TS-001
And so we tell stories, to give ourselves significance and context and meaning. We tell stories to anchor ourselves in space and time, rather than drift in a vast cosmic ocean. We tell stories to create a light in a vast lightless void.
And so we each live in a fantasy world composed of the stories that we have accepted. I call this: The Shadowlands. You live in the shadowlands, you own personal matrix. Only it isn’t a prison, like in the movie- it’s a space suit to keep you alive. Because our minds can’t handle the unvarnished reality of the world of flesh and bone- what I call the Bonelands.
We live in the Shadowlands, but we die in the Bonelands.
Now you may be thinking, after the imaginary mongoose, and the talk about everything being fictional and about lying hard enough that you convince the universe, and now this stuff about the Shadowlands, that I am arguing that magic is nothing more than stories we tell ourselves and each other. And you’d be right.
And from there you might make the leap ti think that I am therefore arguing that magic isn’t real. And in that you would be wrong.
To adapt Gk Chesterton’s famous quote, the question is not if fairy tales are true. The question is, if fairy tales are useful.
TS-0001a
So what is the Bonelands? It’s the universe. It’s a collection of equations interacting at levels of complexity that are so beyond your ability to follow them that they might be mistaken for magick (although they aren’t). The universe is more than forteen billions light years across or 14 billion years old. Humans exist on a single small planet orbiting a youngish star in one arm of an unexcpetional galaxy in the Virgo supercluster. And just the act of attempting to conceive of existence on this level terrifies our little mammal brains. Douglas Adams joked in one of his novels that a device that actually explained to a person their insignificance in the universe would kill that person. He isn’t far off.
We’ve invented gods and monsters, written whole mythologies, gone to war and killed and tortured ourselves and each other, and are in the process of committing planetary suicide- all to hide from the true nature of the universe. The universe, what I am calling the Bonelands- doesn’t care if you live or die. And we can’t handle that. It has not meaning, beyond what we give it, and we can’t handle that. Nihilism chokes the Bonelands like ether, invisible and omnipresent. And nihilism is lethal to sentient beings. We cannot live without purpose, and the Bonelands has none.
So you can’t live in the Bonelands, because your brain is a fragile 3 pound pile of carbon and water that was built by the committee known as natural selection and revised over two million years of human evolution alone, and during none of that time was your brain tested to handle the scope of the universe as a necessary part of survival. When things popped up that did force humans to deal with concepts to large to conceive using the hardware and software available with that version of humanity, our brain’s entered a fantasy land and transformed the dangerous concepts into safer and more manageable metaphors. We interact with the world through our senses, but also through our brain’s illusions. The world you think that you live in is entirely populated by a symbolic overlay of concepts that you have built, borrowed, stolen and unknowingly swallowed or been fed by others.
The world that you think you live in exists entirely within the three pounds of gray matter that you call a brain. And by the way there is no such thing as a brain in the real world. In the Bonelands there exists a thing that we have transformed into the Shadowlands concept known as the brain. Everything you interact with is the invention of your mind. Nothing is real. You experience even your sense of touch, mediated first by the nerves that transmit the feeling and then by your mental constructs which tell you what that feeling means. You are in the Matrix, and you can’t survive outside it. The matrix, the Shadowlands are not your prison- they are your spacesuit.
TS-001aa
You were never in the Bonelands. Let’s get that out of the way. This book will explain why in due course, but to be clear, you have never lived in the so-called real world known as the Bonelands. And so to proceed, you must strip off the illusion that you live in some sort of objective real world and force yourself to confront the idea that the reality you experience is a construct of your mind and your assumptions; and that the Bonelands are a place that you can never directly experience.
How?
Well, to do this, you need to break down your psychological defenses and then mess with your senses. Grant Morrison, magician and comic writer, did this with drugs and/or religious ecstatic experiences. We don’t want you to rely on something as unpredictable as drugs with the unpleasant side effects involved therein. If that’s your preference find another book. We also don’t want to invoke existing religious or mystical scaffolding for reasons that you will discover in due course.
Where does that leave you?
