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This was really nice.

I'll just say, it starts out deconstructing the way "magic" in the modern world has given way to "engineering" and thus mythological things like 'deals with the devil' are no longer believed.

But, in my view, a significant part of the appeal of the 'deal with the devil' is that it isn't mysterious. A Faustian bargain works according to exactly the letter of the deal, and the devil always keeps his end of it. Part of what makes it interesting, enticing even, is that it looks like there might be ways to outwit the devil. The devil then is a force of nature to be engineered just like any other branch of engineering in modern times, not an arbitrary fact of life beyond our comprehension.

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Yes, the point, as I have always thought, is not that playing with the devil is playing with a deceitful sharper, but playing against one's own inability to handle one's desires, one's own imperfections and basically facing the corruption of the original sin in oneself. The devil just sets things up in such a way that the human who yielded to the temptation arrives to the state of ruin faster, and initially enjoying the ride, all while not being formally lied to at any moment.

The idea is that there logically may be ways to outwit the devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted) mind, so the faith is the only salvation, and rejecting any deals is the only non-losing strategy. Remember, Dr Faustus was not written by an atheist.

> The idea is that there logically may be ways to outwit the devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted) mind

If it’s a comedy, The Devil may end up outwitting himself. Doubly funny if the human was suspicious at first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnhfjdVYRrk

Though in the end, The Devil may still get what he wanted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwg8EjQXEc4

Reading the description I immediately knew what will be under the links. Nice reference!

The Swiss outwitted him at the Gotthard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sch%C3%B6llenen... (look for Devil's Bridge legend)

Or in other words "it's hard to get scammed if you're not greedy"

In Pratchett's "Going Postal", there's the following quote:

There is a saying, “You can’t fool an honest man,” which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Moist never tried it, knowingly anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly had to aim.

So in a nutshell the whole genre can be reduced to "be careful what you wish for, you might get it"?

Or "don't think you're as smart as you think you are."

Perhaps there's a line to be drawn from here to the dictum that code should be only half as clever as it could be, because debugging is twice as hard.

Jokes about recursion are always funny, just like this one!

Not just that, but also "...and you'll never be able to handle it, and the sleek scoundrel on the other side knows it".

So you want to wave away whole storytelling experience by sentence that fits in a tweet.

Gist of it might be true but reading dry sentence doesn’t do to a brain same thing as reading a story and going for a ride along with the imaginary person.

Well done story evokes emotions, makes one think of what ifs and what nots.

Also a lot of memes or tweet length life lessons are not possible without long form background we share as a society.

I see a "discussions" one time where a professor tried to explain why Twitter is actually bad for the wiring of the brain. The other guy was a self proclaimed twitter expert. Every time the professor tried to say something the twitter expert interupted him just around 500 chars. The professor eventually got angry then the twitter man said, but i already knew what you wanted to say.

Enraged the professor stood up then left the room.

I thought it was the best instance of my work here is done

And then the whole class stood and clapped - and that twitter expert’s name?

Or you can beat him just by being really good at playing a fiddle.

Faust himself didn't get tricked. He was offered the chance to get out of it until the very last instant. There wasn't any sneaky wording. There wasn't anything to outwit.

At the beginning he somehow convinced himself that his soul didn't really exist, despite the presence of a literal devil in front of him, offering the power to do genuine magic. At the end he somehow just couldn't bring himself to repent.

In between he uses his power for absolutely nothing of interest. The most earth shaking thing he does is that he plays a prank on the Pope.

I'll be honest that I really don't get the point of the story. It's not about the devil being a trickster. If anything it reads kinda like a self critique by Marlowe, but that reading is also kinda shaky. It's more like people just wanted to see an academic get taken down a peg.

Even if the Devil was being honest with the terms, Faust did get tricked so long as he did not believe in souls, even if it was Faust tricking himself, and presumably the Devil was counting on that, knowing as he did that it was a bad deal.

That's not unbelievable. It's human nature. I think a lot of real life businesses that work more or less the same way. It's a tragic tale about a pretty regular guy convincing himself to accept a shitty deal because the short term upside sounds pretty great, despite not even particular wanting or needing that upside.

Have I mentioned that I’d be happy to loan you money for your startup’s cashflow issues, with deferred interest, secured only by your immortal soul?

