[Opinion] Stance -- what it is, what it ain't, and how ta get some.

[Lucien6493]

Stance is like a cobra. It does not argue. It does not prevaricate. It shows up and the room re-arranges itself, just like magick, though it does not concern itself overly much with either theory or praxis, these being the prettily woven chiasm of twin serpents to the right and to the left of the winged staff of Mercury, creating by their crossing over the gates through which power flows like a Uraeus. And if the staff be that of a king, stance will see fit to envenomate and to devour them, even as Moses cast his staff before Pharaoh. So it is best to approach the subject with obliquity, for it is in the angle that the secret of the art is concealed.

Now, stance might instantiate spontaneously if the witch comes from an established lineage, such as the Judaic or the Neoplatonic, but only then if it has become so deeply embedded that it verges on proprioception. In other words, if it becomes the medium through which you move; if it becomes the eyes of the world you look through and not something of which you are consciously aware then it can be said that stance has devoured the twin serpents of theory and praxis. And don't get me wrong here. The eye through which you see, the medium through which you move is the in-forming of a living spiritual tradition, stance arising out of that as an emergent condition. To turn this around is to invoke the dark angel. You cannot practice stance. You cannot bring it about. You cannot imitate it, nor can you inherit it like your family jewels, for stance is sovereignty, and sovereignty is nothing special.

In the good old days of plague, decapitations and other sundry pleasures stance simply meant knowing your allotted place within the great chain of being. It was knowing where you stood. In fact, it gave you a place to stand. Your own place, vouchsafed by the divine, and from which nothing, be it in heaven, on earth or below it could move you. To come from stance, then, is in modern parlance to place the inertia of the entire creation behind your Will, by divine fiat. Everything else is optional because when you stand within the inviolate integrity of your own being magick is no longer something that you do. It becomes something that you inhabit. This, anyway is how I read all of those endless orisons in our beloved grims....as orientation, as positioning. But, well, most of us don't live in that world anymore, a world where reality itself was ensouled, and where spirits walked with us, but we can ground ourselves to the vertical axis without collapsing the one into the other, and that is where belief comes in. I will leave it at that for now.

 

[jbyer]

You should reconsider your stance on gatekeeping/psuedo intellectualism, try and keep things short and concise.

 

[Morell]

A little confused indeed.

It confuses me linguistically, at least. Guess that you might not be native English speaker. The term "stance" is used for physical position of the body. When it comes to mind, opinions and such, the right term is "standing."

...you could also be describing the "sense of belonging," or "belonging" in short.

Post automatically merged: Saturday at 7:13 PM

Also for describing place of your standing in society is "standing" too...

 

[MorganBlack]

I got what Lucien was saying just fine. I think. The real fun is in the exploration. The provocation.

The people I usually can't tell what the fuck they going on about are the neopagans and Witchtokers. They usually have no detectable metaphysic. I know they think they are saying something communicable, but it all just sounds like baby-gargle to me. And if you ask them what they hell they mean they act smug. But I don't come at them and call them gatekeepers, and they certainly are cramped and confusing.

Mystical writings usually use a twilight language with "nonsensical," provocative, or suggestive imagery. Would you really prefer to be spoon-fed? Jump to Sunbtack. You an have TONS of said very sincere, very nice, very academic spoon-feeding. And sometimes it just takes fucking takes forever to find the historical ideas that communicate gnosis - but I got him. Sometimes you just gotta sing it.

As a Neoplatonist of the Iamblichan sort I have to admit Platonism really could use updating with Dr. Jeffrey Kripal’s Dual-Aspect Monism. In Dr. Kripal’s framework there is only "One Thing" (hence the monism). Underlying the fabric of reality is this singular, unified substrate.

We human beings, our consciousness acts like a prism, splitting that single reality into two distinct expressions - the dual-aspects. These are the mental (the inside of things, subjectivity, meaning, thought) and the material (the outside of things, physics, space, object). But they are the all same One Thing.

So I once some asked a pagan friend of mine, "Where do you think that ritual knife you're holding IS, exactly? Be specific." If he said, in the womb of the Goddess, I would agree. But it was just confusing to him.