We aren’t going to telly. What would be the point in that? You’d probably blame us when something went wrong or you did something stupid. We’ve pointed out where you need to go if you want to get where you’ve said you’re going. We aren’t going to be reasonable for every sprained ankle along the way, so figure it out for yourself.
TS-001aaa
“DON’T MESS WITH A WIZARD WHILE HE’S WIZARDING! NOW GO BRING ME A STUFFED ANIMAL!”
– Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
This, then, is one of those books who usually talk vaguely about ‘they’ and ‘them’ and whisper about conspiracies and probably complains about established power. And all of this is true as far as it goes, but quite wrong.
There have been real conspiracies, such as the Phaeton Group which succeeded in large scale price fixing and building in planned obsolescence into the light bulb. But most of the conspiracies imagined by paranoids are too perfect and too vast in scope- and far too unprovable. Evidence of the conspiracy proves the conspiracy, absence of evidence proves the skill of the conspiracy.
This does us no good.
So what I will give you here instead is a conspiracy that requires no secret meetings or whispered conversations in back alleys. It requires no Bilderberg group and no evil illuminati, and only minimal interference from the Annunaki. What it does require is a story, a mythology, and one so infectious that it has survived ten thousand years of near constant mutation with it’s essential assumptions and lies still intact in the present day. Our conspiracy is one perpetrated by the story upon the listeners and readers who retell it generation through generation and thus ensure that another generation will be infected and continue to spread the malignancy for another cycle of birth and death.
you are infected. You are a carrier. You are infectious. This is a socially transmitted disease, a contagious ideology.
But the good news, is that this book is the cure- or at least a booster shot to help you shake of that persistant infection of the mind and the culture.
So read on. Unless you’d like to go find a book on tantric breathing, I’m sure that would be much more edifying.
An Introduction to that 3 Pound meat computer on top of your spine is now in order
– Text missing from manuscript –
So, where am I going with all of this? And how does all of this relate to my rather provocative title? When a dictator want to keep his subjects (it is usually a he) from rebelling, what does he do? Well, besides repression and heavy taxation, the dictator typically looks to ban those technologies comparable to books and swords. Disarming the populace keeps them from being able to oppose the dictators soldiers, and censorship always him to shape the perception of the world- turning his kingdom into a bell jar where he controls
– Text missing from manuscript –
TS-001b
I notice that you still haven’t put this book down. You really should. There isn’t a book in the world that can turn you into a Magician or let you do magic. This book is a not an instruction manual and could never be an instruction manual. This book is a puzzle box and a trap, designed to mess with your head and force you to think in uncomfortable ways until you stumble upon the truth yourself. This Koan is a book, or perhaps the reverse- designed to force you to confront the impossible logic that forms the basis of the modern world. At this point, I hope I’m not going to have to assign you the task of watching that 1990s classic film “The Matrix”. I hope that you have seen it.
The world you live in is in fact a matrix, but not one created by evil overlord villains, we live in an elaborate collaborative group project. If this world feels like a prison to you, then you have built the walls to your own prison. This is not the real world. The real world is the Bonelands, and like the real world of the Matrix Universe, you would not wish to live there. Further to the point, you cannot survive in the Bonelands, your mind can’t handle it. We humans build worlds made of dreams and shadows in order to survive the horror of the Bonelands, but more on that later. Suffice to say, if you think you’re a prisoner, then you need to do more. You need to reshape your world until it is no longer a prison.
You don’t know how to do that? But the answer is simple: Magick.
You don’t see the connection? Well that’s why this book exists.
The path will not be easy. You have deluded yourself into believing that you live in the real world, when in fact you have been living your whole life in the Shadowlands, unknowingly building your own universe under the direction of others to their preference. Deprogramming and showing you the secret codes will not be an easy task. But it will be worthwhile,
Because, to quote Morpheus, “I’m trying to free your mind.”
