"Real" Magic in RPGs, Redux

So I'm trying this again, as the last time I attempted to write on the subject I met with the wrath of The Wench for being "too mean".  This time, the focus will be less on savage mockery of silly people and more on the "magick" itself and what it should look like if you're trying to run a modern campaign where the occult rules are meant to effectively emulate real life.

Again, the first thing to note is that 99.9% of people in the "occult scene" are posers, from the point of view of practicing magic.  That is to say, they don't really do magic at all; they may talk about it or read about it, pretend they have great powers or like to collect crystals, but they've never had an actual experience of magic.   Note that this includes, aside from the most absolute basic practices, 99% of "ceremonial magicians" who, for the purposes of this series, we'll be focusing on (not that there aren't other kinds of modern occultism that could have real "magical power" in your games, certainly tantrism and those rare shamanic practitioners that are actually doing it right, for just two examples, but we have to focus on something, at least to start).  The people interested in hardcore magic, most of them, have read a couple of Crowley books, own a tarot deck or two, and may have tried some of the basic exercises (like the "lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram"), performed them badly, and then quit when nothing happened right away.  Instead, they want to talk a lot about spirits and angels and demons and the Kabbalah and satan and how the man is putting them down, and how many books they own (whether or not they've read them), and how "dark" or "hardcore" they really are. You know, wankery.

A few of these guys even start their own magical orders.

But there is a smaller group of people who actually do the practices.  Before I get into those, we should address how those people get to do it; are they secret initiates of a great magical order? Did they find lost tomes hidden away in some library?

No, fuckers! They just got what's readily available everywhere, and actually did it.

That brings us to the first rule of modern "authentic thaumaturgy":

RULE 1: its not hard to find occult secrets, its hard to understand them.

Remember that. Do not make it hard for someone to find real magic; it was all laid out 100 years ago, and even before the advent of the internet pretty much everything you needed to do "real" magic was readily available for purchase.  And today, on the internet, where you can quickly and easily download pretty much every medieval grimoire, everything the Golden Dawn ever wrote, and absolutely everything Aleister Crowley ever did, including his personal diaries and ALL of the "secret rituals of the O.T.O.", there is really no information that is kept away from you.
In a lot of "occult RPGs", that's one of the first things that strikes me as being utterly unrealistic; the authors make it that real occult knowledge is really difficult to obtain.  It isn't, at all.

What's difficult is the ability to comprehend that knowledge; because you have study a lot of fundamentals, and you HAVE TO actually practice.  So you have to read and read for years and years, and even if you do that you won't have an ounce of magical power unless you've also been exercising and exercising for years and years.

Go find a copy of Aleister Crowley's "The Book of Thoth", that's his book on the Tarot.  Try to read it.  Assuming no (significant) prior knowledge of the occult, you'll understand maybe 10% of it.  The rest will seem like gobbledygook.
So faced with that, most people either just quit in disgust assuming it is all gobbledygook, or they just pretend that they understood more of it when they did, beginning their long careers as occult frauds.
And the Book of Thoth really contains huge and powerful magical secrets. Within that book alone are secrets that contain significant magical gravitas.  But to understand what its saying, after that first reading, you'd need to spend about six months working with the Tarot cards, reading the basics of astrology, reading the basics of kabbalah, reading the basics of alchemy.  And then reading the Book of Thoth again. And after all that, you'll understand maybe 20% of it, but what new insight you got spurs you on to do new kinds of work, that gives you new kinds of insights, which leads you to new areas of study, which leads you to new areas of work, which leads you to new insights...etc etc.
So there's a huge cycle of learning involved.  You could end up reading the just the Book of Thoth over and over again once every 6 months for 15 years, and IF you've actually been studying and practicing magick, then EACH time you read it, the book seems to be totally different than the last; like its been re-written. Because magick has been busy re-writing you.

After the first two or three re-readings, where you figure out that's what's happening, that's where things start to get fucked up.

So yeah, if you want the availability of magical power to reflect real life, make it super-easy to get the information, but very difficult to be able to actually turn it into something useful. The difficulty to obtain the book is low, the study time it takes to master it is high; and brings risks of your giving up, lying to yourself that you get it, becoming obsessed, or starting to have weird reality-questioning shit happen.

Finally (for today) a note on "magical orders": if they don't contain the secrets, what the fuck are they good for?
The biting answer? Mostly nothing. For the most part, again, 90% of "magical orders", "lodges", "secret temples", "working groups", "covens", "rosicrucians", etc. are just places full of Occult Wankers where they can get together and show off their wankery to each other.  The one conceivable benefit is that you might find one or two other frustrated newbies who want to get something real out of it, and just haven't figured out yet that this is not the place to get it.
If you want your "magical order" to seem authentic, it needs to be full of seriously marginal people, who can't hold good day jobs, claiming to be wizards of grand power.  It needs to have endless internal power struggles over who gets to be the "master of the circle" and in bigger societies who gets to be the "outer head of the order ad vitam".  There's HUGE levels of megalomania involved here, and desperate power-mongering over nothing.  Unlike freemasonry, which these "serious" occult wankers tend to mock, most magical orders are not democratic; that's because, in theory, the person who is most magically advanced should be the one in charge.  But in practice, this works out to being an excuse for power-trips, because none of the guys involved are really all that advanced enough to warrant the pitfalls that come with having only one guy in charge forever.  
In any case, most "orders" of this sort don't teach magic at all, and those that do tend to do it poorly.

Seriously, I've found Freemasonry, which can only barely be called a "magical order", to be a much more valuable tool to occult practice than any of these OTOs or Golden Dawns or Rosicrucian Orders or Temples of Set, or any of the other supposedly "hardcore" groups that make so much fun of freemasonry for "not getting it".  Not only do Freemasons tend to get it better than most pretentious occultists do, but they have actual stability, which is really one of the hardest things to keep and most important things to have, if you're going to study the occult.  Masons are people who can hold down regular jobs and have families and social lives, and work in lodges that in many cases have been around and meeting regularly for 150 years or more; neither of those are true for most members of the "serious" orders; where the people involved have allowed their obsession with the occult to destabilize their regular lives (or, in some cases, have failed to be able to use the occult to bring stability into their already fucked-up lives), and where powermongers and megalomaniacs and the lack of a large network of infrastructure means that the order itself is chronically unstable.

If you think I'm exaggerating about this, go and read about the history of the original Golden Dawn. Or read about Agape Lodge in California.  Or take a look at the current problems and struggles of the various "OTO" groups of the past couple of decades.

There is of course that 10% of orders that are of some good. Usually, these are very small groups, where the emphasis is on individual teachers and individual students working together. There will be little importance placed on fancy titles and ranks, and a lot placed on daily work; and the group will tend to be private but not exclusive (the opposite of the shit groups, which tend to be very public (trying to show off to everyone), but elitist (trying to make out that they have special powerful secrets no one else has, and that not just anyone can join)).
Even in the case of these good groups, except in those rare cases where they're being led by someone who's really attained some serious illumination, the most they are useful for is to have members keeping tabs on each other, keeping each other honest. They will focus on sincerity and experimentation, and on trying to have good discipline in the work. So mostly, you'd join a magical order for the same reason you'd join a pilates class rather than just do pilates by yourself out at home; in the hopes that it'll help you to keep up the hard part of the work and give you some structure, plus the occasional tip.  Only in this case, half the time, you end up having your class-mates either want to have sex with you or rob you blind, half of the members can't hold a job because they can't ever actually talk about anything other than pilates, and the three guys who took some other class once before are beating the shit out of each other over who gets to be "Supreme Master of the Pilates Class For All Eternity".

Welcome to the wonderful world of the occult.