> Have I mentioned that I’d be happy to loan you money for your startup’s cashflow issues, with deferred interest, secured only by your immortal soul?

Well I'm atheist, so I don't believe in souls. I guess I'll ... take the deal?

Which brings up another question - is selling something for material gain that you legitimately believe doesn’t exist fraud?

I’m imagining the court precedent in this particular case would be delicious.

Also, this is funny [https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-it-possible-to-unsell-ones-so...].

I recall when eBay had to face that question. Their conclusion:

* If a soul does not exist, it's not a valid eBay auction.

* If a soul does exist, it's a body part, and forbidden from selling on eBay.

I could poke some holes in their ontology, but I thought the conclusion was very clever.

That was such a cop-out. Souls are part of the person, but their whole deal is not being part of the body.

Are we talking European souls, south west Asian souls, or East Asian souls?

I’m pretty sure Daoist, Buddhist, or Hindu souls are not sellable conceptually in the way European souls are. One of those times when ‘無門關’ (mu-koan) might be the right answer. Not really a thing, in the western concept anyway. Anymore than it’s possible to square a circle, or calculate Pi from a line.

Maybe that’s why European cultures have been taking over the world? We were able to sell our souls to the devil?

Looks like Jews don’t have a concept of selling ones soul anymore than Hindus. [https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1093498/jewis...].

Muslims seem divided on the topic (among many others), with a pretty solid ‘western’ type tradition of ‘you bet, but you’ll regret it’ to a similar type view of the Catholics near as I can tell (no, and you’ll be forgiven if you get back on the right path).

I guess it behooves one to familiarize oneself with something one is willing to take as collateral, eh?

P.S. If you’re an atheist who doesn’t believe in a soul, then clearly you’re a soulless bastard. ;)

(Leaving out the extremely wide variety of African and various covered regions indigenous peoples Soul-concepts for brevity).

This goes somewhat deeper than you might expect. "Literal" spells are for sale on e.g. ebay, and presumably authenticity/belief are managed like reputation?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/bn_7023443545

As long as you are open about it and the other side is fine with that, it's not a fraud from your side.

How much money and how deferred? If you're willing to wait until after I'm dead, we can talk.

This sounds like an SCP waiting to be written.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-738

"At the beginning he somehow convinced himself that his soul didn't really exist, despite the presence of a literal devil in front of him, offering the power to do genuine magic."

To be fair, if a "devil" suddenly showed up in front of me, offering me anything I ever wanted in exchange for my "soul", my worldview would not change. Since this "devil" exists, it is part of the natural world, I just can't know exactly what it is or where did it came from. I might as well accept the offer this alien/ultra advanced AI/simulation being/whatever offers me, since this simple fact of something appearing out of nothing is not in any way a proof of God's existence, or of souls being a thing etc. If that was the case, when the Europeans arrived in America, with gunpowder and ocean capable ships, the natives should have, obviously, accepted as fact that they were gods... well, it didn't end well for the Aztecs.

The point depends on the version, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_Faust

Marlowe being neither the first nor the most influential.

Yeah, true. I'm a Shakespearean actor, and so Marlowe's version is most important to me. It has at least has one famous line ("The face that launched a thousand ships").

I actually should at least familiarize myself with Goethe's version.

Coincidentally, I've just finished Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. It's very long and massively overexampled, but still a good and eye-opening read.

When it came out in 1971 it cost an extortionate £7; one national newspaper had an editorial saying people might be forced to pay for it in instalments.

How is that extortionate? Using the inflation calculator of the Bank of England that is 86 pounds now or $110. Admittedly that more expensive than the current price of $24 for the paper back, but at worst that seems to be twice as expensive as a common price for a 850 page book?

At October, 1970, the provisional figures of average weekly earnings of full-time manual workers were £28 Os. 11d. for men aged 21 years and over, and £13 19s. 10d. for women aged 18 years and over. Between October, 1965 and October, 1970, average earnings of all workers covered by the regular inquiry rose by 45.9 per cent. and the general index of retail prices by 26.4 per cent. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1971/jan/...

So it would have been around a decent chunk of your weekly wage as an average worker, it sounds like. I think what we would need to know is how much excess income someone would have for something like that at the time.

I cannot imagine paying £86 for any book tbh. That seems crazy high.

