Hello everybody,

This is my first post, so I will ramble a bit: thank you for this very interesting website, and congratulation on all the RPGs you succeeded in creating. The site design looks great.

So, there are a lot of different subjects I would like to discuss here, but with the limited amount of time I have on my hands, I'll just start with one. I don't know if the matter has been raised yet. If it has, tell me where, and I'll swear I will read the thread. But I'm definitely not going to search through this:
Our users have posted a total of 49454 articles
We have 1137 registered users
;p

End of rambling (well, I’ll let you judge that !)

So, the title was « mystical roleplay ». During the course of my long years of playing both tabletop RPG and computer RPG (respectively TRPG and CPRG from now on) and my few years of working in the video game industry, I have several times heard (or formulated) that notion that RP can be a mystical experience. That statement took different forms, I’ll quote and develop a few, and then I’ll comment if the subject is interesting to some of you.

According to these ideas, with the decay of the traditional western values, codes and educational system, the youngsters are deprived of a mystical teaching. A teaching that would explain not the hows but the whys of the world. They thus seek a mean to reconnect with their higher aspirations. They use TRPG to basically “self-initiate”. Which means they -consciously or not- seek ascension of the soul through exploration of virtual stories. I’ve heard that about “Warcraft III” and “Morrowind” for instance. I think we could also consider the Ultima series before that, and DragonLance or World Of Darkness in the TRPG district. An over-protected generation creates virtual trials to awaken itself.

Another aspect of the question is that, if the stories, characters and places involved in TRPG and CRPG are virtual and do not exist, the players’ emotions are real. During a really good game, if you have a strong visual imagination, you can almost see images of the virtual world and events. Almost. After the game, the images are not so vivid, but you still can vaguely recall them. After a few years, though, the images we have seen in the real world are pretty blurry as well. So, after some time, both kinds of memories are not so different anymore. Of course, you know that one of the memories is real and the other dream. Still the image is there. Same with the relationships. TRPG is extremely binding when it goes well. It can create very strong friendship bonds. What we imagine is psychologically real.

I think some people even create RPG to actually try to communicate moral values to their players. I can point the French TRPG “Shaan” for instance. I’ll risk the Ultima Series on that one as well, although I’m not sure, and don’t want to speak in the name of the Lord.

All of this being probably connected to what Joseph Campbell calls “creative mythology”.

So, I’d be interested to have your opinions on those matters. Do you think we try or tried at some point to use RPG as a mean toward initiation? Can it be done? Should it?

Bon soir, Renard.

You've covered a lot of ground, let me see if I can be of some help.

First, go to the Articles section and read the GNS and Other Matters of Role-playing Theory article. Pay special attention to Narrativism , especially Premise therein. This seems, to me, to be in line with what you're talking about.

I almost got confused because this forum recently had several threads about mythology, but they don't relate to what you're talking about since they involved in-game mythology whereas you're talking about RPGs as a religious experience, as it were. Not really the same thing

Renard d'eau wrote:

According to these ideas, with the decay of the traditional western values, codes and educational system, the youngsters are deprived of a mystical teaching. A teaching that would explain not the hows but the whys of the world. They thus seek a mean to reconnect with their higher aspirations. They use TRPG to basically “self-initiate”. Which means they -consciously or not- seek ascension of the soul through exploration of virtual stories. I’ve heard that about “Warcraft III” and “Morrowind” for instance. I think we could also consider the Ultima series before that, and DragonLance or World Of Darkness in the TRPG district. An over-protected generation creates virtual trials to awaken itself.

Mystical practices are generaly about withdrawal from engagement with the material world - the world of the senses. However that doesn't mean that thinking about fantasy worlds counts as mysticism - rather it is merely substituting imagined matter and virtualised sensory stimulus for the real thing. Therefore I don't think you're any more likely to experience mystical states of conciousness through roleplaying in imaginary worlds, than through activities in the real world.

Roleplaying, like othe rforms of fiction, is a great way to explore 'what if' scenarios. We can create imaginary worlds with imaginary philosophies and imaginary religions and explore the exploits of imaginary philosophers and teachers. All the while, we can use real world concepts as a resource and therefore explore subjects of direct relevence to the real world using our fantastical thought experiments.

Hwever please don't confuse what we might call experimental theology (or any form of theological discussion or study) with the actual practice of religion or mysticism. We can learn about it through roleplaying, just as we can learn about all kinds of human moral and social concepts through fiction, but we can't actualy do it.


Simon Hibbs

simon_hibbs wrote: Mystical practices are generally about withdrawal from engagement with the material world - the world of the senses.

Renard d'eau wrote: Do you think we try or tried at some point to use RPG as a mean toward initiation? Can it be done? Should it?

Le Joueur wrote:

simon_hibbs wrote: Mystical practices are generally about withdrawal from engagement with the material world - the world of the senses.

I'm not able to speak for "generally" or for Christianity, but I can tell you that a significant number of religions are not about "withdrawal from engagement."[/quote

That's true of course, but then not all religious practices are mystical.

I suppose I may be using the term in a theologicaly technical sense not intended in the orriginal post, but a quick check of Merriam-Webster of the term Mystical suggests that it's meaning in common language is consistent with my interpretation too.

I'm not trying to complicate anything, and if I misunderstood the orriginal question then I appologise.


Simon Hibbs

For some people the lack of "reality" in an RPG is going to be a deal-breaker. Most initiations involve some real, physical act, in addition to the Mythical underpinnings.

A while back, I spoke to a guy who was part of an organization that dealt with the phenomenon that you mention. He said that given that Western Society no longer had any initiation rituals that boys were maturing to physical adulthood without ever reaching spiritual adulthood. As such the organization that he belonged to was dedicated to provide just these sorts of "rites of passage" to men who had never had such.

I thought it strange at the time, but then it occured to me that I had been initiated. Basic Training, 1987, Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. It doesn't get much more "real" or "physical" than that. As Simon points out, most religions do have such initiations, and they are, often, physical (I am reminded of my First Communion).

So I kinda understand the idea. There are probably lots of people who never get any sort of initiation. OTOH, the whole organization seemed to smack of a cult. One of their principles was that they coldn't discuss it much, and certainly coudn't discuss the rituals; presumably to keep it sacrosanct. I think, in some technical senses it was in fact a cult. But at the very least they provided real, physical initiation rituals (I assume).

What you're proposing takes away that physical element. Furthermore, RPGs automatically carry some feeling of artificiality (if they don't for you, seek therapy). Now, there may be some for whom this is still sufficient, and RPGs could certainly cover the mythical requirements. I just think that for many, the lack of that physicality to the initiation, and the potential sense of fraud, would make it ineffective.

Further, RPGs seem like cults to people already. This would certainly push them over the edge and mark them as even more "fringe" than they already are.

Mike

Personally, and not to play saint's advocate or something :), I don't at all see why this can't work. You'd have to have a couple of caveats:

1. Everybody's completely committed to the desired goal --- they're looking for mystical experiences here.

2. Nobody has a strong preconception about what mystical ritual practices are or should be, and thus we're not going to try to "get there" through extremist Simulation.

3. Everyone seriously believes it can work, it's appropriate, it's moral, it's devout, it's respectful. They take it really seriously.

Then you just think about session design in terms of ritual practice. You think about Turner and liminality, where the participants in the ritual (game) are wearing masks (characters), which helps disengage them from profane reality. And so forth.

Bear in mind that what you're going to end up with here is mystical ritual. I personally think that analyzing session play in ritual-theory terms is completely legitimate, but I do think that you're going to get a lot of resistance. Most gamers do not think of their games as ritual, or even potentially so. Many gamers are strongly committed to the idea that there is a deep and unbridgeable divide between "playing it" and "doing it." And the game you end up with is going to be so idiosyncratic, personal (limited to one teeny group), and so unlike other games that I think a lot of gamers would say it isn't an RPG anymore.

