Blog Recommendation: "Witchcraft is not Safe"

 "Witchcraft is also not glamorous and sanitized, it’s pissing into bottles full of nails and glass and accidentally getting some on your fingers; it’s blood and bone, it’s using things you’ve come across (or that have come across you); it’s making deals with things you’d damn well better keep an eye on and have a backup plan for; it’s often the mother of cuts and scrapes earned during pitch black hikes with entheogens pumping through your system; it’s not mass-produced and packaged for convenience."


http://seohelrune.net/witchcraft-not-safe/


This entry is my first introduction to this blog, which I now plan to dig into.  It was a powerful, evocative piece that reminded me of my high school and college years - sometimes you run into shit that doesn't fit into a neat and tidy concept, that doesn't just go away because you yell "get out", that has more solidity in this reality than what the "sane" witches believe is possible.  And when that happens you need to know how the fuck to deal with it on the fly, or you need to retreat to your fucking candle baths and leave the real witchcraft to the rest of us.

random childhood thoughts

Did anyone ever get "light as a feather, stiff as a board" to actually work?  Ever?




I'm calling bullshit.

The Science of Ghosts

My friend reblogged some screen caps on tumblr of Derrida talking about ghosts.  I recommend checking out the videos.  It's beautiful, artsy, and melancholy.  Derrida has a fascinating take on the idea of ghosts, one that will further haunt us as we progress technologically.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-derrida/videos/the-science-of-ghosts/

Some fun watching and reading for a lazy Sunday

The Secret of the Ouija Board

IN 1891, THE first ads started appearing in papers: "Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board," boomed a Pittsburgh toy and novelty shop, describing a magical device that answered questions "about the past, present, and future with marvelous accuracy" and promised "never-failing amusement and recreation for all the classes," a link "between the known and unknown, the material and immaterial." Another ad declared it "interesting and mysterious" and testified, "as Proven at Patent Office before it was allowed. Price, $1.50."

conspiracy theories and evolution

The other day my friend and I were talking about conspiracy theories thanks to a blog post he had recently read by a fellow occultist (fyi, this is a garden path sentence.  whee!).  As he described to me the Kennedy assassination in relation to coups in other countries, I could see his point: we're willing to believe that other countries could have governments that plot to overthrow their leaders, but god forbid we believe America to be capable of the same thing.  That's just crazy talk.

Probably the biggest thing in favor of the JFK assassination NOT being a conspiracy is that we haven't definitively exposed it as such yet.  Are you seriously expecting me to believe that there's no Edward Snowden out there to expose the crap out of this with hard proof?  That no one's been on their deathbed with nothing else to lose?  That we were just so much better at keeping things a secret back then?  C'mon.  There should have been something hard and irrefutable by now to prove it was a government conspiracy.  But while I don't currently believe the JFK assassination was a conspiracy, I leave that door open to the possibility that there was something more to it.

The way my friend was describing things that night though almost tipped me in the direction of belief.  I have to give him credit as a storyteller.  He weaves his words like  he's creating a spell, which I suppose is quite a good skill for an occultist to have, but I digress...  He's a persuasive speaker who tends to cut out the dubious parts and get straight to what's salient, palatable, and intelligent.  Listening to his interpretation of the blog post was a wholly different experience than reading it.  I found myself agreeing with my friend but having serious doubts about the blog, despite how beautifully it was written.

I suppose I was expecting the blog to actually focus on the JFK assassination rather than it just being a blip at the end.  Honestly, it was hard for me to get past the first part without wanting to comment on EVERYTHING.  And then the middle just lost me as he started to reference people I typically thought of as kooks.  At the risk of contradicting myself, I will say the writer brought up a good point that as occultists why is it that we believe the "crazy" things we do but have no problem labeling these people as crazy.  I believe I have the answer, and it's quite stupidly simple, but I think it's an answer people need to find by themselves.  Because if you're going to immerse yourself in the occult then you need to regularly ask yourself questions like this in order to stay grounded.

...and look at how much I just wrote without even getting to what I wanted to discuss.  Ugh.  Honestly, I just wanted to take a moment to vent about science-y things.  Particularly in relation to the whole human beings are really some alien star race bullshit.  If the following makes no sense to you, I apologize.  I am literally just going to respond to quotes from a book - quotes from a book on a blog , neither of which you have read.

Yes, we have hair all over our bodies.  We are not "hairless apes."  Maybe you fair folks have no idea what it's like, but as an Italian let me tell you how much I dread bikini season.  I am proud to say I have never shaved my stomach, but those first few days before the sun bleaches me are a special sort of self-conscious hell.

Let me also explain, in an admittedly layperson sort of way, just how genetics and evolution work.  Yes, skin cancer is bad... but it takes time to kill you.  By the time you die of skin cancer, you've already successfully passed on your genes and your children are probably passing your inferior genes on to the next generation.  Especially if you have other traits that are positive to procreation and surviving to sexual maturity.  It's easier than you think for shitty genes to get passed on when they're piggybacking on the good ones.

