The Rastafari have a saying: WORD, SOUND, POWER. Our lives are shaped by the words we hear, both consciously and unconsciously. Words are an invocation, language a system which creates the internal framework of our thoughts, there is an architecture to our inner worlds and words are the architect. Scriptures are revealed in different languages because different languages are appropriate to them, hence the Qu’ran is in Arabic, the Torah in Hebrew. But words more universally are signifiers, things related with the meaning attached to them, if they were not then there would be no communication at all, only the babbling of schizophrenia.
Let’s be clear, superstition is a childish thing, it is a thing we set aside as we grow and mature. Yet it is also a gateway to awakening, it is the most primitive part of ourselves which has a total and childlike faith in the magic and mystery of the world. It is the prototype of religion, which is our connection to what is beyond ourselves, and the most fundamental of necessities if we seek to find wholeness. The question is, where do the boundaries lie? What is the difference between insight and paranoia, between being aware and being neurotic?
In the 1980s, particularly in the USA, there was the “Satanic Panic”. The Evangelicals became convinced that Satanic forces were attempting to influence children through rock music and other avenues, including the tabletop roleplaying game “Dungeons and Dragons”. It is true that many in the entertainment industry are involved in Satanism, in the MK MONARCH psychological programming project (this is what America is like, this is its “soft power”), and that these forms of culture are a trap to stop people from seeking things which are more elevated. This is not true of all rock music by any means, most of it is a lot more human than the pop stuff which is really quite sinister, nonetheless it is quite clear why religious people would freak out about stuff like Led Zeppelin given the connection with Crowley.
But Dungeons and Dragons? It seems like the harmless refuge of the social misfit, the place where geeks can find community and genuine friendship away from the cruelty and judgement of people who think they are cool. It is an opportunity to engage in “Active Imagination”, there is a creative element to it which really is much healthier than sitting in front of a television absorbing the garbage they feed us. In fact the very criticisms of it demonstrate that there is something healthy about it:
“In 1987 two pastors, Peter Leithart and George Grant, published a book, The Catechism of the New Age: A Response to Dungeons and Dragons. Joseph P. Laycock wrote that their book condemned role-playing as allowing too much freedom, which the authors regard as a gateway to critical thinking, which in turn may result in heretical thought.”
The notion that human beings should not engage in critical thinking is oppressive, even barbarous. If we cannot logically analyse the world around us then we will simply be the dumb slaves of whatever ideology we have been programmed with. On the other hand, becoming caught up in our own intellects makes us too skeptical, we demand scientific evidence for absolutely everything, even for the blatant fact of our own consciousness. Still, if the world were free from “heretics” it would be a dull and conformist place, there would be no rebels, free spirits, those carrying the spark of wild nature in their hearts.
Nonetheless, sitting around a table absorbed in an imaginary world seems to be lacking something. It is really symptomatic of the alienated and rationalistic time we live in that people need to do this, to imagine gods and monsters and magic and noble battles, it shows that we have reached a stage in history where little of genuine beauty is left. We pretend because our lives are so stupefyingly dull, and we feel so powerless in the face of all the oppression and horror that we are always seeking something to escape into. This is quite a reasonable human reaction, but not entirely healthy.
Still, a Satanic Panic!? There is little to panic about in something as innocent as Dungeons and Dragons. Games are just games at the end of the day, no sane person would decry playing cards because they happen to be of the same design as the Minor Arcana of Tarot. The Evangelicals who see Satanism everywhere don’t see their own Satanism, do they really think that silly “worship rock” is going to get us attuned with The Divine? Look at the difference between the art that Catholicism has produced and the art which Protestantism produces, it is quite obvious which is the higher teaching. But to each their own mind, and the path they choose to walk.
Nonetheless, words have power. Any act of communication casts its own type of spell over the hearer, it is in Dialogue that we find ourselves. The discourse which we allow into our consciousness is what feeds our thoughts (marketing is the most blatant example of how we can subtly influenced by sensory impressions), which is not to say that we should only read Holy Books because this would be the psychological equivalent of a “Raw Vegan” diet, but at the same time we don’t want to be wasting time occupying ourselves with the diseased imaginations of uninspired hacks. Unfortunately Dungeons and Dragons is closer to a “pulp fiction” paperback than Dostoyevsky.
The thing about games involving magic is that magic is real, and the thing about magic is that talking about it is kind of doing it. There are many different types, it is not simply a question of Good and Evil, placing a curse on a being meriting a curse is quite reasonable as to not harm them would be to do more harm to humanity in general. But when we create imaginary worlds, we create what are known as EGREGORES. These coalescences of subtle energy can have both positive and negative qualities, and can be as small as a whispered prayer or as big as a world religion, as sweet as a declaration of love or as cruel as a public execution. Perhaps the only way to avoid creating them entirely would be to take a vow of silence, but if we cannot do that then we need to learn to have consciousness in our speech, awareness of the world our word is creating, otherwise we give energy to harmful Egregores.
There are three aspects to magical rituals which seem relevant to Dungeons and Dragons:
COLLECTIVITY:
Where human beings come together their energies attune, things get amplified by the collective nature of what is being done, hence why certain magical rituals involve things like human beings holding hands and standing in a circle. Dungeons and Dragons has this characteristic.
SYMBOL:
It seems highly unlikely that the “spells” in Dungeons and Dragons are actually related with those practised by the Luciferian Hierarchies. They are designed according to the mechanics of the game, in order to make it functional. However they are the creation of the subconscious minds of those who designed the game, and the subconscious is full of forms which parallel actual forms in the world.
INTENTION:
Clearly very few people are playing Dungeons and Dragons with the intent of becoming sorcerers (Brujos), of course most don’t even believe in such things. However attacking and casting spells on imaginary characters still involves an element of genuine anger, the players want to reach the end of the game scenario and are trying to destroy obstacles to doing so. Furthermore the game is created with the profit motive as the intention, and hence is designed to have addictive qualities.
Still, we do not need to become judgemental or cruel. People eating MacDonalds are caught up in a far more destructive and ugly Egregore, it’s not like Dungeons and Dragons is trying to take over the world and turn it into a faceless dystopia without human feeling or aesthetic qualities. It is good for the youth to have friends and to play silly games, and “geeks” in particular are often socially isolated and ostracized, they need a community around them for their own mental health. A child raised by television will turn out a lot worse than a child raised by Dungeons and Dragons, and that includes the so-called “religious” programming of the Evangelicals which hides the motives of wealth and acclaim behind a facade of piety and goodness.
However, adults need to behave like adults, to stop playing games and pretending – well, unless they are great artists with some kind of real message for humanity, a Goethe or a Nietzsche. The world is for action, for deeds, and losing ourselves in imaginative constructs is denying reality, an abdication of responsibility, an act of fear before the harshness of the world we are in which ultimately prevents us from growing up.