But I think it is....

I thought a little bit more about this matter and remembered my personal problem with White Wolf's Mage. The mythology of that game is firmly rooted in various mystical traditions of the real world and oddly (despite my interest in mysticism) I've always found this little fact to push me away from the game. It raises the question for me: why would I want to play this? Whatever accomplished in the game will just be pale "fortune-cookie-philosophy" imitation of an actual epiphany.

Yes, this is in (some) contradiction to my earlier post and I'm wondering about that, but this is how I've viewed Mage.

To play the opposing advocate, the argument would be that the myths that inform other ritual are just as fictional as an RPG. Again, I have no doubt that someone could swallow that part. It's the actual, real, physical element that I find missing. And, before anyone mentions it, I doubt that any LARP experience would do it. That is you can't simulate dunking in the river, you actually have to get dunked.

If one did go to this extent, then it would no longer be role-playing, but actual ritual. And you would be a cult.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: And, before anyone mentions it, I doubt that any LARP experience would do it. That is you can't simulate dunking in the river, you actually have to get dunked.

If one did go to this extent, then it would no longer be role-playing, but actual ritual. And you would be a cult.

The pressupposition is that the participants are in fact deadly earnest and trying to become Freemasons. So, if you do the ritual, and believe that it's for real (that the Freemasons will accept you), and you actually perform the physical parts, then how is this any different from actually doing the ritual?

I fail to see how you could believe that the acting out of the ritual would work if it was a simulation, and the Freemasons know nothing of it.

If you don't have this belief, and are still transformed by the ritual, well then, I've admitted that this is possible. But I think it would work with much less fecundity than the real thing. And given that you are doing all the motions, why not do the real thing?

Mike

I am an atheist, yet I like Haendel's messiah, or Bach's Matthauspassion., and I can sympathize with the emotions that this music evokes (or even experience them to some extent while still not believing). And I doubt anyone has ever been converted by music alone.

Well, of course you wouldn't succeed in performing the initiatory ritual as an actual entrance to the order, but you could succeed in obtaining a similar (spiritual) state the (frex) Freemasons are trying to convey via their use of the relevant symbolism in the initiation.

The key issue is that you're just acting this out. It could be argued that it isn't "really you" who is doing this, but the character you're depicting. Of course, the borders are getting blurry there, but that could be the point (though I do see that it could be viewed as rather cult like activity at this point -- or just a case of a very dedicated player). This seems similar to an actor that upon accepting a role as a drug addict decides to have actual experiences with drugs, or (to use a less criminal example) an actor portraying a boxer actually getting into the ring.

As for the example of music, there is a slight difference. Though you can hear the product of a composer's work and experience that, you're not as likely to be as immersed in the consciousness (ie. the thoughts and worldview that contributed to the work turning out the way it did) in the same depth as you could by following a "doctrine" of sorts. It's not just the experience, but the thinking supporting it.

Anyway, I'm headed towards more aimless rambling. Maybe Renard d'eau who started this should contribute to our musings re: his original intentions with this thread.

- Joachim -

Interesting stuff.

I was "into magic" as they say, during the heyday of my role-playing, at least in terms of quantity. I drew a lot of similar parallels, likening role-playing sessions to effective ritual activity. Now, regardless of one's views about whether magical ritual has any potency in terms of acting at a distance, I certainly think that a very intense RPG experience can be transformative in a psychological sense. (There is a whole psychotherapeutic practice, after all, also called "role-playing.") Mike's point is well-taken, however. Having been through two of the cultic initiations he alludes to (Ordo Templi Orientis[1], first degree, if anyone cares, and I'm not really active in it anymore), physicality definitely makes a difference.

