Sunday, February 7, 2010

Postmodern Magic

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look over to the right of your screen you will see that a new blog has been added to the list of blogs I like to read: Postmodern Magic, The Art of Magic in the Information Age. The blog is by Patrick Dunn, a poet, linguist, and author of the book "Postmodern Magic, The Art of Magic in the Information Age", and the more recent "Magic, Power, Language, Symbol, A Magician's Exploration of Linguistics".

I have his first book, and am looking forward to reading the new one. His blog is filled with great gems from insights into occult-related news stories to mini articles on all kinds of magic. His recent post on the nature of Daath for instance is right on the money: it is the space left by a fallen Malkuth. This is a point that almost never gets covered anywhere, yet is so obvious just from looking at the tree glyph itself: if you swing malkuth up using Hod and Netzack as pivots it lands right in Daath and produces a perfectly symmetrical tree.

Anyway, I have been going through back posts, and there are lots of great little gems, so check it out.

5 comments:

Lavanah said...

I think you will really enjoy "Magic, Power, Language, Symbol, A Magician's Exploration of Linguistics." There is a lot of useful material in it and it is very well written (as you would expect). It is one of those books that I would have really liked to have gone through with highlighter and pen, making notes in the margins, but since I am sharing my copy with someone else, I had to make do with post-its and stickies.

Robert said...

I've never understood how something can be post modern. It sounds like people are living in the future and coming back to tell us about it or believe their current minority viewpoint will be the generally accepted wave of the future.

That says nothing about what they are doing. I've just always been confused by the term.

Jason Miller, said...

It is a reaction against Modernism in art and philaosophy. Post Modernism has been a philosophic school since the 1940's and an artistic school even earlier. It is characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions.

Not Sure how Dunn means it.

In many ways you could call Chaos Magic a Post Modernist School of Magic that was a reaction against the Modernist approach used by the GD and other turn of the century groups.

Robert said...

So it is a way of saying anti-modern without implying a love affair with the distant past.

Jason Miller, said...

Not really. You have to understand the movements in Philosophy and Art that actually called themselves "Modernism". This has nothing to do with the idea of the word modern as simply meaning "the present time".

"Modernism", AND "Post Modernism" in these fields are actually old schools of thought now. Newer schools just go by different names because Post-post-post-modernism sounds stupid.

Being a reaction against, isn't necessarily being "anti". It is just the next stage. When you hit a nail with a hammer, the nail is not "anti" hammer.