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Post by Admin on Oct 16, 2021 15:59:10 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2021 14:51:43 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2021 14:58:43 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2021 15:31:21 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2021 17:53:42 GMT
H.P. BLAVATSKY: THE CELTIC DRUIDS AND MAGIC TRADITION In the oldest documents now in our possession – the Vedas and the older laws of Manu – we find many magical rites practiced and permitted by the Brahmans. [1] Thibet, Japan and China teach in the present age that which was taught by the oldest Chaldeans. The clergy of these respective countries, prove moreover what they teach, namely: that the practice of moral and physical purity, and of certain austerities, develops the vital soul-power of self-illumination. Affording to man the control over his own immortal spirit, it gives him truly magical powers over the elementary spirits inferior to himself. In the West we find magic of as high an antiquity as in the East. The Druids of Great Britain practised it in the silent crypts of their deep caves; and Pliny devotes many a chapter to the “wisdom” [2] of the leaders of the Celts. The Semothees, – the Druids of the Gauls, expounded the physical as well as the spiritual sciences. They taught the secrets of the universe, the harmonious progress of the heavenly bodies, the formation of the earth, and above all – the immortality of the soul. [3] Into their sacred groves – natural academies built by the hand of the Invisible Architect – the initiates assembled at the still hour of midnight to learn about what man once was and what he will be. [4] They needed no artificial illumination, nor life-drawing gas, to light up their temples, for the chaste goddess of night beamed her most silvery rays on their oak-crowned heads; and their white-robed sacred bards knew how to converse with the solitary queen of the starry vault. [5] On the dead soil of the long by-gone past stand their sacred oaks, now dried up and stripped of their spiritual meaning by the venomous breath of materialism. But for the student of occult learning, their vegetation is still as verdant and luxuriant, and as full of deep and sacred truths, as at that hour when the arch-druid performed his magical cures, and waving the branch of mistletoe, severed with his golden sickle the green bough from its mother oak-tree. Magic is as old as man. (Helena P. Blavatsky) NOTES BY HPB: [1] See the Code published by Sir William Jones, chap. ix, p. 11. [2] Pliny: “Hist. Nat.”, xxx. I: Ib., xvi, 14; xxv, 9, etc. [3] Pomponius ascribes to them the knowledge of the highest sciences. [4] Cæsar, iii, 14. [5] Pliny, xxx. 000 Read the full article: www.carloscardosoaveline.com/the-celtic-druids-and-magic-tradition/
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Post by Admin on Oct 24, 2021 16:10:05 GMT
Every nursery rime contains profound magical secrets which are open to every one who has made a study of the correspondences of the holy Qabalah. To puzzle out an imaginary meaning for this "nonsense" sets one thinking of the Mysteries; one enters into deep contemplation of holy things and God Himself leads the soul to a real illumination. Hence also the necessity of Incarnation; the soul must descend into all falsity in order to attain All-Truth.
~ Aleister Crowley 1875-1947.
