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