An Affirmation

For years my energy and thus magic have tended to revolve around, if not dating fuccboys, then at least dealing with problematic energies and behaviours. 

In a witchy sense, sometimes the universe sends you things repeatedly because you have failed to deal with that situation in the past. At other times it sends you these situations because you can deal with them, and you've created a sort of vacuum that draws them. I am in no way making this out that this is in any way scientific, but would just point out that while it seems to be contradictory, it exactly reflects the apparently contradictory nature of positive and negative feedback loops in science.
Because I have been the sort of person who dealt with things, they have therefore tended to keep coming my way, and frankly I'm a bit tired of being a magnet for cunts.
One of the problems is that being the sort of happy, self-sufficient and self-assured person I am is an almost automatic magnet for cunts, and it is a sad reflection on our world that simply being happy is enough to drive lots of people mad. Unfortunately they aren't people who want to be happy themselves, they're people who aren't happy and want other people to be unhappy with them.
I'm rather tired of this and so I'm setting out to reset this energetic signature I have. I have written here before about how I think it's useful to return the energies people give out, to the sender, without them having any impact on me.
I'm also making a point of just not engaging with the cunts the universe sends my way. If you want to go around being a little ray of misery, that's fine by me but will leave me completely untouched. Of course this calculated indifference to other people is also guaranteed to wind up these nasty pieces of work, but they'll have to deal with that.
I'm doing some head work by setting myself an affirmation to say to change my head and behaviour. I have had some difficulty doing this, though. My first attempt was:
'Cunts are not attracted to me in any way.'
However every source I have ever read about using affirmations has been most insistent that they should be positive and not include the word 'not'. Obviously I wouldn't feel obliged to follow other people's rules, but probably an affirmation should at least affirm something. So my second attempt was:
'Cunts are repelled from me.'
I avoided the use of the word 'by' because it would suggest that I was repelling them rather than them just not being drawn to me in any way. However on reflection I felt the idea of them being repelled from me still suggested that I was actively involved in this process, rather than them just keeping away from me completely.
Uncharacteristically, I tried to turn this round as it would suggest in all the books, by trying to affirm that I was only attracting what I wanted. So I tried:
'I only attract positivity and good.'
I was even less satisfied with this one because it really didn't sound like me at all, so I felt like it wasn't going to work. And also I really am not in the business of attracting anything at all, but just to keeping nightmare people away. I know that the people who genuinely need me will be drawn to me, but don't want to be surrounded by happy, positive people, because I would want to kill them.
So currently this affirmation stands as:
'Cunts stay away from me so that I am in peace.'
I am certain that by the time I click 'publish' on this blog post I will have changed it to something else, but that's the general idea. 
Regular readers may see this as a major conscious reset of my energies; certainly I do!

A Way of Dividing the Major Arcana

I posted recently about an arbitrary way of dividing up the whole tarot by the background colour of the cards. This is sort-of a guest post because it's just to repost another way of dividing the Major Arcana taken from someone else. As always with blogging, when I post something it's because it either has already entered my inner world or I want to turn it over and let it stew.

This way is taken from a book I read years ago: Anne Lionet: Secrets of Tarot, Dorling-Kindersley, London, 2001, pp. 82 and 83. This is actually one of the books I read fairly early in my tarot reading career, and to be honest, having obtained another copy about twenty years later, I'm horribly aware of how little of it seems familiar to me, so perhaps I didn't pay as much attention as I thought I did!

It gives this way of dividing the 22 Major Arcana cards into themes, which I suppose is a more developed way of the tendency in introductory texts to divide the tarot cards into good/bad or positive/negative. So here are the categories (some cards do fall into more than one category, this isn't a mistake):

1. Enlightenment: The Emperor, The Empress, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hierophant, The Hermit and The World.

2. Responsibility (to Others): The Empress, The Emperor, Judgement, Temperance, and The Lovers.

3. Everyday Living: The Empress, Justice, and The Devil.

4. Reacting to Fate: Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, Judgement, The Moon, and The Star.

5. Cards of Light and Dark: Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, Judgement, The Moon, and The Star.

6. Cards of Reality: The Emperor, The Chariot, Strength, and The Sun.

7. Cards of Dreaming and Doing: Temperance, The Star, and The Chariot.

8. Cards of Moving Forward: The Fool, The Chariot, Wheel of Fortune, The Sun, Judgement, and The World.

As always, when reading someone else's approach to the tarot, I'm struck by the way the cards impact different people in so many ways and have endless resonance. These themes are largely here, as I said, to make me turn them over and see what they make me think, but I just have a couple of first impressions.

The first is that I want to take the category of dreaming and doing further and see what I can do with it. I want to think about whether the whole Major Arcana, or even whole deck, could be dividing up into either dreaming or doing. The reality category also interests me because I would like to see what I can do with the idea of reality and do a similar thing to see if the deck could be divided up into reality/unreality as a whole. I personally don't do reversals because I think each card carries both the upright and reversed energies as a duality all the time, and to try to divide the two is a fruitless exercise: the entire point of paganism/magic/occultism is monism in which everything is one so certainly a card should be able to carry two different meanings at once!