TS-002
“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
Edgar Allan Poe
Alan Moore decided, he said, to become a Magician rather than have a mid life crisis in order to terrify his family. It’s as good a reason as any. We are all latent magicians of course, we swim in the sea of symbols and stories. But a Magician takes conscious control of the process and begins consciously choosing meaning and defining the self with purpose. Alan Moore chose the ancient Greek God Glycon as his patron. This is a snake like god who was widely discredited as a puppet in its own time. Contemporary stories regarding Glycon are all about the debunking of Glycon and his prophet at the time. Alan Moore picked Glycon for that reason, precisely to remind himself where gods dwell and where they derive power. Julius Caesar reportedly had a soldier by his side who was instructed to remind him “You are just a man,” and this is what Alan Moore has done on a mystical scale.
“He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed, and he came up with these great ideas. And I’m tellin’ ya, I think it’s shtick, dude. I think it’s all shtick. I’m gonna start saying that stuff. Cuz you know what? It makes you instantly interesting. Like “O yeah, last night I was hanging out with Socrates. Came to me in a dream. We played poker. We dropped acid.” That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time.”
Rob Liefeld
Rob Liefeld says Alan Moore is pretending to be a magician. I say Rob Liefeld in pretending to be a comic book artist. But that’s the point we’re all pretending. Alan Moore is pretending to be a Magician, how else does one become a Magician. Glycon is a false god, what other kinds are there?
“I use media exposure as a means of playing with multiple personalities. Each interview is a different me and they’re all untrustworthy ”
Grant Morrison
We live inside the Shadowlands, what has probably been most accurately depicted in pop culture by the movie ‘The Matrix’. But notice, when the second and third films showed us what life outside the Matrix looked like, everyone wanted to stay in the matrix. Alan Moore is, to steal from P.T. Barnum, a genuine fake. We’re all fake, the true Magicians are genuine fakes.
“The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.”
James Wolcott
I have as much authority as the pope, just fewer people know it.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
-Walt Whitman
TS-003
“The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story.”
Anthony de Mello
People love to tell you magic words. Abrakadabra. Expelliarmus. Can you smell what the Rock is cooking? But the most powerful words in magic are “Once upon a time,” because the biggest secret about magic is that you’ve been doing it all wrong. Forget magic potions and charms and curses and fireballs and disarming charms. Forget one rings, and ritual sacrifice and scrying and invoking spirits and sigils (althought we’ll get back to all this later, because I’m a lying bastard). Magick is language. Magick is story. Have you ever watched a friend tell and retell a story until it grows and grows in significance? I don’t mean when they start to exaggerate what happened. I’m talking about the story transforms from a simply recounting of an event, into a explanation of why the world is and why they are.
I have told the story of how I met my wife, and how I asked her out so many times that I have polished that story until pulls all the heart strings. The weird coincidences, the improbability of our meeting of our having watched the same television show the night before and had nobody to rant about it to and the weird pushes that just kept nudging two incredibly shy and awkward people until I was haltingly asking her out (she insists it was a adorable). The story transformed from a series of odd events into a story about how fate was pushing us together and we were meant to be with each other. Of course I never say this outright. I don’t have to, the story says it for me. And that story, that we were meant to be together, has become a part of both our stories. And when we (occasionally) fight, this story helps hold us together, because both our stories tell us that the universe wanted us to be together and wanted us to have other person’s back. That story has become magick. The magick is the meaning it gives us, and the effect of that magick is that it sustains us and helps us and our relationship through troubles that make break other relationships.
So am I saying that there is no real magic, and that it is just a story that we tell ourselves? no. I am saying that magic is so much more than what you have been previously told. I’m saying that magic is storytelling, and that is more and not less than what it was previously sold as. You were sold a box of lies. And I am telling You but the lies are the truest part. Somewhere along the line magic went from being the act of self creation, into being the organized and codified act of self delusion. Somewhere along the line magic was transformed into the process we see today, the process of wishing for Christmas to come early.
The power of magic dwindled as the purpose of magic was reduced to a metaphorical toddler screaming “I want! I want!” At the universe. We have made the mistake of believing that magick is used to fill our desires. We were wrong. Magic is used to fulfill our destinies.
