In preparation for the upcoming grimoire course for premium members, I’ve been looking at the impact the concurrent rise of cheap printing and literacy had on the conception of witchcraft and the first instances of women’s use of forbidden books -given that prior to this development only the elite could read. (Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, had a copy of the Hygromanteia but probably little need for money spells.)

A schoolmaster’s daughter living in Stuttgart in 1739 confessed that a Caputchin monk taught her how to summon a “treasure man” which she and he presumably attempted to do. This is quite the trailblaze when you think about it and would probably make a good movie -particularly as “treasure man” suggests Kanye will one day master time travel.

This is not yet the fully-empowered, fully-actualised, sexy diabolism available to cis or trans women in today’s west but it is something.

I woke up thinking about this and found my latest turn on The Higherside Chats is up, where Greg and I indulge in a little ‘What Is To Be Done-ism’. Because trees don’t spring up overnight. First they are small and don’t even look like trees. This is the cognitive error baked into utopianism and the reason it remains such a potent literary genre.

In the first few days of shoot growth, it’s not clear to the untrained eye whether a tree is growing or a “weed” is growing. This gets even more complicated if it is a pioneer species performing soil conditioning so that trees can eventually grow. The German schoolteacher -himself a treasure hunter- must have thought that when his daughter got caught: Is this a good or a bad development for womankind? Is the solve for them to read more or less?

Which brings us to some of today’s weed/pioneer species/tree conjectures. First, inevitably, is food:

All these stories are part of the same phenomenon. As my colleague Tyler Cowen recently wrote, food — and, I would add, the business of food — has become central to contemporary culture. Filling a primal physical need turns out to be a perfect match for the digital age. The question is why. Cowen emphasizes snob appeal — economists love stories of status signalling — but there are other reasons as well. If status signals were all people wanted, they could stick to fashion.



In a world of black boxes, food offers a sense of knowledge and control.



In her book on millennials and food, A Taste of Generation Yum, Eve Turow Paul zeroes in on this theme. She even suggests that her generation’s many food taboos — vegan, paleo, gluten-free, assorted -arians — represent socially acceptable expressions of the same yearning for control that leads to eating disorders.

For more-catholic eaters, knowing where ingredients come from and how to combine them into tasty meals provides its own gratifying sense of mastery. “Understanding a meal is a fairly effortless way to master every single element,” she writes.

“The same yearning for control” is one of those statements that is probably true but poorly described. Yes, queueing up around the block in the snow so you can take a photo of a cronut on your phone is objectively dumb. I don’t think anyone would argue that. But if we are “yearning” for “control” then it implies we have had it taken from us.

And we have. I briefly cover some of the western nutritional changes over the past seventy years in Pieces of Eight but we eat fewer and fewer kinds of foods, those we do eat are often genetically modified and riddled with antibiotics and -as a result- each generation’s microbiome is less diverse than the last, which is probably a crucial vector in the obesity crisis.

“Yearning for control” could just as easily be “the first few years in reasserting sovereignty over something that was mediated away from us.” I’ve been writing for years about how the return of the real is the major underlying trend in the west -which includes western magic. (More on that below.) It is too early to tell whether that is what we are seeing here, but my gut flora say it is. Lest we pull a tree out by mistake, we need to be careful with our descriptions -which incidentally includes dismissing the whole process of observation by calling changing food trends a class issue. I mean they are, of course, but only because they are downstream from some appalling mid-twentieth century regulatory capture. There is genuinely no reason why the US still has Big Corn and Big Soy today when it could have Big Organic Broccoli bribing its congresspeople instead. Genuinely. No. Reason. Biofuels are/should be over. The class discussion is downstream from a bribe designed to alter federal voting and nothing will get solved until that does.

Next we come to a more challenging one in perhaps the best/most-horrifying longread I’ve encountered for months; A New Yorker piece on #VanLife:

Part of the fun of vanlife, Sitner theorized, is the old-fashioned, analog pleasure of tinkering. But vanlife, as a concept and as a self-defined community, is primarily a social-media phenomenon. Attaching a name (and a hashtag) to the phenomenon has also enabled people who would otherwise just be rootless wanderers to make their travels into a kind of product. “There are now professional vanlifers,” Huntington told me, sounding slightly scandalized.



