One of the first things that attracted me to Lusternia was the overwhelmingly accurate representations of both New Age and Ancient magick in it's skills. High Magic, for instance, is designed after the Tree of Life, AKA the Qabalah, or Hermetics.

The Qabalah is known for it's connections to Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, Thelemic orders, and even the beginnings of modern Wicca and Neopaganism. It is based on different influences like the Jewish Kabbalah, Christian Cabbalah, Western astrology, Alchemy, tantra, Freemasonry, and many many others. It is technically and theoretically a syncretic system that is derived from various beliefs from all across the world.

The "spheres" that we use IG are called the Sephirot. Each of these Sephirah have distinct and accurately represented uses and meanings. They are necessarily realities corresponding to different parts of esoteric practices and tarot cards. There are Eleven in all, Ten normal Sephirah and the hidden plane of Daath, which is considered either part of Binah or a place where human consciousness cannot enter.

Even stranger are the current studies of physics. For those in the know, String Theory has been the heart of the research in Quantum Physics for decades and is considered something that will shape reality and science as we know it. It is based on the idea of supergravity interacting with 2 and 5-dimensional membranes. For a long time, there were five different String Theories. They talked about ten different dimensions so small they are the beginning of all matter, or so large they make up time and space itself. For years physicists clashed about the true meaning of these ten dimensions, as each of these theories contradicted one another.

Then the unimaginable happened. One man named Edward Witten managed to unify all of the string theories in something called M-Theory, at once creating an eleventh dimension and evoking a supersymmetry in all dimensions. Why was this important? Because now, it all made sense. Well, not to me since I'm not a physicist... but to them, it made perfect sense. I thinks it's something like the matrices of water... continuous and never able to be compressed, and nearly constantly at extremely low energy levels. When it breaks or "crests", however, the energies become extremely high for a short period.

So, why am I talking about String Theory in this post you ask? Because tens of thousands of people in the occult and hermetic society of people are raving about it. For years Hermeticists have drawn their ideas about the Tree of Life over the new discoveries in String Theory. The mathematical dimensions were shockingly similar, but there was a synchronicity that could not be matched... then M-Theory emerged. The eleventh dimension matched up with the hidden plane of Daath and in moments both metaphysics and physics merged into one continuous idea. Of course, no scientists agreed on this... but metaphysicists across the world became enlightened that the world of Quantum Physics had finally proven what they had known for centuries.

Thank you, creators of Lusternia, for doing so much research into this very interesting subculture of esoterica. Highmagic as a skill has always interested me the most of any skills with few exceptions, and I'll be sure to post a bit about Lowmagic as well. The world of Metaphysics is a dynamic and real place, and since Aristotle was the author of physics as well as metaphysics, I could never discount it's reality. In fact, I've always been a proponent of the fact that magick is real. Not the "I throw fireball at u 4 300 dmg" kind of magic, but the kind of mental and otherworldly magick that can really affect the real world. Ancient druids used to sacrifice goats/humans and smear blood on themselves and the ground to foresee the future and empower their culture. Even if those Druids weren't actually casting crazy spells on others, the psychological effect of these rituals certainly did have an impact on both their own and the Romans who wrote about them. Not to mention that they saw the fall of their culture many years before it happened. It's categorized in countless plays and stories from across the eons. From the witch who curses the man in the town square when she's on the gallows, to the voudon nailing cats to other peoples doors, to the blind prophet who tells Caesar to beware the Ides of March... Call it psychology or esoteric science... if it affects the real world, I think it's Magick.

Long post is long.

And confusing.

Someone else who knows about metaphysics, quantum physics, and the esoteric!

Yes, I noticed similar things in Lusternia, and I love them for it. I also love them for their references to Lovecraft and the various planes of existence, along with Fae. The references to Fae make me happy.

Lusternia's creators have picked up more than one kind of book from the New Age and History sections of their book stores, and I love them for it.

It's not "long post is long," it's "fail post is fail."

I think this might be what happens when you put a physicist and a new age-y type in a blender.

I've actually had the pleasure of meeting a Wiccan academic astronomer. She was generally a participating member of the real world. Otaku scare me, though.

Dear Dakkhan,

<3

Sincerely,
Tyngh

*tokes one too*

Perhaps I'm just misinformed but would you mind explaining the connection between Aristotle's metaphysics and hermeticism?

I think the funny thing is.

Highmagic IRL = May have discovered something really neat.

Highmagic in Lusternia = ROFL. You're kidding me, right?

I felt a similar interest in Lusternia because of this as you... however I have to give a big fat *SIGH* to this comment...

Sorry, I can't help but make another comment, because I fall for these things all the time, and sorry to everbody who has no idea what I'm saying:

You may be intrested to know that the oldest known book on Kabbalah says explictily, "Ten and not nine, Ten and not Eleven"
Daat and Bina can not be seen at the same time, it is either one or the other. And most of the time, when looking one will not be able to see or recognize Keter, but you shouldn't be fooled by this, and know that it's always 10. (the coorelation between this and sub atomic phycis should be obvious)

No connection as far as I know. I was talking about Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics as a merger of Philosophy and Science, in comparison to the theories about Qabalah and String Theory.



