Low-Tech: Magic?

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

(...) I'll add I would strong suggest avoiding a vast majority of "New Age" type books on "magic". Despite people drawing sincere religious and spiritual belief from them they are by and large works of fiction with little to no basis in historical fact.

I fully agree with that. And theosophical authors are in the same vein. Not in vain the current "New Age" (with its many unessential trends) is a spin-off from the classic theosophism, spiritualism, and occultism (all them modern creations of westerners), mixed with some bits of scientific divulgation and modern day popular political notions.

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

Just for full discourse, I consider myself a "Heathen" or a Norse Reconstruction Pagan and have read quite a few of the types of books I just mentioned. The main thing I've learned over the years of being a Pagan is to assume everything you read about it is false unless you (or the author) has an authoritative second source, which ideally would be a contemporary historical source or a well respected modern source.

I understand your point, sure, but the problem with this is that not all is documented, and many things were handled by oral transmission. This means that huge amounts of knowledge bring as references or sources for it . . . just persons, usually true spiritual masters -extremely and more and more hard to find, and even more difficult each day.

In the case of the Norse world and other European "paganisms", that's about a destroyed, dissapeared or dead knowledge, like the own of the Ancient Egypt . . . like the one own of the Templar Order.

It would be needed a kind of miracle for recovering such things lost to peoples in ancient times! (BTW, the Grail Quest, the Ark of the Covenant, the lost of the true pronunciation of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the Soma -all them are "lost items" or "things"- symbolize this loss, between many other things). So it's wise to assume that there aren't true sources for this, even if it's possible to assemble some partial data, but this is always completely insufficient.