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I meant to get more writing done this week. But everything is still happening so much, and my brain is fried. But I'd like to share a recent spiritual epiphany I've had.
If you've been on the internet at all over the past few years, you may be familiar with this meme:
More than one of the "everything is happening so much" issues I've had to deal with recently has involved people who were arrogant. They believed they were immune to consequences. And it dawned on me that this is really what "arrogance" is.
There's a common type of mythological story that goes, "Mankind grew arrogant. Then the gods smited or smote them." (I'm not sure which one of those is grammatically correct here, but yeah.)
Well, mankind has grown arrogant. And we're being smited. Or Smote.
We've seen it in larger world events, in chickens coming home to roost in regards to Donald Trump, his finances (or lacktherof) and the events of January 6, 2021. We've saw it expressed in the tragic submarine disaster this past spring. And whether or not we want to acknowledge it, we have seen it expressed in our collective responses to climate change and the Covid 19 pandemic.
But the seeds of this epiphany were really planted in 2015, when I went to the Texas "regional burn" or Burning Man-style event, "Burning Flipside."
It had rained almost nonstop for weeks beforehand, and really showed no signs of letting up. But when the friends of mine who had been going for years chuckled (nervously) and said, "there have been wet years before, a little rain and mud never hurt anyone," I felt reassured.
Then we went, and it was a nightmare. The day after the burn, the land flooded and suddenly became three separate islands surrounded by rising floodwaters. Those left had to seek whatever shelter they could until they could be airlifted out. Which wasn't me or anyone I had camped with, because we'd spent the previous day striking camp and packing up, because some instinct or set of firing neurons was warning us that if things started to look bad, we needed to be able to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
And that was when I realized that Mother Nature didn't care that we were a lot of tree hugging Hippies, she'd kill us just the same. We were stupid and arrogant to be out there.
I'm grateful, and I'm surprised, that no one was killed. Hearing about the similar situation this year at Burning Man made me sick to my stomach.
Our ancestors lived in this reality every day of their lives, for thousands and thousands of years. For most of human history, in fact. They didn't live apart from nature, because the level of separation from it that we imagine we have today didn't exist for them. They knew that Nature (to borrow a turn of phrase from Nicholas Cage's character from The Rock,) would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.
Any Egyptologists reading this are free to correct me, but I feel like this concept was symbolically expressed and deified as the god Sobek. The Crocodile god.
The ancient Egyptians relied on the Nile river. It was the literal lifeblood of their civilization and their culture and their economy and their national identity. And, just like the crocodiles and hippopotamuses that lived in its waters, and just like the waters themselves in certain conditions, they knew it would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.
Fuck Around And Find Out.
When we were warned about climate change, a lot of us denied it and came up with conspiracy theories about how it wasn't happening, or how it couldn't possibly be manmade.
Another epiphany I've had recently is about how most conspiracy theories work this way. They're a way of denying responsibility, or denying reality. If the bad thing isn't really happening or if it isn't manmade, or is the fault of some shadowy clandestine bad guys, or an attempt by those sinister clandestine bad guys to manipulate or control people's behavior, then you don't have to do anything to change your behavior. You don't have to adapt. You can even tell yourself a feelgood story about how refusing to adapt is admirable and heroic!
A lot of people have been the same way about the Covid 19 pandemic. You've heard them say that it isn't real, it's a government plot, it's not as dangerous as people are saying, people are overreacting, and in fact the things we have to protect ourselves from it - masks and vaccines, are more dangerous than the virus itself even. Anything to deny responsibility, anything but having to change our behavior.
I've seen people who identify as Druids (one of them here on Dreamwidth, a guy who is very prominent in Druidic and Occult subcultural circles and has several books to his name) make these claims, as if staring Mother Nature or The Goddess Herself in the face and screaming "I WILL NOT COMPLY!"
I'm really not sure what to make of anyone claiming to be a Druid with this kind of mindset, whatever their politics are. What I think it goes to show is: we're so sheltered and separated from nature and the normal cycles of cause and effect that even people who claim to revere the natural world to the point of adopting one of the modern Druidic revival belief systems are afflicted with this kind of arrogance, and the denial of responsibility and the reality we're in.
As someone who has made a serious effort to study Traditional Witchcraft, I see a lot of Traditional Witchcraft types scoffing at the idea of Wiccan concepts like the Threefold Law. And honestly, I think the Threefold Law was invented because teenage dingbats (like I used to be) playing around with magic and maybe trying to hex someone for the first time don't really understand the concept of consequences and personal responsibility yet, if ever. But if they can imagine something bad that they want to happen to someone else, they can imagine what it might be like to have it rebound upon themselves three times over. It's a scare tactic that serves a purpose.
And I feel like we maybe don't have enough of those anymore.
Because we're arrogant. As Philip K Dick said, "Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it." And it's killing a lot of us, because we're not respecting it. It's already been going on for a while now.
And if the last three or four years have taught us anything, there are lots of people who would rather cling to their arrogance than save their own lives. Or the lives of those around them.
Fuck Around And Find Out.
If you've been on the internet at all over the past few years, you may be familiar with this meme:
More than one of the "everything is happening so much" issues I've had to deal with recently has involved people who were arrogant. They believed they were immune to consequences. And it dawned on me that this is really what "arrogance" is.
There's a common type of mythological story that goes, "Mankind grew arrogant. Then the gods smited or smote them." (I'm not sure which one of those is grammatically correct here, but yeah.)
Well, mankind has grown arrogant. And we're being smited. Or Smote.
We've seen it in larger world events, in chickens coming home to roost in regards to Donald Trump, his finances (or lacktherof) and the events of January 6, 2021. We've saw it expressed in the tragic submarine disaster this past spring. And whether or not we want to acknowledge it, we have seen it expressed in our collective responses to climate change and the Covid 19 pandemic.
But the seeds of this epiphany were really planted in 2015, when I went to the Texas "regional burn" or Burning Man-style event, "Burning Flipside."
It had rained almost nonstop for weeks beforehand, and really showed no signs of letting up. But when the friends of mine who had been going for years chuckled (nervously) and said, "there have been wet years before, a little rain and mud never hurt anyone," I felt reassured.
Then we went, and it was a nightmare. The day after the burn, the land flooded and suddenly became three separate islands surrounded by rising floodwaters. Those left had to seek whatever shelter they could until they could be airlifted out. Which wasn't me or anyone I had camped with, because we'd spent the previous day striking camp and packing up, because some instinct or set of firing neurons was warning us that if things started to look bad, we needed to be able to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
And that was when I realized that Mother Nature didn't care that we were a lot of tree hugging Hippies, she'd kill us just the same. We were stupid and arrogant to be out there.
I'm grateful, and I'm surprised, that no one was killed. Hearing about the similar situation this year at Burning Man made me sick to my stomach.
Our ancestors lived in this reality every day of their lives, for thousands and thousands of years. For most of human history, in fact. They didn't live apart from nature, because the level of separation from it that we imagine we have today didn't exist for them. They knew that Nature (to borrow a turn of phrase from Nicholas Cage's character from The Rock,) would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.
Any Egyptologists reading this are free to correct me, but I feel like this concept was symbolically expressed and deified as the god Sobek. The Crocodile god.
The ancient Egyptians relied on the Nile river. It was the literal lifeblood of their civilization and their culture and their economy and their national identity. And, just like the crocodiles and hippopotamuses that lived in its waters, and just like the waters themselves in certain conditions, they knew it would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.
Fuck Around And Find Out.
When we were warned about climate change, a lot of us denied it and came up with conspiracy theories about how it wasn't happening, or how it couldn't possibly be manmade.
Another epiphany I've had recently is about how most conspiracy theories work this way. They're a way of denying responsibility, or denying reality. If the bad thing isn't really happening or if it isn't manmade, or is the fault of some shadowy clandestine bad guys, or an attempt by those sinister clandestine bad guys to manipulate or control people's behavior, then you don't have to do anything to change your behavior. You don't have to adapt. You can even tell yourself a feelgood story about how refusing to adapt is admirable and heroic!
A lot of people have been the same way about the Covid 19 pandemic. You've heard them say that it isn't real, it's a government plot, it's not as dangerous as people are saying, people are overreacting, and in fact the things we have to protect ourselves from it - masks and vaccines, are more dangerous than the virus itself even. Anything to deny responsibility, anything but having to change our behavior.
I've seen people who identify as Druids (one of them here on Dreamwidth, a guy who is very prominent in Druidic and Occult subcultural circles and has several books to his name) make these claims, as if staring Mother Nature or The Goddess Herself in the face and screaming "I WILL NOT COMPLY!"
I'm really not sure what to make of anyone claiming to be a Druid with this kind of mindset, whatever their politics are. What I think it goes to show is: we're so sheltered and separated from nature and the normal cycles of cause and effect that even people who claim to revere the natural world to the point of adopting one of the modern Druidic revival belief systems are afflicted with this kind of arrogance, and the denial of responsibility and the reality we're in.
As someone who has made a serious effort to study Traditional Witchcraft, I see a lot of Traditional Witchcraft types scoffing at the idea of Wiccan concepts like the Threefold Law. And honestly, I think the Threefold Law was invented because teenage dingbats (like I used to be) playing around with magic and maybe trying to hex someone for the first time don't really understand the concept of consequences and personal responsibility yet, if ever. But if they can imagine something bad that they want to happen to someone else, they can imagine what it might be like to have it rebound upon themselves three times over. It's a scare tactic that serves a purpose.
And I feel like we maybe don't have enough of those anymore.
Because we're arrogant. As Philip K Dick said, "Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it." And it's killing a lot of us, because we're not respecting it. It's already been going on for a while now.
And if the last three or four years have taught us anything, there are lots of people who would rather cling to their arrogance than save their own lives. Or the lives of those around them.
Fuck Around And Find Out.