“People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”
-Neil Gaiman
Hollywood recently discovered Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth theory through a books and articles written by Christopher Vogler. You probably know it as the Hero’s Journey. It’s also the reason that so many modern movies look similar. The hero’s journey is a common story format that permeates myths and stories back to jesus of nazareth, The Buddha, King Arthuer, even as far back as Odysseus. The reason that the monomyth is so universal, is because humans are universal. We are born. We mature into physical adulthood. We break with our parents and seek our own wisdom. We go out and face challenges, make allies and enemies, must confront failure and the possibility of death and learn from the experience. And, especially in older societies, we then return with our hard won wisdom and experience and join the tribe as a proper adult. The commonness of this experience makes for a common story structure, discovered again and again by cultures across the world and throughout time. Humans grow and mature the same way everywhere, and though culture and tradition can and does alter the tune, the basic format has a remarkable familiarity wherever and whenever we look.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached… We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”
-Edward Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69
Likewise, the characters tend to fall into archetypal groups across these stories. Again there are a multitude of variations, accounting for local culture and tradition, but looking at a broad cross section of stories, the same roles appear again and again.
To the Magically inclined individual who sees magic as the empowered use of story, knowing these common story structures and formats can be tremendously useful. Learning the underlying character and story strutcture archetypes found in myths and legends and various religious and occult traditions is the magical equivalent to learning the alphabet when learning to read. If you were taught to read by memorizing individual whole words, your ability to read new material would be hampered. By learning the alphabet, you can sound out new words and are able to read much more broadly than if you merely memorized whole words with no regard to their underlying letter construction.
“I tend to think of paganism as a kind of alphabet, as a language, it’s like all of the gods are letters in that language. They express nuances, shades of meaning or certain subtleties of ideas, whereas monotheism tends to just be one vowel and it’s just something like ‘oooooooo’. It’s a monkey sound.”
-Alan Moore
So the Bonelands is the world of flesh and bone, and the Shadowlands is the world of story and symbol. Our brains exists in the Bonelands, but the thoughts it produces are trapped in the Shadowlands. We can’t properly interact with the Bonelands, everything is mediated through the Shadowlands. Our sense of sight is limited and flawed and sees only certain spectra of light; and that’s before our mind names and judges the phenomena the eye has seen based upon the stories and myths stored in the Shadowlands. Our sense of touch is an electrical signal that runs through our body and is decoded by the brain based on an interaction between the effect the body is experiencing and how we have been conditioned by the stories of the Shadowlands to experience that sensation (hence why people willingly do things like enjoy bondage and spanking, drink beer, or watch professional golf).
So what does all this mean? Because that’s what the Shadowlands is all about, meaning. This means that the Shadowlands is the video game engine that allows you to interact with the universe, with the Bonelands. And like in a video game, the scope and breadth of our options in the Shadowlands for interacting with the Bonelands are controlled by your tools. In the Shadowlands, your tools are symbols and myths, stories and beliefs, meanings ascribed to things. Magick contains all religion and philosophy, all political science and art, all history and propaganda (and good luck separating those two), all dream and delusions, all illusions and mystical experiences, all altered states of consciousness and any personal narratives. The Shadowlands encompass your sense of self, your self esteem, your sense of place and community and your morals, taboos and values. The past and the future are projections of the Shadowlands. Every social interaction you ever had was within the Shadowlands, and you have no way of knowing how different the experience was for the other party.
Magick is your neural interface, your joystick (pun intended), toolkit, your alphabet (alphabets exist entirely within the Shadowlands) and on and on. People who restrict themselves to one set of beliefs, one set of stories and one set of myths are limiting their ability to interact with the Bonelands. And always remember, you live in the Shadowlands, but you die in the Bonelands.
“Everyone has a beliefsystem, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone’s B.S. too seriously, especially your own.”
-Robert Anton Wilson
Now we tell stories, and we pass stories from person to person. From mother to daughter, from father to son, from Master to apprentice, from Priest to parish, from King to Kingdom, and so on. And each generation adjusts and adapts the stories to match modern views and ideas. What makes the Chaos Mage and especially Pop Magic, is its ruthless pragmatism and willingness to adapt, adopt, modify and outright create the myths and stories needed for the magician’s purposes.
Need to call upon a spirit of endurance and perseverance? How about the Energizer Bunny? Need a trickster Spirit? What about Bugs Bunny? Need to channel the essence of the chosen one and destined hero? Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are available for the choosing.
