BY FELIX ADDISON
Was there a particular moment or was it more like a process? Bits and pieces coalescing until you became conscious that there was another way to think about the world? Or was it always there in a way?
That word and will can change the world, that sign and symbol can from chance cede synchronicity – how was it that it came to be, this way for you to be in the world, this possible paradigm?
For myself it was a process … a process that culminated in a moment arrived at via reason and logic.
I was raised (insofar as it is accurate to say that I was raised at all) in a secular rational materialist paradigm. A household in which superstition was mere silliness and religion an irrational artifact of culture. Dignified rows of heavy encyclopedias were the solid foundation that held down tall bookshelves that spanned an entire wall of my childhood living room. They were filled with art, culture, sociology, history, and science. Let it not be said I lacked access to knowledge.
And I loved it.
I was a voracious reader as a child, and insatiably curious. While many of the volumes on those shelves were beyond my level, I visited them regularly, as almost always when I had a question about the world my parents would tell me to look it up in the encyclopedias. Whether this was a strategy to structure my learning or laziness on their part I do not know, but it instilled the habit of independent investigation.
I discovered the library of my elementary school through the story-reading sessions we were periodically herded in to attend. Quickly tiring of the tedious tales of Jack and Jill going up the hill and similar stuff in the square of shelves that surrounded the storytime circle, which comprised the small kids section, when these sessions were over I would wander the long lines of fiction in the shelves that were taller than I was.
Being one of those kids that is not so mildly obsessed with horses I latched onto and burned through the entire Black Stallion series in something under a year.
I loved our weekly visits to the local library as well, and in the junior reader section I discovered something that spoke to me in a way that those secular stories did not – myth. Two or three shelves filled with creation myths, pantheons of gods, the varied stories of magick and might told by Sheherazade to save her life each night, mystical creatures met in folk tale adventures, heroes of legendary strength – and tales that taught me that nothing wrought of metal no matter who wields it is a match for a riddle. That those who cannot count knowledge, wit, and tricks among their armory shall rarely prevail. I always gravitated back there – though I did not quite understand why it pulled me so.
Back at my elementary school library, having exhausted the epic of the Black Stallion I searched the fiction section for something else to do with horses – and through a book called A Horse and His Boy, discovered the Narnia series.
This was my first encounter with mythic themes in the context of modern storytelling. I followed the adventures of Aslan and the schoolchildren who would command and fight and make decisions as kings and queens when in his land. My mind melded with ideas of walking between worlds – so long as one knows how to find the entrance.
At home, with my toys and even found objects, I made my own worlds. Each object would act as the character I had imbued it with in stories played out upon a linoleum floor, and became so ingrained with these that their motives almost seemed their own and for me to make one act against character for the sake of plot felt like an artificial and unwelcome imposition.
Though my home was secular, I incrementally became aware that religion existed. In one of my early elementary school grades there was a teacher who would read out kids’ versions of bible stories for a bit in the mornings. I thought the ones about the bit in Egypt were pretty good, but most of them were no match for the tales told in the books I found in the junior reader mythology section of my local library. I also had an instinctive aversion to the avid obedience of an absent authority that seemed to be the central thing these stories celebrated. There was also something strange, a glassy look, that appeared in eyes of the teacher who read us these tales, and those of the children that told me they often heard similar stories when they went to a thing called ‘church’.
I even ended up in an annex to one a couple of times, at something called ‘Sunday School’. The adults there kept talking about someone called ‘God’. I remember a painting with blue sky and white clouds and an amorphous figure that seemed to be shining. This was the closest thing to a picture of this God person that there was for me to look at. I know because I asked. I asked a lot of questions about the who, where, and what of this evidently very important person who had a whole building where people went to talk about them. The adults there seemed very happy. I was engaged with the topic at first but pretty soon it was time to sing songs about God instead. It seemed like whenever I asked a new question it was suddenly time for everyone to sing a song. It was very strange.
I decided to make up my own religion. Maybe there was something to it – so I would give it a try. Inspired by Aslan I took my plastic tiger, lion, and black panther, gave them names and the status of gods. I engraved their names on the underside of my windowsill so should I ever forget I could find them again.
I TRIED to worship them, I made up prayers and times to do it, but it felt empty and contrived – more like homework than anything else. So (with appropriate twinges of guilt) I decided this religion thing really was silly and quite boring too and returned to spontaneous play.
As for the church, over the course of my life I have learned more and more of its many crimes. Its bloodsoaked history of indoctrination by coercion. Its opposition of independent thought and inquiry. It’s initiating and integral role in the in the genocide by which colonial powers claimed the continent that I inhabit. It would take decades for the fury and repulsion I feel towards it now to coalesce, but even as a child I sensed something suspicious in that glassy-eyed stare with which it seemed to imbue its adherents, the stories which glorified faith above all, and the place in which everyone must sing a song when the questions get too hard to answer.
By the time I finished the Narnia series I had – by ambient cultural exposure – absorbed enough knowledge of Christian imagery to (with a sudden sense of shock and betrayal) realize what I was looking at the end of the very last novel. When the brave musketeer mouse and the king/queen schoolchildren reach the shining land over the sea and the lion lays down with the lamb. The lion lays down with the lamb. C. S. Lewis how could you! You tricked me into reading Christian propaganda!
This lack of otherwise being indoctrinated into the most common religion around me as well as my aversion to it meant that I did not have to undo much of the conditioning that many people do. It also means that beyond making a wish and blowing out candles on birthday cakes my life also lacked pretty much any cultural exposure to ritual or the concept of manifestation.
No one told me to stop playing with those toys, but there came a time when it had less and less appeal. One day I noticed that it had been at least a couple of months since I had partaken of this pastime that used to be so frequent, that I had so enjoyed. I decided to make a point of doing it again. I went to my big brown cupboard in which they all were stored and took out my usual favorites and set them up to go out upon the style of adventure to which they were often called – and failed utterly to be enthralled. No story unwound of its own accord. It was almost as if I was merely moving pieces of plastic around a linoleum floor.
I tried other toys. They were also unmotivated. The stagecoach driver did not wish to deliver any urgent missive. The two headed dragons would not bicker with themselves. I took every single toy out of that cabinet and not one single one would play with me.
There were no adventures to be found.
I stared at the yellow speckled linoleum strewn with the bodies of plastic creatures of all kinds and wondered what had gone wrong. Then, my hands moving almost of their own accord, I lined them up in a tidy row in front of the big brown cupboard, each beside the other. Each one in its turn took a solemn bow and a moment of remembrance of the many quests in which it had played a part. Then, by my hand, retired to the cupboard. Though this time rather than their usual jumbled heap, they set themselves in dignified and tidy rows. When the last one had gone inside, I knew that it was over. I closed the door, the latch clicked, and I cried. I understood that even were I ever to open that door again, the land that it led to was lost.
It occurs to me now, that this was the first real ritual in which I ever partook. I say partook rather than performed, because it was led by those toys, not I. I say real because a liminal space was created on that linoleum floor. Something my own contrived religion and rote worship had not the power to make. The spontaneous enactment of a rite in which, between the opening and closing of a door, something changed.
And with the closing of that door I also lost the only means by which I practiced at believing things that no one else can see – and my only excuse to do so.
By trade I am an artist. Though, through my teenage years it was my secret dream to become a physicist. Fear of failure and intellectual intimidation kept me from pursuing this and a series of synchronicities led me to the craft of engraving symbols upon skin. I always kept my love of science and exploration of reality through experiment though, and continued to enjoy a lay-person’s style of educating myself in them. That’s an odd term for it isn’t it? Layperson. A term most usually applied as the counterpoint to priesthood. Yet I have oft seen it employed to differentiate between those who have the education to interpret the signs and symbols that are used to describe the mysteries of this universe in mathematics and formula versus those who must have these things translated for us.
There is a dogma too, perhaps not so much restricting what may be said, but bounding what is worth speaking about – and a stigma laid upon those who would speak of unworthy things. All that may be said to be supernatural falls under this taboo.
When the inexplicable is experienced it is the practice of those in this paradigm to interpret these events as errors, either of instruments or the of the mind.
I became goth. I pretended to understand and enjoy Existentialism. I hung around with poets and beatniks and philosophy professors. I did quite a bit of LSD. I pretended that I could not see what it showed me. I wished that life could mean something, but understood that in a materialist paradigm meaning is naught but wishful thinking and wishing is superstition and weakness of mind. True strength of character is accepting oneself as an insignificant speck of temporarily arranged matter doomed to disintegrate into entropy.
Yet I also saw myself as a little bit of the universe popped inside out looking at itself. And doesn’t that make the universe itself at least a little bit conscious?
I also, during a farewell dinner before my journey to Japan, poured a libation from my glass of wine into a plant pot at the restaurant and said a little invocation of luck. Something in me knew better than to pretend I was joking.
I always got my boots (and I only liked a very particular kind) from the same second-hand store. When the old ones were wearing out, I would walk there, while playing a game in my mind that somehow my wanting it could cause there to be a pair of just the right boots in size 7.5 at an affordable price among their very small selection. I would tell myself it was of course only coincidence that there almost always were.
I would analyse my intuitions that turned out to be correct. Search for some scrap of objective information input that could explain my accuracy. If I could not find one, I would resolve to simply try to notice more about my observation process next time.
I wanted desperately to feel the mystic energy of Qi. I told myself that it was silly to try to perceive something that was surely no more than metaphor, some cultural artifact of a pre-scientific time. I told myself this as I practised Aikido under a master in his eighth decade in a tatami mat-floored dojo in Japan.
I told myself it wasn’t possible and then I did it anyway.
I started to feel the energies flow in my body with particular points burning like little supernovas – yet chakras are only anatomical analogies in antiquated systems.
Convenient coincidences kept happening over and over – synchronicity is only another way to say confirmation bias.
Narrative arcs that suspiciously suggested patterns of purpose emerged from events – pattern perception is an evolutionary tendency of the human brain.
I wanted these things to be real – so badly. Yet I told myself that they could not – for science says so.
I existed in a state of cognitive dissonance, one part of me practising acts of manifestation, cheating essentially, on my rational mind, slipping out for an occasional synchronicity on the sly. My body feeling flows of energy that were not allowed to exist until instruments had measured them. My rationality pretending not to notice, dismissing the possibility of any reality or relevance in these furtive flights of fancy. The sense of shame that came from indulging in these acts and thoughts made me realize that although I had never in my life been socialized in or under the authority of a religious authority, I too had indoctrination to undo.
I realized that it was actually irrational to ignore information that did not fit my present paradigm. I realized that the true spirit and method of science demanded exploration of alternative hypotheses to integrate these observations. This freed me to do so.
It suddenly made sense that the only way to find out if magick is real is to do it.
And, if it is a place that needs to be believed to be seen, then that is a valid element of the experiment.
I shed the dogma of what I was not allowed to believe in and decided that this was for me to decide.
And suddenly, I was in a world where I could make of myself a mage.
What’s your story?
FELIX ADDISON
Felix Addison purports to be some kind of wood elf intent on building the Solarpunk utopia and furthermore claims to be stone cold sane. Born of a tale told thrice on All Hallows Eve then woven into the weave. However, hardly anyone noticed for a while because the music was so loud and something strange was happening to time. They live in a magickal house on the edge of the thousand-acre wood and are only occasionally tempted to venture elsewhere. Most of their time is spent running round in spirals very incrementally progressing on dozens of projects for which they do actually have plans drawn up and meticulously logging information about their wide variety of interests and activities in sprawling mind maps which they can rarely convince anyone to look at. Much of the rest of their time is invested in attempting to finally find a functional time management system.
