Category: Spells

Bureaucracy as a system of curses

For some indigenous Indians in southwest Colombia magia, which they define as deriving from books of conjurations that allow one to pact with the Devil, are considered to be an instrument of social control. The whites had brought magia with them, and as one Indian complained, ‘They use it to take our land.’ These perceptions were not only born of suspicions regarding Christian magic but were also an aspect of wider concerns about how books were being used as a means of enslavement. We see this expressed in a magic tradition found amongst the largely indigenous Quichua population of the town of Salasca, Ecuador. In the provincial capital of Ambato lies the seat of a ‘witch-saint’, Saint Gonzalo… who is believed to kill people through a book in which victims’ names are written…. The blancas (whites)… are the guardians of a large ‘witch book’. People pay them to include the names of their enemies, who the saint will then curse, or conversely to have their names removed. This is no legend, but a real money-making activity for the guardians, who have on at least one occasion been charged with adding names to the book to extort money.

… The witch book is no mock grimoire with occult signs and pictures of the Devil; it is a functional large notebook consisting of lined paper, not unlike those used for Civil Registry and Church record keeping. In other words, the archival function of books, which serve as a means of social control in an administrative sense, can also be used to subjugate through magical means.

— Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

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The Kindly Brontosaurus: a spell for customer service

Jessica Winter at Slate describes a technique for dealing with customer service agents that has “hypnotic, even occult powers”: The Kindly Brontosaurus.

A practitioner, nay, an artist, of the Kindly Brontosaurus method would approach the [airline] gate agent as follows. You state your name and request. You make a clear and concise case. And then, after the gate agent informs you that your chances of making it onto this flight are on par with the possibility that a dinosaur will spontaneously reanimate and teach himself to fly an airplane, you nod empathically, say something like “Well, I’m sure we can find a way to work this out,” and step just to the side of the agent’s kiosk.

Here is where the Kindly Brontosaurus rears amiably into the frame. You must stand quietly and lean forward slightly, hands loosely clasped in a faintly prayerful arrangement. You will be in the gate agent’s peripheral vision—close enough that he can’t escape your presence, not so close that you’re crowding him—but you must keep your eyes fixed placidly on the agent’s face at all times. Assemble your features in an understanding, even beatific expression. Do not speak unless asked a question. Whenever the gate agent says anything, whether to you or other would-be passengers, you must nod empathically.

Continue as above until the gate agent gives you your seat number. The Kindly Brontosaurus always gets a seat number.

I am fascinated by what people use spells for, especially outside of spiritual traditions. One narrative about magick is that people used to use magick for all kinds of things, but now we have better tools and more power to control our lives without magickal means. We have medicine to heal injuries and diseases, we have technology to foretell the weather and communicate with distant people, and so on. I am suspicious that customer service and bureaucracy attract more than an average amount of magick spells in the contemporary world, because dealing with them is so disempowering and confusing and we have no superior technologies for battling them.

Tanya Luhrmann on prayer as emotional management

Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, presents her work on prayer as a set of meta-cognitive practices that have health benefits. This is the first time I can remember getting ideas for magick and mindfulness practices from contemporary American evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Luhrmann briefly discusses some ways of understanding common prayer activities as emotional management techniques:

  • The practice of offering gratitude during pain and suffering as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy
  • Confessing sins as a way of verbalizing experience to gain a sense of control, and setting small, manageable goals
  • Asking for help as “externalizing hope”, in a similar sense as many placebo medical treatments

She then goes into detail about another prayer practice, adoration of God and experience of God as a real presence. Parts of this seem similar to other ways of personifying spontaneous thoughts, and I enjoyed the descriptions of activities people use to learn to talk to God. Luhrmann emphasizes that feeling God as a personal presence requires learning (and even play) as well as constant work, which I found reassuring given how much effort I put into my own (admittedly very different) practices for meeting presences in my mind.

The panel responses at the end are solid as well, but as usual I skipped out after the first “this is more of a comment than a question” from the audience.

Meaning response syndromes

“Stendhal syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly viewing art.”

“Jerusalem syndrome is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem.”

“Paris syndrome is a transient psychological disorder exhibited by some individuals visiting or vacationing in Paris or elsewhere in Western Europe. It is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others.”

Alan Moore gives a definition of magic

I suppose the thing with magic is that a lot of it is about writing anyway. “To cast a spell.” That’s a fancy way of saying spelling. Grimoire, the big book of magical secrets. That’s a French way of saying ‘grammar.’ It’s all about language and writing. It’s all about incantation. It’s all about all these things. And so magic, really, it turns out to just be a continuation of the stuff I’ve been doing anyway. Using certain arrangements of words or images to affect people’s consciousness.

— Alan Moore, interviewed by Stewart Lee

Placebos as “meaning responses”

We define the meaning response as the physiologic or psychological effects of meaning in the origins or treatment of illness; meaning responses elicited after the use of inert or sham treatment can be called the “placebo effect” when they are desirable and the “nocebo effect” when they are undesirable…

Insofar as medicine is meaningful, it can affect patients, and it can affect the outcome of treatment. Most elements of medicine are meaningful, even if practitioners do not intend them to be so. The physician’s costume (the white coat with stethoscope hanging out of the pocket), manner (enthusiastic or not), style (therapeutic or experimental), and language are all meaningful and can be shown to affect the outcome; indeed, we argue that both diagnosis and prognosis can be important forms of treatment.

— Daniel E. Moerman and Wayne B. Jonas, Deconstructing the Placebo Effect and Finding the Meaning Response, The Placebo: A Reader

Placebos as a science of rituals and spells

In exploring possible meanings of “critical magick”, I find myself collecting perspectives on magick from many different fields, many ways of knowing. Placebo researchers use the words “magic” and “ritual” more than you might expect from scientists. Here is Ted Kaptchuk, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, giving an introduction to placebo studies. He explains a definition of placebos not as fake treatments, but rather as the impact of all the cultural and relationship stuff that happens along with treatments.

‘Placebo effects’ is a way of quantifying and measuring everything that surrounds pills and procedures, mainstream or alternative. They’re about the rituals, the words, the engagements, the costumes, the diplomas, and those special things you get when you go to a healer.

Two spells for burning buildings

A good spell makes new things possible. Years ago I saved this quote from Stone Butch Blues. It is the genderqueer protagonist’s reaction to reading Women’s Studies books.

I felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to rescue the ideas I needed in my own life.

That line made it easy to explain that a book can be worthwhile and problematic at the same time, provided you have a mission. It made it possible to see reading terrible books with a critical eye as heroic instead of embarrassing. It’s a good spell for someone like me who borrows a lot of books from the 000-200 section of the library, and at the same time has enough science background to question using quantum physics to explain serendipity and enough political analysis to see random dreamcatcher cover art as racist.

If that is too metaphorical, here is a short and direct motto from a vanished blog I used to love. I use this as a disclaimer all the time. It’s a spell that can transform a sketchy text into a resource, that can invoke a bigger context and invite all of someone’s history and knowledge into an encounter. I predict this will be a good spell for most things I post here.

Bring your own analysis.