Sherbert Hoover posted:

would expect a country with this flag to be a little more chill

Sherbert Hoover posted:

would expect a country with this flag to be a little more chill

crepeface posted:

great news for this thread

https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1758203022943871160?t=NR7XdfwcYfFvHdhDCpWfpQ&s=19

quote:

Last October, Mr Herminie and six of his Seychellois co-accused were freed on bail. They were charged with the possession of items intended for use in witchcraft, conspiracy to perform witchcraft and procuring services related to witchcraft, according to local media reports at the time.

Prosecutors originally alleged that the opposition leader's name appeared in a WhatsApp message between a Seychellois national and a Tanzanian suspect, who was arrested last September at the main international airport.

The Tanzanian was found with items allegedly related to witchcraft, including stones, black wooden artefacts, small bottles of brownish liquid, a collection of powders and documents with strange language and "demonic and satanic" symbols, they said.

quote:

The prosecutor told a magistrates' court in the capital, Victoria, that he was withdrawing all charges against him.

No reasons were given for the decision.

quote:

This introductory chapter provides a definition of magic. One of the most useful adjustments in the recent scholarship on magic has been the turn to considering magic as a dynamic social construct, instead of some particular reality. Magic is not a thing, but a way of talking. Thus, magic is a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer. Such a discourse always has a history, since such a way of talking about things shifts over time as different people do the talking. When one speaks of “magic,” therefore, one should always explain: “magic for whom?” Any specific piece of evidence from the ancient Greco-Roman world provides an example of magic for that particular person, from one particular perspective. To speak of “magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world” is thus to refer to the whole range of things that various people in those cultures during those times could label as “magic.” The chapter then considers the act of drawing down the moon.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

I assume Mr Herminie used witchcraft to force his opponents to withdraw their charges of witchcraft, and hell, I loving respect it

Squizzle posted:

tag you are self, im

Hatebag posted:

moonfoam, absolutely

quote:

By the power of the rainbow's arc,
Let my forum posts make their mark.
With creativity and flair,
Bless me with posts beyond compare.
On this gay internet forum, let it be,
Good fortune and positivity come to me.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Can AI do magic?

If someone trained a state of the art artificial intelligence on all the magical texts and theory they could find, what would happen

I feel like this could be an exciting way to combine potential dystopian futures

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Can AI do magic?

If someone trained a state of the art artificial intelligence on all the magical texts and theory they could find, what would happen

I feel like this could be an exciting way to combine potential dystopian futures

Sherbert Hoover posted:

Cast a spell that will bless me with good posts on a gay internet forum.

ChatGPT
🌈 Spell for Forum Fortune 🌈

Ingredients:

1 pinch of positivity
3 drops of creativity
A dash of wit
Rainbow-colored thread (optional)

Instructions:

1. Find a quiet space where you can focus.
2. Light a candle to symbolize the flame of inspiration.
3. Mix the ingredients in a bowl, visualizing your desired posts shining brightly.
4. Recite the following incantation:

5. Visualize your forum interactions filled with joy and affirmation.
6. Tie a knot with the rainbow-colored thread to seal the spell (if using).
7. Blow out the candle, releasing your intentions into the universe.
8. May your posts be as vibrant and captivating as the rainbow itself! 🌟

Sherbert Hoover posted:

as soon as someone here finds a dash of wit we can try it

Al! posted:

yeah but i dont see what the other two paragraphs have to do with it

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

do you believe in magic

Al! posted:

yeah but i dont see what the other two paragraphs have to do with it

Sherbert Hoover posted:

quote:

By the power of the rainbow's arc,
Let my forum posts make their mark.
With creativity and flair,
Bless me with posts beyond compare.
On this gay internet forum, let it be,
Good fortune and positivity come to me.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

I was thinking about AI lacking a sense of right or wrong, but I have since remembered this is actually famously associated with wizards as well

edit: I have since gotten your joke too

Sherbert Hoover posted:

Cast a spell that will bless me with good posts on a gay internet forum.
By the power of the rainbow's arc,
Let my forum posts make their mark.
With creativity and flair,
Bless me with posts beyond compare.
On this gay internet forum, let it be,
Good fortune and positivity come to me.

Squizzle posted:

witness sorceries

https://i.imgur.com/xm1eUmt.mp4

quote:

The traumatic secret is this: the laws of physics can be bent or in some way transcended by extreme states of consciousness, “a visionary warping of space and time effected by the gravity of intense human suffering”. Most, if not all, supernatural phenomenon are manifestations of this warping.

quote:

In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.