Consider that some technical books have a potential target audience of thousand or so people. Then ask how many hours the book needs to save you to be worth $100. Depending on the book that can look very cheap.

Don't go to college, you'll have to do that 5 times every semester.

Oh I forgot that's a thing in some countries. I did both of my university degrees just borrowing books needed from the library, they have to have enough copies for every student if needed.

But did you get a loan and.... pay for it in instalments?

Luckily most of my courses did not require textbooks. Though it was easy enough to get PDFs on libgen.

American way of life

Most of the time we'd end up with a group of friends where we'd each buy a different book then share among each other. Not many were spending the whole amount every semester, especially past the first year when we didn't really know any better.

I think I paid similar for Wolfram's A New Kind of Science back in the early 00's. Huge great beast of a hardback tome, promising the secrets of the universe. I don't think I ever finished it, and ended up giving it away to a charity shop after schlepping it around the world with me, unread.

> twice as expensive as a common price for a 850 page book?

Costs per page have dropped significantly - so not valid to use page count as a fixed comparison point???

So perhaps its price is more reasonable than we might assume.

> but at worst that seems to be twice as expensive as a common price for a 850 page book?

Huh? https://www.amazon.com/Fires-Heaven-Wheel-Time-Book/dp/03128...

Hardcover for $24.49 (703 pages), paperback for $16.99 (848 pages).

Surprised what educating people and making them write their own sentences does to the psyche of a population.

Recently I encountered a piece discussing "The Prestige" as a counter to the opinion that science dulls the wonder of the world by removing magic from the equation.

The idea is that the machine in The Prestige is stipulated as being science as a conceit to allow the audience to experience an unexplainable phenomenon as the people of the time of the film would have experienced to technology of today.

The distinction between magic and technology is shown to be that the wonder goes away for magic tricks once you know how the trick is performed. Technology maintains wonder even after you know how it works, because the wonder is the appreciation of how the goal is achieved by known principles.

Honestly? ‘deals with the devil’ aren’t dangerous because the devil is doing any of the enticing, we are to ourselves.

The devil just gives us a glorious chance to be hoist on our own petard (long term) in exchange for short term glory/enjoyment. A temptation eternally present in humanity, no matter the environment. We’re more than happy to scam ourselves later.

You mean like burning oil and single use plastic?

No, no, we totally have an infinite number of technological tricks to pull out of a magic hat and will roll nat20 every time.

It’s crazy how often it’s actually true though, when it really comes down to it eh?

I don't think climate breakdown, industrial pollution, and microplastic saturation count as nat20s, nor do I think that we'll find a replacement fuel source that can sustain energy demand where it stands right now much less what this civilization would demand between AI/blockchain/metaverse everywhere, for everyone, for everything.

But for a brief period of time we generated a lot of value for shareholders.

Eh, that’s a rather myopic view though isn’t it?

None of those issues you’re talking about seem intractable using the same tools that caused them, frankly, and are likely no harder to solve (if we want) than some of the things we’ve already successfully resolved quite thoroughly like;

- world hunger from a technical/energy basis, as the only remaining hunger issues appear to be politically driven.

- Smallpox, Cholera, Typhoid, Leprosy, and a large slew of other infectious diseases which have ravaged humanity since at least the dawn of recorded history, and probably earlier. Even Malaria is controllable/controlled, depending on the political situation.

- Death by violence or accident is a rare and distant possibility for humans today compared to even 100 years ago.

- Actual life impacting environmental pollution (comparing historical norms like open sewers, indoor wood burning stoves, dangerous fine particulates/dusts), etc. is at historic lows.

- Real world quality of life for the population of the world is at the highest level globally we’ve seen, probably ever. And while there will be dips, that is not likely to materially change back. At least not without a lot of work to intentionally break things.

Do we still have issues that need to be solved, and more upcoming? You bet. Some of them quite urgent. We also have more tools than ever at our disposal to solve them, if/when we use them.

Currently, the biggest issue appears that it isn’t actually obviously critical that we use them, so people are holding back. Because it’s more fun to live their lives than make the sacrifices necessary to use many of those tools.

I mean, just look back to what was going on 100 years ago vs now.

If my view is myopic, yours is rosy. Almost everything you listed is a consequence of us making use of a finite fuel source that was many times denser than anything before, which we are using up faster than ever at the price of the biosphere, but you're assuming the red queen will win her race because she hasn't lost it in the past. That whole "if" we harness the tools we have to solve our problems is doing way too much heavy lifting, and completely ignores the question of if we do indeed have the tools needed to solve the problems we face in the first place.

