Magic Shamanism and Ethnic Cleansing
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The Magic Circle is an 1886 oil painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style by John William Waterhouse. Two copies of the painting were produced.
The two paintings and a study depict a witch or sorceress using a wand to draw a fiery magic circle on the Earth to create a ritual space for her ceremonial magic.
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I can claim to have indigenous blood in the veins of my bodily form. There was a family rumour that one of my female ancestors was a gwrach, a witch. In principle I might have a predilection for the weird, the witchy and the shamanic. This does not have much to do with ultrafast optical spectroscopy of semiconductor Si surfaces under UHV. But the two sit side by side in my psyche without a problem. My people have been subject to ethnic cleansing in the British Isles, driven westward away from the invaders, our lands overrun. We might ask for financial reparations.
The old ways are dying out, watered down with woke silliness and vagina scented candles. In the days of AI who needs a shamanic oracle? The Nvidia grimoires contain all the LLM spells anyone might need. They can churn out unwanted incantations at the top of your Google search engine page without even being asked. There is no need for mystical swords simply a high K dielectric and a nanometre etch device pitch. Sand when roasted in an alchemical furnace yields Si crystal ingots of 450 mm diameter. Shiny.
It is a moot point if the old ways have any part in this brave new world we are without thinking, creating. Headlong we hurtle and we may not see the baby in the bathwater as we jettison it to the sewers.
Around here there are still “witches” and from time to time we note each other. The magic, the power, the prana is stripped from the earth where humans gather in throngs. It remains in the mountains and the land less accessible, untarnished by human brashness. It wanes in summer and waxes in Autumn and Spring. Soon the Autumnal mists will bring it again. The magic here is tied to the water, to the damp. There is a desert magic, that is more wind, a dry magic. It is of a different kind.
All cultures have a form of soothsayer, priests and priestesses, shamans and fortune tellers. Before laparoscopic surgery demons were excised with smoke, potions and ritual. Demons do not kneel to the scalpel or the laser. ASML cannot etch into realms non-mundane.
Should we lose entirely our natural mystic, our bond, our umbilical to the planet will be irrevocably severed.
And when the last river is polluted, there will be no more fish. The harsh stench of cordite will have replaced incense and sage. The smell of the oil refinery and the chemical plant will be our nectar. We will gaze into our pocket Palantir with ten different cameras and monitor our terabyte data allowance usage so that we can jack up on “content” provide algorithmically to each of us personally.
And we won’t even notice the leaves fall unless we see them in an AI generated TikTok video dubbed with an ironic Vivaldi track.
And when the shamans say; “we warned you”, we will not hear. We will put them in orange jump suits and take away their drums…after all we know best.
