Faith and Doubt
I flip through the pages on my Kindle. Reverence to spirits of nature. Herbs associated with healing and protection. A skull from a bird, which, being in short supply within city limits, I have been forced to replace with chicken bone from last night's dinner. Lights off, I pronounce words that I know to have great and powerful historical context, but they just don't seem to mean anything coming from me; I make the motions associated with banishing my fears and insecurities into a figurine in the center, and I'm left afraid it won't work.
I sigh, blow out the candles, and fight the urge to feel silly about myself.
For most of my life, after childhood Catholicism and before delving deep into alt-psychology with the intuition boost of estrogen, I've been an atheist; no, atheist understates it. A grudge against religion for telling me stem cell research and transgendered life are abominations had generalized itself, and I hated all tradition and faith with the same intensity. I saw what people called lost ancient beauty, and thought “good thing we're smarter than that now”; I saw gods as kludgey explanations for natural phenomena we'd now decoded, and spirits as wishful thinking gone amok, both standing in our way to further progress (views some omnipotent future AI would probably find ironic). Magic was just a way to feel like you're doing something about that which you can't change.
And yet.
I review the spell formula. Evocations of deities whose names might mean nothing to me, except when propped up and misused by modern Christians – but once upon a time they meant so very much, and it wasn't all just fables told to children. Gods are not mere stories – they are egregores, thought-constructs born of the memetic genes floating in the primordial soup of human awareness, and ones time-tested to appeal to humans for thousands of years. Humans looked at the way the trees grew around them, the way the rain fell and the wind blew, and they named it God, or Yahweh, or Elohim – so many words people came up with for the same thing, each with a history. It's a beautiful concept that completely fails to land with me.
Magic, in my current understanding, is a method of using emotion and metaphor to direct the subconscious, giving it a direction to focus toward and a toolkit to work with as it flails about, making it more likely to produce something and notice opportunity. I can see where these names fit into the ritual, the way they hold that much meaning to people – but the experiences of the modern world just don't build into something consciously communal like a god. Someday, maybe I can have enough reverence and feeling for these gods, these time-tested, resilient egregores that spring from natural phenomena and reinforce their emotional power every time lightning strikes... but for now a lot of the symbolic components won't do. I don't have the required emotional connection to them.
I try to boil the ritual down not to its parts, but what the parts do. A power source here. A vent there. A barrier in the center. Processes that grab your emotion and keep you engaged for a time, with payoffs at relevant points – mulling over your goals as you light the candles, pacing in the incantations that gives your emotions time to process and catch up.
Forays into hypnosis have taught me a lot: the value of a good metaphor, of an intuitive mental model that resists attempts to compromise it, as a powerful tool to process the world. Tell someone their name's locked away in a box and they won't be able to remember it, because they have an intuitive understanding that boxes are separate, closed spaces where things get put away and not accessed. In this light, the metaphor-driven religion of the ancient world looks less like the cluster of wishful lies I once thought it was, and more like a machine – parts interlocking, generating their own emotional fuel, confirmation-bias giving them a jolt of rejuvenation every time the rain falls.
I take this time-tested, subconscious-honing formula, and I consider the parts that aren't working. The raven skull wasn't just wanted to represent Air because it once flew, it's also associated with Air because air is associated with intelligence and ravens are notoriously clever, and because bird bones are surprisingly light, and the experience of lifting one up would catch one off-guard with its lack of heft. I substitute a set of lockpicks, maintaining the connections to subtle movements and absolute freedom of movement granted by one's cleverness; it's not the lightest thing in the world so it's still not quite as good, but it'll do. Water is still roughly as relevant as ever, the same very molecules circulating since ancient times, and goes unreplaced. Herbs I've never taken don't seem to quite fit with Earth's nourishment, regrowth, and fortitude, so I opt for a potted succulent, enduring and healthy no matter how lazy I am about watering it. With a depressing lack of any supernatural beliefs whatsoever, I compromise by representing Spirit with my phone – all its learned autocorrect quirks, browsing history, and idle processes arguably comprise as good a portrait of my soul as the technological world can provide.
Fire, a force of destructive, passionate will, is replaced with an airline ticket stub, the one I got to see my then-dying girlfriend across the Atlantic. Getting it, and seeing her before she passed, required standing up to my family in a real, angry (if nonviolent) way for the first time in my life. It would mean nothing to anyone else, but to me, it means the triumph of emotion, passion, and will over fear and tyranny. It means that enough willpower will destroy anything in its path to get what it wants, and how glorious it can be when this happens. It's going to power this psychological machine far more effectively than any other conceivable source of metaphorical fire.
