There was a time when I thought that I knew or possessed all there was to know about the occult, and I thought, “Is that it?”
I was wrong.
The fact is that although one may be tempted to assume that Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn between them dispose of the majority of the occult teachings of the present day, there is a vast amount of material out there of equal if not greater quality, which seldom gets talked about. The truth of the matter is that Crowley and the GD only account for the majority of the occult in the English language. If, however, you want to venture outside the influence of the Anglophone sphere, there is a trove waiting to be discovered.
In this respect, the most important foreign languages for an English-speaking occultist are not Hebrew, Coptic and Enochian, but French, German and Italian. There is a large corpus of marvellous occult material in these languages, but because it has never been translated into English, most people in English-speaking countries have never heard of it. It is of course possible that there is yet more in other languages.
I currently am busy translating a load of French rituals into English. To save time I am attempting to use an automatic translation program – but then proof-read the results thoroughly to get the correct nuances and iron out the inevitable errors that these things throw up. One trivial example: the French word Gardien means “Guardian” but also “goalkeeper.” I am therefore having to deal with a French ritual for attaining Knowledge and Conversation of one’s Holy Goalkeeper Angel 🙂
Live! At The Witch Trials
Burn her anyway!
I read today in the Daily Telegraph of how authorities in Germany are reviewing the 400 year old case of a woman burned for witchcraft. What gets me though is that instead of just giving her a posthumous pardon, they are actually “resuming her trial.” 😮
Why??? As I said in a comment to another post, if modern standards of justice were applied to all those of accused of witchcraft in the past, they would all be acquitted, or their cases would never have come to trial in the first place, because (a) their acts would not nowadays be classed as crimes; (b) their confessions were obtained by torture (and hence would be inadmissable as evidence); and (c) it is doubtful that the allegations would be treated with anything other than scepticism anyway. I suppose that because of (stereo)typical German efficiency they have to go through the rigmarole of re-trying the woman in order to exonerate her.
However, before Wiccans start rejoicing, one should note that the present case is taking place not because of the efforts of a pagan activist but those of an evangelical pastor and religious education teacher. Therefore his agenda is not to prove that as a pagan she was not guilty, but as a Christian she was not guilty. The argument being that – like almost all of the 25,000 people accused of Witchcraft between 1500 and 1782 – they were almost all not Pagans, but Christians who had been wrongly accused.
Leave a comment
Filed under Comment
Tagged as daily telegraph, Germany, paganism, Witchcraft