all look different and use different words, they all have one thing in common. That one thing is interpretation. A block of wood is just a block of wood, the metaphysics, energy composition, it’s all the same. The interpretation is all that changes. People will interpret by their worldview. I use worldview in a slightly technical way to mean a cohesive set of values, beliefs, and traditions (also the justifications) belonging to a culture by which members order their experience to give meaning. Slightly technical, it is also an accurate description of what people do naturally. They take what they have and use it to find meaning in what they experience. When the person has a sense of what lies below the skin, their experiences are more profound, and will require something extra than the every world view to make since of it. For that reason they establish systems for classifying the new experience – tables of correspondence. Though they are not the same as the old mundane worldview it is also not wholly different from it. After all the people who made the new system also lives the worldview of their culture. They will make assumptions and references which they will never notice because everyone – they are aware of – knows what they mean. For that reason the two are never completely separable.

Because people are not independent of their culture or worldviews it is also good to ponder about people, culture and life. They are both simple and complex, as is everything else. A person is a person, and life just is. But that person on the level of ideas, energetically, and spiritually, each is particular, useful in their own way. Life has many facets to it and it is much fun to ponder. It is also useful because an object, even one with great occult power, which is not used, is very hard to understand. People have been around a while now and been using things in every fashion conceivable and within every sort of world view for a very long time. What they have accumulated is lore. They do not call it “lore” but none the less it is an understanding of hard won knowledge.

Again I must stress that they are bound to their worldview and so will only describe an interpretation of the fundamental truth of the object. If you asked a mountain how to cleanse a crystal it would likely say you must bury it in the earth for ten days. We all know that there are other ways, but the mountain is limited by its view. Ask an enlightened being how to do it and it would likely give some gibberish about the nature of taint and its causes. No doubt it is true, but less useful than sticking it in the ground. Limitations are useful and so it is not a bad thing that culture decides the use of an object, but we should acknowledge that it is at least so. Adopt whatever system you like but understand where it came from.
You can of course make your own lore; or rather you can discover it. To say that you can “make” lore implies that you are responsible for the properties you seek to describe. This in turn suggests a psychological approach to magick which is counter to my experience. When some new facet of reality is discovered embodied in an object this is new lore. Lore that is interpreted according to some deep understanding is also new lore. Indeed, lore exists – or can exist – for any object, experience or phenomena. Even things that are very boring have a use.

Fatherjhon said:

There is no need to “gather experimental data” as it were because you have the rich and long history of humanity which has done that for you. It is not as wise as it is often thought to mix and match parts of a ritual by random or some hypothesis. I do not like trial and error. It is an approach that eliminates possibilities rather than illuminating them.

How I wish that were true. Many times I have searched through the collected works of the past trying to find an answer to my questions only to discover that I'm at the edge of what is known and if I want to know more I have to find it for myself. Occult knowledge, like all knowledge, isn't static. New things are being discovered, new relationships to scientific knowledge present themselves and experiment is the only certain pathway forward.

I respectfully disagree about the value of trial and error. Eliminating incorrect possibilities is enormously valuable and knowing what not to waste you time on is a great benefit. Experimenting is slow and often directly unrewarding but sharing the results of experimenting is how science has accumulated such a great store of knowledge. Occult practitioners who do the same are benefiting everyone in the field.

Fatherjhon said:
How I wish that were true. Many times I have searched through the collected works of the past trying to find an answer to my questions only to discover that I'm at the edge of what is known and if I want to know more I have to find it for myself. Occult knowledge, like all knowledge, isn't static. New things are being discovered, new relationships to scientific knowledge present themselves and experiment is the only certain pathway forward.

I respectfully disagree about the value of trial and error. Eliminating incorrect possibilities is enormously valuable and knowing what not to waste you time on is a great benefit. Experimenting is slow and often directly unrewarding but sharing the results of experimenting is how science has accumulated such a great store of knowledge. Occult practitioners who do the same are benefiting everyone in the field.

It a minor point so I won’t belabor it, this was a start to a love letter after all, but I’ll clarify it. I do not find that magick is like science. Magick is too big, to fluid, too personal. Here we agree completely, magickal knowledge is not static. I take a slightly different interpretation of that statement. I mean no disrespect to your work. It is simply a different view to say you’re at “the edge of what is known”; when you look outward, I look inward. It is my view that trial and error tries to put things together from facts like a puzzle. In that way each new piece must first rediscovered, then scrutinized, and placed where it might fit, and then again if it does not. It is a perfectly reasonable way to go about it. But using the scientific approach assumes there is something more to magick than our own personal understandings – some immutable law to discover rather than the objects response to our efforts. I am always hesitant to mix the two. I only lament that people now spend much of their time puzzling it out, when each piece of lore (history, use, value, philosophy) of some object provide freely those puzzle pieces, and sometimes hints at their relationships.
Naturally, to say that all that lore has been discovered is silly on the face of it. However, it might be more helpful to say that our understanding of the object is still changing, in that way we do not look only to the object for some use, and there by taking it out of context.