As I sat on my doorstep just now, with the early morning sun streaming down through the tree branches and the birds singing for all they’re worth, I felt a moment of revelation. I looked at my garden, and I realised I want to change it, from a tangled overgrown abundance to a thing of beauty.

Previously to this I had yet again been pondering the way information spreads, the memes we often rely on for our perceptions. The run up to Easter this year has seen many of my facebook friends posting this picture

Ishtar, Babylonian goddess of war

which raised my eyebrows when I first read it, but with continued reposting started to really get to me.

Thankfully many other fb friends have been posting other pictures, like this;

Eostre, northern European goddess of return of life after winter

One of the better, clear and full information pages they referenced can be found here;

http://bellejarblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/easter-is-not-named-after-ishtar-and-other-truths-i-have-to-tell-you/

At the same time, this week I have also been seeing many posts and pictures relating to the North American campaign for gay marriage equality, which were followed by many variations of pictures declaring that the ‘Monsanto Act’ had been passed while attention was diverted…

Monsanto are evil. No doubt there.

…which also seems to turn out to be not quite the whole picture when you read further into the background reality.

Another news story that has appeared in various media outlets this week has been the outrageous tale (originating in The Sun, a notoriously simple newspaper which has featured bare chested women on page 3 since time immemorial) of a woman who got fake breasts paid for by the NHS, while other patients cannot get funding for eg cancer. Terrible!!! But, find out more and you might think differently…

Taken as individual stories that confirm prejudices and add evidence to already held beliefs, these plausible at first glance examples are not uncommon occurrences. For the last few weeks, I have been writing a longer blogpost about the implications of the dichotomy of simple vs complex thinking (you lucky people!). But coming all at once, they distressed me.

I had to bring these stories up now, it is Easter, and I am not happy about goddesses being misassigned. Part of my motivation is, I heartily dislike the conflation of all goddesses into one goddess; while gods can merrily get away with a huge variety of specialist skill bases, goddesses tend to get sex, procreation, and maybe a bit of death if they are lucky. (I realise there are those who buck the trend, but be honest when was the last time you got awestruck about Athena, goddess of being-really-skilled-at-making-things-eg-cloth?).

More importantly Ishtar (who is mainly a goddess of desert warfare and unpleasant death) might not be the best icon for pouring forth worship towards right now. I pay due reverence to her when appropriate, but the celebration of the season when chickens starting to lay again after winter, the day growing in length, the green shoots appearing from beneath the ground, and animals getting frisky does not require admiration of an ancient Babylonian deity whose name slightly sounds like Eostre (herself of somewhat doubtful mythological origins tbh).

I repost memes I like the overall feel of, especially if they come to me from a source I like. I don’t always check them exhaustively first. However, those that seem to be new or startling in their content, I tend to pause and consider. An meme that makes me say ‘Really?!?!’ needs to be confirmed from another source before I am prepared to give it headroom.

I have also seen murmurings from the more conspiracy minded websites that these types of simplistic and plain incorrect sloganeering inciting of emotional anger infomemes are being created deliberately by right wing activists, who can then laugh at the way the duped liberals react without checking facts. How true this is I do not know, I would need to check the facts on it first, but in some ways that is irrelevant. Anyone passing on information that they are told in conjunction with a provocative picture, should perhaps do a quick search around, to reflect on whether those racehorses about to be sent to the knackers are real, and whether that lost dog is in fact still lost, several years after it went missing, or the Like n Share To Win an Ipad! link is actually what it says.

Snopes and Hoax-Slayer are only two of the sites that will do this work on your behalf. You have a duty of care to your many trusting friends to be the person who stops the spread of these scams (for they are, whatever the original motivation of the creators, nothing more than that).

Many of them cause emotional distress unnecessarily, often this is how they spread so fast and uncritically; or alter the reader’s world views inaccurately.

I’m all for choosing to believe what suits you at each moment in life, indeed Chaos Magick thrives on such behaviour. But, choosing from a position of ill-informed ignorance is not much of a choice.

And that is why I shall be making my garden look lovely this year. To show that I can create and change things, rather than simply passing on only what I received.

NW

PS I would like to thank profusely all the people whose fb profiles contributed to all aspects of this blogpost, too many to mention by name.

I was asked recently, at one of my workshops at Treadwell’s esteemed premises, about what happens when a spirit/servitor is deconstructed at the end of its useful life. The person wanted to know, quite understandably, where the energy which made up the servitor went to, back to the general universal pool, or into the creator of the servitor, or where?

I must admit I had issues with trying to answer this question. I see each entity (including myself) as a temporary standing wave in the universal pool of energy/information, and so I don’t tend to distinguish between these as separate things. I had to ponder deeply on this matter…

Some months later I found myself describing invocation at another workshop, and a similar kind of tension was apparent. Does the magician invoke the Deity or, does the Deity set things up so that it invokes itself into the magician? As a chaos magician I tend to cheat and hold both views simultaneously, certainly when a full on invocatory process has worked and I stand in the circle as a deity, I often find myself thinking that I, *insert spirit name here*, have decided to arrive at this place.

Make way for me!

In a world where cause and effect are often taken as the default mechanism for all things, tracking back to who did something has enormous weight when we conceptualise any action. It can in many cases prove productive; by finding the act which altered a course of events, we can see where the praise/fault rests. This can be terribly handy when attempting to replicate the act again in repeatable circumstances.

Magickal activity follows a similar pattern where we try to identify the point of pressure likely to lead to the result we desire (divination) then do something that changes the outcome (enchantment).

From a more philosophical perspective however, this can lead us astray into thinking we are the controller of the universe; when in fact, we are merely a conglomeration of stuff and events that have produced an effect in the world which may well be a result of another entitity’s desire way back when. Science, and magick, by drawing a circle round a specific set of events, artificially define a chain of events when reality has far more integrity to it, far more messy blurring between the fractal sets of physical nested events.

And this is why the chaos magician laughs after doing magick, at the absurdity of pretension involved in believing that one has ultimate power over anything.

We draw circles around our actions, in order to focus attention where we need it. To keep out bad spirits, influences we do not want to include in our sphere.

At the moment of focus, these circles hold firm, but to re-enter the world we must rub them out to merge the world of magickal endeavour with that of the mundane, the ordinary. We laugh at ourselves, we eat and drink, we remove the trappings of The Other that proved so powerful during the Magick.

Because, we live our lives in this mundane world. We enter into magick to affect the mundane, the proving ground, the arena of our daily lives.

Magick is not distinct from the rest of our activities. Just as millinery has had societal influence far beyond its obvious direct products, occulture has pervaded and affected so many aspects of how we see the world (from the origin of Science itself, to so much of that spooky stereotypical imagery we all know and love), that to talk of the occult as a separate thing outside mainstream society proves harder the closer one looks at the boundary (fractal disappearing acts recur). Which is not to say that the descriptor, ‘The Occult’, has no value; we all ‘know’ what that means, from our own perspective at least.

But as when using any group labelling terminology, we should bear in mind the continuum and overlap of the individual people, products, acts, and concepts with other, differently labelled currents.

The work of a Venn master

Linguistics forces us, necessarily, to treat of concepts/defined happenings as isolate objects we can pick up and examine, move in relation to one another, for this is how we interact with the physical world, and it is upon the scaffold of these neural structures we built our words. Yet when we think clearly, we see the way that objects are mere nodes in a far wider network, these apparent things that we reify, they really have existence only as snapshot frames in the flow of the material realm, and the events or spirits we conjure with when we talk similarly flow, emergent highlights from the ground of wisdom.

To ask where does a spirit’s energy return to, is linguistically possible, but when one looks at reality the question disappears, the meaning redundant as we enter that place beyond duality, paradoxical awareness of the neither-neither nature of Nature.

A mountain. A lake. A reflection…

Sometimes the process of asking such questions has immense value in itself though. After all without it I would not have written these words, nor would you have read them…

NW