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Post by Admin on Oct 25, 2021 16:56:11 GMT
Akhenaten: Magic at Amarna historicaleve.com/akhenaten-magic-at-amarna/Magic is one of the most intriguing subjects from ancient Egypt but also one of the most difficult subjects to understand. Egyptian magic was dependent on traditional Egyptian myths and gods for its existence, but what happened to that magic when those myths and gods were abolished by Akhenaten in the Amarna Period (c. 1352 – 1336 BC)? The ancient Egyptians were dependent on magic for protection for themselves, but also their families and businesses. Most (semi-) scientific books on this subject state that magic was still practised at this time, but material evidence to support this statement is seldom provided. Research into the Amarna Period has so far been focused mainly on the Aten temples, the royal family and the religious revolution. But to truly understand this period, and how the average Egyptian lived during the Amarna Period (especially within the capital Akhetaten), we have to look at the material evidence in the workmen’s village of Amarna. The Amarna Period Amenhotep III reigned for nearly forty years before his son Amenhotep IV became sole ruler. In the first years of Amenhotep IV’s reign he continued his father’s religious and building programme. However, he soon began to elevate the god Aten above the other traditional gods. He created a new iconography and in his fifth year took on a different name, ‘Akhenaten’, abolished the other state gods and moved the capital to Amarna where he lived for nearly 17 years. However, as we will see later, Akhenaten’s revolution was not as complete as he would have wanted, and soon after his death, Tutankhamun returned Egypt to the worship of the traditional state god Amun. Egyptian Magic The ancient Egyptians believed that magic was first used by the creator god to create the world and everything in it. The creator god then gave magic to humanity to elevate them above the rest of his creations. By studying their traditional myths, the Egyptians learned about the gods and how to use magic. Mythology was a cornerstone of Egyptian society, but this fell away when Akhenaten abolished the traditional gods without providing a new mythology for his Aten religion. Yet the average Egyptian still needed protection against all sorts of dangers: disease, dangerous animals, ghosts, and many other horrors. It is therefore reasonable to accept that the ordinary Egyptians did not abandon their magic, and still held on to the traditional gods and myths. There were three categories of magic: destructive, productive and defensive. Destructive magic was practised against foreign enemies in the temples of the country and not inside private homes. Productive magic was practised to improve business or crops. Defensive magic was the most common form, and mostly practised inside or around the household. We may take it that every household had its own set of spells and magical objects for the protection of the house and its inhabitants. Simply saying the words of a spell was not enough; it had to be accompanied by objects and hand gestures or actions forming a ritual. For the Egyptians, magic was not irrational or inferior; it was accepted completely and even admired. In Egypt, practising magic was not the exception, but the rule. Research into the Amarna Period has tended to place too much emphasis on the aberrant character of the period, and too little attention on the ‘normal’ aspects. It is generally known that the gods Bes and Taweret were still accepted in the workmen’s village. But if we look closer there are many more gods still visible in the village, such as Hathor, Seth, Wepwawet and even Amun. The traditional character of the tomb also changed; it is well known that images of the traditional funerary gods were replaced with images of the Aten and the royal family; acceptance into the afterlife was dependent on the Aten and the king, while the traditional gods and funerary customs had disappeared. However, in several private tombs, ushabtis have been found. These figurines were connected to the Osirian funerary tradition; the deceased was judged by Osiris and accepted into the afterlife through him. The presence of these ushabtis in private tombs seems to indicate that people were not willing to jeopardise their afterlife by renouncing the traditional burial customs. In one of the royal tombs a ring was found; on top it shows a frog but on the underside it shows the name of Mut, the Goddess of the Sky, Protector of the Dead and consort of Amun. This may indicate that even within royal circles there was resistance to the king’s religious revolution. It is therefore very likely that the average Egyptian did not renounce the traditional gods and myths; they continued to worship them and to practise magic, although no longer in public, but in the secrecy of their own home. The Evidence The distinction between religious and magical artefacts is often difficult to make, and we have to keep in mind that an artefact always has elements of both aspects. We have to consider the intention of the user in order to decide whether an object was “more