The other impression, which is perhaps a caution about this division method, is that I personally would question whether you can make a category of Major Arcana cards which are *the ones* which carry meanings related to Everyday Living. I take the Minor Arcana as being more inclined towards everyday living, minor decisions, routine events, etc, and the Major Arcana as being about bigger perspectives, tendencies, and so on. Major is climate and Minor is weather, if you like, and therefore I'd be wary of assigning some Major Arcana cards to everyday stuff. Of course I'm immediately going to contradict myself by commenting that of course Major cards can mean ordinary pedestrian stuff, because the meanings are endlessly mutable, but then I did just say above that each card can carry at least two contradictory meanings at once!

I'm looking forward to thinking about these divisions and seeing where I go with them. Of course I'm still chewing over Meisner slowly in the bathroom so that will probably result in some posts at some point!

Some Good News

Native Americans burning Benjamin Netanyahu in effigy:

Oh and sadly one of our national treasures has died recently:

Tarot Drama

The modern esoteric tarot is intimately connected to the stage.

For example, Pamela Colman Smith, who designed the Rider Waite tarot, worked as a theatre set designer. This is manifest in her deck in the somewhat unreal world she creates; additionally, there is a whole series of cards sometimes called the Stage Cards. These are marked by a straight line near the back of the scene (pictured) that makes it look exactly as if the character is standing on a stage. If you accept the existence of these cards, they could be interpreted as meaning that there's something not quite real about the scene or situation. 

Additionally, Pam's own favoured method of interpretation was straight out of an acting manual rather than an occult manual. She advocated getting into the position of the character depicted and seeing how it feels. This is a method which doesn't get mentioned that much these days but is really useful.

Convinced of the theatrical element in the modern tarot's makeup I have been casting round to find an acting method that would click with the tarot as a means of interpretation.

Possibly Pam's reading technique is closest to Michael Chekhov's psycho-physical approach (think Jack Nicholson swoon), which aims to create a conscious awareness of the senses through a focus on mind and body.

I have of course dipped my toe into Stanislavsky, although I have had to back out as what I read made me more confused than anything else.

Currently I have a manual on Meisner on the go by the loo and hope to see how his organic authenticity can illuminate the tarot. I love his focus on motivation, because I feel a focus on motivation explains so much human behaviour.

Sources:

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/acting-techniques-stars-swear-11321/

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/meisner-much-repetition-1456/

https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-definitive-guide-to-the-meisner-technique-67712/

Life Lesson from Donald Trump 4

I have been listening to Alison Gill's reading of the lovely Jack Smith's revised filing in the light of the Supreme Court's ruling that the president of the USA is legally immune for official acts, on the Jack podcast. I have been howling with laughter every time she does her impression of the orange freak but nonetheless it's provided me with yet another life lesson from him.

This is that if you are going to pretend that you're concerned about, say, election interference you should act as if you are and not just go looking for it where it would affect you personally. Smith's case would be a lot weaker if he couldn't keep pointing out that Trump wasn't looking for actual electoral problems because he only looked for it where Republicans lost.

Besides, every time Smith calls tRump 'the defendant' I want to hump his leg even more.

Obviously you shouldn't take legal advice from someone pretending to be a dog on the internet, but I believe this reflects a legal principle whose name I can't remember, that you should at least behave in accordance with the position you are claiming. Until recently an example of this in UK law was in adverse possession, where if you squatted a property for long enough and the owner made no effort to get you out, after a certain length of time the property belonged to you. Whereas if you'd done that and in court the owner proved they'd been making endless efforts to get you out, you wouldn't be granted adverse possession.

Essentially in one case the owner is acting like he doesn't mind you having the property and in the other the owner is acting like he doesn't want you to have it. To translate this in Trump terms, he's saying the election wasn't secure but is acting as if he's just looking to win regardless of what he has to do.

This also reflects a magical principle often called 'acting in accord': you put your intent out there and it behoves you to act as if that's what is happening. If you act in a way different to the intent you have put out you're messing it up and it won't happen.

Luckily Donald tRump is obviously not a magician otherwise his hair and skin would look different. 😱

Spirit of Place: Highbury Hall

Last week was Heritage Week and one of the things I did was go on a tour of Joseph Chamberlain's house, Highbury Hall.

It has a resonance for all sorts of people because like so many other things, the Cluedo/Clue game was invented in Birmingham and Highbury was the inspiration for the floorplan on the board. In fact walking in to the house it does feel like the game board!

It's a fuck off massive house with hundreds of rooms cunningly designed to look much smaller and Chamberlain used all sorts of tricks to persuade visitors that it was an ancestral manor in the country, including taking them on confusing routes to the house, while the servants got there first because they went directly from New Street.

In other words there is a high degree of artifice and pretence about it.

Given that it's pretend it will come as no surprise that Chamberlain was both a prominent politician in Birmingham and also in the House of Commons. Frankly the effect has largely been to put me off Joseph Chamberlain and I'm particularly not impressed with the way he had a single home-grown chrysanthemum brought from Birmingham by train to London every day when he was an MP. He managed to create chaos both in the old Liberal party and in the Tory party, and despite supposedly being a competent man left no provision to run the HUGE house he built so it was sold straight after his death. It was a hospital in World War 1 and was ultimately given to the council who used it as a care home and is currently being looked after by a trust. When I say it's huge I'm not exaggerating and on the tour they showed us how when one services installation is outdated they just leave it there and pick another empty room to be the next plant room.

