Where art went wrong

I don't think that I am trying to say exactly that. I would question desire to invent Art or reinvent it. Art as we know it came to full realization and to its peak during Quattrocento or Renaissance era. Before that Aesthetics (or what would become Art) was mostly totally religious activity or was part of religious practices, in general. In Renaissance Art was, first and foremost, humanistic and represented reality and the world. Artists have been continuing this tradition until industrial revolution started to change society dramatically. I am not saying that Modern Art on wrong path because it has separated itself from the people. I don't understand what is common taste? Is there such thing? My point is quite the opposite - modern artists degraded themselves to the level of capitalist barbarity, to vulgar relations of trade. Today, modern Art is pure commerce, it is forced to be entertainment for the masses. It tries to shock and provoke bourgeois and common public, yes, but that's just inertia or habit since Cubists. Even classical Art that was providing existential intensity and was putting viewer into state of crisis is undergoing makeover of culture machine, getting trapped into museums that are more like "educational" Malls or Apple Stores. Museums are forced to become profitable thus attracting hordes of tourists and turning themselves into train stations. There is no escape for humans anymore from economy and its dictate.

fuck i love idiots who rail against modern art and cream themselves dry over the fucking renaissance
the renaissance was the big mistake in art
not modernism
"I don't think that I am trying to say exactly that. I would question desire to invent Art or reinvent it. Art as we know it came to full realization and to its peak during Quattrocento or Renaissance era. Before that Aesthetics (or what would become Art) was mostly totally religious activity or was part of religious practices, in general. In Renaissance Art was, first and foremost, humanistic and represented reality and the world. Artists have been continuing this tradition until industrial revolution started to change society dramatically."
i don't think it was the renaissance  tbh
it was the enlightenments response to renaissance art
that was the big mistake
that's where art was really pulled from the religious imperative
(which isn't the same as the christian imperative)
post hoc

art was never so proud of its stagnation as it was in the 19th century
stagnant and no values
prettyness
bad times

The idiot does make a point in his second paragraph

You can't do honest art following the capitalist imperitive
which means any success you find will be success of the moment
unsustainale

Names of Power

you ever thought of changing your name irl

"I had for a time wondered about the possibility of this - only because of the claim out there that ones name (being referred to by it by others) was meant to have some sort of level of effect upon the person"

i mean sure

but

it has to be your true name

you know

not just the name you were given

more about names of power yo

i dunno about 'levels of success'

we hew our own paths

construct our own meaning

well some names are move useful for what you seek to achive than others

names of power

Well, the question is how would a person evaluate the level of effect of a given name upon them ?

before making the leapen

intuitively

i mean

for example

Andrew Dice Clay

who is an brash aggressive rude italian america

n

but was born Andrew Clay Silverstein

andrew dice clay was just a charcter he did

that slowly engulfed his life

like that commedian who plays chopper

but to a greater extent

how would you compare an company name to an magical name

I suppose they both tend to be representative of some idea. Grant Morrison has famously talked about stuff like the Golden Arches being comparable to sigils or whatever. I think the similarity differs depending on tradition and approach too. Some traditions have people choose magical names, some are chosen for them. Sometimes they're for purposes of identity concealment. Anonymity isn't really something a company would be going for, and they're unlikely to let someone from outside the entity choose their name either

Company names tend to be going for some amount memetic resilience and replicability (though not always. I'm sure Cambridge Analytica would have been happier if no-one ever heard of them)

Whereas I'm not sure that a magical name is intended to colonise people's mental space and be passed around in the same way

what about

wiccan names like silver ravenwolf

some names are move useful for what you seek to achive than others

That's almost in between the two I guess. It's obviously good for her marketing to have that as her nom-de-plume. Would Aleister Crowley have been as successful is he'd stuck to being called Edward Alexander Crowley?