magical” or “more religious”. If the goal of the user was to achieve a certain personal goal for him or her, then the object is more magical. On the other hand, an object should be seen as being more religious if the object was used to communicate with and venerate the gods. In Anna Stevens’ book “Private religion at Amarna” she presents a collection of all the religious objects found in the city of Amarna, including magical objects from the workmen’s village which provide evidence for the continued practice of magic. The following artefacts are the most interesting and remarkable within Stevens’ collection, but it must be kept in mind that they are only a small portion of the material evidence. Amulets Amulets were a necessity in Egypt. Even the poorest Egyptians wore (self-made) amulets. The most commonly represented gods were Bes and Taweret who each had strong protective powers over pregnant women, babies and young children. But the most frequently found amulet is the “wadjet-eye“, also known as the ‘moon eye’ or the ‘eye of Horus’. More than five hundred examples of this amulet were found at Amarna, suggesting a strong dedication to the god Horus in the city. Figures and Models Within this group there is one peculiar set of models that invokes the traditional gods. Over two hundred figures of women (often accompanied by small children) have been found. These figures were placed inside the household and used to appeal to the gods or divine ancestors to grant fertility to a woman or couple. These figures could also have been used in many magical spells, such as described in Papyrus Leiden 348: a spell to cure a stomach ache required the spell to be spoken over a clay figure of a woman. Statues and Stelae A few statue busts and stelae belonging to private individuals have been found in the workmen’s village. These can be similar in significance to the famous socalled ‘ancestor busts’ from the town of Deir el-Medina (the village for the Valley of the Kings’ workers); within the house they provided a point of contact with deceased and divine ancestors who could mediate between the living and the gods. The ancestors were known as ‘excellent spirits of Ra’ as they joined Ra in his travels across the heavens. The ancestor busts or stelae worked on the same principle as the ‘letters to the dead’ written by the living to appeal to, or ask a favour from, the dead. Two stelae dedicated to the god Shed have been found in the village, and this is quite remarkable. This god first appeared in Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty, only a few years before the beginning of the Amarna Period. A strong protective deity, Shed was associated, and often identified, with ‘Horus the Savior’. Even very new deities were apparently accepted and worshipped in Akhetaten. Vessels and Headrests There are many artefacts in the Stevens’ book which are categorised as ‘vessels’, but a few of these vessels may have a deeper significance. Some have the shape of a woman, and may have contained mother’s milk, a very popular ingredient for magical spells. Milk could be used in a sleeping potion for babies, or in ointments for burns, but it was also used in pregnancy tests; the milk of a woman who had given birth to a boy was especially popular. Two headrests were found in Amarna, one of which was decorated with demons to protect the sleeper at night against the terrors of the underworld. Wall Scenes Wall reliefs were discovered in two houses in the workmen’s village. In ‘Main Street House 3’, three Bes figures appear to be dancing while dancing women and girls are depicted in the house ‘Long Wall Street 10’. Bes and the act of dancing were connected to protective rites or rituals that could protect women in labour. The rooms in which these scenes were found are most likely birth rooms or rooms where a woman and child could reside in the fourteen days after birth, a period where both mother and child were considered impure. These decorations show that people in the workmen’s village even depicted gods and traditional rituals on their walls. Conclusion Ancient Egyptian magic was different. Magic was not irrational; it was a means of protection and a way to control one’s environment. It was practised by everybody throughout the Pharaonic era and was considered a normal, and even desired, activity. In the Amarna Period; although the traditional myths and gods were banished from official religion, and magic no longer practised in the large temples, magic itself did not disappear entirely because the ordinary ancient Egyptian was completely dependent on magic for protection. The gods Bes and Taweret were still abundantly present in Amarna, but other gods such as Hathor, Wepwawet, Shed and even Amun were also present. The religious diffusion within the city of Amarna was shallow at best; only the royal family and highest members of court would have fully accepted the Aten-religion. It was a religion meant ‘for the inaugurated’, as C. Tietze so eloquently puts it in his beautiful book Amarna: Lebensräume – Lebensbilder – Weltbilder (Potsdam 2008). Although no longer practised publically, magic continued to thrive in the privacy and protection of the household.
