Reading

Some years ago I conceived an ambition to understand better the way the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn understood the tarot. I knew that certain cards represented various initiations, and so on.

Needless to say this ambition got out of hand. Unfortunately the forthcoming Golden Dawn tarot I wrote about a while ago has had its publication put back to November this year, so I still don't have that one.

In the meantime I have been reading the book called Qabalistic Tarot by Robert Wang, and finished it today.

Now I'm not going to lie, even though I have been making notes and already had some understanding of qabalah, I haven't come away with a comprehensive intellectual understanding of the qabalistic tarot. However a point which Wang makes repeatedly is that by meditative work the subject is changed. He claims physiological changes, and while they're probably not medically measurable I think he is right.

I am taking this as cognate with the magical principle that the real object of magic is always the magician.

Even though Wang uses the example of meditation, of course this applies to other magical acts, and although we don't call reading a magical, changing, act, I haven't yet met a magical person who wasn't well read.

This reading may itself be cognate with the monastic practice of lectio divina - a slow, meditative reading aiming at contemplation and change rather than retention. The sixteenth century writer Blosius describes this reading as a washing.

So out of what I thought would be a simple act of looking the rites up on t'internet has grown one of those occult rabbit holes which signify a change. I have the Complete Golden Dawn book and will read the references to tarot, and also reread the book which comes with the Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn. Next, though, I'm going to start on the book by Pat Zalewski who is the designer of the deck being published later this year. If at the end of all this I haven't had enough, I have Lon Milo Duquette's Chicken Kaballah and Dion Fortune, and then of course there's Aleister Crowley....

Agony Hound: 'My boyfriend's ex rang him three times on our romantic break - including during sex'

Today's problem is from Coleen Nolan's column in the Mirror. I've chosen it because I think a witchy answer would be quite different from Coleen's and the problem lends itself to some discernment.

Dear Coleen,

I’m a woman in my early 40s, divorced with two children. I met a fantastic guy online a few months ago and we’ve seen each other a few times now. We have even spent a romantic weekend away together.

I think this relationship could go the distance, so I’m keen to make it work. My problem is – and I don’t want to sound needy or paranoid – there’s an ex-girlfriend in the background whom he’s best mates with.

She calls him a lot and they do things for each other like feed pets (they’re both dog owners) and he’s always advising her on stuff to do with her business.

They also live near each other, so see each other quite a lot for a drink or a catch-up.

On our romantic weekend away, she called him three times, once during sex! I’m pleased to say he let that particular call go to voicemail. She must have known it was a special weekend, yet had to make her presence felt.

I’m sure there’s nothing going on between them and he even said they stopped dating a few years ago because they realised they were better as friends and the physical side of things wasn’t working. However, it’s still irritating.

Am I being unreasonable?

Coleen says

I don’t think you’re being unreasonable, but I just think you have to get used to their friendship.

I’m much better friends with my ex-hubby Ray now we’re not married and, genuinely, that’s all it is, friendship.

But of course I understand that from your side of the fence, it can be annoying and also make you feel a bit insecure. I was best mates with my first husband Shane after we broke up and he used to call every day, which Ray didn’t like.

In the end, I had to take his feelings into account. So, I think it’s just about a bit of give and take on both sides.

I guess calling three times in the middle of a romantic holiday would be irritating, but if she’s such a good mate, your partner should be able to say to her, “I’m having a lovely weekend with my girlfriend, I’ll talk to you when we get back”.

The important thing to remember is that just because they support each other and do things for each other, doesn’t mean they want to get back into a romantic relationship – that side of things is over. If there was anything more, they’d still be together. Source

The Hound says:

Coleen gives you very sensible advice if you want reassurance that you can continue with this relationship and compromise. I also have no doubt that you can do that but there are a few things you say which worry me. The most obvious is that you obviously feel it wasn't ok for him to be in repeat contact with his ex during your romantic weekend away, which very reasonably you would have expected to be sacrosanct to you and him. This suggests that you have different expectations which could cause trouble in the future.

