A Categorization of Magic Systems (long)

[BPetroff93]

I wasn't trying to suggest anything about your post my friend.  I noticed that this thread was drifting into an area that I have some experience in.  To me this is a subject just as real or scientific as physics.  I realize most people do not feel that way about it, but I thought I would offer some imput.  However, I was concerned about how on topic such input would be.  I thought perhaps if some posters were interested, we could start a child thread in Indie design about using modern magickal theory as an RPG basis.  The entire thrust of my post was to inquire as to what direction this conversation was moving in.

Crowleyite isn't offensive to me, however it is misleading.  I was simply passing on the information as most people are not aware of the distinction.  (Those few who have heard it)

[redwalker]

Now the thing is that in a Neoplatonic conception, the planetary spheres are also controlled and run by demons -- note, not devils.  They have no specific moral value, but are in effect semi-intelligent forces that just follow the orders of God as He placed them in the universe.
...
3. Religious/Ceremonial Magic
This is about contacting demons from the divine sphere, which is to say angels or devils.  You may ask them to do something, or you may simply wish to participate in their nature, making yourself more like them.  The trick is that such beings are by an Aristotelian conception totally beyond us, superior to us in every way; by a Neoplatonic conception, they are subordinate to us, because God made us in His image, and didn't make them so, and there's a reason for that, and similarly His son the Logos was incarnated as a human man, not as an angel, which should tell us something about the special providence afforded to mankind.

Deliberately contacting and manipulating devils is 100% illicit, but that's not to say it's ineffective.  
...
References:
...
Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

Irrelevant side note: That's an impressive publication list.  

Relevant point:
You're probably familiar with the grimoires that say it's okay to call up an angel to bless your wand with the blasting power of Zariatnamik (or something similar) then call up a devil and threaten it with the power of Zariatnamik.

I can see a hard-core Neo-Platonist rationalizing such an act as justified.  But it would be illicit in your terminology, meaning that it would be punished by civil and/or ecclesiastical courts.  (Now, do you mean to say Agrippa thought it was illicit, or just about everybody thought it was illicit?)

My question to you is: do you make a distinction between straight-up pacts with the devil and methods which call the angels first, get the blasting power, and then compel the devils?  (And if so, how much of that distinction is Agrippa and how much is more general than Agrippa?)

[clehrich]

My question to you is: do you make a distinction between straight-up pacts with the devil and methods which call the angels first, get the blasting power, and then compel the devils?  (And if so, how much of that distinction is Agrippa and how much is more general than Agrippa?)

Even Agrippa would be rather uncomfortable with this, I suspect; deliberately contacting devils (except to make them go away) was pretty far beyond the pale at the time.  You do certainly have grimoire texts that are in favor of this, but I've never heard of anyone defending them until very modern times.  Besides, with a number of these grimoires there is real question as to whether anyone actually performed the rituals, or whether to some extent they were not a kind of shock literature.

Agrippa was well outside the norm of his day, but was very influential.  It seems certain that Giordano Bruno and John Dee got a considerable amount of their respective justifications for angelic theurgy from Agrippa's work, for example.  But in 1533 when Agrippa's De occulta philosophia first appeared in complete form, he was fighting against normative definitions of licit magic.

The traditional distinction (from somewhere in the middle ages onward) within Catholic theology held that there was natural magic, which was licit, and then there was demonic magic, which was not, and included everything that wasn't natural.  Divination (e.g. astrology) was always kind of difficult to slot into this division.

Basically what happened was that people divided up magic into licit and illicit, or good and bad, and then labeled the groups "natural" and "demonic" respectively.  So for example, Ficino and Trithemius had these complicated definitions of what constituted natural and demonic magic, but they didn't really hold together logically; it was at base a question of defining what they considered legitimate as natural.  Conversely, you had more hard-line theologians who would try to contract the sphere of the natural so as to brand as much as possible demonic.  You see this quite strongly in Counter-Reformation thinkers like Martin Del Rio, at the turn of the 17th century.

