Tag: propaganda

Posted on

Narrative DESTROYS Facts And Logic! Authenticity FLEES!

If you’re anything like me, you probably hated that title. Hell, I hated typing it! But this is a post about ersatz, and as algorithms are some of its main purveyors, it seemed fitting to start with some clickbait.

The last time we met in this space, I talked about the growing thirst for authenticity I perceive in the overculture. Whether that perception is accurate remains to be seen, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. Houston, we have a problem either way.

If you haven’t already read that post, I recommend that you do so before continuing. Then, my focus was on the science of perception, processing, and bias. Or to quickly summarize: No human perceives reality as it actually is. Instead, we navigate this existence via a working model created and constantly modified by the brain in response to sensory input. This was what I meant by the “unrealness” of reality—a term of my own creation. As someone for whom words are containers for meaning, I often find myself crafting containers for the families of meaning that don’t fit my mother tongue’s current forms.

Simply put, my “unrealness” container is a stand-in for “perception” that also implicitly acknowledges that we humans all experience reality by proxy. If we let it, it can serve as a reminder that the “real” is often not nearly as important as the stories we tell to give it shape.

In my previous post, I mostly stuck to the most common scientific “maps” of this particular territory. However, as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory.” And in my opinion, those scientific maps are missing some layers. They show the equivalent of roads, landmarks, and businesses, but say nothing of the topography, ecosystems, and local culture of a place.

Here begins the process of filling in some of the missing layers that are not so easily labeled or explained. The souls-filled and magical. The inspired and Unseen.

Well, would you know yet more?

Ersatz Like Cobwebs

First though, a story of a dream (so really, a story within a story).

How delightfully meta!

The year was 2022, and my family and I were visiting my parents back in Lancashire, England during the winter break. It was my first trip back in over a decade, and my daughter’s first trip to where her mother grew up.

One night while there, I had a dream. I was rushing along country lanes, long and winding like snakes, the land around me smothered by layers of cobwebs. Now, these weren’t some Otherworldly roads, mind you. That’s just how a lot of the lanes there are—winding serpents of pitch and gravel through tunnels of trees. All snakes I’d set my boots to countless times in waking life.

After a while, I came to a stop and turned to the hedgerow lining the lane. Somehow, I knew I’d reached my destination for the night—that that was where I was supposed to enter. By this point, I was fully lucid in my dreaming. I could have easily turned back the way I came. But Necessity was loud in my souls, so I pushed through the shadows and thorns until the hedge opened up, and I found myself in what appeared to be a council chamber.

Looking around, I saw that numerous peoples had gathered there for a meeting—everybeing from the plant, tree, and animal peoples to the Unseen and Otherworldly. As the only human there, it wasn’t long before I attracted some attention, though perhaps not in the way you might think. Apparently, we humans had always had a place at the meeting. It had just been a good long while since any of our kind had last filled those seats.

The reason, I was told, was the cobwebs. According to my hosts, what I’d perceived as webs were really the layers of stories woven over the human population by those who’d remain in control. The only reason that I finally made the meeting (or could even see those webs to begin with) was because my time away had first loosened, then shaken their hold. Nowadays, I wholly believe those “webs” are what people are referring to when they speak of “the veil.”

Toward A Definition of Ersatz

No matter its name, that barrier or binding is largely what I mean by “ersatz.” My container this time is obviously a borrowing altered from its original form. But “container” struggles seem par for the course when it comes to discussing this subject. The writer James Joyce, for example, named his container “false art” or “improper art,” which J.F. Martel summarizes in the following way:

’Proper art stills us, evoking an emotional state in which “the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing.” Improper art does the opposite, aiming to make the percipient act, think, or feel in a certain prescribed manner.’ (Martel, Reclaiming Art In The Age of Artifice. 26-27).

You may wish to put a pin in that part about “desiring and loathing.” I’ll be returning to it toward the end.

Much like that “false” or “improper” art, my borrowed “ersatz” is any story that binds and keeps us closed off to inspiration, and/or controls and makes us another’s tool or weapon. Ersatz is the stories that trick us into believing ourselves separate from, maybe even better than, other humans due to inborn qualities. It’s the stories that have us reaching into our pockets for money we don’t have for some product to fix everything (usually while also convincing us that we’re brands too).

