A Wisdom Archive on Thaumaturgy

Thaumaturgy (from the Greek words thaumos meaning "miracle" and ergos meaning "work") is the branch of magic (or "magick", for Crowley fans) that is concerned with the production of real-world, "objective" effects, e.g. "miracles". While many believe that thaumaturgy is distinguished from theurgy, the branch which concerns itself with purely spiritual matters, this is not always the case. Thaumaturgy deals with producing a desired effect within the material world, but it is not necessarily opposed to or dis ...

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thaumaturgy
The power for miraculous performance, especially healing, with ecstatic surge of feeling

 
(See also: Thaumaturgy, Body Mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » thaumaturgy dictionary

The Tremere are a fictional clan of vampires, from White Wolf Game Studio's books and role-playing games set in the World of Darkness (Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Dark Ages). The Tremere are a clan of tightly-knit magicians. In comparison to the other vampiric clans, the Tremere are especially loyal to their hierarchy. Their symbol is a square surrounded by a circle; with an isosceles right triangle drawn at 60°, where the hypotenuse is a tangent to the circle. While in the Dark Ages the Tremere were a minor clan, considered mere upstarts, they soon grew powe ...

Read more here: » Tremere: Encyclopedia II - Tremere - Classic World of Darkness

Alan Watts was a popular post-modern philosophical writer. His writing reflects his personal desire to move beyond the bounds of the culture and psychology he had inherited in Britain. Despite the intellectual opportunities he knew had been afforded by the schools he had attended in childhood, he felt the general cultural influence (particularly the religious ideas) had been restrictive and repressive. He wrote that he believed Judeo-Christian culture had developed through the centuries in a way that had not fully accepted human nature, and therefore often stifled people and set them at odds with nature, rather than ...

Read more here: » Alan Watts: Encyclopedia II - Alan Watts - Philosophy summarized

Spells in Fantasy Hero are an application of the Hero powers system, with appropriate limitations applied to simulate the conventional restrictions of magical spells. The spells commonly require incantations (verbal), gestures (physical), a skill roll, and in many cases some type of focus. This last is an object of some type that can be taken or destroyed, thereby hindering the spell caster. The earlier edition of the Fantasy Hero book included a series of magic colleges, fantasy creatures, and a cursory campaign setting. These have b ...

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Crowley learned to play chess at the age of six and first competed on the Eastbourne College chess team (where he was taking classes in 1892). He showed immediate competence, beating the adult champion in town and even editing a chess column for the local newspaper, the Eastbourne Gazette (Sutin, p.33), which he often used to criticize the Eastbourne team. He later joined the university chess club at Cambridge, where he beat the president in his freshman year and practiced two hours a day towards becoming a champion — "My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of ...

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Chess

In the summer of 1902, Oscar Eckenstein and Crowley undertook the first attempt to scale Chogo Ri (known in the west as K2), located in Pakistan. The Eckenstein-Crowley Expedition consisted of Eckenstein, Crowley, Guy Knowles, H. Pfannl, V. Wesseley, and Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. During this trip he won a world record for his hardships on the Baltoro Glacier, sixty-eight straight days of glacial life. In May 1905, he was approached by Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod (1868 - 1925) to accompany him on the first expedition to Kanchenjunga, th ...

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering

Crowley claimed to use a scientific method to study what people at the time called "spiritual" experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine The Equinox. By this he meant that mystical experiences should not be taken at face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying religious meaning. In this he may be considered to foreshadow Dr. Timothy Leary, who at one point sought to apply the same method to psychedelic drug experiences. Yet like Leary's, Crowley's method has received little "scie ...

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality