Spells

and the war between truth and lies

This morning I read a Facebook post — and for the life of me I can’t find it now — about a nun who took in refugee (mostly Jewish) children during WWII. She gave them new names and taught them skills that would keep them hidden and alive, placed them in Christian families and gave them spurious histories, all to keep them safe. What was most interesting about the story was that throughout her life, she repeated a whispered litany of names, families, things about the children, things about the family, that she used after the war to help reunite the families, over and over again. She whispered a long chant, as if she were keeping alive an oral tradition or telling the rosary. When the Germans got wind of her exploits hiding Jewish children, they came for her but found no incriminating evidence. Nothing was written down. It was all in her head. They imprisoned her, they tortured her, they got nothing. She was released after the war and continued reuniting families and kept track of the children she had placed.

It occurred to me that her whispers, her lists of people, how they’re associated and what they’re like, had amounted to a spell. It was a spell of memory, so that the truth would not be forgotten. When all around her was evil, this spell was the thread that would allow her to reconstruct the broken families when evil had been destroyed.

This sends me, of course, straight to Lord of the Rings and Gandalf vs. Sauron. It sends me to elves turned into hoards of orcs. It sends me to now.

It makes me think about how language and particularly memes are used today for spell casting. People encounter taqqiye, lies and omissions every time they look at a screen, every time they read a news article, every time they look at social media, at memes and comments posted by bots and by people who have become bots, and they are captured more securely than if they had been bound with chains. They have been hypnotized. Truth becomes untruth, and untruth becomes truth. These spells invert the world.

The attackers become the attacked. The powerful become the powerless. The oppressors become the oppressed. People don’t question, they recite. They have left their brains at the door. The images, the repetition, fill their minds. The world they depict is not reality, and it has not replaced reality, but in the minds of the spellbound it is the only reality.

People encounter taqqiye, lies and omissions every time they look at a screen and they are captured more securely than if they had been bound with chains.

The screen is the delivery method for what used to be called a binding spell, and these binding spells are spells of untruth.

In the Finnish Kalevala, all speech is considered a spell. Isn’t that interesting? In The Odyssey, when the Cyclops Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, Odysseus tells him, “Nobody.” After Odysseus blinded him and Polyphemus called out to his father, Poseidon for revenge, all he could say was “Nobody blinded me.” That was a spell of untruth.

In qi gung, there is this notion that the life force, qi, can be manipulated and even thrown through breath and intention. When I first heard the concept I very much scoffed. And then I witnessed it happen many times and I even did it myself a few times, and then I believed. What we call “magic” are things we don’t understand yet. I have read that quantum explains many of the things that we call “magic.” Whether or not there is any truth to any of this, what remains is that focused intention is powerful.

Focused intention against you is powerful. When you look at a screen, focused intention against you is most of what you see. The only defense is a mind that knows itself, knows what truth is, and believes in it.

This morning I encountered a terrific essay on how to break a binding spell which set me off on this train of thought. It takes getting the spellbound to ask questions, which is a very difficult thing to do because they have many incentives not to think.

Another thing I encountered today is a spell misdirection, the kind of thing you’d be more likely to see in Harry Potter, but it’s a thing of beauty. The “Hypnosis” drone swarm defensive shield redirects a drone swarm away from their target. Essentially, Hypnosis concocts a spell of untruth, to be used to protect against a regime of untruth.

I am a painter. I look for the mythic reality under the apparent reality. I haven’t come to any conclusions yet but this is an interesting line of inquiry. In a few weeks a new friend will visit, and I will see if I can persuade her to pose. I wonder what her ideas would be on this.