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Friday, August 20, 2021

The Flying Spaghetti Monster: A Witch Perspective


Personally I find that the Pastafarians are very principled, intelligent people. In fact they're almost witches. But a witch insight into their noodly religion throws up some interesting insights.

First a little history.

As F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. By this measure, the religion of Pastafarianism is the creation of a first-rate mind.

There are two contrasting explanations for how Pastafarianism (officially known as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) came into being. The first is that an invisible monster, comprising a tangle of spaghetti flanked by two meatballs, created the universe after a bout of heavy drinking. For hundreds of years, his followers – pirates, mainly – worshipped in secret. Only recently has it become better known.

The second explanation is that Bobby Henderson, a young physics graduate from Oregon State University, wrote to the Kansas Board of Education in 2005 to protest against a proposal to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution in secondary schools. The arguments supporting a scientific basis for intelligent design, he wrote, apply just as well to a universe created by a flying spaghetti monster. Source

The first and most immediate observation is that I looove intelligent design because it paints fundament-alists firmly into a corner. The particular corner is that if creation shows God's design, then he very cunningly designed the human male with his g-spot best reached up the bum. Don't blame me, it's God who designed us for gay sex.

Apart from that titbit calculated to have fundament-alists foaming at the mouth, intelligent design is totally dreary and has the slight problem to overcome that we have a goddam tail bone. Evolution is more intelligent (plus the empirical method doesn't claim to have all the answers) and Pastafarianism is more fun.

However if it is a spoof, from a magical point of view there is a danger in creating gods. Consider for a moment the Simon Necronomicon:

Both the introduction and the book's marketing make sensational claims for the book's magical power. The back blurb claims it is "the most potent and potentially, the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World," and that its rituals will bring "beings and monsters" into "physical appearance". The book's introduction gives readers frequent warnings that the powers it contains are potentially life-threatening, and that perfect mental health is needed; otherwise the book is extremely dangerous. It claims a curse afflicted those who helped publish the book. It also claims that the Golden Dawn methods of magical banishing will not work on the entities in this book. Source

The reason I bring up the Simon Necronomicon is that in a magical world view thoughts are things. If you think something, it is actually created, but not necessarily visibly on this plane. I don't think for an instant that when Lovecraft brought the Necronomicon thought form into being it would take on the independent life that it has an would become an actual paperback grimoire used by kids unprepared for the consequences. This book gives many examples of the real world results of using a grimoire, and the warnings are true.

The application to the FSM of course is that the monster is another thought form which has become an egregore and taken on its own existence. Without meaning to he has created a god and in fact the page I link at the top says that it's as if things are just happening on their own.

So be careful what you think!

Let's end appropriately with an FSM hymn.



Sunday, August 8, 2021

Witch Food: Cornmeal Porridge

Wonderful things, oats. You hear their praise sung all over the internet, that a bowl of porridge will keep you going for ages. Personally I don't find that, and find I get hungry quickly. Hence this recipe, because I personally don't get that with cornmeal porridge and find I don't get hungry for ages, despite the incredible amount of sugar in this recipe. It's a recipe what I came up with myself, because the recipes I found online seem to make it unnecessarily difficult. They also seem to require things I couldn't find in the shops.

You need cornflour - personally I use the course sort. You can find it among the Caribbean foods in the supermarket. If you live somewhere that isn't ethnically diverse it's just polenta. Cornflour is yellow but you can make it with maize flour, which is white and then you have the porridge called mielie pap in South Africa.

You need less of it than you think, about half a cup for one person. 

You add sugar or artificial sweetener - more than you think you should because cornflour isn't very sweet. If you want to reproduce the flavour of the instant pots of this you find, add some banana milkshake or cinnamon.

You can wet it with milk or personally I use milk powder and water from the kettle. It needs to be more wet than you would think, certainly wetter than oat porridge ready to cook.

If you're doing it on the hob just heat it gently, stirring frequently until thickened. There is absolutely no need for the lengthy cooking times you read in recipes which aren't sensible like this one. Gentle heat because it tends to spit.

If you do it in the microwave give it three or four blasts of 30 seconds on full, stirring in between, until it's thick.

At this point add some condensed milk which is the authentic secret ingredient.

Incidentally I must be old because I love both condensed and evaporated milk and see that the internet have rediscovered condensed milk sandwiches.

Totally unrelated to the subject, have a Madam and Eve cartoon about the mother's ongoing war with the mielie lady: