Borrowing from Buddhism the concept of the “near enemy”, we consider how art, history, and psychology may look like magick but can harm our magical practice, exploring: the danger of the near enemy; pity as the near enemy of compassion; art, history, and psychology as near enemies of magick and their detrimental effects; the difference of this approach from Lionel Snell’s approach in SSOTBME; philosophy as a current near enemy that was once synonymous with magick; art as the most insidious near enemy of magick; the legitimate role of art in magick; beauty versus truth; Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; magicians who are artists: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Tommie Kelly; how art and magick can be synonymous; art as a disguise for magick; the different intentions and skill sets of art and magick; Phil Ford and J.F. Martel on M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, and Harrison’s response to this; Philip K. Dick as a gnostic writer and Harrison as an imitator of Gnosticism; Socrates’s expulsion of the artists from Plato’s Republic; my view of history as irrelevant to magick; the roots of my view in chaos magick and Perennialism; defining Perennialism and distinguishing it from Traditionalism; the value of different and multiple paths to truth; the tendency of the historical perspective to situate truth in the tradition rather than in personal experience; the value of tradition as a path to personal experience; psychology as a near enemy and my personal vulnerability to it; the spirit paradigm versus the psychological paradigm; how the psychological paradigm is likely to produce only psychological results; the different dimensions of truth: subjective and objective; the psychological paradigm as possibly occluding the objective dimensions of truth; Jung and the objective dimensions of the psyche; the subjective and objective dimensions of the mind in meditation, and psychology’s pathologizing of the objective dimensions.

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Phil Ford & J.F. Martel (2020). Weird studies Ep. 81. Gnostic lit: on M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart. https://tinyurl.com/2kjpywse (weirdstudies.com). Accessed April 2022.

M. John Harrison (2005). The Course of the Heart. In: Anima. London: Gollancz.

M. John Harrison (2020). The core of the heart. https://tinyurl.com/yeyr3h9y (wordpress.com). Accessed April 2022.

M. John Harrison (2020). I can hear you. https://tinyurl.com/yckfj2wa (wordpress.com). Accessed April 2022.

John Keats (1819). Ode on a Grecian urn. https://tinyurl.com/29z54pjh (owleyes.org). Accessed April 2022.

Tommie Kelly (2021). Art is magick, magick is art! https://youtu.be/TcFVj9NBuJk (youtube.com). Accessed April 2022.

Alan Moore (2016). Art and magic. https://youtu.be/WHxWE-S3nD8 (youtube.com). Accessed April 2022.

Plato (2022). The Republic, 10: 598b. https://tinyurl.com/mt3vybc8 (tufts.edu). Accessed April 2022.