RPGPundit

(July 29, 2011)

First of all your definition of modern magic needs tightening up. You are talking about the western magical tradition but by far the mass numbers of people practising 'Real Magic' are not western occult fanbois they are preliterate aboriginal people who are following standard cultural traditions.
Now obviously these groups are deminishing reapidly but there are still extensive populations and there is a resurgance of practice in populations that have been absorbed into modern socieites.

Second well ... I'll come back to that if I feel like a fight.

When they hop on the internet and explain their view of magic, I'll worry about them.

Your whole argument is a variation on the "Golarion is racist" crap.

Quote from: jibbajibba;565979First of all your definition of modern magic needs tightening up. You are talking about the western magical tradition but by far the mass numbers of people practising 'Real Magic' are not western occult fanbois they are preliterate aboriginal people who are following standard cultural traditions.
Now obviously these groups are deminishing reapidly but there are still extensive populations and there is a resurgance of practice in populations that have been absorbed into modern socieites.

Second well ... I'll come back to that if I feel like a fight.

If you're setting your game in the Amazon jungle or certain very isolated places in Africa or Asia, then you might have a point.   I'm assuming you're setting a game in our own society, where almost no one actually practices "preliterate aboriginal cultural traditions" magick.  The prevalence of bullshit in that domain is roughly the same as in western magick; that is, somewhere between 90-95%.

As I mentioned above, its for a modern campaign, and there are certainly other traditions that have people who do it right too; Tantrism has very powerful magick for example... that 99% of the people "into tantra" don't actually do at all.  Shamanism is the earliest form of magick really... but most self-styled "shamans" are useless wankers or fraudsters.

RPGPundit

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I am curious where you would place mystic religious practices in this discussion pundit (in any religius tradtition).

Just some quick thoughts that surfaced while reading your post, Pundit.

Just sticking to the idea of Western Ritual Magic (the Golden Dawn/Crowley kind of stuff), there might also be an argument to be made that translation effects understanding. I've seen religious scholars argue endlessly about the way different parts of a religious text change depending on if you read the latin translation versus the greek, etc. It could be that while 'occult information' is easy to get, it's been garbled by centuries of poor translation. That problem might also become even more difficult when you consider a magical system that's primarily an oral tradition.

I've grown up in and around New Orleans most of my life and have run into a fair number of people who practice one version or another of the African/Catholicism fusion faiths that have made their way into the area. The reason I bring this up, is that if you are running a modern-day occult conspiracy type game, you might find that there are more than one 'flavor' of occult in the city you are basing it in. Most religions have at least one branch of mysticism which will read to the outside as magic, so it might be worth including them.

As far as how much power any group would have, I kind of base it on the assumptions I've always used when running Call of Cthulhu. Most occult organizations are kind of intensely-focused book clubs. The group gets together talks about what they read that week, goes out for drinks, and generally mess with each others heads. Every now and then, one of these groups has a small core of people who know enough to be dangerous, but they will almost never share that knowledge with anyone else in the group. The end result is that you have a very small number of people capable of any occult power and a much larger group around them that act as lackeys and grunts.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;566116I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I am curious where you would place mystic religious practices in this discussion pundit (in any religius tradtition).

That'd depend on what you define as "mystical religious practices".

RPGPundit

The translations question doesn't end up seeming to matter very much in practice, either, though.  

For example, the Grimoire "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage" was translated into english by Macgregor Mathers back in the late 19th century, from a highly imperfect French translation of the German original.  It was a complete mess; but very few magicians knew just how much of a mess; the description of the central ritual was extremely off, the magical squares used to summon demons were almost universally incomplete... and yet it was widely recognized as one of the most powerful books of magic and most essential to study for the last century, because it worked.  It worked so well that it destroyed people who failed to complete the work; it destroyed the lives of people who were just peripherally involved. It inspired Crowley and many others to create their own "new aeon" versions of the work.  Crowley considered it so important and so efficient a system of magick that after his death, only two things were found in his pocket: the wartime invitation he'd received from British Intelligence to assist them, and an Abramelin square.