E.A.

korealetting

Best Scooby-Doo reveal ever

thomas browne seemed to get by : p

otoh

there were plenty of ancient authors writing as zoroastor

The Crowley name change was very self-conscious marketing, whether or not it actually makes a difference is debatable, but the story goes that he read somewhere that people were more likely to be noteworthy if their names followed a "dum-da-da dum-da" meter, hence Aleister Crowley. He took the Aleister part from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alastor

good plan

i think mouthfeel is important

Finally, someone is talking about the mouthfeel

what do you think of  William Sharp

who wrote "the pagan review" in 1890

as like 6 diffrent authors

and found success as Fiona Macleod

and none as william sharp

Again, echoes of Crowley. The Equinox is largely his writing, though you wouldn't know it if you looked at the list of authors

J K Rowling went by her initials because her publishers were concerned that she'd lose male readers if she called herself Joanne in the byline

yeah

i publish my writing under my initials

Is it possible that Fiona MacLeod's writing was better? Or do you think the name itself mattered?

having not read it

it's possible

i mean i think part of the potency of a name of power

is having the guts to claim it

but i don't think you can just claim a name of great power unearned

i knew a kid who thought he was king arthur

really didn't have what it takes to claim that name at all

tbf few do

to be realistic

few would

not as few as should

I'm a little wary of talking about this, but -redacted- springs to mind

-redacted- sounds simultaneously like a WWI soldier, a beer, and a car mechanic

And it encapsulates what he's trying to sell perfectly

-redacted- has none of that potency

i use -redacted- liberally

i like the ambiguity

A collective of one?

at this point

the opaqueness

wish i had a personal name as good

A few weeks ago I talked about my username (not -redacted- the other one.) Juxtaposition of the technologically advanced notion of a -readacted-  with the -redacted- fight against the alienation that -redacted- bring, plus a nod to Donna Haraway

My irl name is gender ambiguous. A couple of weeks ago I got invited to a women-in-tech meeting at my company because the person sending the email obviously made the wrong assumption when they came to my name in the employee roster.

unless you are blessed with a great name

i suspect

claiming a name is an important part of the pursuit of meaning

as a tool

if nothing else

but it's as much an act of reaching as an act of climbing

Approaches to Paganism

what if i were to tell you paganisms greatest weakness
anyone serious runs off to look at other things

Do you think its because of how "open" the idea of paganism is?

that's a small part

There's nothing forcing you to stay with a pantheon other than deals you've made.

What's the other parts?

it's not obvious how to do deep pagansim, becuase there's no modeli don't think that will always be the case
i think the material now exists
just has not yet been organised

organized paganism sounds almost oxymoronic

and the material didn't exist. 20 years agoorganised material

Ohhh. That makes more sense. Although i guess itd be hard to have a consensus on practice methods and what to do when.

I can see how you'd come to that conclusion

I think we have too much info about too many paganismsYou can have Odin and Anubis as your patrons and have enough info to reasonably guess at how they were both originally worshipped(edited)
So why bother sticking to one system and getting to know it?

i don't think there are that many paganisms...
as in
that many approaches
like
a lot of pantheons
a few -models-
which aren't the same as approaches
a huge ammount of  potential models

I guess too much ability to mix and match pantheons and models is what I meant. I'm coming from chaos magick so I don't have a problem with it in principle, obviously, but it's not a good foundation for a religion

like the whole wiccan ritual framework is a model... but that model fits somewhere as an approach, with other models that share an affinity with it

I think that as far as paganism goes for me (though I'm more animist but they're kissing cousins in my view), it's useful to approach it as a religious/spiritual approach that has a way of relating to the world at it's core, as opposed to a set of beliefs or some articles of faith

Like, continuing with Odin and Anubis. You are almost forced to concede that: all gods are real, all gods are psychological, all gods are different faces of one Big God, or only some gods are real in a semi-arbitrary fashion

reconstructionism is an approach, and there are a lot of models encompassed in it

And all these approaches get lumped into "paganism"

i just think it's a very limited approachall apporaches have their own limitations obviously
just one that declares you have to follow -this- historical model (to be generous) places all kinds of effectively arbitary limits on your practice(edited)