A closer parallel really is what is called "pathworkings"--to a non-believer, people simply close their eyes and imagine things; to the person who does believe in it, these imaginings have effects on some super-real plane of being, which in turn has effects that filter back down into "mundane" reality. These include, but aren't limited to, initiations.

I think that "simulating" activity that has a known intense psychological impact in a game[2] deserves caution and maturity, so I personally would not run a game that included initiations with a lot of versimilitude unless the players were aware of what I felt were possible consequences. Really it's an odd notion, though, since initiations are generally heavily scripted, while an RPG famously allows a much wider range of things to happen, perhaps especially when dealing with otherwordly forces.

To bring it down to a more anthropological level, while I disagree that gaming provides much in the way of initiation, I do think it's enlightening to regard gaming as an oral tradition. Ron's remarks on early RPGs as records of existing practice, rather than instruction manuals, tends to reinforce this notion. So, in answer to the original query, I don't think that young men (or anyone else) playing RPGs can really be said to be participating in any adulthood passage rites; a necessary feature of such a challenge is the social acknowledgment that comes after, and this is lacking even among one's gamer peers. Adventures are recounted with relish but I don't think I've ever heard anyone say ". . . and Bob survived the Keep on the Borderlands module, so we accepted him into adult life."

--JB

[1] I'm practically hopping up and down with glee wondering if this outfit counts as a "cult" in Mike's book. It's been just ages since I had any cred as a spooky guy. BTW, by "allude to" I meant of this kind; not implying that whatever joint Mike was referring to is necessarily the OTO.
[2] My amusing anecdote: a long time ago, I took a character in GURPS with the Quirk: Bad With Names. It was just a quirk, but it was fun to role-play, so I gave it some emphasis. I have been horrible with remembering names ever since, though I wasn't before.

Just a couple points from the sidelines, as it were. I'm deliberately trying to stir the pot, so please, if you take personal offense here, let me know privately and I'll apologize publicly.

1. In terms of a classic Catholic theological mode (one of many, admittedly), you could argue that it's simply a question of intentionality. Suppose I said I was a priest, and that this new RPG InSpectres, which has this mechanic the "Confessional," will actually work as real confession, i.e. wash away sins, so long as you perform the ritual penances prescribed by me in-game (have your character smacked upside the head, etc.). Okay, now you believe me, because I really make this sound convincing, and I'm wearing a collar and all. Okay? Well, the thing is, it works. You receive absolution. The reason is that just because I happen to be a liar who's deceived you doesn't mean that you're screwed automatically, or the first time a silver-tongued Satan came along and told you a lie, you'd go to Hell. So the "physical reality" thing isn't necessarily the case --- depends on what theology you buy.

2. Emile Durkheim's theory of communal effervescence* would certainly apply to a good RPG session; I think he'd grant that easily. So from his point of view, there is already a basic connection between RPG play and religion in the first place. The only question is whether your society chooses to recognize this basically religious behavior within the category that they delimit as religious. So by that logic, to say RPG's aren't open to ritual efficacy is to say that some versions of religion are now and ever shall be stupid and wrong. Sounds bigoted to me.

I think that's enough kerosene to pour on myself for one day....

P.S. J.B., I'll call the OTO a cult if you want me to. Certainly old man Perdurabo would have been hugely amused.

*Basically effervescence is what happens when you get a bunch of people together, all into the same thing, and this social energy bubbles up out of them like magic. If you've ever seen Triumph Of the Will, you know what this is, but you also see it at every political rally, big sports event, or good rock concert. It's what the "pep" squad wanted you to do in high school. Durkheim thinks that religion arises from this same phenomenon. This is really simplistic, but I'm not going to teach my whole damn course here, and I'll bet you're thankful.

clehrich wrote:
2. Nobody has a strong preconception about what mystical ritual practices are or should be, and thus we're not going to try to "get there" through extremist Simulation.

