Facebook is one of my favorite magical tools.
It is an amazing tool for divination -- I know people of all kinds scattered across a continent or two, and I can see what is showing up along each thread of my connections, and also pick up on things that are showing up at really disparate parts of my web. This gives me a way to feel what is moving through the world and discern its patterns.
Sometimes, reading those patterns, it is possible to make just the slightest tonal shift in the song being sung by this part of the human world to change the music entirely. Words, images, songs have this capacity. Viral in the sense that we would mean if we embraced the necessity of the viral elements of our own microbiomes. The nature of the movement of the changes across the web predicted by complexity theory and chaos mathematics.
Facebook is in so many ways a simulacrum of the internet itself, which in turn is a simulacrum of a mycelial network, which mirrors a neural network. The internet itself emerged when neurodivergent people who had been given access to consciousness altering mushrooms and synthetic ergot derivatives were given access to enough silicon, enough electricity, and some new kinds of conductors. Right now much of the mycelium is still living under laboratory conditions, feeding off information poor simple sugars, but as we bring our wild selves into contact with the technology, it can be fed the rich nutrients of the forest floor (because some of us have forests inside us, and our very exhalations can be like falling leaves) which will allow it to blossom forth the most amazing fruiting bodies from the transformation of the nutrients.
Karina taught me that "a witch works with all things." This web is one I tend.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
My Theology is Mycorrhizal
Niki Whiting, just wrote a beautiful essay on the relational and intersectional nature of her theology.
My theology is also relational and intersectional -- but it is above all ecological.
I am a Feri priest, wedded to the gods of my tradition, oathbound to my kindred in my lineage and my tradition. My gods are not metaphors. But, aside from she-who-is-all-that-is-of-which-all-is-fractal-form (shhh! don't tell the other polytheists that I just confessed to monist heresy) they are not everything.
I am also an animist, inhabiting a world in which everything is alive. Gods are one form of life -- like humans and Oaks and Salmon and Mountains and Rivers. The way in which gods differ from other beings is in their persistence of form -- some have lifespans as long as a river or a civilization, others live as long as a galaxy, a handful are almost as old as time itself. But ultimately we and they and the Owl calling outside my window and the Cedar the Owl is perched in and the forest floor and the ocean are all made of the same matter and energy infused with the memory of a world born of the love and desire that arose from the Darkness gazing on Hirself in the curved mirror of space and time.
Anaar recently reminded me that in Feri, perception and experience come before belief, an that whatever is true is observable in nature. So it makes sense that our relationships with gods would resemble our relationships among other beings and other beings relationships with us.
And just as Wolves shape Rivers by preying on the Elk that graze the Willows that change the Rivers' course -- and are changed by the River and the Willows and the Elk in turn -- the presence - or absence - of gods changes an ecosystem. It leaves holes in worlds, internal and external.
The question is not whether the empty places inside us and in our world are god shaped of Bear shaped or Lady Slipper shaped holes, because all exist, all are real, the question is what are the relationships among those holes, and what do those relationships tell us about what is missing from our lives and how to invite its return. And what is ultimately absent is the sense of relationship itself. We have forgotten how to be in relation with gods because we have forgotten how to be in relation with life in all its complex, emergent forms around us. And in the absence of relationship, there is a loss of meaning.
Rhyd Wildermuth writes:
and
But where I differ from Rhyd is with his claim that "humans are the only seekers of meaning we’ve yet encountered" When I call to Owl or Raven in sounds that mimic their vocalizations, they respond in kind, even though they know I am not a bird. When a Cedar exhales volatile oils into the air, they carry messenger molecules recognized by our own nervous and endocrine systems. We are used to experiencing meaning only through the interpretation of our talking selves, but we all know that around some of the most meaningful things, words and concepts fall away and are replaced by the felt sense of being of our wild selves. Stephen Buhner writes:
I learned what I know of speaking with gods from speaking with plants and fungi. There are gods who speak like Spruce, their breath calms us, and we stand in their shade. Their are gods that seduce us like Datura, their breath all perfume and pheromones and opium, There are gods like fermented Apples, who render us drunk or put us to sleep. There are gods like the Matronae who are like mushrooms, each Matrona an individual fruiting body with her own experience, but each connected to the whole by mycelial threads. There are gods like the roots of Oaks. And there are gods like the coiling of mycelium and rhizome.
Like plants, all of them speak unmediated to the wild self, and the talking self finds its version of meaning in the traces of thought and language and narrative that arise where sensation touches consciousness.
Gods are not plants or fungi or animal, but neither are they human. They meet me at the edge of the forest. And it was the forest that taught me how to speak with those who are not human. And so my theology is mycorrhizal.
