I agree totally. The references I relied on in that evaluation were
folklore legends dealing with the carving of runes for magical use (I
forget the guy's name, but legend had it that he carved runes on a drinking
horn and blooded them to see if the wine was poisoned; it was, and the horn
shattered [according to myth]).
> One Hermetic Order source [Phillip & Dennings(?), "Creative
>Visualization"] openly states that any 'divination method' can be
>reverse-engineered into a active-alteration method (of equally dubious
>verifiability....) I am reminded of two things:
Denning & Phillips, BTW, were never connected with the Golden Dawn --
they were members of a Greek-based group called the Aurum Solis (the G. D.
was primarily Egyptian). The methods were only superficially similar, and
this only in two rituals that I have seen (one being the "Wards of
Adamant," which bears resemblance to the G. D.'s "Lesser Banishing Ritual
of the Pentagram.")
> Larry Niven's comment that (paraphrase) "If magic and psi powers
exist,
>they're weak and almost useless. Otherwise, we'd be using them in place
of
>technology."
Technology must be tested, and the more intricate (ahnd effective) the
technology, the more training is required to use it (as a rule of thumb).
Most magicians and psychics are people who do no hard research, don't
practice their work other than reading, and are generally malcontents (a
criminal record usually comes along with an occult record). These are
_hardly_ trained individuals... which goes right back to my point about new
tests.
>//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
>/ Kenneth Boyd
>//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Toward the accumulation of useful information,
Noctem