Life, Interupted

School and job are too things that have popped up as topics of discussion here on occasion (usually as excuses), although I try to keep from spilling too much of my personal life on this blog. I tend to save personal stuff for my more personal blogs targeted toward people who know me, well, personally. But certain things insist on intruding into other things that you might not want them to, and I figure this might be a good place to at least offer an update on Why I’m Not Posting, or: Another Cheap Excuse

School is not going well. I have had no time or energy to devote to my studies as I have needed. I may not finish, and though it pains me, I may write it off. The academic environment is hostile to me for reasons that don’t need to be discussed here, and the demands of working 60 or so hours a week at night have not been conducive to my progress. Plus, I’m a vicious procrastinator, and this combination did not serve me well. As a very dear friend of mine often reminds me, sometimes victory costs more than defeat (and as I remind her, a tactical retreat is not always a defeat).

My job sucks. So I’ve gotten another one. I don’t talk about work here much, but I’ve been in the restaurant business for some time, and since I’ve already mentioned the overnight hours, you can guess that I’m not in the fine dining end of things. I am high enough in things that I’m paid a yearly salary instead of by the hour, so I’m not doing to bad, but greener pastures have called. But those pastures lie about 100 miles away.

You’d think that for someone who has worked with Chaos Magic for so long, I’d be more adaptable to change. (Of course, you’d also think I’d have done some ego magic to fox that procrastination thing. I should get to that. Well, later …) But I am a Scorpio, with a Cancer Moon and ascendant, and I like to be settled in my home territory. But I am moving nonetheless, far from my family, friends, and community. I’ll deal with it, but I won’t like it much.

But there is opportunity.

There is a gap between when I leave Current Job and start New Job. I will be packing, but should also get to do some writing. This will make me at least a little happy.

New Job will involve at least two months of training at a location Not Here. Which means living in a hotel room sans mate or offspring, all by my lonesome. This means a lot of free time, and since I’ve given up the internet porn, I need to find something else to occupy myself with. An intensive magical training session should do the trick!

So, no more unusual than normal, my writing could be erratic, probably a large burst of productivity interrupted by a few spots of nothing. Hopefully people out there still remember me and will take a look at anything that I churn out. And if you’re new to things, please take the time to look over my older writings and blogs posts, on the off chance that you find something you didn’t know was there but you like, and because site hits make me happy, and the happier I am the less likely I am to destroy everything.

Cheers!

Appropriation and Tresspassing

Cultural (mis)appropriation among pagan and magical traditions is a pretty hot topic, and attitudes range from take what you will to don’t touch anything you weren’t born into. A middle ground of some kind is usually inhabited, but rarely solidly defined.

Gordon at Rune Soup, has a rather interesting take on the matter:

My uncertainty continued until university where I studied cross cultural film making, indigenous writing and all manner of topics that sat at the intersection between Anglo-academia and traditional cultures.

What I learnt was, essentially, non-engagement isn’t an option. You can’t just put cultural studies in the “too hard” basket for fear of being racist or insensitive. That’s ultimately more damaging because valid worldviews and modes of thought would be sidelined and forgotten.

What you needed were guidelines. Rules of engagement.

And so it must be for magic, also.

When I shot my underwater documentary in Micronesia I became aware that there were places I was allowed to go and places that I was not allowed to go without the permission of the Nanmwarki (chief).

The places I was allowed to go without permission were those places any lay person could go. Anything beyond that required a title or the permission of someone with a title. I was fine with all this because it’s a very familiar concept to us magical folk.

I was getting closer.

[...]

There is a little statue of Ekeko, the Andean abundance spirit, on my mantle piece. (If you live in London, I bought it here. Warning: World’s worst website.)

Now, it would be hard to find a tradition in the world I knew less about than the indigenous folk practices of the tribes around Lake Titicaca. (Not ‘curing cancer’ hard, but you know what I mean.)

And yet I have no problem housing and feeding Ekeko.

Why?

Because Ekeko statues are even given as gifts. They represent a very simple form of magic that absolutely anyone within that culture has access to.

