When visiting America, the conversation inevitably turns to differing cultural calendars. They cast envious eyes across the sea at the various village festivals and historical sites still available for magical/cultural exploration. As well they should, but some of that envy flows the other way across the ocean too.

From outside the US, Thanksgiving looks fascinating… almost like a caribou migration seen from a BBC drone camera in a documentary or something. Millions of humans migrating across a landmass for identical rituals of food and togetherness. Like any historical festival, you can problematise it on dreary postcolonial terms but, like any historical festival, it is subject to semantic drift. What it represents now, as seen from across the sea, is a surprisingly invitational concept; that of gratitude.

None of the countries I have lived in have an event like it on their calendars -and no others come to mind (because I rarely think about Canada). England’s options are St George’s Day… which doesn’t really do anything, or maybe the Queen’s Birthday which (a) isn’t actually her birthday and (b) is a weird thing to celebrate anyway. Australia Day is mostly an exercise in wallowing in the classic Australian smugness around being born in a warm climate, celebrated by drinking outdoors while wearing shorts or less. New Zealand has Waitangi Day, which I’m fond of, but is a celebration of probably the empire’s most successful treaty with the indigenes it folded into its ermine skirt.

So it is in the spirit of benign envy that I say I am thankful for the others. That would be all you weirdos reading this.

I’ve just returned from a couple of days in the Welsh Borders, hanging out with the Scarlets. And it’s just so fucking nice to spend time in the real world among sympathetic worldviews. Visiting stone circles, getting intoxicated by fireplaces, talking about natural witches, how sorcery is definitively not a wisdom tradition, sharing experiences with the same spirits and generally setting all the worlds right.

Over supper in the village pub, discussion inevitably turned to the state of the planet and I offered something that I want to share here. As global war creeps ever closer, as bankrupt governments use every tool in their toolkit -right up to some decidedly space age mind control- to restrict liberty and unburden you of whatever little wealth you may have left, I want to re-emphasise my belief that ‘we are still gonna win’. Here’s how:

For totalitarianism, the only victory is total victory. Anything else is failure.

Every email must be captured. Everyone must think the same thoughts. Everyone must submit to the same medical regime. Why else would France call for full EU monitoring of the SWIFT payment system? It is the same totalitarian revenue grab. It was the same with the Victorian empire’s army of bureaucrats and unified train timetables and weights and measures. It was the same with all previous communist empires. Every previous archonic regime is an attempt to impose total victory, total imposition of a worldview.

Total victory is a surprisingly fragile, surprisingly tenuous goal. All it takes is one little village of indomitable Gauls and the whole thing collapses. It is also why archonic rhetoric is so petulant and divisive -as we see being whipped up among certain sectors of society (for very dangerous and non-transparent reasons): anything other than full compliance brands you an enemy.

This strikes me as the esoteric meaning behind Samael ‘sinning against the entirety’… the entirety is too big, dynamic, and chaotic to submit to a single worldview. This is the sin of the demiurge:

Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, “It is I who am God; there is none apart from me.” When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And this speech got up to incorruptibility; then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying, “You are mistaken, Samael” – which is, “god of the blind.”

You will also note how easily ‘incorruptibility’ -ie God- dismantled this error. By simply saying no, by saying “I do not believe this”.

So this is why I am thankful for the others. Our continued existence, especially on a distributed, individualised basis, guarantees that totalitarianism will always fail.

Thanks given.