I will admit to being a great romantic but some people would be concerned that you are moving into relationship territory quite quickly having only met him a few times.

I would suggest you consider what you really want in a relationship, whether he will give you this, and then how much you are prepared to compromise. To help this I would suggest making several lists and do this in your own handwriting to make it real - lists of your non-negotiable things in a relationship, the things you see in your partner and then (the most difficult) what this behaviour means for you. In writing down what his behaviour with his ex means for you, do not minimize or excuse it in any way.

Leave it at least a week, making any changes you need to make, and then you may already be very clear what you want to do. In between the extremes of dumping him and just grinning and bearing this there are a number of different ways to negotiate and communicate with him. If you don't want it to explode in your face you would be well to have a script ready. However it could simply be that he doesn't see how that feels for you and will get rid of her if you express the slightest dissatisfaction.

In which case keep hold of him!

Sources for Witchcraft: Dada

Lineage or tradition is very important to some witches. When speaking to these people my personal answer tends to differ based on whom I'm talking to. If they're Gardnerian, for example, I usually tell them I'm Fam Trad and then am mysteriously taken over by the spirit of Gerald Gardner who tells them he made it up.

The reality is that the majority of people who call themselves witches in the twenty first century do not claim an Initiatory history back to a notional ancient pagan religion. The other reality is that those who do claim this are gullible or lying. In reality all modern pagan traditions are composed of different measures of the ingredients which we all draw on: folklore, the grimoire tradition, Crowley, etc. These traditions are out there in the public domain and are influenced by what is going on in the rest of the world, and vice versa. It has struck me recently that an artistic movement has some definite magical overtones.

Dada is the arts movement in question, starting in the teens of the last century:

This new, irrational art movement would be named Dada. It got its name, according to Richard Huelsenbeck, a German artist living in Zurich, when he and Ball came upon the word in a French-German dictionary. To Ball, it fit. “Dada is ‘yes, yes’ in Rumanian, ‘rocking horse’ and ‘hobby horse’ in French,” he noted in his diary. “For Germans it is a sign of foolish naiveté, joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the baby carriage.” Tzara, who later claimed that he had coined the term, quickly used it on posters, put out the first Dada journal and wrote one of the first of many Dada manifestoes, few of which, appropriately enough, made much sense. 

This is almost the perfect description of the mindset magical people seek, to aid the magic. Literally the whole point is forgetting what 'can't' be done and doing stuff to make things happen.

“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn,” he later wrote, describing the construction he called Bicycle Wheel, a precursor of both kinetic and conceptual art. In 1916, German writer Hugo Ball, who had taken refuge from the war in neutral Switzerland, reflected on the state of contemporary art: “The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments....The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language.”

That same year, Ball recited just such a poem on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, a nightspot (named for the 18th-century French philosopher and satirist) that he, Emmy Hennings (a singer and poet he would later marry) and a few expatriate pals had opened as a gathering place for artists and writers. The poem began: “gadji beri bimba / glandridi lauli lonni cadori....” It was utter nonsense, of course, aimed at a public that seemed all too complacent about a senseless war. Politicians of all stripes had proclaimed the war a noble cause—whether it was to defend Germany’s high culture, France’s Enlightenment or Britain’s empire. Ball wanted to shock anyone, he wrote, who regarded “all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence.” One Cabaret Voltaire performer, Romanian artist Tristan Tzara, described its nightly shows as “explosions of elective imbecility.” 

What is this but a description of barbaric words of power? This quote tiptoes towards the vibratory power of sounds.

The illustration for this post is 'Collage with squares arranged according to the laws of chance' by Hans Arp (1916). He made it by dropping pieces of paper and sticking them down where they landed. I wonder which magical art often uses pieces of card and infers from how they end up randomly positioned!

