We seek truth in all human experience, principally because we want security; we want that certainty that we are not deceiving ourselves. The question is, how do we know when we have attained truth? To most of us, truth consists of the substantiation of our ideas.
Ralph M Lewis, The Conscious Interlude [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Dreams you can’t hold onto and secrets you can never share, and lies, and living conspiracies. It’s a conceptual subculture, of ideas consuming other ideas and… sometimes… segments of reality. Sometimes, people.
qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division [Amazon, Publisher, Author, Wiki]
Ideas have no status except through forms that are accepted symbols of sentience and are spatially and outwardly self-indulgent. Excarnation of an inspired or superimposed concept may be induced and orientated by ‘space-apperception’. The whole body and being must suspire… This total effluxion makes everything reciprocal and becomes a re-orientated sequence of focused nexity. Through this harmonic relation with Ego one becomes the qualitative mediator of the hypothetical or real propensity: any position giving vastness or panorama, and, by abstractive gazing beyond distance, allowing and following the flow of thought until there is an intrusive and more cognate idea. This idea is held and projected into the ‘vista’. Nothing innate is permitted to be subtracted from the visualization.
Austin Osman Spare, The Zoëtic Grimoire of Zos
Briefly, Truth is an idea of a supra-rational order, pertaining to Neschamah, not to Ruach. That all rational conceptions imply that we know Truth, and that Truth is in their propositions, only shows that these so-called rational ideas are not really rational at all. Truth is by no means the only idea that resists rational analysis. There are very many ideas that remain indefinable: all simple ideas do so. At the back of all our efforts is the dead wall that we must already know what we are pretending to find out.
Aleister Crowley, Little Essays Toward Truth, Truth
We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability are intertwined—but also how we move beyond these categories to understand the interrelationships of ideas and processes that seem to be separate and unrelated.
Angela Y Davis, ed. Frank Barat, preface by Cornel West, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
In the tradition of all great America ideas, [they] have created a confident plan for action, no matter how costly, impractical, or dangerous.
Sean Bonner and Allen Morgenstern, The New Oklahoma [Amazon]
So much of what magicians have taken for granted this century stems from the work of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley. Much of what will constitute standard magical theory and practice in the next century will derive from the state-of-the-art ideas and techniques currently under development in Chaos Magic.
Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
Well read and familiar with such writers as Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and other scientists, and being rather cosmopolitan in tastes, liked to gather about her, people who had—as she termed it—ideas.
Lydia Leavitt, Bohemian Society
Witchcraft in the Middle Ages by Jeffrey Burton Russell, the 1992 fourth printing paperback from Cornell University Press, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.
“All the known theories and incidents of witchcraft in Western Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century are brilliantly set forth in this engaging and comprehensive history. Building on a foundation of newly discovered primary sources and recent secondary interpretations, Professor Russell first establishes the facts and then explains the phenomenon of witchcraft in terms of its social and religious environment, particularly in relation to medieval heresies. He treats European witchcraft as a product of Christianity, grounded in heresy more than in the magic and sorcery that have existed in other societies. Skillfully blending narration with analysis, he shows how social and religious changes nourished the spread of witchcraft until large portions of medieval Europe were in its grip—’from the most illiterate peasant to the most skilled philosopher or scientist.’ A significant chapter in the history of ideas and their repression is illuminated by this book. Our growing fascination with the occult gives the author’s affirmation that witchcraft arises at times and in areas afflicted with social tensions a special quality of immediacy.” [via]
You may be interested in Hermetic Library fellow, and founder of Concrescent Press, Sam Webster‘s new blog Arkadian Anvil: Hammering out a Pagan Future.
“I have started a new blog called ‘Arkadian Anvil’ to discuss where I think Pagan religion and culture is going. I will be looking at key Pagan ideas and concepts and putting them to trial. As you know I have a unique position, being seminary trained and working on a doctorate in history, never mind thirty years of experience in the community. My inaugural post, after introducing myself, is on the term ‘Pagan’ itself.” [via]