/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>48354362
>the role of the Church is to get rid of mystery
I mean, in history the Church was rather big into mysticism… most of the certified “wizards” in European history in the last thousand or so years were usually monks trying to become closer to God by way of understanding His work/nature. It was a form of natural mysticism, Christian-laced natural philosophy. In the Renaissance, it was “much in vogue” to label nature (that of natural philosophy) as a form of magic, and even math was viewed as a form of magic, for many thousands of years, and people like Isaac Newton were obsessed with the sacred geometry of Solomon’s temple.

All religion is started this way. Interpreting mysteries in nature and attributing it all to the divine, magic, etc. Fantasy is looking at the world in awe, wonder and mystery. This is something even grand fantasists like Tolkien had believed.

>sacraments(notice how they make sure not to conflate this with magecraft) because what it uses as its basis is God
Magic by any other name. Catholics had attempted to summon angels and even demons behind closed doors, even their own priests and bishops, no different from the wizard-king Solomon. “It’s not a sin if God allows it!”. What Christians do is actually indistinguishable from what magicians and witches do. The Mass is a variant of ‘High Ritual Magick’, or that of High Ceremony. They’re just using a lot of different words. It’s all semantics.

Magic has never not been ironic. It’s very one sided. What is magic to the witnesser may not be magic to the magician—same way the elves in middle-earth don’t really believe in (elven) magic—same way the wizards(Istari) aren’t really wizards back home in Valinor. They’re far too used to it, the same way we in the 21st century are much too used to everything we do in the modern world. It’s all just art; the artificial. It (magic) is just an angle. The elves look to the wizars(Maia) the same way men or hobbits look to the elves. Magic’s a bar—higher or lower for all. The malicious and black machines of Mordor are seen as a form of black magic for this very reason. Magic is all about exposure/familiarity.

This is why Nasu magic sort of fails. It is not acknowledging the psychology of the brain chemistry that leads up to “wow, it’s like magic!”. Tolkien had called it in letters ‘enchantment’, or that of being enchanted by a thing to the point of considering it a magical experience. At its most pure and simple, you had the ancients who looked to the stars in the night sky, seeing them as divine phenomena. Magic is “magic”, and (like religion) has always been stage magic—with existence as the magician.