If it embodies the spirit of place it's the spirit of self-serving ambition with no thought for the consequences and that of making out everything is fine when really you've bollocksed it up. A spirit maintained by Birmingham City Council.

Absolutely Not Gardening

I have managed to get involved with 'graveyard gardening' in the city's two listed cemeteries at Warstone Lane and Key Hill. This probably sounds uncharacteristic but it's not really gardening, and in fact filling in a sunken grave with crud taken out of a gully feels much more fundamental and witchy.

This week I've been cutting ivy off overgrown graves, some of which have never been catalogued because they have always been overgrown, and the rest of this post will just be pictures of this satisfying activity. I do have family in Key Hill and keep picturing an arm reaching out of the ground and grabbing me by the ankle.

Incidentally this is yet another confirmation for me that volunteering is much better than an actual job: it was the capitalism that was the problem all along!

Tarot by the Background

Perhaps I had better say that this post is by way of thinking aloud, what I'm going to say is purely a personal thought and if anyone wants to say I'm talking rubbish I won't disagree.

I have thought of a possible way to divide up the tarot cards (based on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck). It is somewhat arbitrary since it came out of thinking about the background colours.

In the RWS deck there are only a few background colours used, and I wanted to attribute a meaning to them. It's possible that I will think more about the backgrounds because sometimes they are something slightly hidden which might be revealed, or provide an environment for the action of the card, or sometimes are literally like a stage backdrop.

By far the most have a blue background, but I am starting with the ones with a yellow background. I am taking my cue from the Fool for this with its predominantly yellow background (although the sun itself is white) and I've decided to attribute a theme or enlightenment or illumination to the cards with a yellow background.

The Fool also has a line in the background of the two other predominant background colours: blue of various shades, and a sort of greyish white.

I have arbitrarily taken the 7 of Cups as my hint here and am attributing a theme of instability or things changing to these cards with blue backgrounds.

Conversely I am attributing a theme of things being stable or solid to the cards with a greyish white background. This may seem strange when Death, the ultimate change, has this background. However I am taking it that death refers to an expected, inevitable change, which is therefore actually stable and unchangeable.

Once again I will stress that this is just a thought and so shouldn't be treated as gospel: you won't find these attributions anywhere in the literature.

The few cards with a black background presented me with a few difficulties, although since they all depict difficult moments of decision and power (I'm taking 3 of Pentacles to refer to a situation where you have to get on with it and make the situation what you will, with the dark background through the doorway representing a future that still has to be created), I have taken them to refer to traumas, initiations and negotiations of power.

This leaves only two which don't fit in. I am taking the reddy-orange of the Emperor to mean authority and the snow of the 5 of Pentacles to mean being outside in the cold so you're not seeing the real background at all. 

I will play with this idea and see how I get on with it. Once again I'm struck how tarot strikes one differently at different times.

Oh, there's something we have to do still:

Ritualising It Out

The phrase of ritualising something out of your system is a direct quote from Anton LaVey but then I'm nothing if not ecumenical.

All the textbooks of practical magic, without exception, say that when working magic you must attain a point where the desire has left you. The 'itch' you are working on has to leave you completely, in other words, to manifest on the material plane, where you want it. The theory is that if you keep thinking about the matter, or chewing it over in any way, the spell comes back to you and won't manifest.

I have always found this incredibly difficult, because I tend to chew things over and find it very difficult just to leave things. For this reason I have always tended towards magics where you can keep coming back and scratching the itch until it does actually leave you. I would not dispute the need for the desire to leave you, just need to make sure it actually does go. 

Personally I think I just sometimes need to keep working on things until it goes. You know when it's left you because it just doesn't bother you any more (bearing in mind that the chief target of magic is always the magician himself, really). If you will pardon my unsubtle way of putting it, it can feel like a cat does when they've used the litter tray and run round the house because they feel much lighter.

These thoughts are occasioned by a matter leaving me today, although it's been evident that things have been moving for some time. Things have seemed to come to a head the past couple of weeks and after events today I am sitting here surprised that I really don't care about it any more. This is how I know that what I want is going to happen.

Of course since someone with an actual legal responsibility for this situation has asked me to let them posted on what is happening on the day I have ceased to care about it, I'm still going to have to do that. But I think that's more along the lines of acting in accord with the spell. The person, who is the hopeless building manager of the building I live in, should have been more interesting in this situation all along, and the fact he has now taken an interest is what shows me something will happen.

I'm sure he wouldn't like me to happen to him!

Tarot:Joe Biden

Of course it's no use and being so inquisitive I just had to ask tarot the question people are asking tonight but hasn't been officially answered yet: why did Joe Biden stand down as presidential candidate?

The answer is fairly straightforward: 8 of Cups (Abandoned Success) and 10 of Swords (Ruin). Both are minor arcana cards so the reasons are down to earth, humanly controllable, and not some huge 'act of God'. They are also in the domains of emotions and thought.

I think that Biden (and/or his advisors) felt and thought that he couldn't win the election, or simply that he is too vulnerable a candidate to the vicissitudes of old age. He has therefore done the right thing and stepped aside.

There is no suggestion of illness here, it's all about the likelihood of loss if he continued to try to fight the election.

And this isn't in the cards but standing down is the more upright thing to do compared to continuing through the election and then standing down so that Kamala Harris would be president, as I have seen suggested, even if he would be more likely than her to win. As I say I think he's done the right thing and it's obviously been a difficult decision.

Urban Grimoire: Sabotage

Sabotage is among my favourite magical acts. 'Magical act?', you may say, but its nature as magic is shown by two things. The opposite of sabotage is compliance to external authority rather than a personally-defined authority, and also the frisson of horror that the word sabotage brings out in the compliant. What could be more magical than that?

There are three specific (and completely legal) examples of sabotage I want to consider. All are designed to stop the powers that be getting what they want. Perhaps I should say that these powers are what the New Testament would call the powers of this world: the powers militating against the world that we want, in witchy terms, or the world that ignores the Kingdom, in Christian terms. (Don't worry, if I haven't offended you yet, I'll get to you shortly).

1. The first, which is my favourite, is malicious compliance. The powers of this world want us to comply, but because they're self-centred can never judge the full consequences of this. There are few pleasures to compare with fully complying to the letter of a policy or law where this compliance has the opposite effect intended.

2. The second is exercising choice. This will sound like a funny one but the Achilles heel of capitalism is that it has to have the appearance of consumer choice built in while actually only a few individuals profit. In the past I've compared this to a game of Monopoly where to 'win' you build up streets and properties in particular colours. You sabotage this by buying streets in different colours which prevents everyone from getting a monopoly so that nobody can win. Out here in the real world people tend to moan that a few people are as rich as Croesus (or even defend them for their 'industry' lol) but still prop up this monopoly by shopping at their site. So the way to sabotage this is to put your purchasing power into alternatives, shopping elsewhere, using different software, and so on. Another example would be to shop in different shops if you can rather than stick to one. There is a reason retailers use tricks to get you coming back and call this 'loyalty': loyalty is Capitalist for subservience.

3. The final one is a way to sabotage our First Past the Post voting system which was designed to create a two-party system where political power only swings between two parties and nobody else can get the necessary majority to form the government, hence why successive governments have refused to reform the system. The way to sabotage this is never to vote for the first or second most popular parties in your constituency (you can judge what these are by looking at successive election results, and of course the exception to this is the Green Party which you should absolutely vote for because it fucking terrifies the main parties). Instead you would stubbornly vote for a minority party which is acceptable to you and continue to do so. At this point people will try to shame you into compliance by telling you that nobody votes for minority parties and you're wasting your vote. However there is a strange thing about human voting behaviour that people tend to vote for what their neighbours vote for, so by sabotaging the system you stand both to change your neighbours' behaviour without them realising you're doing it and horrify the major parties.

And what could be more magical than that?

The Hound's Endorsed Candidates

Never slow to tell the rest of the world what is good for them, here is a short list of candidates who are lucky enough to receive my endorsement and blessing in the forthcoming General Election. Obviously there's one party which particularly appeals to me (pictured) but I have more varied endorsements. And we all know it's lucky to have the witch's blessing.

Birmingham (all constituencies): the Green Party candidate.

Brighton Pavilion: Berry (Green).

Bristol Central: Denyer (Green).

Chingford and Woodford Green: Shaheen (Independent).

Clacton: Watling (Conservative as a tactical vote against Reform, since a Conservative government is unlikely and all I can say is I've never been there but already want to leave the place 😱).

Dorset East: Take (Conservative - this is of course because Sir Michael is a personal friend).

Godalming and Ash: Follows (Lib Dem).

Hackney North and Stoke Newington: Abbott (Labour).

Holborn and St Pancras: Weinstein (Independent).

Ilford North: Mohamad (Independent).

Isle of Wight East: Lowthion (Green).

Islington North: Corbyn (Independent).

Leeds South West and Morley: Seward (Labour).

North East Somerset and Hanham: Norris (Labour).

North Herefordshire: Chowns (Green).

Portsmouth North: Martin (Labour).

Richmond and North Allerton: Binface (Count Binface Party).

Rotherham: Atkinson (Yorkshire).

South West Norfolk: Jermy (Labour).

Stoke-on-Trent North: Williams (Labour).

Waveney Valley: Ramsay (Green). In fact the previous Tory MP has jumped ship here and is endorsing the Green candidate.

Westminster: Larry (Cat).

Without bogging down the post with reasons for each recommendation (the Labour and Lib Dem ones are all tactical votes against particularly odious Tories), if you know the situation you will mainly see a left inclination and championing some underdogs (lol). I used to advocate tactical voting to get rid of the Tories across the board but with the wipeout they're clearly going to get, instead I now recommend tactical voting with the aim of sabotaging our two dominant parties which will force parliamentary reform. To achieve this the way is not to vote Labour or Conservative but to vote for minority parties or left-leaning independents, with the aim of attaining a hung parliament. Or else, if they're strong in your constituency, voting Lib Dems to try to get them into opposition. First Past the Post was designed to favour only two parties and this would increase the likelihood of them being the next government and the Tories being who the fuck cares where.

