h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well if you're going to be facetious...

*There There*
It's all OK...

I just get confuzzled, I'm talking in too many threads about this kind of thing.

Care to expand on "Neo-Romantic", GTB? I think I can just about decipher the rest.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

OK Jose is it Wicca you want to know more about, paganism in general, or something else? On pantheism, I can offer some links:

http://members.aol.com/Heraklit1/index.htm
http://pantheist.net/
http://w3.trib.com/~phxcon/

About Wicca, I know little, but I heartily approve of the Wiccan Rede: "And ye harm none, do as ye will." Is this the sort of thing you were after, or...?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

...or were you after some kind of Berserker cult?

"Neo-Romantic"
Perhaps he wants us all to speak Esperanto

*catches up on four pages of backlog* Whew! That's what I get for never checking in...

A while back someone mentioned a man named Crowley. Any relation to Vivian Crowley? I recently asked my girlfriend to tell me more about Wicca and she gave me a little book by above-named woman. (All right, the book seemed fluffy, but it looked like *adult* fluff, not teenage stuff. At least the title wasn't "Wicca in Four Easy Steps" or something.)

s and more s,
~Wes

I took that to be a referance to "The"* Crowley...

*So called because I can't remember his full name which begs the question why am I posting this

Mr. Crowley, did you ride your white horse?
Mr. Crowley, it's symbolic of course.

I believe the gentleman's name was Aleister. A quick google reveals that Vivian is no relation. She probably adopted Crowley as a pen name.

Neo-romantic? What the hell *did* I mean by that?

Uh... I think a lot about Romanticism lately, however one defines it, and the "neo", besides adding a couple of syllables for effect, acknowledges the Romanticism that was a movement in the arts and philosophy a few centuries back.

I recently had a conversation in which we defined a Romantic as one who considers sensation and emotion to be the primary level of reality, while others (what would one call them?) say that true reality is a realm of ideas and forms. A Romantic might say that any conceptual structure is an overlay, filtering and clouding the pure, direct, immediate experience, while others might disagree, and claim that emotions and our particular human perceptions actually cloud what's real, which is only accessible through ideas and reason.

A later revelation held that a Romantic, as defined above, would never make the assertions attributed to him in the above paragraph, preferring a simple private experience of that fact to a formulation of it in logical English words.

Probably a horrible definition. Sorry you asked?


GTB

Sensation and emotion may well be the primary forms of EXPERIENCE, but are arguably *merely* a subspecies of ideas and forms in any case.
Many of our conceptual structures are not "overlays", but are actually intermediate between the external world as it is and our "direct, immediate experience", which (like the Holy Roman Empire)
is neither pure, direct or immediate. Our particular human perceptions could be said to cloud reality, but only in a trivial and inevitable sense; human reality is not accessed through ideas and reason, rather ideas and reason are features of human reality, along with sensation and emotion of course. Some people pay more attention to one pair than the other, but they can't be separated.

Noggin

Hmm, I would disagree that, "Sensation and emotion . . . are arguably *merely* a subspecies of ideas and forms in any case."

I realize that the most immediate-seeming experiences are already parsed to some degree by parts of the brain such as the visual cortex, but there's a difference between sensory/emotional experience and experience that is mediated by LANGUAGE. In this way, feeling hungry and experiencing the sensation of being satisfied by food is immediate, while having a political opinion, for example, or completing a mathematical proof, is mediated. One could perhaps argue that it's a question of degree, and the sensory experience is simply *more* immediate than the concept-based one, but I would hold that there is a difference of kind between experiences that are pre-linguistic, and those that are only accessible through words.

A mother will protect its young, whether the mother is a human with language, or a bear without language, if the threat is direct and clear - a threatening creature, maybe. Only a mother with language could participate in a rally to encourage legislation which she believes will protect her children.

Maybe it's about different levels of abstraction. It doesn't take much abstraction to engage in the act of copulation; it takes more to make vows in a wedding ceremony. That abstraction is language, and language versus no-language, is, IMO, more than just a matter of degree.

A Platonist, or someone who claims that Ultimate Reality consists of perfect forms that we access through abstract ideas, denies the validity of non-language-based experience, until it is cast into words which can then correspond to ultimate forms or archetypes. My position is sort of a reaction against the Platonists, as I would claim that our abstractions from our primary experience are of more dubious validity than the experiences themselves, which cannot really be doubted, although their linguistic descriptions can be.