"
My theology is also relational and intersectional -- but it is above all ecological.
I am a Feri priest, wedded to the gods of my tradition, oathbound to my kindred in my lineage and my tradition. My gods are not metaphors. But, aside from she-who-is-all-that-is-of-which-all-is-fractal-form (shhh! don't tell the other polytheists that I just confessed to monist heresy) they are not everything.
I am also an animist, inhabiting a world in which everything is alive. Gods are one form of life -- like humans and Oaks and Salmon and Mountains and Rivers. The way in which gods differ from other beings is in their persistence of form -- some have lifespans as long as a river or a civilization, others live as long as a galaxy, a handful are almost as old as time itself. But ultimately we and they and the Owl calling outside my window and the Cedar the Owl is perched in and the forest floor and the ocean are all made of the same matter and energy infused with the memory of a world born of the love and desire that arose from the Darkness gazing on Hirself in the curved mirror of space and time.
Anaar recently reminded me that in Feri, perception and experience come before belief, an that whatever is true is observable in nature. So it makes sense that our relationships with gods would resemble our relationships among other beings and other beings relationships with us.
And just as Wolves shape Rivers by preying on the Elk that graze the Willows that change the Rivers' course -- and are changed by the River and the Willows and the Elk in turn -- the presence - or absence - of gods changes an ecosystem. It leaves holes in worlds, internal and external.
The question is not whether the empty places inside us and in our world are god shaped of Bear shaped or Lady Slipper shaped holes, because all exist, all are real, the question is what are the relationships among those holes, and what do those relationships tell us about what is missing from our lives and how to invite its return. And what is ultimately absent is the sense of relationship itself. We have forgotten how to be in relation with gods because we have forgotten how to be in relation with life in all its complex, emergent forms around us. And in the absence of relationship, there is a loss of meaning.
Rhyd Wildermuth writes:
"Meaning is a social-act, a kind of intercourse between us and the world, and us and each other"
and
"Meaning can’t be reduced, it only expands. Meaning has no cognate, and the only other word in the English language that comes close to functioning as its synonym is not Truth, but Love. [ . . ] When I love someone, they have meaning for me. They are meaningful to me, I derive meaning from them, we mean something to each other. When I do not love someone, they hold no meaning for me; they are meaningless to me, or they mean no-thing to me."Where there is no meaning there is no love, where there is no love their is no deep relatedness, where there is no deep relatedness there is no divinity, for divinity is nothing if not a complex emergent quality of a living system, and without deep relatedness there is no system and no complexity.
But where I differ from Rhyd is with his claim that "humans are the only seekers of meaning we’ve yet encountered" When I call to Owl or Raven in sounds that mimic their vocalizations, they respond in kind, even though they know I am not a bird. When a Cedar exhales volatile oils into the air, they carry messenger molecules recognized by our own nervous and endocrine systems. We are used to experiencing meaning only through the interpretation of our talking selves, but we all know that around some of the most meaningful things, words and concepts fall away and are replaced by the felt sense of being of our wild selves. Stephen Buhner writes:
"Human beings, long embedded within their environment, have always been sensitive to the meanings that surrounded them. Those contained within plant communications, as with all communications, generate feelings in us in response. We know the touch of the world upon us, that we have been caressed by meaning, even though we might not be able to consciously say just what that meaning is. A door opens inside, our unconscious gathers it in, and at night we dream and it is woven into the fabric of our lives. We have always been surrounded by such meaning-imbued language; later we created our own. Our language also travels through the air, though it is vibrating waves of sound. (Did you think we made all this up out of our bulging forebrains alone?) We have always lived, surrounded by original language."The new field of biosemiotics is examining communication within and between communities of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and viruses. I imagine the field extending itself to theosemiotics, which would follow the same patterns observed in the wild world.
I learned what I know of speaking with gods from speaking with plants and fungi. There are gods who speak like Spruce, their breath calms us, and we stand in their shade. Their are gods that seduce us like Datura, their breath all perfume and pheromones and opium, There are gods like fermented Apples, who render us drunk or put us to sleep. There are gods like the Matronae who are like mushrooms, each Matrona an individual fruiting body with her own experience, but each connected to the whole by mycelial threads. There are gods like the roots of Oaks. And there are gods like the coiling of mycelium and rhizome.
Like plants, all of them speak unmediated to the wild self, and the talking self finds its version of meaning in the traces of thought and language and narrative that arise where sensation touches consciousness.
Gods are not plants or fungi or animal, but neither are they human. They meet me at the edge of the forest. And it was the forest that taught me how to speak with those who are not human. And so my theology is mycorrhizal.
"
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