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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Not gonna lie, millennial here, despite normally preferring scientific explanations, I've been seriously considering getting into witchy stuff. Sounds like fun and seems like a way to feel like I actually have some control over this insanity; and anything that doesn't fit can be chalked up to evil hexes or some shit.
Edit: PREFERRING not PREVENTING fuck you autocorrect.
You don't need to actually believe something just to walk the walk. That's all roleplay is. If it looks cool or sounds fun, dive on in.
An idle thought: who says you can't have a foot in both worlds? While 'witchy' points of view typically obscure material causes and effects, the rituals and concepts they provide can still be useful. The trick is recognizing what their utility actually is for you, and where a more rational pov needs to be deployed.
I'll give a pretty tame example of the idea here: horoscopes. I do not believe in astrology, in the sense that the position of stars and planets have a real, direct influence on human activities. But when I read a horoscope, I typically find myself looking at events from a different perspective, and it may cause me to notice something I otherwise would not have. That thing may be legitimately advantageous, and I may pursue action to my benefit because I noticed it. I should pursue that action rationally, with an eye to protecting my safety broadly understood (financial, bodily, etc.) and maintaining a level of risk I can legitimately manage - but I wouldn't be acting on it at all without that moment of magical thinking.
Now, on the other hand, if I just blindly accepted that what I noticed due to the horoscope is truly pre-ordained, and therefore I should pursue action whole hog without any risk assessment or any rational thought, more likely than not I'd find myself in a shitty set of circumstances.
It's a very fine line to walk, and too many people fall off into really wacky, dangerous or delusional shit. But if you can strike a balance, you may find yourself in far more unique, beneficial position than you would be otherwise, simply by widening the field of stuff you're watching for.
Tl;dr: Deliberate, controlled fancy can be useful if you're careful to not let it fuck with your ability to eat, cloth, house and protect yourself and your loved ones, or fuck with members of your community. You also need to take pains to not confuse those moments of fancy for objective truth.
/wook-rant
Honestly, I've seen multiple takes on what "magic" is; with some people describing it in more traditional terms (spells, hexes, potions, etc), and others basically saying, "it's any time action A seems to lead to outcome B, but the mechanism is unknown". The latter I'm fine with and actually encourage, because tbh, the physical world is fucking weird.
There's so much we don't know about physics that putting some cool rocks and a stick in a letter and mailing it to a friend might legitimately bring them good fortune, either because you've improved their mood (most likely), leading their brain to being more positive and efficient, or maybe something you did in the process happened to kickstart a row of dominos that happened to bring them good fortune. It doesn't really matter that you don't know the exact step that caused it, just that one of the steps seemed to do it and that's fine.
I suppose you could take a scientific approach to it though and study what exactly you did and how it seemed to effect the outcome of your magic. Who knows, might stumble across a new scientific law in the process.
On a side note regarding horoscopes, I don't believe in them except that I sometimes wonder if they're the result of patterns, which then became self-fullfilling prophecies. Astrologer notices that X happens more often when A is high in the sky and B is near the horizon, and predicts the occurrence of X. X occurs and people believe the astrologer. Next time A is high in the sky and B is near the horizon, the astrologer once again predicts X, and the people, as part of their belief, unintentionally cause X to happen again. Same thing with Chinese birth years. I wonder if it's the result of people noticing patterns in society and then laymen misattributing it to magic.
Yep - magic can mean a lot of things depending on context. You usually hear about spells and such when it's an exercise in intent projection - trying to send some signal into the universe or whatever to align with your personal goals. The other definition you mention is more about unexplained phenomena. There's definitely others, too.
I probably should have asked this first - when you say getting more into witchy stuff, what does that look like? Say you decide to start tomorrow - what does tomorrow look like for you?
That's a really good question, and I'm not really sure. Part of it is the wide variety of interpretations on what it is which makes it hard to decide where I'd go with it. I think part of it would be just finding neat objects, whether they're rocks, sticks, gems, whatever, and attributing some kind of secret power to them. Tbh I think as someone else pointed out, it'd really be more of a roleplay thing than actual belief.
Part of what's eating me up right now is the realization that under known physical laws, free will doesn't exist. You don't make choices, you don't make decisions, these were all things the universe already knew would occur because at the end of the day, you're a big chemical reaction. All those bigots, all those dictators, they never stood a chance. They never became good people because the conditions necessary for them to change never existed; it was merely an illusion.
I kinda want to believe in free will again, but I'm not sure how to convince myself that free will is possible. I've even explored the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, but I realized that even then, free will is an illusion. If every possible reality occurs, then does free will actually exist? Probably not.
Consider chaos magick which quite openly admits that it might not actually be magic. Magic-ised placebo effect.
I don't understand what witchy means, especially in this context. Can someone please explain?
It'd probably be best for OP to flesh out what they mean, but when I responded I took it to mean occult ideas - magick, correspondences, projecting personal intent via ritual activities, etc.
An example I've seen in the Tiktok world is manifesting, where you do some sort of ritual or whatever activity with the goal of trying to obtain some boon (money, romantic interest, whatever).
Quite a few people dismiss this stuff out of hand, which I get - I personally don't think a manifestation ritual, for instance, will get you much by itself- but I think these things can be useful for some people in a limited sense. My opinion is activities like this can put you in a state of readiness to notice real things you might otherwise pass over, or provide you with some sense of solace or control over your personal circumstances.
This isn't getting into things like high magick and other activities, which again I feel have a place so long as you keep yourself grounded.
my problem with a lot of this stuff is how exploitable it is by unscrupulous people, and how it can train people to stop critically examining things.
rituals and spirituality can be great for mental health, but it makes me so incredibly sad to see people who follow some shitty scam artist and believe what they're doing will magically fix things for them.
At the risk of annoying people for copy-pasting my reply to someone else:
That's a really good question, and I'm not really sure. Part of it is the wide variety of interpretations on what it is which makes it hard to decide where I'd go with it. I think part of it would be just finding neat objects, whether they're rocks, sticks, gems, whatever, and attributing some kind of secret power to them. Tbh I think as someone else pointed out, it'd really be more of a roleplay thing than actual belief.
Part of what's eating me up right now is the realization that under known physical laws, free will doesn't exist. You don't make choices, you don't make decisions, these were all things the universe already knew would occur because at the end of the day, you're a big chemical reaction. All those bigots, all those dictators, they never stood a chance. They never became good people because the conditions necessary for them to change never existed; it was merely an illusion.
I kinda want to believe in free will again, but I'm not sure how to convince myself that free will is possible. I've even explored the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, but I realized that even then, free will is an illusion. If every possible reality occurs, then does free will actually exist? Probably not.
I know that doesn't fully answer your question, but that's kinda where my brain is at right now.
If people who believe in a magical bearded sky father manifesting their bedtime wishes and helping devotees win sporting events and awards are somehow taken seriously, well, I feel perfectly fine choosing to believe in free will.
Humanity didn’t have a clue about all kinds of shit just a few generations ago. It’s quite possible that there is more to the world than what we currently understand and that we really are more than some crazy elaborate finite automata. It’s an egotistical blindspot to think that there are no more unknown unknowns.
Don't waste your very finite time with bullshit. Accept reality cold hard and uncaring. All we have is each other science and tech.