Here then, is the golden rule I had been looking for:

Do not go further into a magical practice than a layman from within that culture is allowed to go without invitation or initiation.

If non-engagement isn’t an option, if cross-cultural magical practices are unavoidable in our global society, then this seems to be the best way to manage it.

Each culture has its own boundaries between what is initiatory and what is not. Culture belongs to the world. Initiation belongs to initiates.

An interesting take on the problem, although I’m not sure I’m totally convince. I think that part of the problem lies in the fact that for some cultures, even the laymen are initiates, and the cultural knowledge itself is initiate-level knowledge. Culture does not belong to the world: it belongs to the society it defines. Perhaps a better boundary would be going no further in a practice than a guest to that culture would be permitted without invitation?

Divining the Law

This is an interesting case:

In Moore-King v. County of Chesterfield Virginia, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112205 (ED VA, Sept. 30, 2011), a Virginia federal district court rejected  constitutional challenges to Chesterfield County, Virginia’s regulation of the business of fortune telling. Patricia Moore-King, a “spiritual counselor” who operated under the name of “Psychic Sophie” claimed that the county’s zoning, business license tax and fortune teller permit ordinances violate her free exercise of religion, free speech and equal protection rights. The court held that plaintiff’s predictions and counseling services are inherently deceptive commercial speech, and that the regulation of them is reasonably drawn. The court rejected plaintiff’s free exercise and RLUIPA claims, finding that she is not engaged in religious practices. It also rejected her equal protection claims.

Where I live, the understanding is that my status as an ordained minister allows me to do readings as such a religious service. On one hand I see how one could argue that extra protections need to be in place for divinations. On the other hand, why should I need to hide behind religion to do a damn tarot spread? This sets a nasty precedent to target pagans doing readings, divinations, and healing services to be targeted as frauds.

Minding the Fences

A while back I had a bit of a falling out with a friend. The nature of the dispute isn’t important: I’m sure we both think that we’re in the right and the other is wrong. Only three major points emerge: 1) We have worked together in magical setting before, and know how the other works; 2) we are no longer on speaking terms, although our mutual friends are being very good about not taking side or doing anything to exacerbate or (even worse!) resolve the situation, instead just letting it be and ignoring it like civilized people; and 3) do to statements the other party has made previous to and during the falling out, it is very possible that he considers me to be less-than-human.

Now, upon our falling out, I did what any good Scorpio magician would do in a similar situation with another Scorpio magician: I redesigned my house wards, buffed my personal shields, and awaited a first strike while preparing but holding back on launching my own (Partly because he was living with a friend of mine, who I did not want in the crossfire). That strike never came, and I can only assume that his response was either similar or identical to mine (which I actually find hilarious).

So I trusted the wards, put my wand away, and moved on. Why then, am I mentioning this at all?

Two reasons. First, while I believe this person to be hubristic, pretentious, and misguided in some of his beliefs, he has taken a position far more extreme, and has made statements to the effect that I no longer classify as fully human in his eyes. This concerns me greatly, for if I am seen as sub-human, many fates and punishments against me can be justified. Even considering this, I haven’t been concerned, until the second point arose.

See, being the brilliant magician he is, this individual has created a kind of spiritual construct. It’s more complex than an elemental, and more aware and free-willed than a normal servitor. And at the local pagan festival this summer, it buzzed by my tent. And on a few occasions in the past couple of months, I’ve felt/seen it testing the perimeter of my house wards. One time I think it actually got in, and my son had some nasty nightmares that night.

That first strike never came, but he has sent a construct to do surveillance.

So I have a few options. I’ve considered building a trap for the construct in case it comes by again. It’s possible I could feed it false information, reprogram it altogether, or simply destroy it. Or maybe keep it for ransom or something, who knows? It wouldn’t be that hard to tune the wards to more specifically block the construct, and I’ve got a pretty good idea the way it could have bypassed the wards and fixed the problem.