The wheel turns. It is what it does.

If your view is that all life will cease on this planet from our current state, then I have records of several billion years of past existence of life on this planet as proof that is relatively unlikely. Especially given the relatively minor (from a geological history perspective) nature of the things you are talking about.

Also if your take on my view is that things will be pleasant, ‘fine’, ‘fun’, or with no change or conflict in the future, then I suggest you re-read it.

I see no reason to think that things will not continue in some form. And I have no reason to think that the issues you are naming are unsolvable, with sufficient motivation. Pain and existential threat being historically very effective motivators.

Right now there are historically very low levels of those motivators. We also have an exceptional ability to insulate us from those motivators (historically), especially in the developed world.

Hell, we haven’t even taken a war time footing economically on things like energy yet.

Obviously things will "continue in some form". It just won't be a pleasant form, because we will not be equal to the challenges we face.

Well, not with that attitude. (Literally)

Hope you're not implying that a positive attitude is all it takes. We're going to use up the runway. That's all.

> then I have records of several billion years of past existence of life on this planet as proof that is relatively unlikely.

Have you looked at that record?

There literal End Of The World happened 6 times!

Mass extinction events like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Basically everyone died 6 times, and 99% of all spieces that ever existed are extinct. Everything bigger than a squirrel died out multiple times over.

> we haven’t taken a war time footing

This is a fantasy that a chain smoker can quit any time he wants and will really kick the habit once he has motivation, like when the doctor tells him he has stage 4 lunch cancer!

We knew about the problem for 120 years, we had the means too - a fleet of electric busses operated in London in 1901. You are on copium

Quite familiar with the fossil record (at least as well as we know it now).

The great oxidation (probably the single most apocalyptic biosphere wide event yeah?) nuked ~ 80% of the biosphere, far from all. It was the modern day equivalent of if a simple life form evolved to (energetically favorable) emit sulphuric acid and cyanide.

And no known life at the time had things like hydroponics, nuclear reactors, bunkers (or concrete), chemistry, nuclear weapons, gene editing tech, etc.

We’ve also had events that pushed atmospheric Co2 to > 3000 ppm, atmospheric oxygen to 35% (above current levels of 20-22%), massive asteroid strikes, etc.

The whole world is running on copium right now, which is why none of the issues being brought up are being addressed.

When people are no longer able to ignore it, it will change and rapidly. Probably involving over correction and create a whole slew of new (and different problems), as is the norm.

As you note, we have the means. And it isn’t technically difficult. It’s just not as fun/easy/pleasant/cheap as the current behavior.

I guess the only difference in our views, is will be do anything before it's too late

Keep in mind, less than 100 years ago, half the world was literally trying to murder the other half using every effort conceivable and every bit of modern technology they could muster. Not that long before there were endemic diseases everywhere that killed 30% of everyone infected.

We have a long, long, long way to go before we conceivably hit ‘too late’. Will people die? Yes. But people die anyway.

If that is comforting or not, is up to you. Either way, the wheel will continue to turn.

If you like the structured nature of deals with Other beings and the intersection of that with magic, you might really enjoy the Pact web serial and its sequel Pale by Wildbow.

They contain an exceptionally intricate and well thought through magic system in a modern "hidden world" setting.

My favorite part is how litigious it all is. Power is gained, lost, and traded through deals practitioners make with Other beings, and these are mired in details and exploitation of nuanced language and such. It even features diabolist lawyers!

https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/

Are the persistent themes the outcome of generation via the authors' predilections, or of winnowing via the readers'?

Ok I read it. More it served the interests of power, "Protestantism (and, of course, Christianity generally) had a need to enforce the discipline of delayed gratification".

It has a heckuva closing sentence.

Interesting, the theme that "the dangers of knowledge (Pandora, Genesis) may be as old as humanity.". Did that one stem from power (and pesky upstarts) too?

(Is nixtamalization (of cornmeal) an example or a counterexample?)

What is the field that studies or pontificates upon the historical? forces that led to various cultural themes?