Speaking of piggybacking... sometimes two traits come from the same gene, chromosome, whatever.  So while one trait is crucial to the survival of the species, the other trait is kinda shitty, useless, or potentially harmful in the long run.  But the crucial trait wins out and gets spread among the species because it's what they need to survive their environment and their competitors/predators.  But in order to have that trait, we're stuck with this other, shitty one since they are both created by the same code.  You can't have one without the other.  Too bad, so sad.

Not getting it yet?  Take a look at dog breeding or cat breeding.  When you selectively breed the animals for a particular trait, they come with a whole host of other traits thanks to genetic piggybacking.  You'll have certain breeds prone to hip dysplasia or deafness, particular fur patterns giving rise to particular eye colors or heterochromia, or a bobtail for no apparent reason. Yes, even animals have vestigial traits (like finger bones in their fins) from another time and different evolution.

So yeah, while it's easy to point out all the shitty traits we have that make us wonder if we were meant to exist on a different planet, it's also pretty easy to explain why we have them.  For all our useful traits and detrimental traits, we also have a ton of practically useless traits.  We love to talk about how certain animals are perfectly adapted to their environment, but animals have problems too.  They get sick, they have useless traits, detrimental traits, and sometimes that leads to extinction but other times their positive traits keep them afloat.

Hell, look at trees!  Look how many fucked up diseases trees are prone to.  You'd think they weren't meant to exist here and yet they're a pretty integral part of the landscape.  Of course, you have to remember that anything bacterial or viral is also just trying to survive on this planet.  So rather than asking why a creature is prone to such diseases, it's sometimes more productive to ask why those diseases adapted to being really good at getting into that particular host.  Why is that host so crucial and convenient to their survival?

Fuck, I don't even know where I'm going with this anymore.  Suffice it to say that I don't believe we are star children or aliens or whatever.  I think it's time for more coffee.

Past Lives

I've always preferred the more concrete realms of magick and the occult. Now this may seem contradictory to some of you (especially if you think everything needs to be tested in a laboratory to be "concrete"), but I assure you - it's legit. I prefer Tarot because it has results I can verify. I prefer spellwork, especially nuanced spells, for the same reason. I have a hard time getting into such nebulous practices as past lives.  How do you verify something like that?

I'm not talking about stuff like little kids that remember past lives, including things that only the dead person would know (like something private they shared with their spouse).  I actually find that rather fascinating.  But what I'm talking about here is past life readings - whether done intuitively, with tarot cards, or some other method.

Most of the time it just seems like one person's word against another's.  One reader tells you you were one person, another reader tells you you were someone else entirely.  Could you have been both?  Sure.  But you would think that at least once in a while two of the readers would pick up on the same past life. 

The problem I've run into is one reader contradicting what another two readers have said, and what my gut tells me.  One person says I've been male 9 times out of 10 in my past lives.  Another person says I've been female in all my past lives.  So what is the truth?  Or are both bullshit?

A lot of times when  I hear readings, the ones done for me included, it feels like the reader is telling you either what they want to hear or what you want to hear.  I think a lot of readers let their own biases influence the reading.  Close minded people are less likely to tell you you were of the opposite sex.  Or perhaps they just see you as embodying your gender so strongly in this life that they can't fathom it could have been different.  Or maybe they have strong ties to a certain heritage or time period and thus imagine that you were apart of it.  Or they just craft an epic story that they know will appeal to you, feeding off what you want to be true and hints you've dropped rather than any sort of true insight.  It becomes a matter of one person's "opinion" versus another's - with no way to prove who is right.  So whose fantasy will prevail?

I told a friend about my most recent reading.  I explained that I felt the reader was wrong because I'd had two readings to the contrary, and my gut has always sided with those readings.  He countered that my "gut feelings" could be explained by psychology and brain chemistry.  (Well, maybe I was born with such brain chemistry as a reflection of my past lives?)  I got a bit annoyed at this point (I'm sorry if I was rude!).  Proving that my gut feeling is the result of brain chemistry neither proves nor disproves what may be my past lives.  In fact, those readings neither prove nor disprove anything either.  All I really have to sway me from believing one person over the other IS my gut feeling (and perhaps a few dreams, as I am not one of those people who claims to remember past lives).  And for all I know, there could be absolutely no such thing as reincarnation, and even the little kids with clear memories of past lives could be explained in some other way. 

In summation, I just feel like this is such a nebulous and subjective field of study and it really aggravates me when people try to assert what's true or false and get really pushy about it.  Especially when it challenges my gut... because there is no objective evidence here.  So why would I believe someone else's opinions over my gut (if I'm to believe in any of this at all)?

This is my life

I'm sitting here in my Miskatonic University shirt and VS sweats... because apparently Cthulhu loves Pink? (And I just added Cthulhu to Blogger's dictionary. Really? Why was that not already in there?!)

In other news, I made a good score at Half Price Books yesterday, especially given the extra discount due to the Labor Day sale.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Now to find time to read all of this, plus everything else in my reading queue.