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3 June 2020 14:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaon"Nothing is 'apolitical’. No one deals with issues that are 'beyond human affairs’. Consider how appealing to transcendent powers, archetypes, or ‘nature’ propagates, legitimises & enforces power structures & political hegemony. Consider the possibilities of a Critical Magick."
See, I don't even necessarily agree with this - and yet...
...a fundamental part of what the spiritual is, is an attempt to go beyond the human. Whether that's seeking greater connection to the natural world, to your ancestors, or to a rarified divine outside the sphere of everyday affairs. Turning away from the world has always been a spiritual tool, in almost every culture - people seeking solitude with the divine, people choosing to live with different habits (often very challenging ones, like rules about sex, food or personal dress).
It almost seems like a cop out to say, as a person of faith or who does magic, "it doesn't matter what I do because it's all ultimately about humans anyway", a disavowal of what can be some of spirituality's greatest gifts.
(Imagine a six pointed star. On one point is the Stellar, and on the point opposing it is the Solar-Lunar (crap name, sorry), which is symbolised by light.
Now, the line between these two points can be turned both ways. In one direction, the most-mortal point of Solar-Lunar is uppermost, and it shows the dominion of human affairs - the worldview of this tweet, almost, where everything returns to human power structures and human affairs; and the flipside of that is, this point on the map asserts human ability to control and master the world and nature. It is the point associated with machinery, skill, and also revolution (because it is the Lunar impacting the Solar, it is a motion away from something stagnant - it is both dazzling and renewing fire, and the chaos of the riot). It is the post associated with a lot of World Religions, in which man is the image of the divine who loves us, and through Him we are masters of all we survey - we named the animals, our planet is circled by the sun and the stars, our ability to summon a brilliant and dazzling celestial light of enlightement, mastery and power, the glory of the divine as embodied in us, like an angel in golden armour bearing a silver sword, challenging the Holy Father in his walled and perfect city, demanding change.
Now reverse the line. The human is below your feet, and what's around you is immensity. What could be smaller or more meaningless than human structures, feelings or skill? The planet earth is a small island on dark seas of infinity, and we're not even at the center (the universe has no center - it is everywhere and nowhere). We are part of an ecosystem, and we did name the plants and fish, but they have their secret words for themselves which we cannot understand - and they have their own gods too, and myths in which the world is cetaceanocentric, felinocentric, mustelidocentric. We make ourselves small if we only look at other human faces and fill our lives with words and pictures made by one another. And out, beyond the natural world, the divine is something larger than us - in time, in space, in scope, in caverns measureless to man.
Landcraft is built on our ability to rotate that star like a kind of compass, pointing us to where we want to go. Both of these approaches can be useful, at times; and you can identify these trends in many existing spiritualities; but it's most powerful to hold both as possibilities)
See, I don't even necessarily agree with this - and yet...
...a fundamental part of what the spiritual is, is an attempt to go beyond the human. Whether that's seeking greater connection to the natural world, to your ancestors, or to a rarified divine outside the sphere of everyday affairs. Turning away from the world has always been a spiritual tool, in almost every culture - people seeking solitude with the divine, people choosing to live with different habits (often very challenging ones, like rules about sex, food or personal dress).
It almost seems like a cop out to say, as a person of faith or who does magic, "it doesn't matter what I do because it's all ultimately about humans anyway", a disavowal of what can be some of spirituality's greatest gifts.
(Imagine a six pointed star. On one point is the Stellar, and on the point opposing it is the Solar-Lunar (crap name, sorry), which is symbolised by light.
Now, the line between these two points can be turned both ways. In one direction, the most-mortal point of Solar-Lunar is uppermost, and it shows the dominion of human affairs - the worldview of this tweet, almost, where everything returns to human power structures and human affairs; and the flipside of that is, this point on the map asserts human ability to control and master the world and nature. It is the point associated with machinery, skill, and also revolution (because it is the Lunar impacting the Solar, it is a motion away from something stagnant - it is both dazzling and renewing fire, and the chaos of the riot). It is the post associated with a lot of World Religions, in which man is the image of the divine who loves us, and through Him we are masters of all we survey - we named the animals, our planet is circled by the sun and the stars, our ability to summon a brilliant and dazzling celestial light of enlightement, mastery and power, the glory of the divine as embodied in us, like an angel in golden armour bearing a silver sword, challenging the Holy Father in his walled and perfect city, demanding change.
Now reverse the line. The human is below your feet, and what's around you is immensity. What could be smaller or more meaningless than human structures, feelings or skill? The planet earth is a small island on dark seas of infinity, and we're not even at the center (the universe has no center - it is everywhere and nowhere). We are part of an ecosystem, and we did name the plants and fish, but they have their secret words for themselves which we cannot understand - and they have their own gods too, and myths in which the world is cetaceanocentric, felinocentric, mustelidocentric. We make ourselves small if we only look at other human faces and fill our lives with words and pictures made by one another. And out, beyond the natural world, the divine is something larger than us - in time, in space, in scope, in caverns measureless to man.
Landcraft is built on our ability to rotate that star like a kind of compass, pointing us to where we want to go. Both of these approaches can be useful, at times; and you can identify these trends in many existing spiritualities; but it's most powerful to hold both as possibilities)