Old school ceremonial magicians might balk at this. Alan Moore, despite ostensibly not being a Chaos mage has an answer for that in his worship of Glycon- a snake god of an Ancient Greek Mystery cult that was exposed as a fake with a literal physical puppet during the lifetime of the original cult. Does this seems blasphemous? Offensive to the ancient magical traditions? Remember than most religious and magical traditions are syncretist. The Hebrews adopted Zoroastrian traditions. The Christians adapted traditions and myths from a multitude of Pagan religions. The Various pagan traditions of Europe have gleefully mixed and matched gods and myths throughout the millenia. Buddhism has adapted and adopted what it needed in each new cultural environment to which it has traveled. The religious and spiritual traditions of this time and place and not the spiritual and religious traditions of any other time or place. They have changed, they have been re-invented and adapted again and again and again. Now if these things had a separate existence outside the Shadowlands, outside the world of stories and myth- then these adaptions must be errors.
And yet, magicians the world over still get results. One explanation might be that these things are all delusions of the mind. I prefer the explanation that these things fictional beings who live in stories, that they are creatures of narrative and that they live and function within the narrative, and as long as the narrative survives, so do they.
Is it internal or external? Who cares. Do you get results? Keep your magical journal and record what works and what doesn’t. Did you successfully summon the Force Spirit of Yoda to advise you? Brilliant. Did you fail to summon Abaddon the Spiritof the Scape Goat to banish your guilt? That’s fine, note it down and keep a record. Is is traditional. No relevant. Does it work? Is is a ‘real’ god? Doesn’t matter. Can you invoke it?
Grant Morrison hints and suggests this when in his comic book epic Hypersigil he has King Mob invoke John Lennon as a god- the Lennonhead. Ask yourself what you need from the ritual? And ask yourself what beings represent that thing? Ganesha to remove obstacles. Bugs Bunny to get out of a tight situation. Sherlock Holmes to solve a puzzle. Wonder Woman to force the truth. Work with Archetypes first and then find the entity you need. Pop Magic gives you a much bigger tool box from which to pick, but only work with entities that resonate with you. These are stories, I would never work with Harry Potter, because I am a horrible person and never read the books. I would work with Luke Skywalker or Paul Atriedes or The Doctor from Doctor Who, as my needs dictated.
What am I saying? Am I saying that magic is all in my head? Am I saying that magic is all in your head? Yes I am. But please remember, you live in your head. We do not use the magic of story to impose the impossible upon the Bonelands. The story uses uses its magick to impose the impossible upon us. The best we can do is pick the right story and commit to the process.
“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
– Stephen Fry
TS-0004
No Meaning. The scariest thing that occurs to me on a regular basis is this. There is no meaning save what we create. There is no purpose that the universe gives us. Look at the religions of man and ask yourself as honestly as you can: does this look like the divine work of a perfect creator? Or does it look like the work of a person or group of people operating in their own interests in the time and place where the religion first originated? Buddhism originated out of a caste system where people could be born into servitude, and Buddhism’s great insight was that life is suffering and the the material world where one can be born with shackles on must be transcended. While the message might be useful, that sounds nothing like a divine truth, and everything like what people living under a caste system would imagine as an escape hatch for their current system. Traditional Chinese Mythology imagines a huge heavenly bureaucracy to match the huge earthly bureaucracy of the Emperor, and even imagines a matching bureaucracy in Hell. Isn’t that convenient. Christianity is a messiah religion built on the promise of delivering the Jewish diaspora from their scattered broken state. A people who had lost their nation and control of their borders imagining a messiah who would come and set it all right, surely not a stretch of the imagination.
What do we see in every corner of belief and philosophy and self-help and so on? We see people in the darkness, trying to light candles by which they might see. We people trying to find purpose, and trying to credit it to something bigger than themselves so as to make it seem more powerful to them and to others.
We are all alone in the darkness. It is our job to make fire. It is our job to reincarnate the phoenix.
And so we tell stories. And in the stories, the Firebird soars in the darkness and pushes it back for the length of the tale. A little light in the darkness goes a long way, a little warmth in cold can save us all.