I agree. It's like saying you can only write classical music by candlelight cause that's how the people in the 18th century did it

i'm only using reconstructionism as an example because it's one of the clearest approaches currently consciously practicedthere's the traditionalist approach, which says that there's this divinely ordained order to society and constructs a model of paganism around divine kings and defied emperors, because it's looking for religious justification for societies structure then fits paganism into that
it gives it a strong direction, even if it's a historical and repugnant
and then you have wicca, which is a model, a successful model, clearly... i don't think anyone has identified an approach that encompasses how most wiccans (esspecially eclectic) employ it though

Employ it in what sense?

in the sense of 'use it'
it's vague
because the problem, such as it is, is vagueness
i don't think it's a problem that needs to be solved on the practictioners end.... just that i think there is something that -can- be identified there.... just hard to discern what it is

I think Wicca is a lot like most mainstream religions in it's bones. The more traditional, the more focused it is on a divine liturgy, it employs operative magic but I wouldn't say that it's focused on practical enchantment. Eclectic is faster and looser, but that parallels the fact that you have a die-hard Church-going-psalm-knowing Christians, plus a much larger contingent of vaguely-Christ-following, not particularly devout, or even necessarily that well-informed on the specifics of their own faith, individuals
The Gardnerians I've known definitely thought of it in terms of a received tradition, almost like an apostolic succession
But a more pluralistic expression of that handing-down process

i guess in large part traditional wicca is opaque to outsiders, but i'll have a little think...
amistace day stuff going on down the road
bb in like half an hour

It's opaque-ish. The Witches' Bible by Janet & Stuart Farrar exposes the core of the tradition well enough I guess

i guess my question would be, how much does this relate to like crowley, the book of the law, the authority of channeled texts, etc
in the most generous way possible is the approach basically taking x, this religious teacher, as the guide, and hueing to a greater or lesser extent to what they established
?
is that close?
bbl

I don't want to claim to speak authoritatively on it, because not-an-initiate, but the various lineages in Wicca tend revolve around the particular spin that their teacher puts on it, but if they're "traditional" Wiccans, eventually that line reaches back to Gardner. Alexandrian obviously emphasise the ideas of Alex Sanders, but the Gardner link is still there, they bring in a bit more of the ceremonial magic line, Qabalah and stuff.
There are notions, particularly within Thelemic circles, that Wicca is practically-Thelema but with a nature-worship aesthetic (as opposed to a broadly Freemasonic/"Hermetic" tone.) I doubt Wiccans themselves would necessarily agree
I guess again, the more eclectic, the further away from that original core you might get, and the coven structure necessarily means that the approach evolves (some covens will become "mother covens" for the formation of new covens started by a Wiccan priest/ess that was initiated by the mother coven. Each coven keeps and adds to it's own Book of Shadows as a document that gets passed down the initiation line)
I actually think that coven model for group practise is quite elegant. Polycentric authority structure, capacity for continuous evolution

i didn't mean to imply they came from crowley, just that it's similar to taking authority from a channeled/holy text(edited)
:9
but yeah, i see the practical distinction
with the coven thing

I don't think the Book of Shadows is the same kind of thing. It's probably got more in common with The Book of Common Prayer

i was trying to say the origionator takes the place of the text in this example
but yes, you've clarified it in a useful manner

Where do you think the model for deep paganism can come from?

i dunno, i have my suspicions, but
i think there are 3 approaches that are most likely to produce it
some kind of homeric/tragic approach, some kind of hesiodic approach (an approach that works and days is a model of), or some kind of animist-liminal approach
the question for the hesiodic approach, is, if you strip out everything bad about works and days, is there anything left
some kind of holistic agrarian approach
would probably necessitate communes
under the current exonomic system

What does animist-liminal encompass for you?

feeling toward the borderland where animism becomes polytheism
whatever that looks like
it's 10,000 kilometres removed from philosophical constructions of what gods should look like
in terms of approach

Pagan aesthetics

i think an interesting thing about paganism
is how christian polemicists can look at wicca and claim it has a christian basis, or christian aesthetic
and there's a ring of truth to it
but at the same time you could push -western- paganism aesthetically all the way toward primitivism, in the modernist sense, and the distance from christianity would become a gulf... yet the distance from wicca would remain the same
and there are other directions, as antethical to christian aesthics it can be pushed, or approached, from that are equally valid