Tired of Capitalism 1.0? Try Capitalism 2.0 instead! Think you know REAL Capitalism? Think again! 100% guaranteed to make you rich!

(Terms and conditions most definitely apply.)

Ersatz is propaganda and marketing and nationalist myths of blood, soil, and divine destiny. It’s the various “programs” or ideologies by which our societies run. To quote Martel again (who’s clearly also in the container business), ”Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.”

And unfortunately, that artifice or ersatz is more prevalent than ever before.

According to Samuel Spitale in the introduction of How To Win The War On Truth, the average American is subjected to anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 media messages a day (up from around 1,600 fifty years ago).

No wonder so many of us struggle to find the space for Authenticity’s seeds.

Weaponized Ersatz: A Two-Headed Beast

So, we have our ersatz, already monstrous but still growing. Worse still, this beast is polycephalus. For the purposes of this post, I’ve set a two-head limit for this word-woven creature. After all, nuance often gives way to endless rabbit holes without proper boundaries. And well…this post is already a warren.

With that said, let’s meet our fiend!

A loud roar suddenly shatters the silence as the beast rises. Its feet make dust of hard rock. Terrified, you begin to retreat, your heartbeat a war drum in your chest. The land shakes as it takes a step, and, unable to look away, you stumble and lose your footing. Palms aching, you take to shuffling backward on your butt—anything to escape. But then the land shakes again as it takes another step, and realization sinks in as hard as the stone making raw meat of your skin. Your desperate shuffle could never match a monster’s stride. Blood like ice, you freeze. Instead, you stare at the two heads swaying like snakes, their mighty maws open wide, and prepare for the end.

Dear Gods, please let it be quick…

One head lowers, and you find yourself choking on its breath. “WHEN YOU’RE HERE, YOU’RE FAMILY!!” it bellows, the words so loud they rattle your bones.

A half-second later, its twin lets out a second booming slogan. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The laughter slips out before you realize it.

“Fuck me, Marketing and Propaganda?” you manage between cackles. You sound insane, and maybe you are, but this beast makes crazy people of us all anyway. The two heads cock to one side, and you laugh even louder. “I’d rather a fucking demogorgon!” you snort.

(Me too, fictional scenario person. Me too. At least demogorgons aren’t the bestial equivalent of glitter.)

A Natural History Of Glitter

When I first began looking into the history of this beast, I’d assumed it would be easy. There are, after all, entire courses on these subjects. However, I quickly found that most of the relevant sources treated marketing and propaganda as completely different entities rather than parts of the same beast.

In my opinion, this is a flaw at best. Not only does it obscure the commonalities between the two heads, it also shrouds the extent of its reach in our lives. Worse still, I would argue that, much like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, the marketing we consume as benign actually primes us for propaganda as well.

But more on that shortly.

Whenever I research a subject, I first seek out the root—the “origin story,” so to speak. Without those “first layers” or “prologue,” I find it hard to fully anchor a subject in my mind.

Unfortunately for me, this glittery beast has no clear parentage. That tendency to see two different beasts instead of a singular fiend obscures its origin story as well. So, a person working within the “two-beast” model with a focus on marketing, for example, might cite Adam Smith as the father, as he is considered the originator of the concept. However, a second person with a focus on propaganda might cite Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, as the father of “public relations” (itself a rebranding of propaganda) instead.

Faulty modeling aside, however, we are dealing with the same beast. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays writes about propaganda and public relations for commercial and political ends without differentiation. Where nowadays we might say that marketing sells products and propaganda ideas, it was all the same toolkit to Bernays.

Interestingly, he also makes it clear that a group he refers to as the invisible government—shadowy figures who understand the mechanism and motivations of the public mind—uses that same toolkit to rule over the people as well (Bernays. 9-10).

”The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities.” (Bernays. 19).

Given that the “powerful help” is our beast, it’s little wonder the mist between the two heads is so damn thick!

The last time I darkened this digital domain, I talked about some of the recent research into perception, emotion, and bias. Now obviously, Bernays had none of those modern discoveries to pull on, but he was very familiar with his uncle’s work (as well as that of some of his contemporaries). Where his predecessors, the “old propagandists,” relied on “the psychological method of approach” (in other words, arguments based on facts and logic), Bernays focused on influencing the “mental pictures” in the public mind (Bernays, 106-107).

”Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring policy of creating or shaping events to influence the relationship of the public to a given enterprise.