I'm not saying that Dada had a direct impact on the history of modern witchcraft, but I think it reasonable to conclude that there was something in the air in the twentieth century which brought traditional magical techniques and similar arts, to the attention of humanity. Perhaps the most obvious relative would be chaos magic, which apart from its popularity in the nineties caused by the prominent technique of wanking over a sigil, contains a deeper theory on the role of chaos.

Major preoccupations of the Dadaists were war, mechanisation and the place of humanity in this - surely more relevant now than ever! Perhaps it is time for a Dada revival.

Source of the quotes

Borley Rectory again - The Banishing (2021)

There has been a rash of films in the past few years based on the Borley Rectory narrative. This is the first this year (and there's a second called The Ghosts of Borley Rectory later in the year) and I bought it because the online reviews were almost unanimously positive.

I have read nearly everything about Borley Rectory (ever since a copy of The Most Haunted House in England I found in our local library was my entry to weird shit years ago) but I have not kept au courant with this rush of films. 

The whole Borley mythology makes it difficult to turn into a film, because even if you just wrote a script giving the reported incidences as written, it would be like one of those overdone sixties Amicus films and frankly, nobody would believe it was true. Which, frankly, it probably wasn't.

This one takes an unusual tack by focusing on the relationship between Lionel (rector of Borley in the 1930s) and Marianne Foyster. It is an interesting tack because it brings to the fore the tension between a rather stuffy husband and his young and flighty wife. It also brings to the fore the true nightmare that marriage would be if the wife can't have children.

Another thing which is better than in most films is they have used a house which feels like the rectory - at least according to the pictures before it mysteriously burned down after the insurance was mysteriously dramatically increased. The film gets the isolation right.

It does depart from the narrative of the haunting and makes it actually rather more dramatic. It takes the classic horror film path of letting the tension build up. This is clearly a departure from the haunting and it's slightly naughty to describe it on the case as a true story when it is to my mind based on the said true story but not as close as implied.

I do quite see why though. There is a problem with the literature, which can be clearly split down the middle into the totally credulous and the totally disbelieving. None of the literature investigated the haunting in a sufficiently controlled way, and when you take into account the effects of local legend, stressed and isolated people, and the fact that many of the phenomena could have been explained by the building itself, you are left with very little. If you then account for investigators who were either credulous or have been shown to cheat at other times, you are left with very little indeed. My opinion is that the most likely phenomena to be supernatural would be the apports, and the noises in the church but not the noises in the rectory.

I can see that the story would provide a rather boring film except for the real fanatics. Films like a clear story arc and the film invents stuff to create that, which is fair enough. A story of rambling rectory, local gossip, rector who makes the mistake of involving a publicity mad paper salesman turned ghost Hunter, new rector with nymphomaniac bored wife, and the house being burned down in the most obvious insurance scam ever - frankly this isn't the arc the public wants.

So the thing to do is forget any Borley connection and enjoy this as the superlative horror it is.

Quack Remedies

High time I got round to the post I have mooted for ages about quack remedies, prompted by an altercation I had online with someone promoting the highly dangerous Gerson protocol for cancer treatment. Don't just believe me, here is what Cancer Research UK has to say about it:

Gerson therapy involves a specific organic vegetarian diet with nutritional supplements and enemas. There is no scientific evidence to use it as a treatment for cancer.

Summary

• Gerson therapy uses a specific organic vegetarian diet, nutritional supplements and enemas to treat cancer
• There is no scientific evidence that it can treat cancer or its symptoms
• Gerson therapy can have severe side effects Source

The way the therapy is described is the point: there is no scientific evidence that it will treat cancer. Personally I think coffee enemas can only end in years. It is also significant that it is a cancer treatment because naturally people with cancer get very desperate and are taken in.

Unfortunately we live in an age where people don't know how to marshall scientific evidence and believe things which have no real evidence. There is a particular way of doing scientific research which will show that you will keep getting the same result to a statistically significant number of times with the same intervention as long as all the other variables are controlled. The highest level of evidence is that provided by what are called double blind randomized controlled trials, where neither the scientists or the testees know what is being done.