It worked for me. The first part did a great job of painting the horror of living in an age of ignorance, at the mercy of unseen, never understood forces. But I kept thinking... no, hold on... that's now too! [0], so was pleased the last stanza wrapped up as I anticipated, concluding modern forms of magic and Faustian bargains are indeed "exchange in which short-term gain threatens long-term security." As a book review it went off into the long grass for a bit in the middle.

[0] EDIT; sorry but that SouthPark episode where Butters prays to the government just popped into my head; "And if it wouldn't be too much trouble, I'd really like to get a puppy for Christmas this year. G'night, Government!"

The devil never lies.

Or so the devil would have you believe.

Exactly. All of magic is like that and has never really been mysterious... the people actually practicing it have mostly always understood that it was psychological hacks: that people are mostly holding themselves back from what they want, one just needs to align their unconscious desires with their will, and it will happen.

(in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley was asked if magic is "real" e.g. can you actually do physical things like light a fire with your mind. His answer was basically that he didn't care or it doesn't matter- because the magic that aligns your unconscious with your conscious will is more powerful than people even imagine that type of magic would be.

"Magic" in its various forms is alive and well, and is actually widely used (although often on the down low) by creative types to create things that far exceed what confused/ignorant lay people historically imagined magic to be capable of.

> it was psychological hacks: that people are mostly holding themselves back from what they want, one just needs to align their unconscious desires with their will, and it will happen.

This is the correct understanding of magick, at least as formulated by Crowley and other western esotericists such as the Hermeticists. "As above, so below" and the principle of correspondence refer to the way in which our inner psychological worlds correspond to the external world without. To the degree that we are able to transform our inner psychological world and the ways in which we perceive reality [0], we are able to at least modify our own subjective take on the world, which influences our behaviour and the actions we (are willing to) take or don't take in the objective, outer sphere, and thus, as a downstream consequence, modifies the external world without.

Crucially, this modification of one's internal state can be done through sheer application of will alone, and so in a similar fashion as one can invent entire software systems, logical structures, and psychotechnologies [1] through nothing other than the operation of one's mind, one can rewire aspects of their own subjective, psychological reality, and thus minutely affect the real world without.

The conjuring of firebolts and magic missiles are to be regarded as "stage magic" or prestidigitation, not the psychological/spiritual practice that produces inner transformation and mastery of the self (magick). Religion, spirituality, and mysticism are studies of the mind/soul (synonyms for the exact same thing, that which beholds the unconscious, intellectual, emotional, and other aspects of reality not having to do with meatspace), not cheap conjuring tricks or metaphysical assertions about bearded men in the sky or "energies" pervading the universe.

[0] As a modern, practical, worked example see the "Practices" in Igor Kusakov's Psychonetics which can be tried right now, in your browser: https://web.archive.org/web/20160520233250/http://deconcentr...

[1] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/

well said but lacking?

> modification of one's internal state can be done through

there is an old theology question.. can enlightenment/grace/salvation come through individual will and effort? purifications? a certain diet? the right books?

extend that to all manner of transformations .. is it really the sole power of an individual human that can effect such changes? How does a human live, eat, exist each day.. not alone really.. similarly in the unseen realms..

Those who have strong will tend to see the case for individual efforts.

Aleister Crowley's conception of magic is much more modern than the forms of occultism discussed in this article though. He was a modern man living in a modern world, influenced by modern philosophy. If you had asked someone in the 1500s that question, they would have said yes and thought you were an idiot for asking about it.

I disagree - I think more intelligent people have always had a more nuanced view of things like religion and magic, but it wasn’t accepted to talk openly about it. You don’t need science or modern philosophy to be curious and critical of what you hear. Marcus Aurelius touched on this in his private journal ~2k years ago, and it was clear that he understood magic and religion as useful metaphors.

Agreed. Interestingly, my understanding is that it was quiet-ishly passed on by monks and clergy through the middle ages. See John of Morigny on Wikipedia as an example.

Interesting example, I hadn't heard of Morigny, and will look at his book.

I think one reason these things are 'mystical' and 'mysterious' is because the people that understood them did openly talk about them and write about them, but used literary and speaking techniques that give them plausible deniability, and mostly limit the audience to people intelligent enough to decipher them. William Blake is a great example of this- he was writing about ideas so progressive and ahead of their time, many are still today unacceptable to talk about, yet he was able to publish book after book about them in the late 1700s, and was regarded as kooky, rather than dangerous.

