Spirits and the Human Mind

Oct 16, 2010

Greetings faithful bloggers!

I’m posting this while I get ready to head out to GSG for the workshop today.  I wanted to take a few moments to respond to a comment posted this morning on my Solomonic Yahoo Group.  Since this is pretty foundational stuff, I thought I would share it with all of you:

In solomonic@yahoogroups.com, a member wrote:
> >
> >  I think we need to study the mind rather than seals. But then seals are

> > representations of aspects of the mind….

Crowley’s intro to the Goetia would agree with you.  I would say it is over-simplistic to the point of being dead wrong.

The seals represent the 72 Spirits.  Those Spirits represent forces of nature.  Those forces of nature have their correspondences in the human mind (example: storms often evoke melancholy).  Thus, the presence of a spirit can activate the portions of the human mind to which it naturally corresponds.  (And, in fact, summoning a spiritual entity properly involves manually activating the appropriate mental states to begin with, and avoiding the activation of the wrong ones.)

When one suggests that spirits, or their seals, merely represent portions of the human psyche, one is missing out on their true nature.  I concede the fact that the names, images, descriptions and seals we have for any spiritual creature (even God) evolved strictly among humans- and represent our unique ape-interface with the spiritual world.  *However*, the forces of nature they represent neither depend on humans for existence nor care whether we exist at all.

Great example:  Our own Kathy McDonald learned about the personalities of the spirits of the seven planets by working metallurgy.  (See her “Pauline Arts Adventure” – which should be in our files section.)  She didn’t do it by reading psychology textbooks.

LVX
Aaron