
Banishing pentagram. Start from the lower left point and continue around, finishing where you started.
Those swines at Quora.com deleted one of my answers there on the grounds that it violated one of their policies. They didn’t say which policy, and on the basis that my answer did not – for once – contain any smut or bad language, I must assume it was because I included a link to Aaron Leitch’s website in it. (NB: I’m sure they had nothing personal against Aaron Leitch, it was just the fact that it was an external website).
Anywho, I was just answering a simple little question, to wit: “How can you return black magic back upon the sender’s own head?” My reply:
Witches Janet & Stewart Farrar wrote that all that is needed to send such magic back to its caster is a sufficiently powerful magical defence. With this in mind you cannot do better than the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which is the classic basic protection ritual.
It occurred to me that I wrote this a few years ago, so would I have anything to add to that? If I had not been in a hurry I might have added that there are other ways apart from the LBRP, of course. For example: just by living a virtuous life. Porphyry told a story that a philosopher called Olympius once tried to curse the great Neo-Platonist Plotinus – only for the curse to bounce right off and affect the embittered upstart instead. Plotinus was by all accounts a highly spiritually advanced person, but he did not practice ritual magic as far as anyone knew, so his powers of magical protection must have arisen as a side-effect of his other spiritual practices.
There are probably many other miscellaneous techniques but the only other one of which I have direct experience is that if one actually knew what skulduggery any given sorcerer were up to, it would be possible to craft a magical defence specific to that situation. This is a rare occurrence, as usually if a sorcerer is powerful enough to cast effective magic, they will not be stupid enough to broadcast the fact they are doing so (fourth power of the Sphinx and all that), but it has happened.
Why are people so ready and willing to accept magical thinking? – Quora
“Magical thinking” may be out of place in the hard sciences, but Scientists tend to forget – not everything in this world is Scientific. The most obvious example of which is Art – by which I include literature, music, film & theatre, and just about everything we do for cultural and aesthetic reasons.
In order to appreciate a work of Science Fiction, one has to has to have a Magical Thinking mindset, not a Scientific one, because the plot necessarily requires a suspension of disbelief. The same could also be said for horror fiction, fantasy fiction, etc
It is also necessary to accept Magical Thinking in order to appreciate history itself, since as late as the middle of the twentieth century, the Arts were given greater emphasis in education than the Sciences. There was indeed a time when it was thought that you could get farther in life with a knowledge of the works of (e.g.) Shakespeare than of Isaac Newton. This is not necessarily the view of modern education, but if you didn’t actually realise this then you would fail to understand the decision making processes of the world’s most influential people of the comparatively recent past.
Finally of course, Magical Thinking is a requisite for understanding actual magic. 😉
Source: Alex Sumner’s answer to Why are people so ready and willing to accept magical thinking? – Quora
Leave a comment
Filed under Comment
Tagged as Darth Vader, magical thinking, quora.com, Star Wars