IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
Okay. But the point here is that the priest does not manipulate God. God cannot be manipulated. The Mass does not manipulate God. Therefore it is not magic.
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Would you describe Jesus as practicing a form of sympathetic magic
- Thread starter amorphous_constellation
- Start date
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
No, I think you're absolutely correct. But the example is as close as I can come, which I *think* I stated in my original post (can't remember for sure...). The point I was making is that, in the RCC belief, bread and wine are transformed. It's interesting that the word "worship" comes from two Anglo-Saxon root words, the "wor" part from the root word warden, which means "to be" or "to become." And it's the same root as words like "witch" and "weird." So those who came up with the term "worship" as the English version of leiturgia certainly thought some kind of "becoming" or transformation was taking place. Whether it can be defined as "magic" or not is up for debate, I suppose.
amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
Well, I suppose that depends on if you have more of a mechanistic conception of god. For doesn't it state in Leviticus 26:3-4, that god's beneficence hinges on the specific adherence to a number of rules.. The opposite of this, it seems to me, might be the christian conception of 'grace,' where god becomes less like a vast 'control panel' and more like a regular subjective and somewhat unpredictable being. The latter is I think less inclined to allow for sympathetic magic as I understand it, though I suppose that is what I'm trying to sort out with the thread
Interesting, this reminds me though of a Jackson Crawford video I had watched recently on the word 'wyrd,' though the argument seems to be that some significant divergence in understanding occurred, for example, between how the concept was understood in beowulf and how it was understood by the norse, from whose lands the angles had come. Perhaps the english had by then secularized the root of the term to have to do more with mere 'luck,' whereas the norse thought of it as dealing more with fate, coming from goddesses that had a connection to the well of urd. (or earth, which probably also has the same root as worship and weird?) I'm not sure, very interesting to think about sometimes though
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