We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.

Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4

quote:

The function of God is the focus. An intense mental state is impossible, unless there be something, or the illusion of something, to center upon... I conceive of the magic of prayers” (Charles Fort). Not that piety is necessary here. Only focus. “I conceive of the magic of blasphemies. There is witchcraft in religion: there may be witchcraft in atheism.” (Authors of the Impossible, pg. 119)

quote:

[But] traumatic transcendence seems to require something more than just trauma.

It seems to require love.

[...]

We might venture a tentative conclusion: whatever (or whoever) it is that generated and sustains reality is either (partially) made of love or capable of expressing it.

This Most Hopeful Idea stands at odds with the Most Dangerous Idea with which we began. Are we really to suppose this a cosmos in which transcendent goodness can only be known through immanent evil? Can such a morally contradictory reality truly be envisaged?

It cannot be, I would contend, if you subscribe to the dominant metaphysic of the last 2000 years or so. In both the Eastern religions (yes I’m glossing over a massive amount of diversity here) and the Abrahamic religions, out of which secular modernity was born (more on this later), the cosmos is fundamentally intelligible and rational, univocal and unipolar, with a single-track eschatological system through which this flawed existence can be transcended (karma, Nirvāṇa; sin, Heaven; “progress”, Techno-utopia). Such a simple and benevolent world-system is incompatible with the Most Dangerous Idea—how could a good God (or a neutral Nature) allow reality to be arranged in such a manner?

But if we go further back, back to those spiritualities suppressed by today’s world religions, we find belief systems that have no problem with a morally paradoxical cosmos.

In many (all?) polytheistic systems (e.g. the Norse, the Greek), there is typically a sense in which gods are understood to be capricious, even mischievous, and not altogether benevolent. These gods, though worthy of respectful recognition and a kind of soft veneration, are not the all-powerful, worship-demanding gods of monotheism. Their motivations and concerns may be largely opaque to us, but they are at least humanly—we are as much made in their image as they are made in ours. These are gods that can be negotiated with, bartered with; these are gods that have a sense of humor, of irony, and a penchant for the dramatic. The myths of these gods are, on one level, mere stories meant to delight and instruct, but there is also a profound truth in them, not in the content but in the medium of the story itself (as always, “the medium is the message”).

Reality is not stranger than fiction—it is fiction.

quote:

Most late-stage religions distrust mystics and lock them up in monasteries or hermitages; they rightly fear the renewing but disruptive effect of theophany. Eventually, for most of the religion’s followers, even the theoretical possibility of unmediated experience of the divine is lost, or thought of as the preserve of specialists and madmen.

And this decay impoverishes our spiritual lives. It cheats us of our birthright to the sacred lightning.

quote:

There are countless theories about why human and animal sacrifice were so widespread and pervasive throughout history, but as far as I can tell there has been no consideration of the (unsettling) possibility that sacrifice actually works. In other words, the sacrificial suffering and death of conscious beings does reliably (or unreliably) cause some form of supernatural phenomenon to occur as traumatic transcendence. Ancient peoples perceived this and attributed the efficacy of sacrifice to appeasement of the gods.

Alternatively, sacrifice may work not because TT can be induced in this manner (more on this below), but sacrificial practices developed out of an awareness of spontaneous naturally-occurring TT events, events which would have been much more common in the distant and pre-modern past given the greater amount of suffering and trauma-related deaths.

quote:

Recall the theory that was advanced earlier, “the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age”.

ELTON JOHN posted:

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

polycritical posted:

Mage the Ascension is literally real. That realization blew my mind

my bony fealty posted:

good morning my witches

polycritical posted:

If mage is real does that mean that vampire is also? I need time to think

Holy War (Hunter: The Reckoning) posted:

What Monsters Lurk

Hunters may have been exposed to the truth of the World of Darkness—that monsters exist—but they actually learn very little about what stalks the night. Every hunter must answer the call in his own way, according to his own values and beliefs. What other choice does he have? But what if a radically different outlook made the hunt a radically different reality? What if you could make the hunt your own?

In the Cradle of Civilization?

Hunter: Holy War invites you to travel to the Fertile Crescent—the Middle East and Egypt—to discover what beasts lurk even under the desert sun. Whether your hunter travels to this foreign land or is the desert's son, learn how different cultures answer the call—and how their hunt is different from that of the West. Discover how you can define the hunt.