Thread: Good, Evil, and Shadows.

I no longer wish to contribute to this forum, my apologies, but I'll be removing anything that was my own work (Essays, pathworkings, training exercises, and the like.)

Since Lady Dunsany has left these forums, they have decayed and degenerated, in my opinion. I see no one and nothing left of the greatness that I saw when I first arrived. Goodbye everyone.

I will offer you my 2 cents: There is no such thing as evil, but there are such things as wisdom and virtue. The strong have a tendency to triumph, and stupid things tend to happen to stupid people.

An interesting perspective indeed, I've wondered about the reality of good and evil, at one point I too did believe there was no good and evil simply because each action did have a "good" reaction and an "evil" reaction; an example I liked was: If someone wound up murdering baby Adolf, the man would be condemned for the slaughtering of a young child, but, without meaning to, saved thousands and stopped a future war.

But, by that same token, I've found that (re)actions have a certain percentage of "good" and "evil", in the above example, a great goodness was done, but only if it did NOT happen, thus in saving the world, he saved nothing. Only caused discord and sorrow (Something along the lines of by stopping WWII, he didn't change anything, because it hadn't happened, if it had and then he killed him, then he'd be a hero). Thus his actions were in majority, evil.
Ironically, at least to me, if the Holocaust never happened, I'd be living in Poland right now wishing I lived in America, instead of vice-versa. Huh. Time travel paradoxes, gotta love em.

This also eventually evolved into the idea that good things can be done through the use of positive and negative forces ( "I believe in revenge" ). I would wholeheartedly use my magick for a good end through "evil" means.

One actual example of this would be my ex-girlfriend Amber. She was recently having nightmares in which a man was draining her energy, not only was this making her stop sleeping, it was actually draining her.
So I used a technique of mine to find him, I astral projected into his home while he was asleep and not only read his mind to find his worst fears, I inflicted nightmares based solely upon and including every one of them, then, at the end of this dream, I entered into his dreams and warned (AKA threatened him) against his actions upon certain consequences I cannot state here.
Her nightmares stopped.
I apologize if I rambled, I can get quite winded. But yeah, that's my perspective; but yours is still quite valid, I just have a tenancy to over-think things until I come to a singular idea, then re-over-think them at every opportunity.

Cheers! I'm off to bed for the... Morning...

I like your perspective, Saeiane. I particularly like your quote "A witch that cannot hex, cannot heal."
If someone was threatening me or mine, I'd have no problem doing something about it. Hexing, reversing their magic, binding/banishing them as the situation called for. I don't think I'd be doing anything evil. I really don't think that "bad" energy would come back to get me, since it was retaliatory in the first place.
I think too many people are afraid to get their hands dirty with "evil" magic that's not necessarily evil.
I liked from your speech: "Evil is predatory, the practitioner that works with evil will almost always wind up a tool."
I agree completely, and as long as one is not actively harnessing evil energy, I think most things balance themselves out in the long run.

The problems with good and evil are those deciding which is which. In the enuma elish, for example, tiamat and Marduk went to war. Tiamat was villified as the enemy without any real reasons why. Instead just propaganda to honor one deity by villifying another.