3. Everyone seriously believes it can work, it's appropriate, it's moral, it's devout, it's respectful. They take it really seriously.

2. Emile Durkheim's theory of communal effervescence* would certainly apply to a good RPG session; I think he'd grant that easily. So from his point of view, there is already a basic connection between RPG play and religion in the first place. The only question is whether your society chooses to recognize this basically religious behavior within the category that they delimit as religious. So by that logic, to say RPG's aren't open to ritual efficacy is to say that some versions of religion are now and ever shall be stupid and wrong. Sounds bigoted to me.

Durkheim thinks that religion arises from this same phenomenon. This is really simplistic, but I'm not going to teach my whole damn course here, and I'll bet you're thankful.

Je parles un tres petit peux de francais (little enough that I probably got that wrong), but doesn't d'eau mean of the water?

Nevermind; it's not important.

Another aside, although perhaps more practical: when people say to "search the archives" they mean to use the site search engine, not to rummage through all the posts and threads by hand. It works pretty well, but you have to have a pretty good idea of what you're seeking.

The matter of mysticism has gotten entangled into this thread, and someone has raised the issue of whether there is any Christian mysticism. Yes and no, I'd say; or better, it depends on what you mean.

The sort of mysticism Renard seems to be describing is designed to help the seeker escape the evils of physical reality into the good spiritual realm. That concept is inherently foreign to Christian doctrine. It's essentially Platonic, with strong representation in Eastern religions. It's called Dualism. (There are two kinds of Dualism, one a good/evil dualism that assumes co-equal opposite supernatural powers of good and evil, the "Yin/Yang" concept, neither ever dominating the other, and the spiritual/physical dualism that says material things and things of the body are inherently evil and to be escaped and avoided, while spiritual non-physical things are to be embraced. It is this latter form that is connected to mysticism.) Christianity holds that the physical world is created good, and the spirit world also contains evil, thus one is not "better" than the other, and man exists in both.

I'm inclined to agree with those who say that if you organize a ritual with the intent of achieving some sort of mystical escape from the physical world into the spiritual world, you're no longer role playing but developing your own religious practices. If you're pretending these things with no expectation of such an outcome, that's role playing, but you won't achieve any sort of "mystic experience" in that sense.

--M. J. Young

So, there seems to be a general consent that a role-playing game utilizing a strong mystical component would be somewhat questionable? I think so, but I don't dismiss the potential value of role-playing activity that could be realized in this, even though I definately wouldn't like to see role-playing games breed any more cult-like activity in a negative fashion.

M. J. Young wrote:

The matter of mysticism has gotten entangled into this thread, and someone has raised the issue of whether there is any Christian mysticism. Yes and no, I'd say; or better, it depends on what you mean.

The sort of mysticism Renard seems to be describing is designed to help the seeker escape the evils of physical reality into the good spiritual realm. That concept is inherently foreign to Christian doctrine.

Hi.

contracycle,

clehrich wrote:
2. Nobody has a strong preconception about what mystical ritual practices are or should be, and thus we're not going to try to "get there" through extremist Simulation.

3. Everyone seriously believes it can work, it's appropriate, it's moral, it's devout, it's respectful. They take it really seriously.

I can't see how these two cannot be mutually contradictory.

Hang on hang on - "communal effervescence", yes, but how does this translate into a religious sensibility? . . . the effervescence can (and indeed most often is) driven by some other form of identification or self-comprehension.

I definately grant that SOME of this behaviour has been ritualised and endowed with supernatural properties, and thereby obtained a religios character, but I'm not sure its reasonable to then extrapolate that all instances of the effervescence are therby proto-religious or potentially so.

The sort of mysticism Renard seems to be describing is designed to help the seeker escape the evils of physical reality into the good spiritual realm. That concept is inherently foreign to Christian doctrine. . . . Christianity holds that the physical world is created good, and the spirit world also contains evil, thus one is not "better" than the other, and man exists in both.

