I messed up and typo-ed principle instead of primitive in the previous post. It\’s since been corrected. Sorry Gordon, my bad. I do want to raise something brought up in the comments though.

And I\’m not wrong. You\’ve mistaken a suburban obsession with old timey country wisdom -and a cosplay fetishisation of taking grimoire ingredients literally- with some sort of ranking of English counties. If you want to talk about Cornwall, go nuts, but don\’t say I\’m wrong when I can point at any number of tumblogs or instagram pictures from Minnesota or wherever working to precise formulae from 250 years ago across an ocean, from a place they will never visit.

I get that, and for the most part I agree with you, but honestly I shall stick by what I said, precisely because while you are right about all those tumblogs, instagram pictures etc, the fact remains that there are people there who\’re not obsessed with those things, and it seemed to me making a blanket statement like that stuck in my craw. You\’re quite right. Cornwall is STILL a fucking shithole in many ways, which is precisely why people who are there (a small proportion, granted) were and are working, operative magical types in order to survive. What I wrote was not about defending some mythical ranking or any such thing, but precisely about that.

Perhaps I did misread it, but nevertheless, I think that differentiation between the folks who are fetishising things, and actual folk living and working and doing things on the ground needs making clearer in general discussions – in general occult discourse as a whole there is an assumption that \’Everyone is like me.\’

I\’m not saying Gordon thinks like that – his work has proven not, in my view. However, there\’s an assumption prevalent in Western occultism that everyone has the same time, money, resources etc. A kind of faux-egalitarianism which only seems to pay lip-service to the marginalised individuals who practice magic. Look at the prices of books, or academic texts. They\’re almost prohibitively expensive for folks on the edges.

What exists there then, is word of mouth based on practical experience, not some fetishised ancient lineage. That\’s the kind of stuff that spawned some of the nineteenth century crap we\’re still having to deal – mythical fertility cults for goodness sake.  As if we know what one of those is.

So, just in case it isn\’t clear, I have no beef with the general content of what was written. I did indeed say it was a good post, and that our esteemed London Correspondent was not in fact, wrong.  It\’s just that paragraph which I feel is easy to mis-take – just as it appears I did. But I\’m fairly sure my points still stand to some degree.