TS-005
The method be which Science proves its ability to interact with the Bonelands is the one realm where magick has proven itself perfectly inept: Prophecy. Nostradamus left a series of ambiguous scraps that could mean anything and thus predicted nothing. Several Popes, Gregori Rasputin, and no less than Isaac Newton (in his mystical rather than his scientific writings) all predicted apocalypses that did not happen.
“The richest sciences are those in which we start from simple rules and then go on to very, very long trains of consequences and very long trains of consequences, which you are still predicting correctly.”
-Benoît Mandelbrot
Science on the other hand, has made prophecy it’s test for everything. Science builds it’s theories out of collected facts known about the Bonelands. The theory itself is a prophecy machine. The theory is a construct that predicts the future based on the expected interactions of known facts. When the theory is incorrect, the errors are added to the machine (that is the theory itself), and thus the theory makes more accurate predictions in the future. Science has made the art of Prophecy into a craft whose success can be measured and improved.
But science does not simply look forward. It also looks backward, creating prophecies about the past- predicting answers to mysteries of the days gone by.
“Little by little, the universe was subjected to the methods and tools of science, and became a demonstrably knowable place.”
-Neil Degrasse Tyson
The poor magician ignores the theories and prophecies of Science and does not change the holy words of their grimoires and good books. But the wise magus does not limit themselves to stories already proven to be no more than a poorly cast shadow laying strangely across the Bonelands. The stories of the Shadowlands are always wrong, but using the prophecies of Science, said stories can become continuously less wrong.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
– Stephen Hawking
“One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.”
-Stephen Hawking
This is why you hate the Bonelands. You trust science when it lets you drive down the highway in a metal box clinging to a container of constantly exploding flammable liquid at 50mph. You trust science when it lets Maury tell you that you are not in fact the father. You trust science when it brings you food out of season and un spoiled over hundreds of miles. You trust science when it suspends you in the air in a metal tube with wings. You trust science when it lets you send information anywhere in the world in an instant. You trust science when it sends you Reality TV through wires and air waves. You trust science when it shows you photographic maps generated by little metal devices hanging improbably in the void of space. You trust science when it maps the human genome. You trust science when it creates computers, and radar, and sonar, and wifi. You trust science whenever it is convenient and useful to your life.
“We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”
-Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe
But when the evidence science discovers impinges on your precious little illusions, suddenly you don’t trust science.
Suddenly you would rather trust an institution that tortured people to death for disagreeing. Suddenly you would rather support an institution that claimed the earth was flat, the center of the universe and created in a work week. Suddenly you would rather trust a book that thinks bats are birds, that rabbits chew their cud, that believes in sea monsters. Suddenly you would rather put your trust in a book that can’t keep its own stories without contradiction, and gives accounts of events that don’t match other historical records. Suddenly you’d rather trust a book that has people riding camels before they were domesticated, and advised that showing animals striped clothes while they mate would result in striped babies. You would prefer to take the word a supposed being who claims on one hand to be all powerful and on the other to be unable to defeat chariots of iron, a being who claims to be all-loving, but then turns women to salt, commands rape victims to marry their rapists, kills the first born of his enemies and sentences those who doubt to an eternity of torment.
You would rather take the word of a document so old and inaccurate that it thinks pi is a round number, hand washing is unnecessary, and slavery is acceptable.
And this is why we need better stories. Because we turn away from the Bonelands whenever the things it shows us don’t match what we prefer. We will turn back to preposterous stories and powerful fables, myths that feed our cognitive biases and legends that make us feel better about our place and meaning in the vast unknown. We are going to back slide, we can’t stare into the abyss without flinching. So if we are going to spent our lives in the Shadowlands, I would like to argue that we should build one that doesn’t lead to slavery, child labour, sexism, genocide, and a vicious breed of anti-science thinking.
Just maybe, that’s a good idea.
“I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?”
– Neil Degrasse Tyson
TS-006
(organization disputed)
I am the witch doctor, unstuck in time.
I see the future as the past.
I see the world I left my children
I have already failed them.
But time is a ball
And I can reach in and pull a thread
And change the future that I made
Undo the failures now apparent.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 