(no subject)

[johnpalmer]

Those of you who are into magic and ritual, how do you raise power?

Chanting helps, right? And music, even a good sing-song voice, right? Rhymes, gestures, dance, they all help, right? And if you have a group doing it, so much the better, right?

And, here's the thing. One one level, that power is real, because it can change you, and it can change other people, who are also involved. Only the densest of people would deny that these can be powerful, even life-changing, emotional events.

Would you say that's relatively indisputable?

What's my point? This is my point:

Childhood teasing is hostile magic.

'nuff said?

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

(Remembering being chased down the our block in Alabama by the Mean Boys who ran after me chanting, "Fatty, fatty, two-by-four, couldn't get through the bathroom door ...")

Oh, yeah.

[elimloth.livejournal.com]

Hmm... http://spiritmoving.com

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

'nuff said indeed!

Mind you, remember what happens to those that practice hostile magic !

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Uh. *thud as jaw hits desk* Yep.

[katmoonshaker.livejournal.com]

I always knew that.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Dunno about the magic part -- I'm cheerfully agnostic on the subject and happy to stay that way -- but it's certainly hostile.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Aint that the truth. Also, it's often done, not by individuals, but groups.

Whether you want to view it as pure psychology, pure magic, or a mixture of both, your point is very valid.

It can take years to undo the "curses", and often it has to be done by raising power of your own, repeatedly, to counter it.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Selene's page of quotes on ritual and the arts is particularly apropos, I think ...

[cerval.livejournal.com]

I was about to launch into a hem-and-haw about how you were exactly right, in concept, but, if they didn't know they were doing magic, then was it really magic, however harmful it may have been, yadda yadda yadda.

About to.

Then I thought about all the times that I've cleaned up an area where bad or sloppy magical work was done and left. What do I always say to myself? "These idiots, who don't even know what they're doing shouldn't go around playing with power and magic..." That's what I always say.

Bullies? Intent is there. Will is there. The act of raising power is there. A person or object of focus is there. All of the necessary elements of ritual, much less simple magic, are present.

John, you are absolutely correct. And I am glad that I thought it through before I opened my mouth , merely to place my foot in it.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Excellent insight, and one which deserves a wide audience. I hope you don't mind that I passed this along to my pagan mailing list.

Of course, a larger part of the problem is that the people most guilty of either doing this or failing to discourage it generally don't believe in "ritual magic". Even though a lot of them believe in bad luck from breaking a mirror, or good luck from knocking on wood, and even though they may still practice ritual magic under a different name. They'd say this was all hokum, and what they do has no similarity to it at all. I don't know what to do about that side of it, but I'm happy to do what I can about spreading the concept.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I definitely don't have a problem with your passing it on.

And, you're right... even if you discount the ability to affect the world, magical workings can have power, but people who've never seen strong ritual won't understand it.

It's really kind of funny... most pagans I know would be strict about not letting children they were responsible for do any nasty teasing, even without this type of insight. So, it's an idea that has its best effect on those who (I imagine) least need to hear it.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Yes...

You know, this part is really funny. When I get right down to it, a lot of my problems can realistically be described as post-traumatic stress disorder. I mean, I have (well, today, mostly, "had") flashbacks and such, but I didn't want to label a bunch of childhood teasing (okay, and having kids surrounding me and spitting on me... and once being urinated on... and, okay, yes, it *was* pretty bad) as "trauma."

If it happened to *someone else*, of course, my response would be "PTSD? It'd be scary if you didn't show some signs of PTSD."

Throw in negative energy, and accept that I'm sensitive to this energy, and it makes a kind of sense it didn't before.

Throw in the fact that once I mastered some forms of shielding, and it snapped the door shut on a lot of that pain, and it makes even more sense.

Damn it, it can be *hard* to be skeptical sometimes! :-)

But what I was thinking about was just the last OLOTEAS ritual where I knew that the music and dance were nothing special, but it still held some incredible power... even if I do cling to skepticism and say there was no physical change, there was clearly huge amounts of emotional energy being channeled. And, even if "emotional energy" didn't really exist in the sense that electricity exists, it *is* a damn good metaphor for something that's hard to describe otherwise.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. That's one of the key things that's been digging at me. Even if you don't accept that your will can affect the physical world, it's clear that your will can affect *you*. And, it's clear that there are ways of evoking emotional responses... if there weren't such ways, we couldn't have writers, musicians, actors, etc..

Even if I chose to cling to skepticism over "changing the physical world", there *is* a real, honest-to-goodess magic that exists, and it's extremely powerful at changing the psyche.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm literally agnostic on it as well ("gnosis" = spiritual knowledge; I'm willing to work with magical imagery right now because it's providing better results than not, but I don't know what it *is*... or even if it exists, really), but there's definitely something that could be called "magic" for its ability to evoke, change, and intensify emotional responses. There are hard-to-explain commonalities between people; certain types of music can get people feeling energized; others can make people more relaxed. Certain words will make people choke up with sadness, or ready to roar with anger, etc..

If a condescending anthropologist were studying our society many years from now, they might call an incident of childhood teasing a "primative casting-out ritual"... and I think that they'd be right. Or, at least, "not completely wrong".

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Chuckle; it takes some of us longer; I'm still getting into this 'magic stuff', and trying to figure out what it really means to me.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Hah. What I remember most, and what's scariest, is what Starhawk had to say about it. She believed in the three-fold law, but she felt that hostile magic would return on you more than three times over, because a spell was a piece of you, and you were a piece of it.

And I don't know if I want to think about what *that* means about kids who grow up and are never taught that it was nasty and wrong.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. It's like the effect is magnified, I think. It's one thing if one person says something... but when it's more, and when they've closed ranks to shove their teasing at you, it just focusses and gets nastier, and, I dunno... "louder", even if the volume is the same.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop a certain form of sing-song teasing, mind you... :-)

(Never mind, folks, private joke...)

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

The quotes really hit home... one of them jumped off the page at me (so to speak)

Ritual cuts through and operates on everything besides the "head" level. In this culture, this heady, agnostic, Christian, scientific, materialist culture, ritual is ignored. Since ritual is a need, and since the mainstream of Western civilization is not meeting this need, a great deal of what's happening these days is simply people's attempts to find ways to meet this need for themselves.

- Aidan Kelly

It's like... ritual can be seized on, and used, and it is deep, and fundamental, but it's hard to express why that's so powerful, because ritual is so frequently ignored

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Chuckle; yes, that's pretty much how *I* reacted when I *had* this revelation. I'm going to take this as evidence that I *did* find the right wording to express it :-).

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

And sometimes the "common framework" - the language in which to describe that-which-is-currently-unknowable - is all that's important.

Someday, maybe we'll understand it, and have language that can hold the concepts... but for now, the framework is the power, because it is the medium for understanding.

[katmoonshaker.livejournal.com]

I didn't get into it formally until I was an adult, but I was using it informally since I was born. ::grin::

[kightp.livejournal.com]

LaLaLa ... I can't hear you ...

(Translation: No problem, darlin', as long as you don't assemble a whole pack of kids to join you ...)

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Ignored by the conscious mind, maybe ... bu people do a lot of that amount to ritual: Playing the same lottery numbers on the same day of the week, for instance, or going through specific, ordered preparations before going out on a date or a job interview, or chanting "go batter go batter go" at a ball game.

I've long felt that in a culture based so much in the head, our hearts and spirits seek out ritual even though we don't know to call it that, because on some level we need it.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

When we talked last night I think I referred to this as "naive hostile magic." Because at some point kids do need to be taught - I don't think we come factory equipped with a strong sense of right and wrong, and I know that the part of the brain that gets the whole thing about consequences doesn't develop fully until one's 20s.

Absent early teaching and modeling, though, I suspect a lot of little bullies grow up to be big bullies.

Hm. It strikes me that I know a whole lot of people who admit to sharing the experience of having been bullied by other kids, but I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone admit to having been one of the bullies. I may take this over to my own journal later on and paw it around a bit.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree that ritual isn't ignored in the sense of not causing things, or not being grabbed and used. What I mean is, it's very hard to convince people that ritual has that much effect, and that much power. Hell, I knew better, but it took me a long time to believe it at the gut level.

Isn't it kind of interesting that there's a counter-ritual? "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me". Unfortunately, it's not a very powerful counter, and doesn't last long against hard battering.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, there are a bunch of counter-spells: "I know you are, but what am I?" comes to mind.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Boy, did you ever.

[cerval.livejournal.com]

*nods* I've always had a problem with that "PTSD? Heck no! Not me. I remember everything that's ever happened to me... Well, except for the time I misplace during those pesky little dissociative episodes... but anyway..."

And as I have said, they can say whatever they want about "a little harmless teasing", but "a little harmless teasing" resulting in trauma so intense that by high school I could stand down a cheerleading squad by looking at them. Not maliciously, just by making eye contact. I was just... that far gone.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

And (although I didn't run across this one until I no longer needed it) "I'm rubber and you're glue and everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you!"

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I mentioned this in my LJ, but I wanted to tell you specifically that I told my pdoc about this, and her eyes got really wide for a moment, and she said, "Yes. And all the more powerful because children don't yet have good defenses, and because they naturally group together".

I suspect that this will find its way into her work with children and teens, although not necessarily expressed in the words "ritual magic", depending on the particular clients and their backgrounds.

(And here we're back to "meaning has meaning" vs. "words have meaning" -- these were the exactly perfect words to reach me, but I'm sure there are people who wouldn't have gotten the meaning from them. But in a way that bolsters your side of the argument; whatever words work to convey the meaning, the meaning is stil the same. Hm. And I promise I'm not arguing with you in the sense of claiming that I'm right and you're wrong; I'm more noodling at it to see if we can come to mutual agreement and understanding, or if this will be a case where we poke at it for a while then agree that we have different outlooks.)

[shipofools999.livejournal.com]

Whoa, yeah. *thud*

I was scrolling down the your page so the words were revealed line by line. The line about "Childhood teasing is hostile magic" hit hard. Yup, explains a lot. You delivered it well.

I one aspect of my therapy is dealing with the trauma from childhood teasing. What was done to me wasn't all that bad, but the effect on me was tremendous. I finally realized it was the effect that mattered to the definition of trauma, not the actions. I understand where you are coming from. I will be storing this in my LJ Memories and probably posting a link. Thanks for writing this.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Wow. How'd I miss this until janetmiles pointed to it?

That's an amazing - and very true - observation, John.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

effective magick is psychology in action. my former High Priestess has a master's degree in counseling, and has always taught magick and ritual in a psychological framework. and now my son, who is working on a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, is applying techniques of magick to psychology, and techniques of psychology to magick, more or less interchangeably.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. I understand where you're coming from (or at least, I'm pretty sure I do), and I don't have any problem with the questions you've raised.

Part of what got me on the "words don't have power, meaning has power" is the fact that I could call you a pervert, and you might smile, and say "yep!", but if someone else did, you might be hurt by it... and it's because the meaning isn't quite "you engage in unusual sexual practices", anymore... it's "you engage in sexual practices that make me despise you, or hold you in contempt".

It's not the definition of the word that has power... it's the meaning behind it that has the power.

Of course, wording can cause massive changes. If you heard someone speaking a hate-filled diatrabe about the other wonderful Janet I know from certain newsgroups (Janet Hardy), and that person said "And what's more, she's a slut, and a pervert!", the meaning is still "she's worthy of our anger, and/or hatred, and/or contempt", but the specific words chosen could easily cause me to burst out laughing... "slut" can hardly be an insult to her, and I imagine she's reclaimed "pervert" as well (I just realized I can't quite specifically ever remember hearing/reading her use that word.)

I suppose that what it comes down to is that those words have become so linked to my image of her that the attempt to imbue them with negative meaning strikes me as ridiculous.