Recently Ivo Dominguez Jr published a thought provoking article where he discussed the lack of the literacy in magic in today's Pagans. While I found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of what he had to say (I've observed in the past that there is an increasing amount of emphasis on removing magic from Paganism because it makes Paganism less acceptable to the mainstream*), I also found his use of the word literacy problematic, and by extension it caused me to re-examine his article and some of my agreement with the article in a different light. As a result, I think it worthwhile to examine the concept of the literacy of magic, both in relationship to the word literacy and its variety of meanings, and also in context to the practice of magic vs the "literacy" of magic, which I'll argue are not one and the same (in part 2 of this series). In fact, part of the issue I have with the use of the word literacy is that conjures up the armchair magician, a person has read a lot of books on magic, but has done little, if anything, with that magical knowledge. I would locate the armchair magician on the opposite end of the illiterate Pagan (at least as that illiteracy applies to magic). However, as we'll see, it's simplistic to categorize anyone as literate or illiterate, because literacy itself is a loaded term.
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Just as a clarification, I did not say that the Western Magickal Tradition was the only source for trusted systems, only that it w
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Hi Ivo, Thanks for the clarification. I really appreciate that you've written that post, because it's gotten some much needed con
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I would hazard a guess that it is because we are talking about different kinds of magic. To take a simplified approach, you can d
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I'm of a different mind in that I'd maintain that humans were practitioners of magic before we were practitioners of religion. Tha
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I'd say part of it is due to the same factors which are apparent in the discussion of the word 'literacy' and the looseness of lan