My MP

I posted some time ago that I wasn't cursing my then MP, incumbent Labour MP since 2010 and now Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. I said that she has cursed herself by annoying a considerable part of the constituency. Then a complete unknown Independent candidate who took 20% of the votes for West Midlands mayor out of nowhere, stood as an independent in this constituency. Despite this being one of the safest Labour constituencies in the country Labour are worried and have declared this a battleground seat. Of course I wouldn't be a witch if I didn't meddle.

But first look at the Royal Proclamation at the top, bringing that terrible parliament to an end. What a thing of beauty! In fact I love this bit of an election where there are no MPs and parliament is dissolved completely!

As it happens I'm not going to vote for the independent, because I have some reservations about him. Instead I'm going to vote Green, not only because I want a Green government but with the intention of dividing Labour's HUGE majority as much as possible. There is no risk of returning a Conservative here: we haven't had a Tory MP since World War 2 and the highest percentage they've got recently is 12%. My plan is a long term one because I think the same MP will be returned again with a smaller majority: the aim is to encourage people locally to feel able to vote for something other than Labour.

As this candle burns down Shabhana Mahmood's majority falls and falls and falls.

Frankly we're in the unique position for the UK that the Tory party is on life support and the right wing is divided by two parties, ie exactly the same problem that means we don't get left wing governments. I think it is the time therefore to vote for what we really want. The best outcome would be a hung parliament IMO although we won't get that, and I'd love the Opposition to be Lib Dem. Mainly because it would increase the likelihood of them being the next government in our First Past the Post system but who wouldn't vote for them after this stunt?

Finally!

Check where your ID is and put gin on the shopping list! The entire country will have a hangover for a week after taking a drink for every Tory unseated!

Yes, I know I predicted it would be in the autumn but this is the nicest way to be wrong.

Local hero and national treasure Fokawolf has started off his campaign for the Tory party with a bang:

I'm afraid you'll have to go to YouTube to hear the sound track to this post:

Pictured: St Paul's in the Jewellery Quarter.

Health Again

The crumbling corpse which I carry around with me took another turn for the worse about six months ago, and so in an attempt to stop myself progressing from pre-diabetes to actual diabetes I'm making some more changes to my life.

I'd already made some, and think I have hit on the best way to manage my inflammatory arthritis (as well as taking medication obvs). Despite the professionals telling me at different times to rest and to exercise, none of them seem to have hit on the reality that the key to managing it is to increase your exercise *and also* to rest more. So I'm walking like nobody's business but also going to bed when I feel like it.

Perhaps the thing most horrifying about it is the realisation that I honestly don't think you have enough time to manage this illness and work a full time job. I was much worse when I was working and unfortunately having an active job is not the answer because you have no guarantee when it will put you in bed for a day.

It will help with the arthritis but I'm also working on losing some weight to try to avoid diabetes. I've been making diet changes for some months but after trying a couple of apps that really weren't going to work for me, have hit on the NHS weight loss app which is very simple and I'm getting on better with.

Strangely something I'm finding helpful is the experience of having stopped smoking in the past. It feels very familiar to be moving to a place of actually making changes. There's also a strange irony in that having worked with people with anorexia for years I knew all about how to lose weight (both dangerously and sensibly) but actually doing it was something else.

And as we know witchcraft is all about making change happen!

Being Selective

I think a major feature of the fairly neat compartments into which our world has been dividing itself for some years, is that one side is real and the other isn't. That's why the right wing attracts the flat earthers and conspiracy theorists: the whole thing is a fib.

'But they're mistaken or have been lied to' goes the narrative at this point.

I'm afraid at this point I honestly don't care. At this point if you claim to think the earth is flat, Trump won, Brexit was a sensible decision, abortion is murder, covid doesn't exist, etc, you are choosing to believe this nonsense. The reality is as an adult it behoves you to orientate yourself to reality, and I don't owe these people a discussion, evidence, or even an audience. They're fools and will not be persuaded because they don't want to be (that is, if they're even actual people, on social media).

Is this judgemental? Of course. Am I being horrible? You bet. Do I care? Do I fuck.

When you don't care about these fools, it changes your perspective. It gives you the opportunity to concentrate and be very selective who you talk with. This means that I don't waste the remaining years of my life around people that I can't stand, and I think we can all agree that this is a desirable thing.

In my misspent youth hanging around the monastic world I got to know the idea of being focused on thing, being alone, and so on. In a Christian monastic world this tends to mean being focused on God and the other people in the community form the lessons that God teaches you by the love of neighbour. I suppose in true witchy fashion I've turned this on its head to focus on what I want to focus on, and not be distracted by fools. The Hound's rule for monasteries would tend to end up with a very different end product than St Benedict's!

I honestly can't really see a downside to this approach. I can see an objection that you would never get your opinions challenged if you only hang out with people of your own opinion. However if you're just making a point of avoiding unreality and argument with the unpersuadable I think you actually get challenged more. I think this is the result of seeking out intelligent people.

This also highlights that in a witchy/Pagan milieu, rather than the single eye being focused on God, it will necessarily be focused on the world and open to all the possibilities therein. Just not fools.