Exactly. It's there, but not really. The eleventh dimension in M-Theory is technically a different way of looking at the other theories, somewhat like reflections in a mirror. It's a way observing the five super symmetrical dualities of the earlier incarnations of String theory. I'm still not decided on if it's a very odd coincidence or not.

"The early Quabalists recognized only ten emanations of the Holy Tree. If an auxiliary sphere was postulated at all it would perhaps been close in nature to the astrological concept of "mid-points," i.e., hypothetical sensitive foci which are presumed to be a meaningful product of the angular relationship between two planets. The points are the result of aspecting planetary forces and have no fixed independent existence. Lunar nodes, which are much used in Eastern astrology, and in assessing karmic factors in a natal chart, have a similar role, being simply the point at which the moon's orbit crosses the plane of the ecliptic.
In Hebrew "Daath" means "knowledge," although the sphere may be found in some older Qabalistic documents titled "Science." Its position (it indeed it could be said to have one) is conventionally drawn upon the Tree with broken lines, approximately mid-way between the first emanation, Kether, and the sixth, Tiphareth, astride the great gulf of the Abyss." - John Bonner

John Boner....hehehe.

I will be sure to be an active participant in this thread once I open my stash.

As someone with a great fondness for both the "esoteric" traditions and for advanced physics, I still can't help laughing at people who seriously think that string theory in some way corroborates, or even has anything to do with, occultism. The resemblances are so superficial they don't even hold up as metaphors, let alone as some kind of real connection. Even in a tradition that can take homeopathic medicine seriously, that's a stretch. The Tao Of Physics was execrable and unsupportable but it holds up better than that. That said, using string theory as an element in occultism "because it's cool" is fine, as long as people stop imagining that something real has actually been demonstrated!

I confess to being lost.

Gwylifar, what about in "Book of Shadows" by H.P.S Phyllis Curott where she says that recent Quantum Mechanics research shows that the human will can influence particles on the quantum level? Is that not true?

(not trying to argue with, as I agree with you here, but I am wondering if you have heard of said research?

That research was kind of dubious. Lemme see if I can dig it up and edit...

EDIT: Nope, ignore then

I haven't read that one, but The Conscious Universe by Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau is probably along the same lines; it tends to waft from microscopic fact to vague metaphor to cosmological grand idea with that kind of casual breathlessness that so badly marred The Tao of Physics, though perhaps not quite as irresponsibly. I can't guess where Curott falls on that spectrum (though the title doesn't sound promising!).

The observer effect is something which is very hard to describe in a way that accurately reflects what it is, but does not lead to all kinds of loopy ideas that people can therefore change the rules of determinism through an act of will. Even studied physicists have been known to fall into the trap, and laypeople are almost impossibly doomed to it. But the words by which we describe even such basics as Schroedinger's Cat or the wave/particle duality problems in the double-slit experiment (let alone the really gnarly stuff you get into long before you reach string theory) are just maddeningly likely to give people the wrong idea, and it's so easy for them to then write books based on those wrong ideas.

There's also a lot of people who leap from the idea that "the only determinism at the subatomic level is stochastic" to "there is no determinism", which is just a misunderstanding of probability transformed into a misunderstanding of the fundamental principles. It's not really a new error, it just makes an old error far more dangerous.

I don't think I could do any better than anyone else in explaining how the observer effect does not even remotely mean you can influence the world through occultism by the force of your will, or how the Heisenberg uncertainty principle doesn't violate macroscopic determinism, in terms that are convincing and unlikely to simply lead from one fallacy to another. If I could, I'd have a bestseller on the shelves and a tidy sum in my bank account. So instead, I'll try to recommend a few other sources that approach the question usefully.

There is an appendix in God's Equation, by Amir D. Aczel, that provides a mathematical proof of the observer effect which really made it clear to me, but few people have enough math to follow it. I was struggling with it, and the insight at the end was one of those things that I would have to reread it to recapture, and it will only stay with me for a little while. But if you can follow it, it's the best I've encountered in explaining both how the observer effect mathematically has to exist (and which explains what the various experiments confirming it are really telling us), without lapsing too far into metaphors that seem to imply vastly different things than what the theory and experiment actually imply.

For those without the math, the best book oriented towards the layperson with no physics knowledge that explains quantum physics in a meaningful, engaging way without lapsing into the mistaking-metaphor-for-reality problem is John Gribbin's In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. The edition I have is over 20 years old, I wonder if a newer one is out. (Not that this stuff has changed since 1984. Quantum physics was mostly done in the 1920s to 1940s, at the same time as relativity, though most people imagine it to be a far more recent thing than relativity.)

(Boy, it's hard to come up with an ObOnTopic for this.)