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 When I say it's huge I'm not exaggerating and on the tour they showed us how when one services installation is outdated they just leave it there and pick another empty room to be the next plant room.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.