In 2004 or thereabouts, someone finally translated the original german version, and everyone agrees that the new version is vastly superior. Ultimately, though, the effectiveness of the practice is equally good, whether you use the old (terrible) translation, the new translation, or one of the redesigns (like Crowley)... as long as you actually PRACTICE.

RPGPundit

Regarding the afro-caribbean magic systems, the same 90% law applies.  There's a huge number of con-artists, new age charlatans, churches-by-any-other-name etc in there, and there's a small number of really serious people who do some very serious stuff.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;566102If you're setting your game in the Amazon jungle or certain very isolated places in Africa or Asia, then you might have a point.   I'm assuming you're setting a game in our own society, where almost no one actually practices "preliterate aboriginal cultural traditions" magick.  The prevalence of bullshit in that domain is roughly the same as in western magick; that is, somewhere between 90-95%.

As I mentioned above, its for a modern campaign, and there are certainly other traditions that have people who do it right too; Tantrism has very powerful magick for example... that 99% of the people "into tantra" don't actually do at all.  Shamanism is the earliest form of magick really... but most self-styled "shamans" are useless wankers or fraudsters.

RPGPundit

No you are missing a point. Sorry if I din't explain myself very well.

There are plenty of Amazonian aboriginals living in Rio, Sao Paulo still practicing tradditional shaministic traddition, there are plenty of Souix still stilling in reservations practising the old traditions.
And of course most are charlatans but they are charlatans who have dedicated 20 years to it rather than Californian college kids who think devils are real.
There is an excellent essay by Claude Levi-Strauss comparing shamanism to Psychoanalysis and that is the intersect point in which magic and reality meet.

Now if you want to give a modern occult game a blush of realism by all means stick to Cowley and Eliphas Levi et al but from a game perspective you are better off buying some Hellblazer comics and riffing off Gaiman.
If you are actually interested in current magical practices then by far the bulk of them are shaman on the edge of western civilisation or in the amazon basin, or the valleys of PGN, or the siberian steppe or a village on the ganges delta.

Quote from: RPGPundit;566222That'd depend on what you define as "mystical religious practices".

RPGPundit

Trying to stay fairly vague. I guess anything that tries to induce a direct spiritual Experience or change of cons iousness....anything from starving yourself in a cave to meditation or the sama.

Quote from: jibbajibba;566246No you are missing a point. Sorry if I din't explain myself very well.

There are plenty of Amazonian aboriginals living in Rio, Sao Paulo still practicing tradditional shaministic traddition, there are plenty of Souix still stilling in reservations practising the old traditions.
And of course most are charlatans but they are charlatans who have dedicated 20 years to it rather than Californian college kids who think devils are real.
There is an excellent essay by Claude Levi-Strauss comparing shamanism to Psychoanalysis and that is the intersect point in which magic and reality meet.

Now if you want to give a modern occult game a blush of realism by all means stick to Cowley and Eliphas Levi et al but from a game perspective you are better off buying some Hellblazer comics and riffing off Gaiman.
If you are actually interested in current magical practices then by far the bulk of them are shaman on the edge of western civilisation or in the amazon basin, or the valleys of PGN, or the siberian steppe or a village on the ganges delta.

From my own experiences, I would answer thusly: You have to make a distinction between "folk religion" and magick as a practice.  There are tribal practitioners that do actually practice magick, certainly, and cultures that are perhaps more inclined to it than western culture has been for about 1500 years or so; but the majority of "shamans" are little more than a priesthood by another name.
The amount of serious practitioners in those cultures end up being about the same as in our culture or any other culture, which I'd figure somewhere under the double digit mark in percentage.  This number doesn't appear to be a flaw of our particular civilization, its pretty much an endemic reality of the human condition.