Subtle, I know.

Crying Wolf Too Often

Surely we are all familiar with the story of the boy who kept crying 'Wolf!' when there wasn't one with the result that eventually nobody believed him and then one day there was an actual wolf. Of course everyone ignored his cries that there was a wolf with predictable results.

I realize that I have been thinking quite a lot over the past couple of years of how, like falsely saying there's a wolf, many of the principles of our society are not strategies intended for long term use and in fact cry wolf. I've referred to the way capitalism negates itself when carried to its natural conclusion, for example. Specifically the mythology of capitalism is that it encourages competition and anyone can get in on the act if they want. And so we have endless copies of the same businesses making the same products. But it also includes its downfall, because if there is actual competition there is nothing to stop the consumer choosing where to shop and putting some of the businesses out of business.

And so this is why the competition aspect easily flips into a monopoly (Amazon, anyone?) before progressing into fascism and force. The choice supposedly built into capitalism is an illusion, or rather a lie.

Perhaps the best example of this is the UK's privatised water companies, where in fact nobody gets any choice and can't not use them.

The theme of entities lying is built into religious and spiritual traditions across the board. For example Christians call their Satan the father of lies. And this idea of an untrue threat or promise can be found in hero myths.

It's most present to us moderns in social media, which is perhaps the best example of why lying and building systems on illusions doesn't work. You would have to be incredibly naive in 2024 not to be at least aware that accounts on social media may not be telling the truth and may not even be real people. It's so prevalent that I don't think there can be anyone unaware that media and social media manipulates things now. The almost laughably bad AI has also added to this.

This is exactly the same phenomenon as the boy crying wolf: you just can't keep on lying because people notice.

In this General Election year there's a lot of scare mongering going on about how the Tories are going to use disinformation in their campaign. I honestly can't understand why: beyond the +/- 25% who are so stupid, bigoted or blinded that they would vote for them anyway, in Britain the words Tory and liar are now synonymous. And this purely because of their prolific lies. 

The reality is that lying does not gain any cause or business a huge following alone (of course motivation is always more complex than I'm painting it here because I'm focusing on fibbing, monopolies and the way our institutions are not built on sustainable foundations).

The moral of the story is that sometimes if a situation feels like it can't be changed the thing to do is just let it progress as it is. Our overlords are not geniuses and it's very unlikely they'll have thought out the consequences of their actions.

And then have a good laugh at them. This is very important because it's an important banishing ritual in chaos magic.

Another Triumph

Two years ago I wrote about the effectiveness of The Review Spell. It's a magnificently powerful spell, and as I wrote then has a great effect in encouraging people who know something is wrong but aren't sure what.

I have been using this on the hopeless management company of this building for some time (not everything I do appears here). I have to say, apart from the obvious reviews from employees' friends, their reviews are terrible, and include words like fraud and criminal. I left a review commenting that people can get them back by claiming compensation from the ombudsman scheme that they have to belong to by law, and this review got ten likes very quickly.

Then this weekend they wrote letters addressed to the leaseholders about revised fire safety precautions following a risk assessment. Now, normally they write by post to the leaseholders because they're not all resident: this is what they do when they demand the service charge to make sure the leaseholders get them.

Instead what they did with these letters addressed to the leaseholders was scatter them on the floor outside the flats like pizza menus. They were therefore making sure not all the leaseholders would see them. And this is about fucking fire safety.

So I took pictures of the letters on the floor and posted them on their Google review with a dramatic caption to say they were for the Health and Safety Executive if there's a Grenfell here so they would know they hadn't communicated the revised fire precautions.

Guess what, a week later I got two more copies of the letter in the post, one to the resident and one to the leaseholder. 

And it's not even like they can reply to my review because I'll point out they still haven't replied to the complaint I sent them in January. But of course I have a separate plan for that. Once you're cursed by the Hound your life just becomes more and more difficult.

Happiness is Rebellion

Let's start with a tale Snopes says is an urban legend:

Lunching with English friends at the time of her husband's retirement, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to in the years ahead. "A penis," she replied without hesitation. The embarrassed silence that followed was finally broken by the former president. "My dear," he murmured, "I think the English don't pronounce the word quite like that. It's 'appiness.'"

We all know one of them, one of those annoyingly superior people who know best and act as if the world is their oyster. I'm not talking about becoming quite one of them, but about the attitude. They're ok and always will be. In the UK they tend to shop in Waitrose.

We have many of them in the government and nobody else's views impinge on them in any way.

What if we take the attitude and rebel by being happy? In a stressful, conflicted world it would be natural to be depressed and stressed beyond belief. I'm also not talking about minimising any of the shit that's going on in the world.

I'm talking about doing things that make us happy as a rebellion against the nonsense. An act of self care in the face of everything, if you like. A way of changing the script slightly.

Because when you make small changes they tend to have knock on effects elsewhere, like all magical acts.

It is also my firm conviction that the world is increasingly dividing into two factions. In true Hound fashion I call the factions the people who are cunts, and the ones who aren't cunts. The cunts want everyone except themselves to be miserable, and the non-cunts want everyone to be happy. This means that being happy, making sure you can be happy by doing things which make you happy, is actually an act of rebellion against the people who want everyone else to be miserable.