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Post by Admin on Oct 25, 2021 17:24:16 GMT
The Strange Case of Janet Wishart, the Great Witch of Scotland Brent Swancer October 25, 2021 mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/10/the-strange-case-of-janet-wishart-the-great-witch-of-scotland/The 16th century was a time when dark magic and supernatural forces were very real to the scared populace of many areas of Europe, a time when black magic and witches were a constant threat, and in 1597 the country of Scotland began a major crackdown on these nefarious evil forces. What would go on to be called the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597 was launched by James VI, the King of Scotland, and was the second of five nationwide witch hunts in Scottish history. It was certainly a bad time to be a witch at the time, with the Scottish Witchcraft Act, enacted on June 4, 1563, making it legal to execute those suspected of being witches and which had led to the indiscriminate deaths of hundreds of suspects, mostly women. At the time to be even suspected of being a witch was basically a death sentence, and the methods used to try witches left little chance of being proven innocent. Being unable to shed tears on command, unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer, having an unusual birthmark, or floating in water rather than sinking were all seen as sure signs of guilt, and once accused executions were carried out swiftly and ruthlessly. From March to October 1597 this was carried out on a massive, nationwide scale, and one of the more famous and supposedly most powerful of these witches was a woman named Janet Wishart, of Aberdeen. By all accounts, Wishart had long been well known around town as being a witch, and she held all around her in a grip of fear. It is said that she had first shown her dark powers in 1572, when one day five young men caught her stealing from her neighbor. When confronted, Wishart allegedly cursed them, proclaiming, “Weill haif ye schemit me. I sail gar the best of yow repent,” and two of the boys were found drowned at the river not long after. After this, Wishart was said to practice all sorts of black magic, causing people to fall ill, drop dead, or go insane, causing businesses to fail, destroying marriages through spells, and other supernatural acts, including raising storms, using black cats to invade homes and cause nightmares, smiting crops, and many others. She was also allegedly sometimes seen consorting with the Devil himself, and people were absolutely terrified of her. She was especially well known for her curses, which she doled out freely and with little provocation. It seems that merely looking at her the wrong way was enough to invoke her wrath, and tales of this happening were many. One of the more famous tales involves Wishart’s son-in-law, John Allen, who regularly abused her daughter. Upon hearing of this abuse, Wishart became furious, and cursed him to be visited nightly by a demonic brown dog, which would enter their room and attack John every night for 6 weeks while always leaving his wife untouched. On another occasion, a brewer named Katherine Rattray annoyed Wishart with some petty slight, after which her brewery was cursed and all of her ale was spoiled. Rattray’s daughter, Katherine Ewin, convinced Wishart to teach her a ritual to lift the curse, but when she tried to teach this ritual to others Wishart cursed Ewin’s baby, which died soon after. Ewin and her husband were also plagued by one of Wishart’s “nightmare cats,” which would come to them every night for 20 nights to cause horrific nightmares and claw at them in their sleep. There was also a merchant named Walter Healing, who in 1593 made the egregious error of refusing to sell Wishart some wool. She apparently really wanted that wool, because as punishment she cursed Healing’s child and the baby died the next night in its sleep. Wishart’s even cursed her own servant, James Ailhows, when he tried to quit, striking him down with a deadly illness that almost killed him before he paid another witch to lift the curse. This could be done at time, the lifting of the curse, and this can also be seen in the time she struck down a mariner named Alexander Thomson, who seems to have gotten on her bad side. One report of this from the time reads: Janet Wishart, on her way back from the blockhouse and Fattie, where she had been holding conference with the devil, pursued Alexander Thomson, mariner, coming forth of Aberdeen to his ship, ran between him and Alexander Fidler, under the Castle Hill, as swift, it appeared to him, as an arrow could be shot forth of a bow, going betwixt him and the sun, and cast her “cantrips” in his way. Whereupon, the said Alexander Thomson took an immediate “fear and trembling,” and was forced to hasten home, take to his bed, and lie there for the space of a month, so that none believed he would live;–one half of the day burning in his body, as if he had been roasting in an oven, with an extreme feverish thirst, “so that he could never be satisfied of drink,” the other half of the day melting away his body with an extraordinarily cold sweat. And Thomson, knowing she had cast this kind of witchcraft upon him, sent his wife to threaten her, that, unless she at once relieved him, he would see that she was burnt. And she, fearing lest he should accuse her, sent him by the two women a certain kind of beer and some other drugs to drink, after which Thomson mended daily, and recovered his former health. Wishart had all manner of curses in her arsenal. She also one time cursed