I could, of course, be completely wrong.

Indeed, as in "Magick" by Aleister Crowley, also know as "the Great Beast" (and thus 666 - the biblical 'number of the beast' - is also associated with him). "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" was his creed. [Contrast with the similar sounding, but profoundly different, Wiccan Rede: "And ye harm none, do what ye will"] Crowley was a man who knew/acknowledged no limits. He was, in informal terms, a total nutter.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

<...we defined a Romantic as one who considers sensation and emotion to be the primary level of reality>

That seems reasonable to me, I must admit. Surely everything else is derivative compared to sensation and emotion?

<...while others (what would one call them?) say that true reality is a realm of ideas and forms.>

One might call them classicists, after Pirsig, and maybe even offer the opinion that they're nutters. True reality is reality itself; theorising about it is great fun, and can prove useful and worthwhile, but the 'original sin' of such thinkers is to place theory above the reality it derives from. When there is contradiction, they try to change reality instead of their own theories. Thus was created the 'emperor's new clothes' and 'doublethink'.



Wouldn't an 'adjunct' or 'aid to understanding' be a better term than 'overlay'? Just because such things aren't as close to actual reality as sensation or emotion, it doesn't mean they are without value or use. Far from it! Look how useful scientific theory has proved, despite its remove from the real world.

If I have understood correctly, I think I just took up a new descriptive label - Romantic - to go with the ones I already have.

<...a Romantic, as defined above, would never make the assertions attributed to him in the above paragraph, preferring a simple private experience of that fact to a formulation of it in logical English words.>

OK, so there's no monopoly on stupidity!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

*and* of reality - you can't get any closer to reality than the perception of being a participant in it!



Yes, collectively, these structures form in our minds a model of the reality in which we live, to which we refer to make sense of our perceptions of that reality.



Only by those who wish to muddy the waters in the first place! Stuff and nonsense! Reality is hard enough to understand without those who attempt to *introduce* confusion, in order to further their own views!



No, it's accessed by what we can directly detect of reality itself. Then we bring to bear all the tools at our disposal, of whatever nature, to help us understand it. Ideas and reason are invaluable in this, but they are qualitatively different from sensation and emotion. And that isn't perjorative to either, just as it isn't discriminatory to acknowledge the (real) differences between human males and females.



Au contraire! Of course they can. For optimum understanding of the real world, all are necessary, of course. But to say they can't be separated is to identify the brush and the paint as indistinguishable!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Hi Jose .

Sorry to be so late in adding me ten pennorth but vitae interruptus etc.

Mandragora has given you some good places to start I see, however, if you want a more interactive approach I suggest wandering over to the Pagan Federation's website or Witchvox. Both have good introductions to the various forms of Wicca, Witchcraft and the like.

Witchcraft does suffer from not having any really good historical references except from its mortal enemies, who were prone to accentuate only those incidences that supported their persecution.

Both Crowley and Gardner were groundbreakers that led the way to the present revival, but homage should also be paid to those they drew their inspiration from. Ross Nichols and Philip Carr-Gomm both gave Gardner in particular a lot of druidic information that he then used to set the eight festivals into the Wiccan calender, amongst other things.......

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

'lo Math.
Crowley often gets a rotten press but, whilst that's mostly his own fault, it's due to his undeserved reputation rather than the reality of his escapades. Even the most outrageous of his activities were not as wild as contemporary opinion believed. He had limits but was interested in testing as far as they went to see if he could then control things. And he only cultivated the Beast thing to gripe off his ma, who came up with it. (He was raised Plymouth Brethren.) He is still referred to as a Satanist and 'the most evil man in Britain' another ill-deserved contemporary epithet (albeit one which he probably loved...)
And he set records for moutain-climbing, which is easily overlooked in all the cat blood-drinking and Scarlet Woman-ising.

Thanks ever so much for the info.

Crowley, yes, there was a heavily biased account on him on channel 4 last year. I think the trouble with trying to find out anything about him is that most sources are not objective and go for hype instead.

Indeed and at least Crowley could write something readable even if the reader isn't impressed by what he has to say at least he says it well! Unlike a a real Satanist who is hyped up to be something wasn't Anton LeVey... dull dreary unispiring self gratifying rhetoric... bah