And this isn't just a positive behaviour. It is actually witchcraft. If you think about the bit in the Gospel of the Witches about the feast, it says, you will dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise... and this will continue until every last one of the oppressors is dead.

That sounds very much like the sort of thing I'm getting at. Like sticking your fingers up. And strangely enough I have a soundtrack for this!

Finally if you'd like something quieter I've just recently discovered there are people (all men, apparently) who are made happy by racing washing machines! AND they even get people in the comments requesting particular cycles. 😂

My Next Prediction

Swear to Goddess, I don't know what's wrong with people. The pundits are busy saying that there will be a General Election in this country in the Spring, around May time. So let's look at this.

The reality is the only person in this country who by law can call a General Election is the current Prime Minister and he's a twat. So there are actually two different things going on here.

1. The law is that a GE must be called by a date early in 2025 - I think it's the end of January although this is without checking. People keep quoting this because they're law-abiding folks who take their turn but for some reason they're still not noticing that the government are not like that. What is wrong with them? So it isn't impossible that they will use any excuse they can find not to hold an election at all, whether or not it's legal. Their Rwanda programme has been judged illegal but they've continued with it, so why people would think they would follow any other law is incredible.

2. If they decide they've asset stripped the country of whatever they can (not for any reason of democracy or legality), Riski will call the election much later this year, in the Autumn or even as late as December.

Assuming we have an election the next government will be a Starmer Labour government which would not currently be my preferred outcome. I do hope the people who vote for it aren't disappointed at what they actually get. I've actually never voted for any of the governments we've had in my lifetime and don't intend to start now!

I'm also going to predict something about a result which is unlikely. In the event we have yet another Tory government this would be a disaster and tragedy because of the deaths but would have a strange side benefit.

This would be that another Tory term would essentially end the Conservative and Unionist Party. This may sound like it's impossible but previously the Whig and the old Liberal Parties were fixtures of our country and no longer exist. 

Every year marks further deaths of traditional Tory voters and the youngsters who are cunts will vote Reform UK. If they don't have another term to keep reminding people how terrible they are, the pendulum will swing back and we'll get future Tory governments. 

The reason the same donors are giving to both Tories and Labour is they can also see the scenario of the Conservative party dying out and they have millions to spend in double bribes. They also correctly see that if the Conservative Party dies the real hard right (a minority) would vote Reform UK but the furthest right Party would then be Labour.

It's also not unusual for political parties to move round on the political scale or even swap over. For example the Republican party abolished slavery in the US but now want the death penalty for an abortion FFS.

In the event Labour takes the place of the Tories moderates would go to the Lib Dems and leftists to the Greens. 

My best prediction is an election late Autumn into the Winter and Starmer to win. Here in Birmingham Ladywood I'll be voting Green and I think we'll get the same Labour MP with a reduced majority because she's pissed off the Muslims. If I thought the Lib Dems could unseat her I would vote for them.

This is the Party anthem of the Liberal Democrats, just because I like it.

My Lent Book

As is the custom I have nicked from the Christians, every year I choose a book to be my Lent book. Despite not keeping Lent in any way at all, obviously.

This year it has rather chosen itself because in January I already started re-reading Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot, for something like the third time. I felt a pull towards it and a desire to read it again very slowly and let it sink in.

It's not an easy subject, or book, obviously, and I also felt strongly that to do so I should clear some dead wood out of my psychic space to enable the change to happen. In this case it meant getting together a number of individually very minor annoyances with the company that manages this building and putting them together into one complaint. Not to put too fine a point on it, it felt so clearing to do this that I now understand why cats zoom around the house after using the litter tray! I am delighted to say that they ignored this complaint so it's now with the ombudsman and out of my head.

Last year, after Lent, I also performed the exercise of reading all the way through the bible again. I used the New English Translation that has translators' notes online and read the Oxford Bible Commentary as a companion. I think this is the third time I have done this in my life, although the first while I haven't been one of the faithful.

The main thing this experience did for me was to reinforce what I already knew, that Christian topics of obsession are almost never based on what the bible actually says. For example I have commented here before on the biblical approach to 'the unborn', which is to treat them purely and simply as property and afford them none of the value given to people. The other major thing it reinforced was my conviction that the majority of Christians read the bible selectively at best, and probably repeat reading the same bits. Of course there are some who put in the necessary work to get to the bottom of the multivocal, repetitive, contradictory and disjointed text, but the road to atheism is littered with well-read bibles. Because if you read it and don't conclude that a lot of it is about land grabs and that God just loooves genocide, you're not paying attention.

I would have loved to have this book, actually by Richard Littler, the creator of Scarfolk, but sadly it doesn't exist.

Sense of Place: Made in Birmingham (Again)

This is Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley constituency. I fucking love this woman AND she voted against the whip for a ceasefire and resigned her shadow cabinet role in protest.

You just *know* she's thinking 'set of cunts', don't you? This is why people either like or loathe Birmingham: it reflects back what you give out yourself and most people can't take that.