This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether that enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president.” (Bernays, 25)

Over the years, Bernays worked on both commercial and political campaigns alike, influencing American life in surprising ways. In the 1920s, for example, a time when smoking was not so common among women, Bernays ran a campaign for Lucky Strike that equated smoking with women’s rights and presented cigarettes as “torches of freedom” (Spitale. 14-16). It’s also thanks to Bernays that hairnets became ubiquitous in food service. As shorter styles became more fashionable among women, hairnet sales sank. To remedy this, Bernays convinced health officials to make them a requirement for food service workers (Ibid. 16). He is also why people came to consider disposable cups cleaner than reusable options, and why men now also wear wristwatches and no longer consider them women’s jewelry (Ibid.)

Most infamously, however, Bernays produced propaganda for the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) against the democratically elected government of Guatemala, labeling them “communists.” This helped to enable a CIA-backed coup that led to decades of dictatorship and civil war for the poor people of Guatemala (Ibid. 16).

(This was also the origin of the term “banana republic,” by the way.)

So yeah…absolutely abhorrent.

As significant a parent as Bernays was though, he’s clearly not the only “daddy” in the mix for our beast. Unsurprisingly, this being is more homunculus than anybeing naturally spawned. (Gods, what a collection of words!) Moreover, there may also be some earlier, magical parentage as well.

Marketing, Propaganda, And The Magic Of Desire

This next part begins with the work of Ioan Petru Culianu. In life, Culianu was a Romanian-American historian known for his books on certain niche aspects of renaissance thought. A practicing magician who sadly met his end in 1991 in his bathroom courtesy of a bullet to the head.

A murder that remains unsolved to this day.

Well anyway, one of Culianu’s main academic foci was the writings of Giordano Bruno, a friar-turned-magician who was burned for heresy in the year 1600.

In his book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Culianu uses Bruno’s essay On Bindings In General as a framework to examine the possible connections between renaissance magic and mass-media marketing. For Bruno, the key to magic was eros (desire).  Along similar lines, modern advertising manipulates consciousness via images that spark desire. Sex sells either way.

Nowadays, we don’t typically think of marketing and propaganda as magical arts. However, Culianu considered this desire-based manipulation the very foundation of political power in modern industrial nations (referred to by Culianu as “magician states”) (Greer. The King In Orange. 19-21).

A Souls-Familiar Layer?

Emotions have long been understood to be magically potent. In Heathenry, the furious god is also the “Father of Galdr” or verbal charm magic. A form of magic that not only marries narrative (and sometimes also poetic meter) with intense emotion and modes of performance. Speak a galdor while utterly enraged, and you’ll probably get some spectacular (not to mention quick) results.

However, fury isn’t the only emotion that appears in connection with magic in the Norse sources. The other main emotion was familiar to both Bruno and Bernays.

Desire.

In the Old Norse sources, both fury and desire are stirrings of the same soul. This is the Hugr, the most “occult” of a person’s souls, you might say. Although better attested in Norse sources, cognate forms appear in all the older Germanic tongues, all of which rooted other words. Among the early English, Hugr was known as Hyge, while a speaker of Old Saxon would have referred to their Hugi instead. In Old High German, the word was Hugu, and in Gothic, it was Hugs.

Broadly speaking, Hugr is “mind,” “heart,” “desire,” and “longing,” though I should also note that these cognates do differ slightly in meaning. For example, the Old English Hyge could be “thought,” “mind,” “courage,” “intention,” “heart,” “disposition,” and “pride.” The Gothic Hugs, however, primarily carried meanings of “thought,” “intelligence” and “understanding” with none of the heart.

Overall, the best summary of Hugr as I understand and experience this soul comes from Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál chapter 86:

“Thought (Hugr) is called mind and tenderness, love, affection, desire, pleasure…Thought is also called disposition, attitude, energy, fortitude, liking, memory, wit, temper, character, troth. A thought can also be called anger, enmity, hostility, ferocity, evil, grief, sorrow, bad temper, wrath, duplicity, insincerity, inconstancy, frivolity, brashness, impulsiveness, impetuousness. (Faulkes trans. 154.)

As I said earlier, they are the most “occult” of our souls. At times in the sources, they give counsel, while at other times they appear to be a ward. A protector. They are also a wanderer, capable of independent movement from the human whole.