So, there seems to be a general consent that a role-playing game utilizing a strong mystical component would be somewhat questionable? I think so, but I don't dismiss the potential value of role-playing activity that could be realized in this, even though I definately wouldn't like to see role-playing games breed any more cult-like activity in a negative fashion.

I find this topic interesting from my literary criticist point of view. Let me first state that I'm here talking about initiation as a social phenomennon. This is quite a long post.

The idea of gaming as an initiation rite makes a lot of sense to me. Vladimir Propp did great pioneer research into Russian folktales and he came up with the idea that the magical passages of the protagonists (from mundane world to "faerie" and back again)had their roots in ancient initiation rites. The protagonists would face trials of moral and courage in the "faerie" and beat them and then they would return to the mundane world with a changed identity (for example peasant gets to marry the princess and becomes the King's heir).

Northorp Frye has touched the same thing in his studies of the structures of romance. He sees the plot of a romance as a battle for identity. First the protagonist is in the idyllic world with a stable identity (childhood). The hero loses this identity in a crisis and must face the dangers of the demonic world (puberty) before new stable identity emerges and idyllic world is restored (adulthood). The new identity is not the same as the first one. This corresponds also to the aristotelian beginning-middle-end thing.

When you consider the most common story-types and especially those that are popular among adolecent players (adventures, hack n' slash, etc.) you find precisely this initiation structure. The initiation goes on on many levels: PC adventures (trials) and leveling up (new identity, adulthood) are a projection of the passage of the player. Maybe it really does (I believe it does) respond to the need of an initiation in a secular society. It is of course not the only form of initiation an individual can take in western society. And remember I'm talking on a social level here - not on a religious level.

As an aside: It is also common among more mature gamers to see the dungeon adventure -phase as some kind of rite of passage. Everybody (not actually) has done it when they were young. Passage to "gamer adulthood" begins with this DnD-style of gaming. The trial is to see the more "sophisticated" styles beyond dungeon crawling and reach "adulthood" and full membership of the gaming community. Not all succeed: some quit gaming (leave the community) and other are stuck in "juvenile" adventure gaming (don't reach full membership).

I too belive that dungeons are one important form of initiation in the gamer community but the value statements above are not mine. They are just how I see many (elitist) people think.

For what it's worth, I've heard of the driving test being refered to as our
modern culture's initiation ritual.

Initiation rituals are transformative, they change us. They also involve personal commitment to the ideals and principles of the society (or religions) in which we initiate. Roleplaying an imaginary person doing so wimight perhaps teach us a bit about initiation, perhaps explore the theme of initiation at a hypothetical level. That's not the same thing as doing it.

Having said that, roleplaying does have a social dimension - we could talk about initiation into gamer culture. Perhaps running your first game might be an initiation of sorts. However that's not the same thing as initiation in-game, or in-character.

Also note that it is quite possible to fail an initiation, and that this failiure can have non-trivial consequences.


Simon Hibbs

simon_hibbs wrote: For what it's worth, I've heard of the driving test being refered to as our
modern culture's initiation ritual.

Mike just hit the nail on the head, conceptually --- this is what I was trying to get at.

What possible value could simulating it have over actually doing it?

Hmm. There are threads about the Forge in which I have argued that immersion is a trance-like state, and that under immersion there is in effect no conscious suspension of disbelief; I have drawn analogies to RW ritual practice too. But I have also argued that this is IMO a good reason to avoid subjects that may be functionally traumatic to the player; I don't do torture and similar unpleasantness to the characters in any depth or with significant graphic description because I am wary of how this may be internalised. Call me paranoid if you wish, but I'm very cautious of pushing too far in this direction.

Hey Contracycle,

You're paranoid. (Well, you asked.) No, actually I think you're entirely correct: to encourage immersion into the group and character experience and then provoke a major emotional effect is extraordinarily dangerous. At the least, it's likely to lose you friends, but I think we can all see that this can go a lot farther in a lot of really ugly directions.