a neighbor’s cow to produce poison instead of milk, caused stillbirths, caused livestock to die off with deadly spells, ruined crops, and at other times caused people to go blind or deaf. She also allegedly had the power to heal, and could fashion charms and amulets with beneficial effects, but she did this far less often than her destructive magic, and only when well compensated. She cast these spells and curses regularly, and she made no effort to hide the fact that she was a witch, a pretty dangerous game back in an era when witches were being tortured and executed all over the country on a regular basis, and in 1597 her reign of terror would come to an end. It was with the coming of the Great Scottish Witch Hunt that word of Wishart’s powers came to the attention of authorities, and it was also found that her husband John Leys, and her son and daughter were all adept in witchcraft. The entire family was arrested and put on trial, with them claiming that the Devil was visiting them in their cells to provide legal advice. It doesn’t seem to have done any good, because at her trial, Wishart was charged with numerous indictments and found guilty of “witchcraft, sorcery and other diabolical, detestable, practices.” So severe were the charges levelled against her, spanning 24 years, that she was given the worst form of execution, that of being burned alive rather than the more usual practice of strangling the accused and burning the body after death. Her son was also executed, although the rest of her family were eventually freed and exiled from Aberdeen. The Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597 would lead to 400 people put on trial and at least 200 sentenced to death over a six-month period, but the most notorious of these remains Janet Wishart. We are left to wonder if she ever really had any of these powers, and if she was guilty of anything at all other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Certainly many would vouch for the stories of her insidious magical powers, but how much stock can we put into these? Whether she ever really was able to do even half of what was claimed, Janet Wishart has become known as one of the most powerful and notorious witches that ever lived in Scotland or anywhere else, and her story continues to reverberate through history to this very day.
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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2021 10:42:17 GMT
How Witches Have Held Us Under Their Spell for Centuries As a free, powerful, and unpredictable woman, the witch has long been a crucible for mainstream society’s darkest fears. hyperallergic.com/686995/how-witches-have-held-us-under-their-spell-for-centuries/She’s gone by many names in many times and places: Hekate in ancient Greece, Isis in ancient Egypt, Baba Yaga in Eastern Europe, Ceridwen in medieval Wales, Freya in Norse mythology. Whether as a poisoner, healer, seductress, or crone, the witch has appeared in cultures across the globe for thousands of years. Witches have inspired the likes of Shakespeare, Goya, and Dalí, and are the protagonists of countless fairy tales, legends, books, films, artworks, and songs. A new book, Witchcraft (Taschen) co-edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman, delves into the witch’s complex history, symbols, and depictions across time through more than 30 essays and hundreds of full-color illustrations. Witchcraft explores the witch’s lasting hold on our imagination, and her current-day iterations. As a free, powerful, and unpredictable woman, the witch has long been a crucible for mainstream society’s darkest fears. One of the first recorded instances of the word ‘witch’ was in the Old Testament, where a merciless verse from Exodus commands, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The story of the witch is inextricably linked with the brutality and persecution of the Reformation era. It’s estimated that 50,000 to 80,000 suspected witches were killed in Europe between 1500 and 1660. Some 70 to 80% of the victims were women, the majority being poor and elderly. Witches became a catchall scapegoat for all sorts of ills at the time, including disease, death, infertility, bad weather, and shipwrecks, and news of their highly publicized trials and supposed evil deeds spread like wildfire in books, pamphlets, and other propaganda thanks to the birth of the printing press. It’s impossible to know how many of those accused were actually practitioners, but the mere threat of witchcraft — or of women acting independently outside of established norms — was enough to drive those in power to murderous hysteria. “The witch craze took different forms at different times and places, but never lost its essential character: that of a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population,” historian Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 1972 book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. “Witches represented a political, religious, and sexual threat to Protestant and Catholic churches alike, as well as to the State.” With the rise of the Age of Enlightenment in the 1680s, witch hunts faded in Europe. But they continued in the New World, where they were used to villify Indigenous people, survivors of the translatlantic slave trade, and famously resulted in the execution of 19 villagers in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. By the late 1800s, Western creatives began to reexamine the witch, recasting her as a nonconformist hero in their artworks. Witches later served as inspiration for the Surrealists and feminists in the 1960s, including the activist group W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Today, witchcraft is an adaptable spiritual practice embraced by a wide swath of people. In light of women’s still-fraught place in the world, Witchcraft offers readers a study of an empowered archetype that continues to evolve.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 10:54:41 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 16:42:36 GMT
