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Semotus Vita - Virtue[less] |
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Every student of magick would benefit from studying math, because it leaves the student with a set of lenses through which to view the world, and a set of tools for altering the things that these lenses reveal. Moreover, math is an art with no limits - any tool can theoretically be applied to any task, if the task is viewed properly. The methods of math carry quite well into the realms of metaphor, into other types of mental pursuit - mysticism, logic, philosophy - resulting in overall expansion of the student's cognitive ability.
This mirrors the method of the magickian, who presents hirself with a never-ending set of new experiences and ideas. These in turn have to be assimilated into some sort of overall framework, whether this be Kabalah, mythology, chaos, materialism, or humanism. This framework is never completely stable, and the magician may find hirself at a nexus where the framework is suddenly and severely tested. It must then be rebuilt or replaced - how is this to be done? The student who is well grounded in "solid" cognitive disciplines such as math, logic, psychology, symbolism, or philosophy will have a better chance of surviving these types of "paradigm shifts" unscarred. With magickal maturity, even the framework itself becomes only a tool that can be changed at will, as a serpent sheds its skin.
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The history of mysticism is closely tied to the pursuit of mathematical understanding. Pythagoras is perhaps the most well-known example of a mathematician-mystic, but the truth is that math's footprints can be found everywhere in magick: the occurance of the Golden Ratio in Egyptian temples, the pentagram, and the religious paintings of Leonardo da Vinci... numerical symbolism that has changed little over thousands of years... the encoding of astronomical data at sites like Stonehenge... the age-old practice of gematria, assigning numerical value to the letters of the alphabet... the remarkable similarity between modern cosmology and ancient Kabalah... and so on and so forth. Most of magick's pre-eminent figures, notably John Dee and Aleister Crowley, were well-educated in math, and math played a considerable role in their work.
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