I got what Lucian was saying. Your "stance" - and the worldview you hold, you family, the questions you ask, the degree of openness or rigidity you bring, how your body is feeling, whether you are angry, peevish, happy, horny, or depressed, and even the things in your environment, all of it is a dynamic, creative filter - your stance -that create your experiences. I like that word a lot too. It speaks to you are relating to the All. A "daimon" -the one you experience is ALL of that, in space-time.

So a daimon that is helpful to me may be poison to you. And vice versa. Your "stance" makes this so. Meaning all of the above. And in ritual your expectation mater, as well if you decide to use fire, hot peppers, and gunpowder - or honey, water, fine perfume and champagne. It’s not because these things are "feeding them energy" as neopagans think. The stuff IS them... and us in my view. Well, part of us. . We just get to choose what stuff to use, and what manifestation we get to have, because we humans are cool like that.

 

[Morell]

You have it out for neopagans and tiktokers just as much as I have it out for abrahamics.

Definitely you have very different angle or point of view that I have, so makes sense that while this seems obvious to you, it seems confusing to me. I still insist that standing is better term here, even when it includes physical presence, it's physical presence within a society. Even in "mystical rumbling" a mystic is trying to share something and to be understood. Not that it really works.

We all have some sort of vocabulary in our heads, that matches the terms with meaning basing on our own understanding and experience of the world. So no matter what you say, every term that people find in their internal vocabulary, they understand in their way, so if you want to reach out with something you get far better results with using vocabulary that is on others' heads. ... you are not copying knowledge from your head to theirs, you need to develop and grow knowledge within their heads... if you get the difference.

 

[MorganBlack]

Well, shit. Since were getting personal here.

Know this is not personal, so I will tell you what the do. The exact thing they do is a a mixed up confusion of Platonism and animism to make the worst version of both, excusing this giant "pagan" turducken as "folk magic."

For the other issues I will address. See the dynamic from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

These fragile tender-pagans. They sure can dish it out, but they can't take it. We were all friends, and it was all fine until some of them started attacking me and other Folk Catholics with sneers, slurs, and condescension. That was when I stopped being inclusive and decided I will not tolerate their bigotry.

When I accidentally found Neo-Nazi pagans on Signal and entire online communities filled to bursting with rotten anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-brown people sentiment, that's when I realized something had gone terribly wrong with the neopagan revivalism effort.

I support it in general, but come on. It is all fed by the same victim narrative. Talk about Nietzschean Ressentiment. The neopagan and pagan religion has become all about the weak complaining they are oppressed. It was supposed to be more than a hug-box.

Re "vocabulary." I agree with you. But it's so much more than that. That vocabulary is OUR vocabulary, the traditional magicians' vocabulary they are appropriating. The fact that they know very little about the Western magic tradition, nor our philosophical traditions, does not mean I have to concede the ground to them just because they outnumber me.

There's a deep end and shallow end to every pool, and they are the shallow end. Their own elders were smarter and less entitled. I knew many of them. So, I reject the consensus they made among themselves, and will not bow before the tyranny of intolerant religious extremists.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 7:10 PM

Oh, just to add, here.

I will go to bat for anyone in any mythic framework they want to use. Just do try to play nice with others.

But this other shit, this is my red line. Please try to see it from my side.

The word "Abrahamist" has evolved over the past few years from a inaccurate and pretty hand-wavy term into a weaponized pagan extremist dog-whistle. Recently, in the past decade, it;s become used explicitly to strip away the cultural, historical, and ethnic distinctions of minority communities, lumping all of us into a single, hostile and mostly hallucinated monolithic boogie-man for white suburbanites.

've notice recently the work has become indicator of pagan radicalizationm so that if someone uses it i will suspect them of being an intolerant religious extremist, or possibly even a Neo-Nazi, until proven otherwise.

You have to try and see it from my Latino experience.

Our communities are directly in the crosshairs of this radicalized pagan hostility. Sure, Its' all fun and games and dancing getting blotted., but for us the downsides of this viewpoint are real.

Extremists are the ones burning down and vandalizing our churches. According to civil rights groups and hate-crime tracking by agencies like the FBI, Catholic houses of worship have faced a sharp escalation in targeted attacks over the last several years, with hundreds of incidents of arson, property destruction, and direct threats recorded annually across North America.