"Most early depictions of witches framed them as possessing malevolent energy. In fact a lot of early writings on witches and witchcraft were downright menacing and certainly helped stoke fear of anything unexplained or deemed unnatural. There’s, of course, the Bible, and then Malleus Maleficarum, a medieval book seen as the de facto manual on witchcraft and its heretic nature. It was written by a pair of German Domenicans so it certainly had ties to the church but its popularity extended far beyond the church—and even surpassed the Bible in popularity for a time. Then, of course, there were the mythological sorceresses, including Circe, Hecate, and Morgan le Fay, who while not initially presented as evil in some cases, generally saw their stories descend into tales of duplicitousness and cruelty. While we can look back fondly on their scheming ways, for centuries they were best remembered (mostly by men) as unnatural cautionary figures. Even Shakespeare, who lived during a time of deep fear of witchcraft, got in on the trend. The Three Witches of Macbeth exist as a menacing force, even if they’re not remotely the only villains in that particular play." EXPLORING THE TROPES OF THE MODERN DAY GOOD WITCH IN POP CULTURE nerdist.com/article/good-witch-tropes-pop-culture/
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2021 10:01:38 GMT
Will magic defeat America’s elites? A former Grand Archdruid on the power of political spells BY JOHN MICHAEL GREER unherd.com/2021/10/will-magic-defeat-americas-elites/Suggest that magic plays a massive role in American politics today and most people will look at you as though you just sprouted an extra head. There’s a reason for that reaction, rooted in an impressive ignorance about the nature of magic. A century or so of pop-culture fantasias of the Harry Potter variety, using inaccurate notions of magic as a dumpster for the human needs and longings that our gizmocentric society does a poor job of fulfilling, stands in the way of understanding what it is and how it shapes our political realities. The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature. Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind. No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will. This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay. This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies. Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product. Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of more than a minority of voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives. Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed. But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life. Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline. Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed. In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply. Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands. Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will. That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here. So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion. Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice. American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement. It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street. That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay. That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2021 20:34:56 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2021 11:05:07 GMT
How Studying Witchcraft Changed My Relationship with the Outdoors What a year of studying witchcraft taught me about our relationship to wild places www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/witch-witchcraft-wicca-nature/On December 30, 2020, the date of the Cold Moon, I took a late-afternoon walk through the cedar forest at the edge of my neighborhood in Nelson, British Columbia. I observed the snow, light and fluffy from a fresh storm cycle. I breathed in the icy air, wiggling my ungloved fingers in my pockets to keep them warm. I noticed the iridescent quality of the waning light. And I walked in silence, because I was alone, and because I wanted to move in step with the stillness of my environment. In many ways, my walk was no different than any walk I’d taken on a chilly day in the mountains. Except that I was doing it as a ritual, as a fledgling witch. Not the pointy-hat-wearing, spell-casting witch from fairy tales and movies. Not the kind of unfortunate soul that Christian zealots executed in the 16th and 17th centuries. I’m talking about real-life, modern-day witches: people who study nature, its cycles, and the way it influences our lives in order to generate positive changes in ourselves and in the world. That’s the way my teacher, Natalie Rousseau, a 45-year-old hedge witch—a woman who practices outside the confines of Wicca or other pagan religions—from Pemberton, British Columbia, describes it. I’m currently enrolled in her 12-month online course “The Witches Year,” an introduction for anyone curious about incorporating elements of witchcraft into their daily lives. As a recreational mountain athlete, what I’m learning overlaps