A sepparate portion of the page will be devoted to the real thing. I'm sure this is going to get rational gamers pissed at me as a nutter who can't sepparate fantasy from reality, and genuine parctitioners to dismiss me as a stoopid D&D'er.

Let me try to set both sides straight. First off, Mage: the Ascension is not about anything remotely real - it's fiction, a game, plain and simple. You can search through the suplements for years and not find a single bit of ginuine 'occult knowledge.' But, it is a *fun* game, and I'd encourage any serious practitioners out there to get off thier high horses and play! If scientists can read Harlan Elison and watch Star Trek, then 'real mages' can play FRPGs without shame.

But, though I'm not about to mistake the stuff in "Mage" for the real thing, and, though I'm really more of a sceptic by nature, there are many people who do believe in magick. And, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that magick - ritual, symbolism, will, however you wish to conceptualize it - is real. Maybe its only in a psychological sense, maybe its quantifiable. Either way, the power of spiritual ideas - religion and magick - is undeniable.

Years ago, I was talking to a Druid friend about the nature of magick, and I came away with the idea that - 'real' or not - it was all based around symbolism, and, that most of those symbols were archaic. That's when I decided to become a technomancer - to look for spiritual meaning in the symbols of the modern day. That was in 1984, I haven't done much to that end in the years since, but I'm still willing to try.

Recently, there's been some talk about using computers and the Net in magickal practice on alt.magick.virtual-adepts - a newsgroup originally started for IC discussion but long since taken over by those interested in RL magick. When I have something useful to say on that subject, you'll find it here. Until then, please check out my Mage: the Ascension site through any of the links at the top of this page, or go on to Trap 14's site, and a bit of the real thing: