Shhh! Pie Ritual

I started writing this one about three weeks ago, that post went off on a tangent, so it became the "Discordian Mystic Blogger" post. Putting a bit of clear, blue sky between the concept of the post and the execution of it has had some effect on what the post is actually about.

The key part of this post is a pretty standard session of mockery of the wholesale adoption of the word "spiritual" by people who like to also misuse the word "energy". It's not kind, but it is important and necessary to those drawn to the magic and the mystic to point this stuff out on a regular basis. As it happens I don't like the magic, the more mystic I get the less magic appears to be a good idea overall. You want to use something you literally cannot know about as the vehicle for manifesting your power physically, go ahead, but disappointment and/or madness are the likely outcomes.

If you're liable to get butthurt by me mocking something, by the way, remember I'm a practising Discordian, it's part of my devotion to eventually mock EVERYTHING. So today it's "spirituality". My key beef with even using the word can be adequately summed up by having a look at the semantic nightmare that is the Wikipedia page for the term. It's become one of those words whose connotations are so broad as to render the term effectively meaningless.

The litmus test is that I could if I so desired, describe myself as spiritual, but you could put me into conversation with another person who described themselves the same way and we would have nothing in common whatsoever. The other key point, in my recent experience of these things, is that more and more self-described spiritual people have a mandatory love of crystals that I do not have.

Of course, the very nature of the catch-all vagueness that is "being spiritual" means that I don't have to and that if you do then that's also fine. It's a bit, however like being agnostic. Being agnostic, at this time is a series of negatives, you are not-religious, not-atheist and also not-spiritual, probably.

I guess that if you are spiritual and agnostic, that might be fine. If you are religious and spiritual, that's allowed but, I sense, frowned upon by the religious side. If you are atheist but spiritual I think that means you go UFO-spotting(?), or ghost hunting, or believe in bigfoot, I mean that it is theoretically possible, but very confusing.

So it's possible to be spiritual and for that to mean almost anything. It's weird, it's the club for people who aren't joiners, like, at all, but seek a sense of belonging with fellows they cannot identify (because, trust me, it isn't "everyone else who's also spiritual") and also with some higher power that falls outside or beyond the definitions of a higher power enshrined in any sort of organized mass-religious organisation.

This, you see, is why I would identify myself as a Discordian Mystic. I was going to go for "Shaman" but apparently being a shaman necessarily involves communing with spirits you believe in (and it really doesn't matter whether I believe in spirits or not I am confident that I cannot reliably communicate with them directly) and also experiencing altered states of consciousness. People experience an altered state of consciousness every time they dream (or whenever they rewatch Videodrome), but I suspect this is not what the phrase is intended to encompass. So, I'm withdrawing my Shamanic application form.

Mystic, on the other hand, specifically being one, is not a common thing but encompasses a vagueness that I have just been taking pot shots at  "spirituality" for exemplifying. As this is an extreme example of my own semantic hypocrisy and demonstration that my ego is out of control I will naturally throw myself into this dubious role whole-heartedly and so deny the weasel-word spirituality even as I attempt to bolster my edginess by planting a flag in the term "mystic".

Awesome.

But why all this jumping around from foot to foot, wrestling with what or even if you believe? I think it's important that everyone has this struggle. I think that it's also important that it's never a done deal. I think, furthermore, that if what you believe doesn't have the name of something on the menu then you should probably try a bit harder to give it a name yourself.

Probably not much more to say on that part at present. So, let's move on...

My relationship with Tarot cards began a good while before my relationship with Discordianism.  One of my great advantages growing up was that, for a variety of reasons, my parents didn't really believe in anything, and yet both had an interest in things they didn't really believe. It is in this manner that I read some Tarot books and, eventually, Piers Anthony's Tarot trilogy, an obscure work that has had a profound effect on some people.

As it turns out Discordians did as a social group eventually get round to producing their own stab at Tarot but the project status is currently half-baked, like most Discordian things. It probably doesn't help that the pope in charge of this project decided to make up their own card schema, which takes the piano of the Tarot deck and turns it into a key-tar. Piers Anthony added a suit and some Major Arcana cards in his work, which is kind of like when Holly in Red Dwarf decimalised music with the new notes "woh" and "boh".

Not that I'm really offended by people making stuff up, that would be the bad kind of hypocritical, not like the hypocrisy from further up which is the good kind, follow? But if your Tarot isn't 78 cards, 22 Major 40 Pips, 16 Courts then it isn't really a Tarot deck in the same way that a keytar isn't a grand piano.

Recently, and for reasons of permanently evolving karma I have been drawn back into my Tarot studies, and have found myself refreshed with a new sense of purpose in the endeavour. So, this entry is like an introduction to my Tarot Journal, which I have been filling out since the 6th of February and which I will be adding in (back-dated for entries before this one) to my regular blog from this point.

Why?

Well, there's a lot to the answer to that question. I'm sure it will all come out in the wash. In the first instance, though, I think it is because I would be keen to get people talking about the Discordian approach to Tarot work. Are people who like Tarot interested? Are Discordians? Are you?

Could be that this is the latest in the series of failed attempts to get a proper discussion going on here. But, as usual, I have cheated in that the discussion topic helps me roll forward even if nobody else has anything to say on the topic.

Vodun In The UK

I've had Starfall in my "to-do" pile for so long that I forget how much has changed since 2006. When I began the book my concept of Vodun was informed by what I could find on the topic available on the internet. It was very much the only choice. The UK is one of the places on the face of the earth that could not be much more cut off from primary sources for research into the topic.

To illustrate lets consider that in 2006 Facebook had only just opened its doors to public access. So there would certainly be no chance of joining an appropriate public group on the platform to ask questions and learn more. Although the internet was supposed to be the great connecting medium through which we could learn about each other more deeply we have a way to go.

Even to this day I can understand why those who practice vodun are wary about talking on the public internet. As much as the internet is supposed to be acultural the facts of global politics mean that vodun is likely to be viewed with suspicion through the lens of the haughty anthropologist, the unrelenting skeptic or the mercenary marketing man.

Not that I saw this article from a low-quality British advertising paper at the time, but it sums up some of the things I wanted to stay away from. I want to think about things but I don't want to appropriate them. Vodun is not mine, I don't own it, no one does, but the thought habit of thinking about things studied as things owned is one that I am consciously trying to fight against.

I studied vodun, and one of the important reasons why I did was that it was going to be something very hard for me to become confident in. I wanted to appreciate without stepping over any lines. I wanted to celebrate the fact of vodun, as much as I could, on its own terms and for its own sake.

I think it would be fair to say that I was afraid of vodou when I started to look into it. Not in the manner you might expect. I had for it the same fear I had of what people refer to as Chaos Magick, I am dismissive of neither because whatever an individual may believe is within the realm of the possible the harm of disrespecting the practice is obvious to anyone.

Even if you have adopted an atheist and skeptical framework then you can still detect that those who have stared too long into any abyss emerge from the experience broken. No one can feel comfortable contemplating what someone who has been burned by that spirit fire may have seen and experienced in order to end up in pieces. All that differs is an observer's rationalisation of what exactly they saw and how they came to experience it.

In the decade since I wrote the core of Starfall white Western society has found the space for some useful consideration of vodou. I like this article from The Guardian in 2015, it manages to cover such a broad amount of topics and aspects from a few different perspectives that it makes for something to consider and digest, rather than attempting to be a satisfactory precis.

This is how most people in the UK and America
first experience any kind of vodou...

Having said that I am far less keen on the tone of this piece from just over a month ago on the BBC. This article definitely hits straight into the anthropological tone that attempts to historicise and contain the thing it studies. The Guardian piece has a far more chaotic mood, talking about people, places and even becoming poetic in its turn. Even when it seeks out the word of an anthropological source it selects carefully. The anthropologist Ira Lowenthal is interviewed, it would appear Lowenthal has a hard won grasp of what vodou is all about and can translate for those who do not find it in their blood:

Vodou says ‘no, I’m not a cow. Cows cannot dance, cows do not sing. Cows cannot become God. Not only am I a human being – I’m considerably more human than you. Watch me create divinity in this world you have given me that is so ugly and so hard. Watch me become God in front of your eyes.’

I think this quote captures, in its construction, an important thing that we have to take in about understanding vodou. If you are not part of a historical tradition that is grounded in enslavement, exploitation and degradation then you will take a lot longer to understand the nature of this spirituality. You can have been a beggar, an enemy, or an outcast, you can have been of low rank and status but unless you have been a slave (even via ancestry) you do not have an instant connection to the vodou loa.

Another interesting connection to Starfall comes out of the Lowenthal interview:

White people lost their spirits centuries ago. We lost it all. The Haitians believe we used to have spirits, but we were too stupid to keep them.

In a way this is a central theme of Starfall, the female protagonist, Carrie, is without a spiritual dimension as the novel begins. The antagonist, Thomas Rempstone, trades with spirits but tells himself he is practicing a kind of spirit science. The other protagonist, Dillon, possesses an innate spirituality, but he struggles with it. The novel's central problems are all about the fact that the Haitian loa are unable to understand the spirits of the British earth, in Starfall Britain is home of weak, confused spirits on the surface, below that surface an ecosystem of dark and powerful mystery that the vodou loa see as a real threat.

All of this spiritual uncertainty and turmoil is, to me, a real thing. Spirituality and the notion of spirits are not easy, you cannot run along a spiritual path. I guess that's why the fate of the UK vodou practitioner detailed in the Metro article above causes me a little intellectual irritation. His spiritual practice now identifies as shamanism. I combed a little through his site but he doesn't mention vodou obviously, if at all. I imagine, if pressed, he would answer that he has blended some of the practices of vodou into his shamanism. Maybe that's fine, but it seems off to me.

I cannot help but feel that maybe he has re-thought representing himself as one who knows the secrets of vodou because he feels that he probably doesn't and, besides, vodou is not as effective a brand for those looking to "find themselves" as the idea of a shamanic retreat. Vodou is for Hallowe'en, donuts, club nights and psychedelic UK rock bands.

This casual appropriation is one of the major obstacles for those outsiders trying to build up a real understanding of vodou. The assumed ownership of the term in order to peddle goods and services is the most crass display of what those who don't understand (and probably fear) the spirituality represent. Trivialisation, mockery, ingrained disrespect are all internal barriers that keep people away from the power they are defying. It is those barriers that are inside everyone who does not have the cultural history to just "get it". For me Starfall was a step in the process of learning respect and building that bridge.