Sunday, April 18, 2010

Poetry, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thought

"Poetry and magic ... are based on a belief that thought can create its own reality—which Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough called the theory of 'the omnipotence of thought' and which Freud, in his comment on Frazer's anthropological investigations in Totem and Taboo, traced back to the child's power, with an outcry of desire, to make the missing mother mysteriously appear again and offer the all-providing breast. It is no accident, then, that so many poems, from the Odyssey right up to Joyce's great prose-poem, Finnegans Wake, contain magical 'invocations' summoning the goddess to appear at once."
—Robert Anton Wilson, Decadance

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