This idea was discussed in "On the Practice of Esotericism," 1992. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709872

Try reading what Renaissance humanists actually wrote about magic — like Pico, Ficino or Porta. ChatGPT can help you explore. It is a lot more complicated than you portray.

ChatGPT is like Wikipedia c. 2005: simultaneously very useful and yet with just enough junk to cause problems which mostly affect those who know the least about whichever topic.

Still better than learning from newspapers, though.

I think scholarly books and translations create a sense of "Truth" that is dangerous for beginners. With ChatGPT, it creates an automatic "should I really believe this?" sensation in the reader. I LOVE that sensation when dealing with old literature.

Most translations have serious issues. Most human summaries and books about old literature are crushingly wrong or misleading in key ways. That's not necessarily a problem, unless the reader takes them as the "Truth." It takes a long time for a beginner to get the confidence to doubt the experts.

Wikipedia had this effect: making us question what we read on the internet (since it was written by amateurs). However, now that wikipedia has largely become the best source of information on the web (due to insistence on sourcing), I see chatGPT playing a key role in building critical thinking skills among topic n00bs. It can help guide a beginner towards new knowledge in an accessible manner, but yet leaves them feeling skeptical and wanting more direct information. Many experts doubt that the average person can think this way, but my experience with 15 year olds using chatGPT is that they very quickly learn to maintain skepticism. They just need about an hour or two of use, and it comes naturally.

Maybe with better models, they won't get this practice. Maybe in the future, we will roll out GPT3 for human training.

> Many experts doubt that the average person can think this way, but my experience with 15 year olds using chatGPT is that they very quickly learn to maintain skepticism. They just need about an hour or two of use, and it comes naturally.

Interesting, and I hope that reproduces outside the sample :)

I also read a lot of old translations, especially philosophy, and completely agree. It is amazing how many translators that are academic professors with PhDs in the subject matter fundamentally misunderstand the ideas they are translating, or try to seem "impressive" (and obscure their lack of comprehension) by translating simple plain text into pompous and indecipherable jargon.

Personally, I usually deal with that by reading the translators commentary so I can see where they were missing the point, and reading multiple translations.

A lot of the time I think certain ideas are semi-intentionally misunderstood, because they are personally threatening or upsetting to the translator. Nietzsche for example had a deep disdain for the type of professor that translates classic texts- from having had a bad experience as a professor of classics himself at University of Basel. His books are filled with cutting deep insults directly targeted at this type of person and their career, and when they translate it, they seem to almost always manage to "subtly misunderstand" what he's saying.

There is also an aspect of (for lack of a better term) "spiritual progression" where unless you are already at or nearly at the level of the author, you can't comprehend the ideas, and then tend to assume it is something else entirely that you can comprehend.

I'll take a look, but not going to use ChatGTP to learn about historical texts...

Try taking a Loeb Library original Greek or Latin text and asking ChatGPT (4) to create a table with the original, the transliteration and the translation, with one row per phrase, trying to preserve word order and cognates.

> (in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley was asked if magic is "real" e.g. can you actually do physical things like light a fire with your mind. His answer was basically that he didn't care or it doesn't matter-

Aligning the conscious with the subconscious is surely powerful, but this dismissal seems more like sour grapes tbh.

Perhaps, but Crowley actually claimed to be capable of that type of physical magic, and still dismissed it. I’m not sure what to make of that- he was brilliant but probably both crazy and dishonest.

> I’m not sure what to make of that

Easy. Crowley was a grifter taking advantage of credulous people for his own ends. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

Grifter is uncharitable for someone that is dealing with esoteric things relating to the unconscious where words fail, and who openly admits that what he says isn't intended to be taken as literal truth- I mean he even titled his books things like "the book of lies." His intended audience is too intelligent to be easily "grifted" or to take him literally.

In the words of Garek (Deep Space Nine):

Doctor: What I want to know, out of all of the stories you've told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?

Garek: My dear doctor, they're all true.

Doctor: Even the lies?

Garek: Especially the lies.

Source: https://youtu.be/4n8j6z8fQ_c?feature=shared

There are plenty of people "practicing magic" even today that are fully convinced they are producing physical results through non-physical means. I would bet anything that there has always been a mix of both of these types of people, plus a huge array of charlatans.

The mark always believes he has an edge.

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