Introducing Myself..., ...and possibly living to tell about it Options

Hello everyone!

I'm glad to have found this forum, it looks well put-together and there's a very nice selection of topics. I hope to get in touch with some people of like mind (and even some whose minds differ greatly from my own but who are still willing to engage in civil discussion).

My magical path, like the paths of many others I'm sure, has been eclectic. My first explorations led me into the territory of Wicca and druidism and I found that Wicca was a pretty good starting point. It gave me a good, solid foundation to stand on and served as a pretty balanced point of reference for all that has since come my way in the area of magic. I didn't really adhere to the path itself, but rather took what was useful to me and left the rest behind. When I found chaos magic, naturally, it had an irresistible appeal to me since it encouraged that. Reading Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine changed my life. When I first took my "pick-and-choose" approach to Wicca, I tended to view it as a shortcoming at times, an inability to assimilate the entire system. Then I read Condensed Chaos and found that it wasn't a weakness, but a potential strength, and that from the chaos magician's point of view, my tendency to do that showed that I had a natural understanding that it wasn't necessarily the system itself that contains the magic, but rather the magic seems to be what holds the system together; the system is a machine built around the core essence that is magic.

Ironically, I was never able to fully embrace the chaos path, either. Its level of freedom is good, but I think many practitioners take that attitude to the nth degree and take liberties that aren't necessary just for the sake of doing it. I think some people try so hard to come up with new approaches and systems that they often convolute and over-complicate things, and to me the point and message of chaos magic is one of simplification.

Most recently, I've delved into the Golden Dawn system to see what it can offer me. I tend to view it from a slightly chaos-magic-oriented point of view, with the theory that the god-names, for example, can be thought of as a form of sigil. I'm interested in finding the extent to which that is true, and the extent to which the symbols and powers tapped in the system have objective realities of their own.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for sitting through the monologue. I'm glad to be here.

Hi there, as you stated this is an eclectic bunch.

Wicca also has a pick and choose method, but that depends on what traditions it follows.

Anyway, welcome on…use the search or assistant functions as they are invaluable to me.

As far as your background it sounds very familiar to me…but with different connection points. But then again I am sure that is the history of many.