Yvonne over at Fifth Dimensional Self posted this:
...Furthermore, can I say that I find a lot of the blogs to be overflowing with insincerity, ego, false confidence, intellectual insecurity, hyper-pettiness, grandstanding the likes of which one finds at a Princeton graduate student seminar, and unselfconsciously masculinist discourse that often devolves into arguments over obscure facets of knowledge and other (generally worthless) arcana, how much one knows or doesn't know about this or that, whose books are coming out, what courses are being sold, who has the best amulets, who can piss the furthest, who is better at commanding god knows what demon or spirit to do god knows what and so forth.
As with magick practice in general, much content is dominated by the male interest in either getting laid or getting rich. Hence the pissing contests.
Since I don't have a penis I suppose I generally lack interest in these styles.I wonder where the women mages are?
While I wouldn't put it in those gender terms, I fully understand the concept she is expressing. There is a large part of magecraft that is directly theurgical in nature that is often ignored in the blogosphere. When it is mentioned, it is often by female neo-pagans as 'working with the goddess' or communing with the goddess. However, what comes out of that is such a different form of theurgy that one can miss what is being said if you don't have the language or experience to understand. I am not claiming I understand at all. I am merely saying that I get of whiff of it. Often, one can sense their theurgy is often martial, when you read between the lines.
The OTO also produces some powerhouse women but be warned "woman girt with sword" is not some metaphor. Those ladies kick ass. I do not fully understand how they express their theurgy either but I know it is there. It too is oddly martial.
The people in the pagan community I know that seem to have hit the theurgic mark quite well are the OBOD Druids. I don't see much of them on-line.
I also see the need for more female mages that do theurgy and express in ways people that are not doing their exact form of the work can easily understand.
If you women are out there that do theurgy and can talk to us people that do it other ways or even something close to 'our' way, please let us know you are there, doubly so if you blog.
5 comments:
I'll stick my toes in the water and say this much. I'm a female who has been involved with Theurgy for a few years now. My Work isn't at a place where I'd feel confident enough in blogging about it though. Not yet at least.
The martial thing makes total sense for a Hermetic tradition. There's mainly only one woman on the Tree, and she's in Netzach. Of course, there are more you can find if you factor in other correspondences, like Isis in Chesed or The Priestess in Da'ath. I'm sure you've seen female mages who embody those archetypes too.
I'm not really a mage, but I intend to write a lot more about both theurgy and thaumaturgy in the future. As tiresome as pissing contests are, I do think it's important for women to challenge themselves and others, and to take pride in their own work, whatever the chosen field.
I see the tree as an embodiment of both forms and neither. In every form of the tree, there is only love, hidden beneath the forms and ideas of its parts. There are no parts only a whole.
Sol, skip to the beginning of this blog. It is full of my mistakes, my arrogance, my folly but others learned from that.
Revealing yourself is a service to others but you can only serve others when you are ready.
Certainly it does seem as if the theurgical arts are male dominated. I have been a part of three Temples (all in the same Order but in different areas of the U.S.A), and there always seem to be far more men than women. It is intriguing especially since systems such as The Golden Dawn and Thelema do not leave out the Divine Feminine in their practices and in fact really encourage thier members to get in touch with the feminine energies.
My hypothesis on this situation is that 1.) the nature of theurgy in general is outwardly expressive in it's nature. Magic focuses on raising, harnessing, and focusing energy...this in itself has a very masculine quality.
2.) The work that is entailed in following a theurgical path tends to focus more on what men need than women.During my years of teaching yoga, meditation, magic, and being an Adept in a G.D. Order I have found that many women naturally get in touch with energies far faster and easier than men do. This is due to the fact that women tend to have more practice in trusting and listening to their intuition and therefore find quicker success in their internal practices. Because of this theurgical material can seem very dry and even superfulous to many women. Men and mercurial or martial type women on the other hand get a real kick out of memorizing facts, reading ancient tomes etc, finding out all the details. These type of people see their magical sucess (at least in the beginning) as being based on what they know rather than what they are feeling. This is why you see the ego-based pissing contests occurring so frequently that our dear Soror has complained about.
What is important in the Great Work for both men and women is to realize that we are looking to join the Sun and Moon. Thus we need to explore these sides equally. If we find great success in the internal arts we should use them to help master the more external arts within us and vice versa.
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