Lastly, the protection circle. Written with the names of God, names that mean protection and stability, names that mean something so sacred that no demon or idea-construct dare cross it – but to me nothing is sacred, and those names mean false hope and being failed by that same kind of protection, they mean desperate and unanswered prayers to be born in a different body or to different parents. They are names of a pure and benevolent God, to be sure, but one that does not resonate with me. At a friend's recommendation, I replace them with a pattern of rectangles – a brick wall. Simple, solid, effective, and something I've related to in life to be all those things. The metaphor of a brick wall providing resilience has echoed in my mind every time I've seen or brushed against one; its rough texture, its dense weight, its structure of solid and mortar components – these all must become intrinsic properties of Protection for the ritual to work right, and I let the metaphor roll around my mind as I slowly and deliberately draw the chalk lines.
I light the candles. I turn out the lights. I read over the spell again, wishing I had the kind of reverence for its spirits to follow it as written. I read the words, trying to grasp the nature of the gods, represented through these emotional connections.
Earth's certainty and love. “The ancients couldn't have all been delusional,” I think, as I pat the hardy plant's leaves, a sign of irrepressible life. Fear has no place to hide.
Water's tide and nourishment. “Their tides washed indiscriminately, but in the right direction.” I swirl the glass of water around, letting it make waves, but not spilling a drop; I set it back down, knowing that it may wave and ripple, but it's all swirling around the same place. Uncertainty is the way of life – it is not to be feared.
Air's nuance. “The focal points of emotional intensity, the drawing of internal ideas, seeds the unconscious with resilient metaphor to work with and gives it a goal to work towards after confirming its strength with the natural forces of the outside world. All the little things make sense together.” The tension wrench of constant questioning, the rake of hypnotic experimentation, the pick of precise observation, the bump-key of epiphany and willingness to embrace the “petty” solution – all forces that give me strength as they push me towards the truth. “I am capable, powerful, and have a way forward.” I can feel the wind blowing through me, lifting doubts out of my mind, turning a desert to an airborne cloud and leaving nothing behind.
Spirit's perfection and realized vision. “Anyone who saw all these psychological dynamics and quirks in our head – our imagination's dependence on emotion and meaning, our ability to prime ourselves for certain kinds of ideas – would have tried to develop a heuristic for it instead of waiting to find the precise neurochemical causes. The only thing they got 'wrong' was thinking their spirits and forces, things that we can now model as memes and egregores, had a molecular existence – and they couldn't have even known molecules existed! Their worldview had no reason not to be wise.” I open my phone's keyboard, and consider that a sufficiently wise autocorrect algorithm may deduce that it is being typed, and while it's unlikely to know what a finger is, it'll know it has a personality and what it's like. “I have an essence, a soul, an identity – and it has a goal.” My scattered, self-loathing thoughts now have something to bind them together, an idea that repels my fears like holding a cross before a vampire.
Fire's passion. Fire's determination. Fire's knowledge that no matter how hopeless things look, our creativity and drive can find a way out. Fire's indomitable rage over all that tries to hold it back, Fire's warmth and light that brings love to those it wants to protect, Fire's damn-the-consequences approach to getting what it needs now, no matter how ephemeral or brief.
I look at the ticket, and place a ten-pound note over it. A souvenir I brought back. Proof that my rage and love got me something I'll never regret fighting for.
“Fear and doubt are pointless. For all intents and purposes, magic is real. And it will give me what I want.”
I feel the strength of earth in my muscles, the water in my veins, the oxygen in my brain, the collective soul in my mind – and now Fire is raging up underneath it. Confidence, strength, fluidity, identity, and passion, all woven together, forcing all the doubt, all the malevolent spirits of self-sabotaging memes or paranoid possibilities away. There's no place for them here anymore, and I focus on the little figurine in the center, walled in by the sensible reality of brickwork. It's unchanged from the first attempt – a cheap toy picked up from a local store, not particularly meaningful. Before it was just filler; now it's a representation of my old self's noncommittal approach, my scared and doubting self that was too afraid of looking silly to do a ritual properly, my acceptance of mediocrity so I won't have to deal with the shame of failure. It's easy to concentrate on it and feel all those old thoughts being burned away by elemental force shifting into the toy, projecting all the inferiorities I know I've overcome into the one sole representation of their continued existence.
As I blow out the candles, I analyze the ritual, thinking of how my subconscious may have been filled with metaphorically productive ideas – how through its language of symbol and miracle, it served as a reminder of everything I have, everything I care about that gives me strength, and taught me how powerless my fears are before them. In a way, it's like a therapy session. The psychological curiosities are secondary to one question, though: did it work?
I think it did, because after going into this full of doubt and fear, I feel sure that I'll like whatever comes next.