Agrippa was one of the first thinkers, and certainly the first really systematic thinker, to argue that this binary distinction was useless.  He actually advocated for a certain kind of demonic magic as not only licit but actually holy, if done properly.  But he also went to some lengths to make that inobvious in his work.  Bruno and Dee and the like picked it up, naturally, and so you see Dee beavering away in his basement summoning angels right and left.  It's funny you should ask this, actually, because quite honestly until I wrote my book on Agrippa nobody ever seems to have seen the radical nature of Agrippa's thought, nor understood why he was so influential.  At base, scholars never seem to have read the texts very carefully.

At any rate, the Reformation was in general tougher on this binary distinction than the Catholics had been, but the Counter-Reformation got on board with the Reformation hard-line on this issue.  Basically they went to great lengths to contract the notion of "natural" as much as possible.  This was actually one of the influences that helped support the formation of what we now call "science," in that it postulated a notion that the study of nature must be radically divorced from the metaphysical, and that operative work with the metaphysical must be demonic (and hence illicit).

Anyway, hope that helps.  Sorry to have derailed this thread; that wasn't my intention.  What I wanted to do was to give some sense of just how complex this classification was and is, so that for RPG purposes we could avoid absolute statements.

[redwalker]

 Basically they went to great lengths to contract the notion of "natural" as much as possible.  This was actually one of the influences that helped support the formation of what we now call "science," in that it postulated a notion that the study of nature must be radically divorced from the metaphysical, and that operative work with the metaphysical must be demonic (and hence illicit).

Anyway, hope that helps.  Sorry to have derailed this thread; that wasn't my intention.  What I wanted to do was to give some sense of just how complex this classification was and is, so that for RPG purposes we could avoid absolute statements.

That actually helps me tremendously.  A lot of my gaming inspirations derive from the distinction between magic and science and your words have given me much food for thought.  Thank you very much.

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

I know that I have been totally AWOL for a while, but my beautiful daughter has been a huge distraction (11 days old and has Daddy wrapped around her finger).  Anyway, this real world discussion of magic is going into interesting places, but I think that it is somewhat off-topic.  I'm starting a new thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10995 where we could perhaps more conveniently continue this.

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

Let me try and steer this conversation back to more gaming territory.  I should have made clearer my use of "metaphysic" meant something like "explanation" and has nothing to do with rules per se.  That is, I wasn't making any suggestions on how to create game rules for magic.   The metaphysic could correlate to the mechanics, but in no way has to, although I'm not sure that I'd agree that examples are as bleak as has been suggested.

I was, I suppose, implying that any game that uses magic as an element should contain some notion of how and why that magic operates in a narrative sense, not a mechanical sense.  That doesn't mean that they characters know this, but I do believe that the characters must have some explanation for what they are doing.  Sane people don't go around doing things with no theory as to why and how they are doing them.  Does that make me a pro-Sim gamer?  Probably.  But even in a more Narrativist game, I'd think that you would want to have some idea of what is going on.  Having no idea of how magic operates would be like playing a swashbuckling game and having no idea how sailing works: sure you could do it and probably tell a good story, but its all a bit odd.  "I open my sails the whole way, rush toward the pirates, and then slam on the brakes!"  Unless the point of the game is that you can make up all the rules of reality as you go (insert the obvious example here), then there need to be some agreed upon rules for how reality behaves.  

Normally we don't consider this in games because most of the rules are the same as in our lives (well, maybe amped up a bit): we all understand that if your character jumps off the building, he will fall down to the ground.  But this is exactly what you don't have if there is no metaphysic of magic.  Just to pick some real simple examples: do I, as a mage, detect the presence of magic around me?  Could I attempt to deflect or dispel magics cast against me?  Do I have a better chance of working an enchanted object?  Is there a moral component to magic, quite apart from social opinion?  Even D&D has most of these questions answered, but you have to extract some of them.

Let me ask a question at this point: to those who don't find *the source* of magic as a principal distinction, I'm curious as to what you think it should be?  I am so far unconvinced by arguments, but want to hear more of them.  I already suggested why "supernatural" doesn't work.  Chris went to great effort to discuss early modern conceptions of magic: I would note that this is all a Type II magic, which then divides into natural and unnatural categories.  Opposing this, the orthodox Church practices a Type I.A. magic and regards occult sciences as really being Type I.B.