So while there's certainly some amazing stuff you can look at (and use in game-terms) in these "shamanic" cultures (or their remnants), the idea that there are "noble savages" who have somehow got it more right than anyone else is pretty much bullshit; and of course in practical terms, the cultural context makes it a barrier to outside access.  The percentage of amazonian witch-doctors or Sioux medicine men who are actually serious is pretty small, the percentage of white people claiming to practice in those traditions who are actually serious I'd peg at just about absolute zero.

RPGPundit

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;566263Trying to stay fairly vague. I guess anything that tries to induce a direct spiritual Experience or change of cons iousness....anything from starving yourself in a cave to meditation or the sama.

Well, see, to follow up on my last post, the vast majority of people allegedly engaging in mysticism are really just practicing religion in drag, or hitting the dead end of inducing altered states with no follow-through; starving yourself in a cave if you don't end up questioning your basic conditionings is pretty much indistinguishable from dropping LSD and listening to Grateful Dead albums without questioning your basic conditionings. It might make you a nice guy, or it might make you a raving looney, but it goes nowhere.  
That's why all genuine mystical traditions, from Sufism to Tantra to the more esoteric Christian practices, have always warned against getting stuck in "bliss states" and moving no further, and have likewise warned away the trap of extreme asceticism or the pursuit of miraculous powers/"siddhis"/etc.

But if you're talking about a complete and living discipline of mysticism (again, be it Tantrism, Sufism, Taoist mysticism, etc) which has not been stratified as a religion or devalued itself into what amounts to a "cargo cult", then certainly there's value in that, and at the highest levels western occultism/magick becomes indistinguishable from the highest levels of mysticism.   One of Crowley's great innovations (or rather, reformations) to the stratified and decayed structure of western magick was to import key practices from eastern sources (especially Raja Yoga) that restored certain fundamentals whose western equivalents had been lost in the entropy of the ages.

RPGPundit

Speaking of which:

"Real" Magick in RPGs, Continued..

So, getting to some actual "things magicians do"; we begin with an unusual point: yoga.

Yes, yoga, but maybe not the yoga that you think!  Some of you who read a recent Cracked article might have noted that what we think of as "yoga" today, the series of stretching exercises, is in fact a pretty recent invention.  It wasn't quite invented by Iyengar, like the article suggests, but pretty close.  It was really popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the idea of Yoga being "Hatha Yoga" (the stretching exercises) became so deeply popular that even most Indians believe that its really an ancient practice.

To put this into context, the stretching exercises of hatha yoga are sort-of spiritual, but only in the way that "doing pushups for jesus" is sort-of spiritual.  And what's happened with Yoga now is like as if people started believe that ALL "prayer" was doing push-ups.

In fact, there is a real yoga, or several real "yogas" to be more accurate, and almost all of them ironically involve not moving at all. Most of them actually require you to stay as incredibly physically still as possible.  The physical stretches, the sun salutations and downward-dog and all that stuff was just the warm-up stretches that people might do at other times, before and after spending hours and hours of trying not to move the slightest little bit.

So what the fuck does all of this have to do with western magicians? The answer is that a great deal of western magicians are into yoga; this is because late 19th/early 20th century magical groups were seriously into yoga (starting with the Theosophists, going into the Golden Dawn, and culminating with Aleister Crowley, who was an expert on the subject and wrote volumes about it). The yoga they were into, however, was not the "stretchy" kind, but the old school yoga, the Raja ("royal") Yoga.

Remember, first of all, that 90% of self-styled "magicians", including those who talk about yoga, won't actually do any of it at all.  New Agers and neo-pagans are, ironically, more likely to actually do stretchy-yoga at least; unlike ceremonial "hardcore" magicians, who will mostly fulfill the facetious definition that Crowley made for how to describe a Theosophist: "They talk a lot about yoga, and do no work".

Meanwhile, many of those magicians who actually both tell you they're "into yoga" and actually DO yoga, will not do any yoga the standard person (or player character) is likely to recognize.  There are tons of "ceremonial magicians" who are "yogis" that couldn't stretch to save their lives, that have wrecked joints and back aches and couldn't touch their toes if you offered them a million dollars.