surprisingly with many of the ways I already relate to the outdoors. But the course has also encouraged me to reconsider my relationship with nature, both in how I regard and move through it. When I registered for the program in the fall of 2020, I was supposed to have been bikepacking across the outback of South Australia. But that trip, along with all of my travel-writing assignments for the year, was a casualty of COVID-19. Meanwhile, Canada’s infection rates were starting to climb again in a deadly second wave. Spirituality—or my lack thereof—was heavy on my mind. I’d discarded the Catholicism of my youth long ago, and while I’d read books on Buddhism and gleaned some helpful practices from yoga classes and mindfulness apps like Headspace, I didn’t have anything solid enough to stand up to the uncertainty of a long-term global pandemic. The tagline on Rousseau’s elegant website appealed to me: “Earth-based wisdom, embodied practice, & everyday magic.” I have zero experience with the occult, unless you count having my fortune read at a local fair as a teenager growing up in Ohio. But the way Rousseau presented witchcraft didn’t seem to require engaging with anything paranormal—or even a belief in a higher power. It was more about slowing down and noticing the natural world, especially the shifts that happen over the course of a day, a month, or a season. As the pandemic raged on, I was open to trying new practices that might help me cope. There are now nearly eight million #witchesofinstagram posts. On TikTok, #witchtok returns 20.5 billion views. A search on Amazon for “witchcraft books” released within the past 90 days yields more than 2,000 results. Practitioners, who tend to be small-scale and hyper-local, can’t keep up with the demand for goods, services, and information. Herbalist Jess Turner, founder of Olamina Botanicals in Brooklyn, reported her highest-ever sales numbers of plant-based tonics, salves, and formulas in the first quarter of 2021. She tells me that participation in her workshops, like one on home remedies for illness, has more than doubled. Interest in witchcraft has been trending for a few years now. Derrick Land, an insurance-fraud investigator in Texas by day, expected about 500 attendees at his inaugural Austin Witchfest on March 5, 2020, just before events were canceled in the wake of the pandemic. More than 3,000 people showed up. Pam Grossman, author of Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power, attributes the surge to major social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “Whenever there’s a sense of a kind of mass tension and distrust in institutional power, people lean more into alternative modes of power, of which witchcraft is certainly one,” she says. Fiona Duncan, a former K-12 teacher and college professor who has practiced witchcraft for three decades, sees it as a product of a growing discontent with religion. According to the Pew Research Center, more U.S. adults than ever now say they think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. To fill that gap, Duncan launched an online school of witchcraft in 2019. Her students include an ob-gyn, a physicist who works at Microsoft, an epidemiologist at Cleveland State University, several college professors, high school teachers, and published authors. “These people are highly intelligent and emotionally developed and yearn for something more,” Duncan wrote to me in an email. “They believe they can find it (and they can!) through connecting with Nature’s energies and their own, which is what the Craft is all about.” Witches, it seemed, were tapping into something about nature that, despite all my time in the outdoors, I’d somehow missed. My Witches Year began, fittingly, on Halloween 2020, also known as Samhain (a Gaelic word pronounced SAH-win). For the ancient Celts, the festival of Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, or the Dark Season. On Zoom, from her home in the Coast Mountains of B.C., Rousseau invited us to take a comfortable seat, close our eyes, and tune in to the natural landscape. What types of trees were close by? Where was the sun in the sky? How far was the nearest body of water? I did all that. And noted that more than 100 other people were logged in to the session. From what I could tell by peeking at Zoom’s gallery view, my cohort consisted of students who ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties. Rousseau, wrapped in a blanket, with her long blond hair loose around her shoulders, looked more like a surfer or a yoga teacher than what we may think of when we hear witch. She’s all three, as well as a trail runner, hiker, motorcyclist, and mom. Rousseau began exploring occult traditions like tarot and astrology in her teens, as an avid reader with a penchant for the esoteric. She’s been teaching yoga for two decades now and has always incorporated seasonal wisdom into her classes and workshops, as a way of acknowledging the cycles of the earth. She started offering courses about her nature-based spirituality practices, which is how Rousseau defines witchcraft, in 2017. That was the same year she moved to B.C.’s verdant Pemberton Valley and dove into gardening, foraging, and wild crafting—gathering plants and herbs from the wild to use as medicine. “My connection to the natural world was just the most alive thing in me,” says Rousseau. “It was all I wanted to talk about or share or do.”
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Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2021 12:19:12 GMT
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