Most important of all though, Hugr has force. They are the fury in the galdor and the lust in the seiðr, they are the difference between empty words and gestures, and tangible result. Hugr is what makes Wish real in the world.

All of which makes Hugr the main prey of our two-headed beast.

Where marketing works to ensnare Hugr with bait made of carefully crafted wishes, propaganda ensnares by stirring up rage and offering nightmarish possible futures to appeal to Hugr-as-ward. If we’re not careful, this beast can make monsters of our Hugr over time as well.

And that, Hel-friends, is a recipe for disaster that lasts long after the screen has gone dead.

Final Words

I was planning to follow up with another post on this topic directly after this. However, the thing about exploring such huge subjects is that, sooner or later, I begin to feel trapped. Suddenly, I find all kinds of other things to talk (ahem, rant) about and find myself getting annoyed. Eventually, I lose interest and cease writing full stop.

So, this time I’m trying something different.

I’m going to post that stuff anyway instead of trying to stick to one series at a time. Expect the unexpected, I guess!

That said, I’m not nearly done with this subject. So far I’ve focused on the effects on individual humans, but I’m yet to touch on mass effects. What happens when significant numbers of Hugr-twisted humans obsess over a practitioner of New Thought who markets themself as a brand? How about when big tech takes a huge dump in the information space? More importantly, why even take that dump in the first place after warning of its dangers less than a decade ago?

The technology might well be new, but the playbook really is not.

Until that next time though, I really encourage you to check out Winifred Rose’s work on Hugr. One of the very best things I’ve ever done for myself both as a human and Wicce is to get to know mine. Nowadays, my Hugr and I are more intentional in our collaboration. Better still, we’re both learning to spot that beast’s bait.

An important practice in our increasingly brain-cooked world full of people with out-of-control and twisted Hugr-souls!

So, until then, be well, Hel-friends and stay safe.
<3

Sources

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda (Original Classic 1928 Edition): The Definitive and Complete Masterwork on Public Relations. 2025.

Greer, John M. The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Martel, J.F. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015.

Spitale, Samuel C. How To Win The War On Truth. 2022.

Sturluson, Snorri. Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning. Translated by Anthony Faulkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press (UK), 1982.

 

Posted on

An Elephant Called “Magic”

A few years ago now I gave a class on Christian religious baggage at a Heathen event. The title of the class was Uncloaking Elephants, because I wanted to focus on some of the baggage that most tend not to see in the first place. Unlike their easily-seen cousins, these proverbial elephants don’t just huddle in the corners of our mind-rooms; they’re part of the décor—in some cases, the very foundations of those spaces.

They’re the default assumptions of our overculture, premises we accept without question, their religious roots usually forgotten.

One such “elephant” that has been coming to mind of late concerns the concept of magic. If you’ve ever been to any of my classes, you’ll know that I talk about magic a lot. (Hell, I even have a definition I use while teaching!) But the truth of the matter is that this is just me making use of an elephant as koine; “magic” is common parlance. Were it up to me though, I’d actually take that elephant and toss it off a cliff.

Fuckety-bye, Dumbo!

An Elephant Named “Magic” Plummets To The Earth

But why? Why would I take a perfectly proficient proverbial pachyderm and yeet them to their demise?

Because words are more than containers for ideas; they also delineate conceptual boundaries, and in aggregate, form entire frameworks. Most of the time, those containers are simple, their boundaries easily delineated. A “chair,” for example, is a piece of furniture where people may plant their butts (comfort level may vary). Other words, however, defy concise definition, which is naturally the group within which we find the word “magic.”

Common though it is, this term confounds practitioners and scholars alike (no matter what some may tell you). To quote the academic Richard Kieckhefer, who has spent literal decades studying this very topic, in The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Magic (2019):

”What is magic? We know perfectly well what it is if no one asks us, but when someone asks and we try to define it, we are confused.” (p.15)
Yet that confusion (which is by no means limited to Professor Kieckhefer) doesn’t prevent academics from operating under certain assumptions.

To see where I’m going with this, consider the following from pages 226-227 of European Paganism by Ken Dowden:

“I have excluded magic, because by definition it is not capable of being institutionalized within religion, though plainly actions which we or others might dismissively categorize as magical can be performed by priests as ritual—or by individuals who happen to be recognized religious professionals as acts of, for example, medicine.”