Incidentally I see Labour and the Tories are reported to be closer in polls than they were. I really hope that continues because a Lab/Con coalition government with a Lib Dem/Green coalition opposition would be hysterical.

Agony Hound: Am I the Asshole for "Hiding" my Savings from my Fiancée?

This one has me honestly stumped and it's wild. The source was obviously Reddit although I found it on Instagram. As always click on the pictures to engorge them if you can't read them.

I'm not going to put any of the initial reactions to this, although the consensus was that he wasn't an asshole, because the opinions of the internet were literally all over the place.

For me personally it raises so many more questions than it answers. The first being the obvious one that he's been able to suddenly come up with the funds for his other half's bills with no explanation of where he got the money and she's not asking. Even though you would obviously exercise some caution about telling people about your finances, my impression is that he's being at least secretive about it. And why isn't his good fortune showing in his life style? How is it even possible that he's been extremely fortunate in life and she isn't able to see that in any way? I don't think he answered the question but I wonder what culture he comes from because literally telling your fiancée nothing about your finances until after you're married is utterly bizarre. It's also looking for trouble, because you would want to know about that before getting married, surely.

It's also apparent that they are not made for each other in other ways because he saw her reaction to this as giving him the 'silent treatment'. She also didn't like that he posted this on Reddit.

Although these people provide the material for me to opine about their lives, as a general rule I think someone who has to ask advice on Reddit when he has upset you by being basically secretive about where the money comes from, may not have the emotional literacy at that point to undertake marriage. And then to kick off the conversation by showing her the Reddit comments is just WTF.

However I find her as peculiar as I do him.

Yes it's unusual to manage to save up $160,000 and I'd be asking where it came from, it also isn't actually a huge sum of money. I have no idea whether it would even buy a decent house in the US but suspect it wouldn't. He's talking about this sum as if it's untold riches, but so is she which makes me wonder how naive she is.

I'm very wary of her reaction to this, that it made her feel inadequate. WTF is going on in this relationship? It's exhausting just reading about it.

My conclusion would be that obviously if they still see something each other (and strangely what they see doesn't come across in this post) they should start with some kind of counselling to make sure they're both on the same page and stop the relationship being this dramatic.

However my personal opinion is that they're not made for each other: the way of communicating drives her up the wall, he has to ask outside their partnership for help, her reaction to this annoys him, she (IMO) over-reacts by feeling inadequate at this. Phew, it's exhausting.

Fox News Tarot Reading

I am absolutely howling that a) Focks News had a tarot reader on at all when most of its viewers are 'Christians'* and b) what happened when they did.

*Speaking as a witch, of course I'm well acquainted with Jesus and can tell you right now from him he has very very few followers indeed.

Sense of Place: Bordesley Station Again

Nearly eighteen months ago, I posted about the least-used train station in the West Midlands, which has one timetabled train a week going into the city centre, and match day specials if Blues are playing at home. I won't repeat the history I copied from elsewhere and pasted there because I would get rude comments about not only stealing stuff but keeping on posting the same stolen stuff.

When I wrote that I had never been on the platforms; now I am delighted to say that by chance I caught it on one of its weekly openings and took the opportunity to nip up the stairs and have a look. Of course there isn't a ticket barrier, in fact there's barely a station, platform or anything else there.

The station is up on a viaduct so you enter through a gate under a railway arch and go up the stairs. There is only one staircase because there is only one double platform and the two other disused platforms, which I see no effort has been made to disguise in any way, apart from obviously having the undergrowth cut down now and then.

I can't begin to describe how desolate and weird it is on the station. More or less twenty feet up in the air, in a city with absolutely nobody around, is a very strange place to be, and I now have some more understanding of why railways are associated with ghosts and all sorts of strange experiences.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if they came to lock up the station without checking and just left me up there. I found myself thinking of all the cattle that arrived at the city at the station, and particularly found myself wondering how on earth they would have got live cattle down to ground level from the viaduct. Did an errant cow ever jump off the side?

But there is one pervading feeling there, which I picked up on in my previous post, and that is sheer rage. I think that's what makes it really weird. Despite my normal state of barely hidden rage I am certain that what I was feeling there wasn't my own rage. I also didn't get a clear source or reason for it, it was just 'free floating' anger as it was, and I haven't yet unwrapped it enough to think what it was about. When I posted about it before I commented that it was the sort of place 'an errant ghost train would drop you off to be tormented by a long dead stationmaster with a grudge, cheered on by the ghosts of all the cattle who had been transported there', and bugger me that feeling is even stronger on the platform. I'm not certain it would even need to be a specific entity such as a station master, because I just kept thinking of the cows. And all I can say is if it was their rage, bovine fury is quite something, and lasts a long time since it's at least decades since it was a cattle station.

Just to complete the weirdness, while I was standing on the platform feeling utterly unnerved a train to London Marylebone went through and the driver waved at me. I HAVE NEVER HAD A TRAIN DRIVER WAVE AT ME IN MY LIFE. What the hell. I'm fairly sure they don't wave at train spotters so perhaps he was waving to tell me there was no way I was going to leave there by train in the next week but it was still utterly strange. As if I'd entered some kind of portal into a different reality.

Without further ado, on with the pictures.

Image credit and a much more comprehensive and normal exploration: here