Hi. As you can tell, I'm relatively new here, and I didn't find a thread about this already (sorry if there is one). From an early age, I'd always been interested and inspired by occultism, magic, and things like that, despite being strongly religious. Anyway, one of the reasons I joined here was because I figured that there might be people here who could help me with a particular problem I was faced with. It's this little passage in the Bible, I think most of you know it.
It's in Deuteronomy.
Specifically,
Deuteronomy 18:10-12 It gives prohibitions against witchcraft and sorcery, and things like that.
However, I decided that, for the purposes of this thread, we ought to discuss the passage as it is referred to in
this specific translation, because it's directly translated from Hebrew (oh, and here's the same chapter of Deuteronomy with Hebrew and English side by side, for those of you who know Hebrew):
Quote:
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, one that useth divination, a soothsayer, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, 11 or a charmer, or one that consulteth a ghost or a familiar spirit, or a necromancer. 12 For whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the LORD; and because of these abominations the LORD thy God is driving them out from before thee.
Now, the interesting thing about this passage is that it's very specific about what is forbidden. Divination is forbidden, soothsaying is forbidden, enchanting things is forbidden, sorcery is forbidden, charming people is forbidden, consulting ghosts is forbidden, using familiar spirits is forbidden, and necromancy is forbidden. This version reads off like a list, distinct and precise. These are obviously different arts, and it seems like this part of the Bible is being very specific with
what it forbids. That's why I'm curious about it. It seems to me like, if it went out of its way to forbid certain specific practices instead of a blanket prohibition, then there has to be a reason for it.
That leaves me with quite a few questions; What the hell is a sorcerer? What is a charmer? What do all these things mean? More importantly, why are they forbidden? Apparently, necromancy includes things that aren't contacting spirits of the dead, else it wouldn't be listed separately.
So I come to the good people of Occult Corpus, for two reasons. One, those of you who study the Kaballah probably can give some deeper insights into what the Hebrew really means. For two, those of you not involved in Kaballah are probably versed in different occult paradigms anyway and probably have a better idea about what each of these things mean than I do.
So... that's pretty much everything. I hope you guys can help me out with this, because it seems like there's a reason you're not supposed to do these things, and if we find out the specifics of what these things are, we might be able to understand why.
