The Spirits are parts of your mind?

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Nashimiron
Adeptus Minor
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The Spirits are parts of your mind?

Post#1 » Mon Oct 16, 2017 11:22 am

A discussion on the Headless One went off into the dreaded territory of the discussion about the psychological explanation for the existence of spirits. Shatteredzen said:

Shatteredzen wrote:As far as the HGA and the Goetia, there is a case to be made for some of the process to be psychological. From a Gnostic standpoint, if humanity is carrying a divine spark then we ourselves should also carry shards of each of these beings in our own psyche. That said, if it is human imagination which creates these beings in the first place then it is possible that we share some fractal part of our selves with them in some form of collective species unconcious. It really simply depends on which paradigm or modality of cosmology you understand and believe.

I tend to take a view of these things from something closer to Neil Gaimans Amercian Gods book, in that they are somewhat a product of human thought and that to some degree our interaction with them is a reflection of our internal construction of their reality. Your mileage may vary, but my experience is that there is a co-dependent relationship and trying to abstract out who came first is merely engaging in a "chicken or the egg" argument. I would argue that any model that seeks to describe magic in an "either, or" method of spiritism or psychology is ignoring quite purposefully the density of layered interactions which are at work in favor of proposing a simple, reductionist "I have it" mentality to sell books or claim supremacy of thought, which is nonsense.


There is a larger discussion to be had about the nature of the spirits, which Shatteredzen outlines quite well above.

In some of the Gnostic scriptures the cosmogonic myth describes how the Archetypal Human pre-exists the gods, and in fact the universe, as it was the gods that made the universe. I actually thought of this when watching American Gods, doesn't he ask Wotan who made the gods, and he dodges the question, or something? I thought - he can't answer that, he would have to say "you made us!"

Also, this idea comes through Gnosticism into Kabbalah, as on the Tree of Life, the third path of Gimel, comes down from Kether into Tiphareth (The Son) before the fourth path of Daleth causes the joining of Chokmah (Father / Demiurge) & Binah (Mother / World Soul), showing the Son pre-existing His own conception!

Another worthwhile source that expands the discussion relates to Sufi ideas about the jinn being projections of the Nephesh:

The Zawiya was under a kind of double siege. One was conducted by the politico-military apparatus of Algiers and their henchmen in Mostaganem. But there was also an invisible siege mounted by Iblis, the Devil, and invisible jinn....I asked Faid what the jinn were. He replied that they were projections of the nafs. Confusingly, the lovers of God aquired the most jinn.


This is from

Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties

I find these theories which are based on esoteric philosophies more useful than the pop psychology that Crowley once briefly entertained, and which folks today are want to take as Gospel. What do others here think? Does the idea of the spirits coming out of the Nephesh sound reasonable?

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