#dion-fortune — Public Fediverse posts

I didn’t see any suggestions that doing this would be unwelcome here on pagan.plus, so this is the beginning of my live-blogging (live-Tooting?) my way through “The Mystical Qabalah” by Dion Fortune. (1/?)

I’d like to begin with what I think is an important disclaimer: The use of Kabbalah in the Western Hermetic tradition has historically gone hand-in-hand with a great deal of antisemitism. The artist and art educator Ezra Rose has recently published a good monograph on the subject, available at

https://ezrarose.itch.io/fyma-a-lesser-key

...which I encourage everyone to read! It's terrific!

I’m still wrestling with the question of where I personally land on the question of cultural appropriation. On the one hand, I tend to believe that the free exchange of artistic practices, religious ideas, languages, culinary concepts, stories, music, social structures, everything that constitutes “culture”, is all to the good. On the other hand, one has to work pretty hard to ignore the fact that very often, that “free exchange” is intrinsically unbalanced.

The dominant culture is always free to “adapt” whatever they like from minority cultures, to extract profit from them, and equally free to dismiss them out of hand. People operating within the dominant culture, who are not themselves of that culture, do not have an equivalent freedom. They cannot dismiss the dominant culture without incurring social cost, nor are they accorded the freedom to act outside of their perceived identity without pushback.

#Magick #DionFortune

I didn’t see any suggestions that doing this would be unwelcome here on pagan.plus, so this is the beginning of my live-blogging (live-Tooting?) my way through “The Mystical Qabalah” by Dion Fortune. (1/?)

I’d like to begin with what I think is an important disclaimer: The use of Kabbalah in the Western Hermetic tradition has historically gone hand-in-hand with a great deal of antisemitism. The artist and art educator Ezra Rose has recently published a good monograph on the subject, available at

https://ezrarose.itch.io/fyma-a-lesser-key

...which I encourage everyone to read! It's terrific!

I’m still wrestling with the question of where I personally land on the question of cultural appropriation. On the one hand, I tend to believe that the free exchange of artistic practices, religious ideas, languages, culinary concepts, stories, music, social structures, everything that constitutes “culture”, is all to the good. On the other hand, one has to work pretty hard to ignore the fact that very often, that “free exchange” is intrinsically unbalanced.

The dominant culture is always free to “adapt” whatever they like from minority cultures, to extract profit from them, and equally free to dismiss them out of hand. People operating within the dominant culture, who are not themselves of that culture, do not have an equivalent freedom. They cannot dismiss the dominant culture without incurring social cost, nor are they accorded the freedom to act outside of their perceived identity without pushback.

#Magick #DionFortune