20.04.2020 Addendum

Out walking yesterday, or days before, they’re all merging, something occurred to me that pulled together everything in my last post. I think it was the thought I was trying to articulate; I just hadn’t had it yet.

So before I update you on what’s been going on and take a look at another theory that’s bubbled up from the fertile swamps just below the material surface of East London, I want to write a little addendum to tie up the last post. I’ll try and keep it brief.

ADDENDUM

I just added the title because it looks cool in caps.

Dog walking is great because it allows you let your mind off the leash. Just stare at things, look at patterns on trees or interesting twigs and listen to birds. When you’re busy doing nothing, sometimes you forget to shut the back doors of your mind, goblins can creep in.

I think that’s the main benefit of my ADHD, maybe the pay off of having an unfocused mind is it stays open. So when I saw this –

I immediately thought of spells and magic. It’s not a huge jump, it looks like something from the Blair Witch Project, a little bit spooky maybe, but probably some kids had a game, where they collected twigs, maybe to build a house for some imaginary imps.

I took a slightly different route this time, and by the time I got to the bottom, part of the park I would never usually go to, I was well primed to take a glimpse behind the curtain. I found this –

Someone had put a lot of effort into it. It was a perfect square, all the sides equal length and each corner 90 degrees. So it wasn’t a group of eight year olds burning off energy. It really seemed like someone had planned this and measured it out. I’ve heard art described as anything that doesn’t have any functional purpose, it’s pulling ideas and objects out of the immaterial, transforming nothing into something. Art is a way of transubstantiating the emotions and opinions of other people, and transubstantiation is highly mystical.

Alan Moore puts it better, “I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.”

All writing, and art, is telepathy, magic, or if unsuccessful maybe an attempt at magic.

So if you’d argue the people who put these sticks in this shape were making a piece or art for entertainment or a game, I would say the difference is semantic. If it was kids who piled those sticks up, playing a game that followed the logic of rules that only exist in their minds, they were doing magic.

I ran with it. I stepped inside the perimeter pretending it was a healing square (a device of my own imagination), and I felt calm and soothed. The person who put those sticks down, via the manipulation of symbols in our shared subconscious, made me believe it was for healing, so I stepped in, and my mind was at ease. It worked. Is that not magic?

My dog knocked a few sticks out of place so I put them back and wandered off.

Slightly further down in Wapping (not in the usual way we experience time, in the linear way it was a day or two before) we came across this, a PR campaign marking sites of witchcraft for a tourist attraction called the London Dungeon.

I did a bit of research and discovered the infamous Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and others like him tried a surprisingly large amount of witches in and around the East End in the seventeenth century. Apparently only 500 witches were executed in the United Kingdom, and something like ten of them were round here. I won’t go through them with you because there was enough of that in the last post.

Putting a witch on trial and burning them at the steak does not mean they were a witch, or confirm any supernatural powers, but it is worth considering that witch hunting is itself a magical act. It’s human sacrifice to ward off evil. And in order to try someone for witchcraft you have to believe in it.

Aldous Huxley puts it very well in his book Devils of Loudun, about the possession of 17 nuns in a 1630's French town and the torture and sadistic execution of the parson accused of bewitching them. He says, “there's no reason to discount the existence of malevolent discorporate conscious entities, or demons, but in this case the corruption of Catholic church makes us doubt their involvement.”

He also says there are risks in this kind of persecution, “that in exorcising imaginary demons you can summon real ones, not only that but the persecution of witches, or whatever the current undesirable type of person is, propagandises their power, and creates more of them.” I believe a similar thing happens with terror groups like ISIS. So whether or not people were practising black magic round here, persecuting people for it makes it real.

This was all swimming round my head, when I thought I am seeing these magic signs everywhere because I am looking for them, so I must be overstating them, but it occurred to me, the whole country, the whole world is going through a time of renewed belief in and practise of magic. It’s everywhere at the moment. Again, some more successful than others.

Every Thursday when people clap on their balconies for the NHS. It is a purely symbolic act expressing our gratitude, a thing that doesn’t really exist. Nevertheless, this seems to be extraordinarily powerful. I can’t really see much difference between that and Muslims praying together on Friday afternoons in the mosques and masjids.

We also see sigil magic everywhere at the moment, rainbows in windows offering support to people who, chances are will never see them.

Imagine it written in an old healing book.

A spell of goode will, high spirits and fortification to those battling the evil of our current virus which afflicteth all of us.

First take an aspect of a rainbow drawn by the hand of an innocent (the innocence and optimism of children lend this spell a particular potency) and placeth it on the thresholde of the home in which you dwelleth.

Then on Thursday evenings as the clock striketh 8, ermerge on to your stoop and applaud the work of those you wish to fortify.

Repeat everyweek until each pestilence hath past away. The doctors shall take heed and emboldened be in carrying on in their fight.

Encourage those in your homestead to join the ritual.

And Captain Tom Moore, the 99-year-old veteran, inspired by his love of the NHS for the kindness they showed him, walked 100 laps of his garden and raised £23m!

This is a beautiful thing, and the magic symbolism is undeniable. The criticism of this and the claps, is that NHS workers need practical material help, not just well wishes. Which is obviously true. They need resources and good pay, as well as love and respect, but increasing their funding is not within the reach of people out on their balconies clapping every Thursday. And Captain Moore gives us all a boost of moral, but the danger is he is unwittingly normalising the idea that the NHS is a charity, which Nye Bevan, when he introduced it, specifically said it wasn’t. To me that’s a slippery slope, maybe an unintended consequence of a spell cast in good faith.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary also spectacularly clumsily cast a spell which I would argue was in bad faith. He has said in parliament recently, “now is not the time to discuss pay rises for nurses,” but riding the swell of positive opinion about them, and in an attempt to divert attention from his incompetence he created a badge for care workers and front line staff who may not be medics. The CARE badge.

Trouble is, the badge costs £8.99 and most care workers are on minimum wage, which has just gone up to £8.71 an hour. To me that seems like an insult. Meanwhile, more and more of these workers are dying. It’s hard to get reliable figures, but I’ve seen it around 75 NHS workers and 20 transport workers so far. The last few days we’ve had something like 850 a day dying in hospital, they’re not counting the dead outside.

We look down on cultures who practice superstition because dogmatists of another type, militant atheists like Richard Dawkins mock it, and tells us the only thing that’s real is science. But just like the Turkish and Greeks who put Nazar charms in their homes to ward off the evil eye, we put faith in symbols, and pray together appealing to fortune and grace. And while it may not change anything in a material sense, I think it has the power to raise consciousness and work towards a kinder world.

I’m going to do another post with the things I wanted to talk about, because this was a bit bigger than I expected.

I hope you find your own magic.