You don't have to read the boring research - in Britain you can tell if a treatment is evidence based because you can get it on the NHS. You can't get homeopathy or chiropractic for example. This is because they don't work. I do like the quaint homeopathic remedy of bits of the Berlin Wall to treat feelings of isolation!

The biggest barriers to getting treatments which work are the alternative remedies industry and the internet.

The good news is that if you eat a balanced diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, little fat and sugar, drink moderately and don't smoke, exercise regularly and deal with stress, you are already doing all you can to extend your life using the power of food. There are otherwise vanishingly few food treatments and the vast majority of supplements are a total waste of money.

You can easily tell these quack remedies. They have testimonials. They will say they are ancient (in other words date from the times we were ancient at forty). Are all natural. There is a full list of red flags here.

Things have reached such a sorry pass that people don't believe medicine works any more. The ridiculous belief that vaccines cause autism persists with no evidence whatsoever. Diseases which were thought conquered have had a resurgence because of these dangerous clowns.

Currently most dangerous is the refusal to quake before the coronavirus. The evidence is very clearly that while the vaccine does have some risk it is always better for you and everyone else to have the vaccine than risk having the virus. The only alternative is lockdowns and isolation because you can't have an economy if you're dead. If you want the whole picture there is a very good discussion with the evidence in answers to an actual vaccine sceptic in the comments here.

What does this have to do with witchcraft, especially as witches are known for peddling herbal remedies? There are two answers to that. The first is that witches are also supposed to be wise and real wisdom means consenting to a treatment which has some chance of working. It also means not wasting money on shit which won't work or will harm. Can you tell I've had enough of idiots over the past couple of years?

The other thing is that in addition to the objective effect of medicine I mentioned above, the mind has a great effect on health and this is where the magic comes in. I have left it last because of course the placebo effect is incredibly difficult to pin down in research, and is virtually impossible to control for. However I am sure anyone would agree that going about things with a mindset that you are actually going to do everything you can to change things, can only help. We all know Uncle Al's definition of magic as the art and science of causing change in conformity with will and that applies here. It also means the magical tools, even if they are the magical tools of remembering to take medication and turn up for appointments.

I am in two minds about mentioning him because his presence here will seem to contradict what I've said above about evidence but I'm bringing him up for a particular reason. Plus you wouldn't know it was a post by me if it wasn't completely contradictory. There was a controversial psychiatrist called William Sargant (1907 to 1988). In the age of psychotherapy he poo pooed it completely and usually without a valid evidence base pursued the physical treatments of the time, most of which are defunct, such as lobotomy, abreaction, insulin coma therapy. The only treatment of this vintage still in use is ECT because (you guessed it) it has a valid evidence base in RCTs. One of the things you don't read about him now was that at the time he had an exceptional success rate with these ineffective treatments. Unfortunately because he refused to participate in research this was only ever anecdotal. The reason he appears here is that it is thought these treatments were more successful for him because he thought they would work. His belief made them work.

This is not to say that anything will work if you believe it will (see, I'm a witch, I knew you were thinking that). The treatments he was working with had other variables involved that contributed to them working and his belief in them only increased the success rate. For example, in the 1950s mental health professionals thought Deep Insulin Coma Therapy was an effective treatment, because it had worked in trials. However these trials weren't controlled enough and when better controlled trials were done and the actual coma was taken out, it was found what made people better was the nursing care!

To summarize: prescribed treatments on the NHS are evidence based in the UK, and beyond a normally healthy lifestyle no special supplements are usually needed. Therapies outside the NHS are best avoided because they can actually be harmful. If you are unfortunate enough to have cancer, please follow your medical team's advice.

Since we are in the middle of a pandemic, I will not give credence to any conspiracy theories or nonsense about the coronavirus and thus possibly cause deaths. I will not enable comments promoting nonsense.