My Field Trip to the Pitt Rivers Museum

I have revisited the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford after a gap of 20 years. Naturally it doesn't look to have changed much in that time, but has been the cause of my realisation that I have changed considerably. When I first visited, of course I was already a witch really: I just hadn't realised it. Now I am tending to see the collection rather differently, and what most strikes me is the small corner devoted to the paraphernalia of magic. The talismans and what have you in the section are obviously explicitly for magical use. But the collection (intentionally or not) gives the impression that the use of magic has ceased in the modern era. As a modern magician what also struck me about the rest of the collection was that virtually everything could be used for magic at a push - masks and various items of clothing, for example. As I say this means a marked change in my own mindset since I first visited the museum as a student.
The other thing which strikes me is the fact that much of the collection is either of offensive or defensive use, indicating that these are the true motivations of so much human behaviour.
The item which most struck me was a monkey's skull used by headhunters' children in Borneo as a play way of preparing for real head hunting in later life. I want one!

Anecdote from Patricia Crowther about Alex Sanders and Aleister Crowley

"That I disliked Alex Sanders from the start will not come as a shock to anyone associated with witchcraft. He came to our home on only three occasions, and at no time did he set foot in my temple.
[...]
'On his second visit (in the morning of 18 June 1962), he wanted to try the planchette. We obliged, and a spirit calling himself Aleister Crowley came through (we often had messages from Crowley). This time, all he could manage to say was 'Chuck the bugger out!' Sanders enquired, 'What did he say?', and I contrived to camouflage the awkward moment, by replying, 'I think he said," It's a lovely day out".'
Patricia Crowther: High Priestess. Phoenix Publishing, Blane (Washington), 1998, pp. 64 -5.

It is the bit about often getting Uncle Al which makes this perfect.
I'm going on a field trip this week: I'm going to do the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford. Now you may say it bears a passing resemblance to my living room but there are people whose collections of weird shit rival even mine!

Witch's Hymn Book: Algernon Wants You to Say OK

This is a song I have just rediscovered through watching Tiswas on youtube, and it's definitely fit for the witch's hymn book.
It's also by way of a happy birthday to Inexplicable Device but don't remind him of his birthday because it's only people of Our Age who remember Tiswas the first time round!

I'm Doing Something Right

A couple of days ago I walked past one of those charity muggers in the street and he commented that I was the only person he'd seen that day who looked happy. I can only think that it's great to be me.
I continue to leave a trail of disaster in other people's lives. The woman I dislike at work is off sick long term. I suspect that what is afflicting her is her own incompetence and inability to be mistress of her own life. She was recently interviewed for a job which she didn't get and went around saying it was because they didn't interview her properly.
I'm such a bitch.
Oh - the picture is of a slave having his bonds removed.

My Lent Book has Found Me

I just knew that publishing my last post would put the message out to the universe and a suitable Lent book would appear. And it is the autobiography of Patricia Crowther, the famous Gardnerian High Priestess of Sheffield.
Personally I'm finding that books about magic are well nigh impossible to read nowadays. I get less and less interested in hearing what other witches have to say about their magic - regular readers will be aware of my philosophy that my magic is my own and yours is yours and once a person develops their own magic there is a limit to what they can learn from other people. I don't, however, have a problem with reading about the practitioners of other 'denominations' of witchcraft.
And many of them seem to be Wiccan. I read Lois Bourne's autobiography forever ago. I've read Gardner's books about Wicca as well as some of Philip Heselton's books about Gardner. You may remember that last summer an attempt to read Doreen Valiente Witch sitting on the canal bank had to be aborted because she had the most peculiar effect of making men walk up and show me their erections. Nor have I neglected the Alexandrians: I was very impressed in Maxine Sanders's book to read about how when she was living in a little village in Ireland she used to come downstairs in the morning to discover a rabbit hanging off the doorknob and a note beginning 'Dear Madam witch...' wanting some magic.
Perhaps this reading books is the modern equivalent of magical people meeting to stop each other going off the rails. It is certainly the equivalent for those who don't have a real community to interact with. I have a real community I could be interacting with but obviously I've taken a dislike to them so don't.
I have only read one chapter and already like Crowther enormously - but then her theatrical background was always going to be a hit with me. One anecdote I particularly like is that Arnold her husband was going home from Gerald Gardner's on the underground one evening. He had an armful of old swords which Gerald had given him, and which weren't wrapped up very well. An old man stopped him and asked him (this was in the 1950s) if he'd just been demobbed from the Boer War!

My Lent Book

This year I don't yet have a Lent book. Regular readers will be aware that this is a practice I have borrowed from the Christians and then subverted. As a witch, of course, Lent isn't an event for me, and of course I make sure the books I select are diametrically opposed to the sort of books the Christians select for this time of year. In fact the practice has to be changed to be valid for the witch world view: of course that is because it comes from a world view where the reader is challenged and inspired by a divinely inspired text and the first occurence of the practice I know f is in the Rule of St Benedict where the monk is allocated a book for Lent by the abbot.
I have had some possible books in mind but I haven't been inclined to obtain any of them. Perhaps the most 'suitable' is Bede Griffiths's autobiography which I have considered rereading for many years. I am nervous, however, since I usually find it impossible to return to a book read a long time ago. I did see a manual on masturbation which I thought would be a wonderfully inappropriate choice but prefer my favourite hobby to be dictated by my own whim.
Then today I saw a book in a charity shop which I thought would be perfect: it had some such title as Mood Mapping, but I was put off by a small selection I read in the shop. It was talking about the impact bullying has on relationships. The author may not have thought his generalisation through but he said that bullying is most often inflicted by those of higher intelligence on those of lower intelligence.
There are two things wrong with that statement. Having worked in some complete shit holes i know the anatomy of workplace bullying from the inside and know the evidence is strongy that it mostly occurs when somebody cisn't competent to deal with their situation so consciously of otherwise it gets taken out on everyone else. When I saw this I had just come out of work where the incompetent supervisor I wrote about recently publicly humiliated someone for a mistake (don't wory, her appraisal is tomorrow and I will be forcing the new manager to add that to the list of other issues with her performance).
My real point here is that I found myself in a position where I was faced with an authoritative text which I had the temerity to disagree with and reject as a teacher because I knew better. This may simply be because I am an arrogant bastard but i would like to think that what has actually happened is that I have moved into a place where the authority is within rather than without.