Should I consider this an act of aggression? If the construct did in fact penetrate the wards, that’s a pretty flagrant violation of my home space, especially if that was the cause of my son’s distress that night. But I am certain that the thing was hovering around the perimeter wards, and I’m not sure how aggressive I should consider that to be. Checking out my defenses is not an overly friendly act.

So I’m back to square one. Do I batten down the hatches, prepare a retaliatory strike, and rely on MAD to keep the first strike from coming? Do I escalate by sending my own construct to test his wards? Send a warning shot? He moved recently, and is probably still settling in to his new location. He’d be fairly vulnerable, but then again that may explain the recon. But does it excuse it?

And the construct hasn’t been by for a while (or it’s better at hiding now). Perhaps it knows I detected it and hasn’t bothered to come back. Maybe my ability to detect the intrusion was all he was testing. But again, that doesn’t excuse what I see as a hostile act on my home territory.

And or course, I could just ignore it, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing to this point. But I’m not Wiccan, don’t follow no Rede, and I keep thinking I’ve been served a bit. So I ask anyone who still reads this, should I lay a smack-down?

Wilderness and Privilege

I’m not much into post-modern political complaints about privilege and whatnot, and I’m not much of an environmentalist, but this article by Lupa really struck a chord with me:

I feel less and less like there’s a strict dichotomy between human habitations and everything else. Yes, wilderness is its own thing, and to be valued for what it is, and preserved as best as possible. But I’m feeling increasingly critical of the idea that cities are uniformly bad, that anything humans do or create is unnatural, and that you have to choose sides or else you aren’t a good enough environmentalist.

All these ideas of moving out to the country, living sustainably, or just spending more time hiking, camping, etc.–all these have something in common. They all assume that a person has the means to spend quality time outdoors. And that smacks of a great deal of social and financial privilege.

For one thing, it assumes that you have enough money to be able to drive out to the wilderness if you don’t already live there. It assumes you can buy or rent a car, and also have the necessary equipment to hike, camp, etc. once you’re out there.

It also assumes that you have the time to be able to do this. If you’re working two or three jobs and spending eighty hours a week working, you probably don’t have much leisure time to put toward outdoor activities.

The urban:bad, wilderness:good dichotomy is very prevalent, and definitely in long need of review. There are plenty of good books out there on urban paganism, and some of them don’t focus solely on ways to pretend you’re in a wilderness environment while you’re in the city. As Lupa has previously said, nothing we do as humans is unnatural or really different than what most other animals do: we’re just more complex and sophisticated in the doing of it. Nature is all around in the city, and its magic is there too.

But that’s not the issue I want to get at.

Last week, my partner and I met with a friends of hers to pick apples from an orchard. We loaded up the car, drove almost 50 miles to the orchard, got to pick among some apples that were half-rotten and worm-eaten, and then went to dinner at a rather nice nearby restaurant. Sure, it was a fun time, but the economics break down thusly: $30 in gas, total travel time of two hours there and back, $25 for dinner, because we shared a plate, and around 4 hours of lingering around the orchard and other nearby attractions. For a dozen apples of lower quality than what we could have gotten at the local grocery store for $3.

We paid for the experience. And that assumed that we had the money and time to indulge in that experience. And I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that excursion used up my day off (which I intended to use to rest my feet from my 50 hour workweek) and depleted the remainder of my funds for the next week and a half afterward.

And going out to a campground is the same deal. It assumes you have the money, the equipment, and the time available to indulge. The local/organic food movement is also of the same mindset: it assumes you have the resources to purchase more expensive food, and that you have the agricultural diversity that the movement’s originators in California enjoy locally. (Sorry, but I like tomatoes and bananas, even if it’s winter. And I like coffee. Ever notice that local-food people always have coffee, but aren’t usually from Hawai’i?)

And here’s the kicker: try telling someone that you’re pagan, but that you don’t buy organic/local food or camp. See what kind of looks you get. Tell a fellow pagan that you don’t like to be naked in the woods, because you welt when you get bit by mosquitoes and you burn easily in the sun. See what they say.

Boy, aren’t we a privileged bunch?