This is why I said that if you really wanted to use RPGs for mystical purposes, everyone would have to have agreed on this in advance. You could not, ethically speaking, insert that direction with unsuspecting players. Evangelizing or proselytizing is one thing, but manipulating people who have voluntarily made themselves emotionally vulnerable is quite another.

And this is exactly where the Durkheim idea becomes problematic: from his perspective, a completely self-conscious evocation of effervescence would not have a religious effect, because you would know where the "energy" was coming from. But again, I think he's wrong anyway.

Incidentally, Renard, you still out there? Are we totally off-topic, or is any of this helping you?

clehrich wrote: But who said gaming is simulation? That's one model, not all. One could certainly simulate all sorts of ritual behaviors, including initiation, but why is that the limit of how RPGs can function as social structures?

You see this kind of structure drawn on heavily in method-acting models, esp. early Stanislavky [let's not get into a debate about acting in RPGs, okay?].

So I do think that ritual theory can be of considerable value in thinking about what RPGs are and do. Given that as a model, it's certainly possible, getting back to the base of the thread, for an RPG to serve a mystical function --- the issue is whether you'd want to do so.

Let me propose an alternative example, which may help clarify what I'm talking about.

In a number of forms of alchemy, notably late Paracelsian alchemy, the Great Work of transmuting base metals into gold is a mystical process. The alchemist recognizes an analogy between himself and the material in the crucible, comparing his necessarily base soul with (for example) lead. This analogy is quite specific: the crucible is a microcosm of the universe, just as man is a microcosm. Therefore as the base metal is transmuted into gold, so too is the soul transmuted into perfection and purity. This is part of why such alchemy wasn't just mucking about with chemicals: the alchemist could not effect the transmutation without himself undergoing the transmutation, because the analogy was bi-directional. To change lead into gold requires a miracle, because it changes the substance (as well as the accidents) of the material; in order to get this miracle to happen, you can't just heat things in the lab, but must open yourself to the transforming power of God. The analogy to transubstantiation in the Catholic Mass is deliberate: the fact that the wafer and wine are transmuted into the body and blood of Christ establishes a precedent, by which God tells the alchemist that such transmutation is not only possible but also holy. This grounds the practice of alchemy theogically. So here you have a brief precis of one classic form of mystical alchemy (on which see Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, orig. French Forgerons et alchymistes if you really want the details).

Okay, now C. G. Jung also noticed this process, and thought that it could be done through psychotherapy, by walking through the archetypal structures of the Great Work in imagination. This idea was in turn picked up by Campbell at the Eranos conferences, leading in part to his idea of "creative mythology" as a transformational experience (which is where Renard started this thread).

So think RPGs. If you think purely alchemically, the game is the crucible, and your character is the lead. By effecting a transmutation of the PC, you effect a transmutation of your own soul. I very much think Campbell would support this, and probably Jung, and the advantage of looking at it their way is that you don't have to have God involved: the transmutation is psychic or psychological, rather than a process of divine intervention.

As I've said before, I'm very leery of such a model as a "good thing," because it seems to be very open to abuse. But I simply do not see why this is not possible or plausible.

Hi there,

OK, thread-drift has occurred.

- initiation rituals (gaming as)

- shamanism (sub-topic, Greg Stafford)

- mysticism as game content relative to system

- mysticism as accessed by gaming as an activity

- and probably more stuff

Please take'em to sub-threads.

Best,
Ron

To answer clehrich first, I’m still out there, and this does help a lot! I have discussed this subject IRL a few times, and rarely had anything approaching what I got here! And for the French-lovers ;) yes, renard d’eau does mean fox of the water while renardeau (different spelling, same pronunciation) is the fox pup.

Since the thread is officially over, I’ll take the discussion for those still interested to a new thread, called “gaming as initiation rituals and mysticism as accessed by gaming”…