My son attends Mass at a church in Portland. OR. If you look at the pews, it's mostly elderly Polish octogenarians and many Latino families. Two years ago the FBI had to explicitly step in and warn the parish administration that domestic extremists were actively planning an attack on the church.

My son is a thorough-going Lefty Catholic, pro-working class, anti-war, as we tend to be. An you know what? He was more horrified to discover that the feds had moles and informants embedded inside the local community's activist networks , than he was about his own immediate safety. That is Catholic charity. Under duress that love of neighbor comes through.

In really real in-the-real-world reality of Portland pagans terrorizing my family or threatening the spaces where vulnerable people gather completely destroys any illusion of an "inclusive" pagan spirituality. This intersection of far-right "folkish" ideology, eco-fascism, and aggressive online radicalization on platforms like Signal has mutated into sort a dangerous entitlement, hallucination over fake-lore history, and hysteria.

By all accounts, and my own actions, I am a terrible Catholic. I am by far less a much less nice person than the more mainstream Catholics are, and I refuse to "turn the other cheek" and cede cultural, spiritual, or physical ground to extremists hiding behind a hijacked "pagan" vocabulary. Just.

Try to be better. That's all I ask.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 8:15 PM

Just know that the slur sets my teeth on edge - mostly for all the persecution and needless stress it causes to my family, as I mentioned above.

Until 500 years ago ( capital 'M') Magic was mostly Folk Catholicism. And most of it is still to this day. At least in this hemisphere. The fact nobody knows yet acts entitled is a major white person blind spot. Ya'll really have no idea.

And honestly, don't you think people who act like they have an interest in esoterica and magic should know this? The fact they don't makes me suspect it's all a big neopagan LARP.

They only get upset because I'm impolite and evil enough to pike fun at them. Not real hostility is intended. I happen to like many pagan and Wiccans, as Ive sad on this site many times.

And Isn't WF is supposed to be where everyone puts on their big boy pants? In case you haven't not noticed, they all HATE this site.This site is ONE place that is free from the business reality the rest of the entire magical publishing business has focus on, coddling them and prioritizing their New Age viewpoints, to sell to their massive consumer market of Marvel-Disney pagans.

OK, enough of that. I hope we can all move on.

I would like to get to the place where everybody could de-escalate. Until then If I keep making fun of the parts of that "magic book" market of pagan hyper-consumers that is a silly LARP - and point out some unconformable truths. It might happen one day. I hope. Or it could all blow up.

 

[WonderFire]

The great chain of being and your supposed place in it is a psyop by spirits who want you to be their little bitch and not question what you get out of building temples and shrines to them for nothing in return.
Then some humans realized they can get into the game as well. "Shut up serf, I was ordained by the pope, all authority comes from God!"
Yet the Devil and Madame La Guillotine had some other ideas.

 

[MorganBlack]

Well, not a fan of Romaneque state building , not by Catholics, nor anybody

The thing is I WANT the neopagan revivalists to succeed. I actually am rooting for them. No kidding here.

I want them to have millions of pagans so The Numinous comes through those mythologies. It does not have to be Catholic coded. Nobody owns "The One."

But they really have no idea. The Folk Catholicism healings are quite amazing. Legit miracles happen, physical healing. I could go on, but why bother? The pagans could have that too. The extreme bending of reality to improve people's lives can happen for them. They just got derailed as an online grievance hate-cult. Their 'stance' sucks.

 

[Lucien6493]

I am going to reframe this discussion ever so slightly because stance is not a lifestyle choice, it is a technical term pertaining to an ontology that has been displaced by a postmodernist understanding of language as the substrate of the world, and bridging those two worlds is a real problem because if you live in a world where only language exists, then the source‑code of reality looks like just another language game. But stance isn’t a narrative—it’s constituent of the architecture beneath the narratives. To call that gatekeeping is like arguing that HTLM is optional in reference to the game client. Stance is where the real enters the rendered. As far as magick goes, it makes things effortless, extremely fast and but highly destabilizing to postmodern concepts of reality. Most people do just fine without it, slogging diligently away between theory and praxis sometimes for lifetimes on end. It is a perfectly respectable way of going about such things if you don't actually believe that what you are doing has real world consequences and if you can live with an ontology of half-baked projections, vibes and mood-boards.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 10:00 PM

And @Morell...mystics are not trying to explain anything. They’re invoking the very ground that makes knowing anything possible in the first place. Fortunately they are forced to use the language of complex systems such as neural networks and ecosystems, namely metaphor, in a way which is unavoidably recursive, fractal, non-linear and self-referential. I say fortunately because we manifestly lack, thanks to our cultural literalism any capacity to actually live with the unknowable in a meaningful way.

