Best. Ritual. Scheduling. EVER

[baxil]

Time to close the books on Pcon 2010, which means sharing the awesome and never-before-told Sunday evening anecdotes!

1: I chose that day to wear my Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt. Although I did not achieve spiritual enlightenment, I did procure the following unsolicited testimonial: "The 3-Wolf Moon T-shirt is only surpassed in manliness by

Comments

[tracerj]

When a Discordian ritual can get a little serious in the right way and make someone else's serious ritual a little silly in the right way, that is the most successful ritual EVER. Nicely told.

[baxil]

Thank you, and agreed! (The ritual leaders got quite a kick out of the story too.)

[athelind]

Ah, synchronicity.

I am wholly in line with Pop Culture As Ritual right now.

You see, when I was in the process of moving out, I realized that I needed to get my head together, and brought with me a box full of books to "feed my head" with "Things I KNOW, but need to LEARN". Books about philosophy, about General Semantics, about thinking and feeling and reaching into the spiritual life of the world.

I've picked them up, started them, and put them down again, each in turn. None of them were speaking to me.

thoughtsdriftby, as it turns out, has the entire run of Babylon 5 on DVD. Since I haven't watched the show since its original airing, I started plugging in a disc every now and then and watching it, a few episodes at a time.

And that spoke to me. Mr. Straczynski's "novel for television" has been telling me the story I need to hear right now -- it resonates with my life and the choices I have to make.

And that's why an anecdote about a pop-culture ritual about Destruction and Responsibility that culminates with the revelation that "I'm Here

[baxil]

I think that, in a subtly profound way a lot of people miss, Pop Culture magic is the most honest magic there is in our culture. All of the various reconstructionist and historical magical traditions draw from symbols that used to be central to the cultures in which those people (and magicians) were embedded, and now those symbols are basically arbitrary because we (as educated, suburban, technological, thoroughly modern beings) have only tangential connection to what they used to represent

[ext_30283]

So given my current run of LJ commenting and that I'm not sure my email on this topic made it past your spam filter due to an errant choice of keywords on my part, I'm going to be inconsistent and post it in this thread anyway and let you do what you wish with it.

Mainly, this brings up a question I may have asked before, but if so, the answer has been lost to the mists of time. Something I'm curious whether you've considered at all, given some of your other interests. In deference to the topic, I will present the idea in Jeopardy style, albeit slightly bogotified:

“I'll take Modern Ritual Equipment for 400, Alex.”

“Aleister.”

“Those are the same word.”

“Fine. This floor-mounted device has a pattern of glyphs that can be used in the creation and performance of predetermined, complex patterns composed of simple, energetic motions that must be performed precisely to obtain a desirable result.”

“What is a dancepad?”

[arethinn]

And a trick that can allegedly induce a short-term (1/2-hour) state of dissociation/magical perception: Put essential oil of clarey sage (specifically clarey sage, which "smells like cold wet tea bags") on your left wrist pulse point, under your left nostril, and on your left temple. (This sends the intuitive side of your brain into overdrive; he says you can get the same effect by putting frankincense oil in the same places on the right side of your body, which lulls the intellectual side into sleep.)

You're supposed to do the clary sage and frankincense at the same time.

Also, I have no idea why he's characterizing the smell of clary sage oil as "cold wet tea bags"; it's not how I'd describe it at all, although I can't think of what other words to use. To me it's one of those things which smells like itself and which you refer to when trying to describe other smells (such as, to use a more common example, peppermint).

[baxil]

Oh, thanks! Noted for future use. From your correction, can I assume you've tried this yourself? What were your experiences?

(Having no experience with clarey sage, I'll take your word on the smell.)

[arethinn]

From your correction, can I assume you've tried this yourself? What were your experiences?

No, I just think you misuderstood his instructions. I am passingly familiar with the setup he refers to as "To Gain the Sight" (it's something Gardnerian, but you ought to be able to find it on the internet) and it makes more sense to me that you would be wanting to turn on the right and turn off the left at the same time. I was pretty sure he said "and" and not "or" re: the oils.

Having no experience with clarey sage, I'll take your word on the smell.

Clary sage (no e) is common enough wherever you see essential oils in the first place that you shouldn't have trouble finding it if you want to take a sniff. (Apparently according to Wikipedia, others describe it as sweaty, spicy, or hay-like. Hay-like is the closest one, to my nose.)

[baxil]

> Clary sage (no e)

... Goddammit. I've fallen into an alternate universe again.

I swear that I specifically checked that first thing when I got home from the con, because I wasn't sure of the spelling, and when I googled it nothing fell out for "clary" and what few references I saw used the "e". Now, of course, when I google either one I get a full page of results for 'clary sage' including the Wikipedia article I never saw the first time around.

I could blame the and/or error on that too, but it's more likely that I simply misheard or misinterpreted during his talk.

[elynne]

heeeheheheheheee. Ah, Discordianism. ^.^ That's an excellent story, thank you!

[firestrike]

I woke up the next morning in a hotel room with two women and a hangover ... wearing a wedding ring.

And where, pray tell, does a hangover wear a wedding ring?

[baxil]

My dear sir, you misread me! I woke up in a hotel room with two women and an ellipsis.

Perhaps the confusion stems from that latter specimen being a rare and wily Hangover Ellipsis (Punctuatrix postmargaritavilli), which (as I discovered in conversation after staring somewhat rudely at its terminal dot) was married to a lovely semicolon from Lodi.