The man who is prepared to die may accomplish anything.

I’ve been looking through sources to see who I might be quoting for the sentiment above and I still haven’t sorted it. The original could be in a language I don’t know, thousands of years old. Or maybe it’s a James Bond villain. But it’s not just a truth in narrative logic. It’s actually true. One who dies in the process or aftermath of achieving any goal, no matter how stupid or heinous or heroic or pointless that goal is, is freed from suffering any consequences except the one that he or she has chosen. Any punishment or shame or notoriety passes, usually harmlessly, to family or associates. Both heroes and villains, which are frequently interchangeable depending on individual sympathies, derive their status as such by not being particularly opposed to a fatal outcome.

On that topic, these creatures have something interesting in common: Read the rest of this entry »

One of tenets of narrative logic — the logic used to make things true in our heads, that causes distress when it does not agree with observations — is that effort is rewarded, followed swiftly by a corollary that says greater effort is rewarded more than lesser effort. Of all the major disagreements with the nature of causality that we carry around in our heads, this one is the one that seems to cause the most misery. We desperately want there to be parity between effort spent and reward received, if not a slight tip of the balance in our favor.

Physical causality isn’t like that. An action taken at the right place in the right time under the right circumstances has a result, and it might be a desired one, but it’s just the next step in a cascade. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been ages since I’ve read Isaac Bonewits’s Real Magic, but a huge chunk of it stuck with me.

It’s by no means a how-to. Instead, it’s a book-length, thrice-revised expansion of of the senior thesis of the only person I’ve even heard of to receive a Bachelors of the Arts in Thaumaturgy from an accredited university — though it may explain it a bit to say it was from UC Berkeley in 1970. The overall view is that it is an academic work, in construction if not tone and lack of bias, and as such the analysis it contains is not unscientific. Various traditions and practices of (scientifically speaking) a superstitious nature are deconstructed to reveal a candidate set of underlying laws that seem to govern the construction of esoteric belief and ritual.

I remain fascinated by Bonewits’s analysis, and I believe there is some truth in it — truth in what it reveals of how people think why they try to influence the world around them, leaving aside any question of whether such influences are effective. Read the rest of this entry »