#43388 - 10/01/10 01:31 PM
Re: Origins of the Circle in the Occult
[Re: Lamar]
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Prometheus9
stranger
Registered: 09/09/09
Posts: 34
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I wouldn't look towards history as the means of understanding why symbols appear again and again, but rather at the nature of the brains and minds which the symbols have been given meaning.
You may find this helpful
http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/varieties_of_psychedelic_experience.pdf
Certain symbols seem to crop up within the human perceptual system during altered states of consciousness. While Masters and Houston discuss this phenomena in the context of people in clinical settings under the influence of indole-ring psychedelics similar patterns emerge form more endogenous altered states.
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#43396 - 10/02/10 06:11 AM
Re: Origins of the Circle in the Occult
[Re: Lamar]
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Aklo
member
Registered: 08/03/10
Posts: 145
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Someone may find this useful
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala
In the western implementation of Raja Yoga provided by Crowley in Book 4 Part 1 and 8 Lectures on Yoga, what corresponds to the mandala is the geometric figure on which the subject focuses his attention or imagination during dharana.
I began by taking a simple geometrical object in one colour, such as a yellow square. I will quote the official instructions in 'The Equinox'.
'Dharana-Control of thought.'
1. Constrain the mind to concentrate itself upon a single simple object imagined. The five tatwas are useful for this purpose; they are: a black oval; a blue disk; a silver crescent; a yellow square; a red triangle.
2. Proceed to combinations of single objects; e.g., a black oval within a yellow square, and so on. ....
And so on. As such, it parallels the sneaky use of mantra, introduced as an aid to timing breaths, to help still the other, verbal part of the brain in a quasi-mechanical approximation of the previous Limb, pratyahara.
As usual, there are immediate problems.
Suppose you have chosen a white cross. It will move its bar up and down, elongate the bar, turn the bar oblique, get its arms unequal, turn upside down, grow branches, get a crack around it or a figure upon it, change its shape altogether like an Amoeba, change its size and distance as a whole, change the degree of its illumination, and at the same time change its colour. It will get splotchy and blotchy, grow patterns, rise, fall, twist and turn; clouds will pass over its face. There is no conceivable change of which it is incapable. Not to mention its total disappearance, and replacement by something altogether different!
Any one to whom this experience does not occur need not imagine that he is meditating.
As the linked article tends to demonstrate, the people who make these objects of meditation in the places where making them is a traditional art form tend to make a lot of circular ones, and the rest almost universally incorporate circles into the design. There's a fairly simple reason for this.
If you actually do the work described, the attempt to continuously visualize a single image for shorter and longer periods of time, you will find that orienting your object in a visualized circle will greatly decrease the shape-changing interference described above.
Now in Laveyan magic this kind of thing obviously corresponds more with the Sigil of Baphomet than it does with any sort of traditional "magick circle". I have a lot to add in relation to these traditional circles, which represent a warding process rather than a fixed symbol, but I don't want them to detract from this preliminary discussion of the pantacle.
Looking back on his childhood explorations, Lavey recalls, "I looked through all the grimoires and all I saw was junk. Casting a circle to protect yourself! When I started devising my own rituals, out of frustration with all I'd seen, I shaped a glowing pentacle to attract these forces ...."
--Barton
Edited by Aklo (10/02/10 06:42 AM)
_________________________
Behold, I send you forth as wolves among sheep; eat Lambchop for supper and fuck Bo Peep!
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