Which is really a shame, because part of the philosophy of Raja Yoga (the  non-stretchy kind) is that body, mind and soul should be connected.  While hatha yoga (stretchy yoga) exercises aren't really "magical", they are quite good at helping you to have a sufficiently efficient body to make those connections. So what you're likely to find, if we want it to be an "NPC breakdown" is the following types (in increasing order of rarity):

1: neo pagans and new agers who do stretchy yoga
2: ceremonial magicians who talk about "yoga" but do nothing at all.
3: ceremonial magicians who do non-stretchy yoga but aren't really getting anywhere because they're thinking of it as a mental exercise
4: ceremonial magicians who turn on to the fact that maybe connecting mind and body requires actually exercising the body, and do both the stretchy and non-stretchy yoga.

What the fuck is the non-stretchy yoga supposed to do, anyways?
To put it in basic terms and without elaboration (because this blog entry is about how to use this shit for RPGs, and not how to actually do it), Raja Yoga is all about creating intense concentration.  The first step in this is "asana" ("posture"), which involves keeping the body incredibly still.  The classical western-magical test for this is to be able to hold a position so still that you can rest a saucerful of water on your head for an hour without spilling a drop.
Asana is meant to still the body, while "pranayama" controls the breath; people who practice this can eventually lengthen their breathing cycle (inhalations and exhalations, and the pauses in between) so that a reasonably capable student can spend 20 seconds breathing in, holding the breath for 30, and breathing out for 40 seconds, then holding the breath for 30 again, meaning he's doing one full breath every 120 seconds.
Next comes Dharana, where the magician focuses his mind, blanking out all thoughts except for a single object of concentration, able to focus totally without distractions.
All of this is meant to lead one to a state of Dhyana, awareness, where you enter an altered level of consciousness that can be used on the one hand to vastly improve your senses and perceptions, and on the other to enter into states of trance that allow you to communicate with spiritual entities (when combined with other magical practices).

Of course, this sort of shit takes months or years of work, and most people just give up on it.  But if you should want your PCs to run into a "real" magician/yogi in the game, or to play one, prolonged effort of this kind should lead them to be able to resist extremes of cold and heat (bonuses to saving throws?), hold the breath for long periods of time (endurance?), and have incredible powers of concentration (useful for the performance of ritual magic later, where concentration is absolutely essential to the ritual working successfully).

There are other kinds of non-stretchy yoga too; Kundalini yoga being a popular one.  Contrary to the common assumption about that, it has incredibly little to do with sex.  Of course, a great deal of people the PCs run into will probably talk about kundalini yoga as if its all about getting some "sacred sex" going and trying to do so with the player characters.  Others who are into kundalini yoga will go on and on about "chakras", talking about them as though they're real physical centers in the body, even though the yogic texts make it clear that they're meant to be allegorical. But to make a long story short, someone who's really practiced kundalini yoga will be using these allegories of the "chakras" to create a kind of harmony between mind and body, emotions and thought, and can use these abilities to do things like ignore considerable amounts of physical pain, speed up the healing process, develop increased memory, and again improve their sense of awareness.
I suppose if you want to, you can treat "prana" (energy) in your game as something a bit more literal than allegorical, or in any case you can emphasize the psychosomatic effects of the same, and someone who is trained in kundalini yoga could be able to help cure someone with an "energetic disease" or, in theory, cause one.

More on this stuff later.

RPGPundit

(august 2, 2011)

Quote from: RPGPundit;567472But if you should want your PCs to run into a "real" magician/yogi in the game, or to play one, prolonged effort of this kind should lead them to be able to resist extremes of cold and heat (bonuses to saving throws?), hold the breath for long periods of time (endurance?), and have incredible powers of concentration (useful for the performance of ritual magic later, where concentration is absolutely essential to the ritual working successfully).

Reference the works and achievements of Wim Hof for more information on the above.