 

[akenu]

I've honestly never heard of a "stance" like this outside of Jojo's bizzare adventures...

 

[MorganBlack]

I love the word 'stance' - and have used it a fair amount to talk about some subtle points of spirit-magic.

Since I can't invite you into the circle to see how magicians do things, we are having to use words here to describe a magician's mode-of-being.

Your stance literally is YOU + your relating-to-the-world.

The quality of your stance manifests different qualities of forces and powers. If you are sweet, you get a sweet manifestation. If you are mean, like I am, you get a mean manifestation.

I like to simplify classical Neoplatonism for a modern audience and just say a daimon is "always half you." That half of them you experience is your "stance. "

Daimons are psychoid entitles - part mind, part matter - and your "stance" - meaning here all that you bring to the table - shapes how they act, what they appear like, and what they do, or even not do. Ritualize and treat them like hellspawn demons and they will be legit demons. Change your stance and they are UFOs, or fae, or pagan gods. But also look at the utter uselessness for magic of the many daimonic manifestations in the UFO/UAP or DMT machine elves phenomenon. YOU matter here. You stance matters. Your expectation matters.

In Neoplatonic terms, that is the shape and nature of the daimon you experience, is the combination of you, your subjectivity, and the rest of the sublunar world. So, in calling a daimon for war, a magician will take a different stance than calling them for love or success.

It all matters. How we act, what we have around us, the materia and reagent, the timing, the ambient broader culture, our tools, the specific grim or even the lack of a grim, or the internet as a grim. the inner meaning we carry into ceremony, our mood, the words we use, whether those words are known and recognized by the daimons when you call them.... It all matters, far far more than just psychology. It gives them bodies to use and effect our intent. (well,in part, but that is another topic)

 

[FireBorn]

@Lucien6493 damn bro, talk about trying to put lightening in a bottle. I may not be able to articulate what you wrote intellectually cleanly like big brained @MorganBlack , but I also think that is part of the point.

I like the sovereignty aspect a lot. Like a lot a lot. That part resonates with me fully. Everything I have learned in the occult is about sovereignty. Owning my shit fully without the bullshit narrative or moral excuses others try to force upon you. Learning to embody this life fully without apology.

To me: Stance is my fire before it becomes action. Stance is the place my fire stands from. Stance is the shape my fire takes when I stop apologizing for existing.

So yeah, keep writing in that oblique Lucien way. I think some of that is just your style, not you trying to be coy for the sake of being coy. Others will resonate, or they won’t.

I may have also completely shit the bed here and missed the point. I can carry that too ha! Either way, I miss your posts brother!

 

[MorganBlack]

Yep yep.

'The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.'

Dr. Jeffrey Kripal once said, and I agree, "Religion is art that forgotten it's art." We need the poets!

I tend to speak pragmatically and operationally. I take my weird adventures in grimoire magic and ground them in the pre-20th century Western Magical tradition, Neoplatonism, evidence-based history, and philosophy. (My weird Catholicism is a bit of fluke because of Mom, there. )

Bureaucratic Catholicism is stupid, but why the hell people keep want to making progressively stupider religious constructs I find weird (and not good weird) , and beside the point of all this. The ones we have are not perfect, but thinking anything new we make will ever be perfect is a fool's errand.

Humans are great distortion engines. What makes us good at magic, is terrible for hard religious statements, except as a Zen "finger pointing to the moon." At least with magic, we can tell whether we are being successful or not.

 

[Lucien6493]

You didn't miss the point at all, man. You pretty much hit dead center. I got the idea from @MorganBlack actually and just ran with it. Stance saved me from trying to reverse engineer my ceaseless pranking of myself. As in, "what the hell did I just do?". But yes, I see it in terms of sovereignty. Very much so. It is why I don't do banishings. I'm part of the field, so if a spirit wants to contend with me it can look at itself in the mirror of my stance. I just open my heart to it, all the way, because that is where my human self and the magick meet.