Here we see Dowden inserting a well-worn divider between magic and ritual, and in so doing, once again separating priest from witch.
Quite an odd trajectory for a term originally used to refer to a class of Zoroastrian priests.

A Flashback For “Magic” On The Brink Of Death

The Greek sources are full of interesting births. A god gets a migraine and pops a fully formed goddess of wisdom from his head with the help of an ax. Some foam oozes from the castrated junk of a primordial god and births a love goddess. You get the idea…

Living rent free in Zeus’ head.

Another interesting birth for you now: a group of priests, or magi, attract enough attention from some 5th century BCE Greeks to wind up in texts and produce a baby elephant…or something.

Silly elephant stories aside, this is the origin story of the word “magic,” a word that has carried the implication of foreignness and the social “other” ever since the first Greek spilled some ink about them. The magi as recorded in those early texts were ritualists (as one might expect for priests), but also practitioners of mysterious arts like astrology and magical healing. The first etic definition of magic and the magical was, simply put, whatever acts or practices the Greeks associated with that Persian priestly class (Kieckhefer. Magic in the Middle Ages. p. 10).

So far our elephant has remained relatively small and is yet to gain stealth. For the next part of the story though, we’ll need to fast-forward almost a millennium—to the 4th century CE, to be exact—and exchange the columns of Greece for those of Rome. A time when Christianity was ascendant in the empire and the early Christians secure enough to flex their socio-political power.

*Insert Leveling-Up Montage*

And naturally, a good deal of that flexing involved spreading the word like Jimmy Pop spread the turd back in the late 90 s. The more things change, the more they stay the same…

However, jokes about Jimmy Poop and Jesus aside, a key part of the Christian conversion strategy back then was conflating Pagan ritual technologies with magic.

Remember that earlier prejudice against the magi and connotations of the social other? Well, the 4th century Christians made good use of those biases. Presenting themselves as the social in-group, they painted the Pagans as outsiders and labeled their own seemingly magical acts as “miracles.” Early Christian narratives from the classical world during this time are full of exorcism narratives, all written with the goal of depicting the Pagan (ergo “magical”) as foolish and weak, and their own god as the mighty victor (MacCullen, Ramsey. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. pp. 8-10; 91-93).

However, it would take more than some 4th century smacktalk to attain religious dominance. You see, for the average Greco-Roman Pagan, one’s shrine of choice was where you went for healing and/or oracular help—functions that the Christians would have to either replace or sully if they were to convince the Pagans away from their older cults (MacCullen. pp. 53 – 57).

Another part of the wider strategy to chip away at Pagan cultus was labeling Pagan spirits and deities “demons” by default (from the Greek daimones; Latin daemones). A far cry from the sulfur-smelling pit fiend of later lore, the original Greek daimon was (among other things) an intermediary between humans and gods.

With the Pagan holy powers now “demons” and the practices of their cults “magic,” anything savoring of Paganism (and later heresy) became both “magical” and “demonic” by definition, and as such, eventually the antithesis of religion, society, and culture (Kieckhefer. Magic in the Middle Ages. p. 38).

End montage.

The elephant named “Magic” has now attained its final form and is all set to become another piece of the over-cultural default. They’re the woody knot in a doorpost or mantelpiece ornament gathering dust that have been there forever.

Practically invisible.

#NotAllPachyderms

Elephant Meets Ground = Splat

Eventually all things come to an end: our proverbial pachyderm meets the ground in a bloody mess.

Toward the beginning of this post, I said that words both contain meanings and delineate their conceptual boundaries. The way we define and understand words shapes our ability to think about a subject or problem in a very real way. By conflating the already maligned “magic” with the Pagan, those 4th century Christian clerics have left us with an ideological catch-22 that has us struggling to arrive at a consensus definition for a word that originally referred to a kind of priest while also denying that any connection with priesthood exists.

Madness.

But this is why “magic” is so difficult to define, the reason for the countless discussions and arguments about where the line lies between “magic” and “religion.” (A pointless debate when you really think about it.)

This is why we see scholars such as the aforementioned Ken Dowden confidently asserting that magic “by definition” is “not capable of being institutionalized within religion” (in a chapter with multiple primary source quotations, some of which directly contradict that entire notion).

Over and over, we keep trying to force a round peg into a square hole.