Vanlifers have a tendency to call their journeys “projects,” and to describe them in the elevator-pitch terms that make sense to potential sponsors. While still in Central America, King and Smith came up with a name for their project: Where’s My Office Now, a reference to their goal of fusing travel and work. “We wanted to see if it was possible to combine this nomadic hippie life with a nine-to-five job,” Smith explained. After the couple returned from Central America but before they bought a van, King registered a Web site and set up social-media accounts. “The business part of me knew there was potential,” she said. Smith, who was still using a flip phone, was suspicious of his girlfriend’s preoccupation with social media, worrying that it would detract from the experience.

(I owe many thanks to this article for introducing me to the Instagram account “You Did Not Sleep There”.)

Again, I’m not sure we’re losing the trees in the weeds here. Let me tell you a story from my ancient history. In the last year of high school, a couple of friends and I ran the numbers on doing a year in a van driving around Australia -just as one of my friend’s fathers had done in the 70s. He was so very excited that his son might follow in his tire marks as he described it as the best year of his life and the best possible training for later manhood.

Not only is it incandescently more expensive from a fuel and food perspective, but there are a lot more rules on where you can park up, a lot more policemen to enforce those rules and it is impossible to live on a government benefit the way this surf bum father once did. Needless to say he was crushed. Today? I presume it is even more difficult, hence why only retirees do it. (Australia calls them “grey nomads” and they are awesome.)

Then I think of the patient, subtle cynicism in the subtext of the New Yorker piece around how these trips are called “projects”. Well, the other key difference between the 70s and today (in Australia, anyway) is the complete lack of work -casual or otherwise- in remote or regional centres. This was the other piece of my friend’s father’s story: a month in a mill here, a couple of months in a pub there. Move on down the road, get something else.

Those days are gone like Aleppo.

So sponsored van lifers might just be pioneer species rather than weeds. Which is to say they’re doing something “false-ish” so that the “real” -in this case a dencentralised, low-cost work/life adventure- has even the slightest chance of one day growing.

That brings us to Walpurgisnacht. A few years ago I wondered if Wicca wasn’t the boot loader for the return of real witchcraft and I think 2017 is the year it loaded. I’m informed there was recently some navel-gazing about the role of neopaganism in the current era and my first thought was: well… yeah.

The Empire has reconfigured. We no longer face neighbours in waistcoasts and church hats tutting at us because we are so free spirited we choose not to wear shoes in the supermarket. The town from Footloose collapsed due to economic centralisation and those old patterns of ‘troubling’ the old Empire just look like fruity boomer nonsense today -and I don’t even mean that cynically. It was good work once. Another way of saying this so as not to fall into the food article trap is: you won. This is what it looks like. Take the win.

In his latest post about Beltane, Chris Knowles writes:

I’m currently working on a post about the morphogenesis of British paganism in the context of the current folk horror revival that will revisit some of these themes.

Putting words in his fancy mouth, I wonder if this isn’t rumination on the fact that -in my Twitter feed, anyway- 2017 was the first year Walpurgisnacht beat Beltane. Obviously I view this as a very good thing because Walpurgisnacht is at least plugged into a socket in the wall that has power running through it, but it also means it’s going to spend a few years in the hashtag wilderness of #FolkloreThursday and all the other tweetchantments that populate our point in the timeline.

Fine.

No one would argue that today we look out over a field that has had a lot of nasty shit done to it. And is still being done to it. We can still see a few assholes laughing and casting irradiated salt around with gay abandon. But things take time to grow and I’m not willing to call “weed” on every tiny little shoot that we see. Even just the possibility that one of these becomes a tree is a tremendous source of optimism and hope. So be optimistic and be hopeful. There are always trees growing somewhere.

The schoolmaster’s daughter who summoned the treasure man probably did so in a way that would appal the grimoire purists of today’s internet.

But I’m very glad she did it. And if you stop to think about it, so are you.