Our current common understanding of the word “magic” (itself the product of a 4th century Christian conversion strategy) is more hindrance than help. It actively limits our ability to think about Pagan/Heathen cultus while, more nefariously, perpetuating the inference that our traditions are automatically inferior (especially if they look a little woo-woo magical)

Worse still, that status as a default assumption impedes our ability to engage with historical evidence without first editing or ignoring the parts that don’t fit. (Or alternatively: creating caveats and/or additional frameworks to explain the numerous exceptions.)

So yeah, we should yeet the elephant—that old foot soldier of conversion—and the premise it came to represent. Their memory will remain, so we’ll keep the koine (for now).
It’s time to stop letting that ghost call the shots and ask ourselves what might be instead.

Sources

Dowden, Ken. European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic In The Middle Ages.
McCullen, Ramsey. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries.
The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Magic (from Mitchell, Stephen. Old Norse Folklore: Magic, Witchcraft, and Charms in Medieval Scandinavia.)

 

Posted on

Otherworldly Bleed, Consensus, and Magic

Otherworldly Observations

A few years ago, back when this idea of the otherworld bleeding through began to make its way into Pagan/Witch discourse, I had a curious incident at the side of a river with a witchy friend. We’d been on a walk together as we often did back then in the pre-plague years, end eventually (unsurprisingly) we’d begun to “talk shop.” You see, both of us had noticed the uptick in otherworldly activity, in a similar way to how hunters are often the first to notice disease in deer.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not comparing the Other with disease here (I wouldn’t dare). I’m just saying that as magical practitioners, we tend to be among the first to notice this kind of thing.

But we were both also getting messages from multiple people. Moreover, these were often from people who didn’t ordinarily experience our kind of strangeness, and that stood out.

At some point in our discussion, I mentioned the fact that a witch’s knowledge and power was believed to come from otherworldly sources where I’m from. And I wondered what the effects of this otherworldly “bleed” would have on magic and what we humans can do with magic. Naturally (because I’m an idiot like this), I grabbed a stick and drew a sigil I use when creating portals into the sand and silt of the riverbank.

The effect was almost instantaneous: a shifting sensation that used to take more effort to achieve.

I closed it and scrubbed it from the sand almost as soon as my friend and I noticed the shift. But I’ve been musing about the changing limits of magical possibility, consensus, and opposition ever since.

John’s Rising Currents

Discourse is a funny old thing. Sometimes we can have an observation or thought sitting in the soil of our mind for a long time without writing about it. But then, something will happen to water it, and it’ll take root and grow.

(As an aside, it’s interesting how we refer to events that spark action as “precipitating events.” Soil and seeds. Soil and seeds.)

I’m a firm believer that most things have their season. And if the blog John Beckett posted this morning is anything to go by, then this subject’s season has come.

In The Currents of Magic are Getting Stronger, John Beckett makes the same observation I did at the side of that river. Ironically, he uses the analogy of a river running higher and faster to explain his observation that the “currents” of magic are getting stronger and enabling an increase in possibility/greater results. He also goes on to cautiously suggest some possible causes, and this is where I feel like I have something to add.

Magic and the Otherworldly

I’ve blogged about this before, but in the historical witchcraft traditions where I’m from, the source of the witch’s power and knowledge was otherworldly. This is where we get into familiars and hierarchy. These are all complex topics, and more than I can cover in this blog, so I encourage you to read the posts I’ve linked here if you want to go deeper. That’s not to say that what we call the “otherworldly” is the only possible source of magic and knowledge though, nor the only possible framework through which these changes can be understood.

We also cannot ignore the fact that most of the discussion on this topic is coming from US sources.  I’m not saying that strange things aren’t also happening elsewhere—some of my mother’s stories from back in Lancashire have been decidedly stranger than usual of late. But we also cannot assume that just because this stuff is happening here, it’s happening everywhere.

In my opinion, an important consideration in this discussion of how widespread or localized this “trend” is, boils down to the relationship between a culture and the otherworldly beings they interact with. ( Assuming the relationship between Otherworldly beings and magic is found within those cultures in the first place.)

Fairy-like beings are found in lore pretty much all over the world, but not all cultures have responded in the same way to their presence over time. Some cultures—such as many Western European cultures—equated them with demons and/ fallen angels, destroyed their sanctuaries, and drove them out after humans converted to Christianity (LeCouteux, Claude. Demons and Spirits of the Land. Pp. 23-28, 68-80).

And I’m not saying that folk practices involving the otherworldly didn’t still exist, of course. We know they did. But as I’ll hopefully make clear in the next section, consensus (like all stories) is a powerful and often binding thing.

This process wasn’t limited to Western Europe either. If Cotton Mather is to be believed in his Wonders of the Invisible World, early colonizers in what would become the US also drove out “devils.” He even goes on to blame the apparent preponderance of witches in Salem on a counterattack by the devils, thus retaining that link between witches and the Otherworldly in his interpretation of events.

The otherworld is bleeding through, the devils are coming back, and they’re bringing us witches with them?

However in some places, maybe the Otherworld didn’t need to bleed back in from anywhere else at all.

Reality, Consensus, Possibility, and Feedback Loops

Another story now. Back in the mid-2000s, I came across an interesting interaction at a Pagan Conference in England between a gentleman from an African country (I didn’t get chance to ask him which), and a vendor who was selling these tacky, crystal-encrusted “wish books.” For her, even as someone who considered herself a witch, these books were just a bit of fun and to be commonly understood as such. There was no real expectation that writing your wishes in them would yield any concrete results. But her potential customer clearly had far greater expectations of the “wish book” than her and kept asking her in a deadly serious voice if it really worked.

As you might imagine, this became increasingly more uncomfortable the longer it went on.

To me though, as an observer, I couldn’t help but be struck by the wildly different expectations of magic that were revealed through this interaction. Again, this is something I’ve written about before, but much of what we commonly call “reality” is more accurately described as consensus. We take in far more information through our ordinary senses per second than we can even be conscious of, let alone store in our memories. Moreover, studies have shown that we’re more likely to become conscious of/retain the information that aligns with our existing beliefs and biases.

This is impossible to separate from consensus. I believe that consensus, in a sense, both delineates and limits the boundaries of possibility.

From this perspective, the more people that experience and/or interact with the strange and Otherworldly, the more the consensus that THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN “REALITY” is challenged. And over time if enough people start to have these experiences, the consensus of a culture shifts to include them in the realm of possibility. This in turn, creates a kind of feedback loop in which that consensus is progressively widened. (A process that is not so different from what you find in a propaganda campaign.)

This is theory, but I would argue we have historical proof of the reverse: the binding effects of consensus.

I’ve written about this before, but we can see this in how concepts of dreaming change in Northwestern Europe after the advent of Christianity. People went from considering dreams a place where they could encounter the dead and otherworldly in a concrete way, to a state of consciousness in which people only experience nonsensical or anxiety-driven scenarios.

(Again, another way of driving out the otherworldly, I might add.)

This is all very exciting to think about, but I think we need to also be cautious here too.

The Other Side of the Coin

Within the Pagan and Witch communities, I think there is a tendency to assume that we are the only ones out there working magic. We forget that Christians also have their magic, and that a more forgiving consensus is also going to benefit them as well.

Unfortunately for us, they tend to be very much against our kind of magic, and they still largely label the Other as “demonic.” They also have an established tradition of weaponized “prayer” in the form of “prayer warriors,” who often work together in groups and are capable of a level of faith and zeal very few Pagans and Witches can muster.

Another area of concern is that I suspect a lot of the more “fringe” Christians are feeling the same uptick in activity as we are. I’m far from an expert on this subject, but I keep an eye on some of these groups as part of my omen-taking, and this is something I’ve noticed. There seems to have been an uptick in videos of “demonic possession” over the past few years. And talk of spiritual warfare against demons and witches seems to have become more common. (Here’s a recent example.) There have also been large events such as the Jericho March earlier this year. Participants of the march blew shofarim and marched around the Capitol building seven times while praying- a clear imitation of the Israelite siege of the city of Jericho. The next day was 1/6, in case you were wondering about their intentions.

If there’s anything we can learn from history when it comes to religious fundamentalists of a certain kind, it’s that this usually doesn’t go well for us. The more people believe in the possibilities of magic in general, the more they tend to blame magic (and practitioners) when things go wrong. So, the Otherworldly may be more present, and “currents of magic” may be rising and growing in strength, but they’re not without a brewing backlash.

I just hope we don’t wind up in a place where humans meet the same fate as books.