Wiccans--not the
original "Old Ones" but the
modern witches--
share a delusion amongst themselves, that they are
skilled in what I like to call
Universal C.
I've never met anybody
actually skilled in Universal C, but I'm sure its
possible. Universal C is the
code that the
Universe and all its
servers are programmed in. Sane people
understand that they do not know this language; therefore they
attempt to operate their
workstations by way of the
proper interface, not by
coding. Coding, these
sane wonders know, doesn't work if you don't know the
language. Wiccans....well, they haven't
got that far yet.
A healthy
person, when they wish to
cause an effect, will always attempt to
perform the action that should theoretically cause the desired effect. If they
want to be
dressed, they put on
clothes. If they want to be
full of food, they
eat. Don't get me
wrong; even Wiccans can do
that much. But what happens when a person wants to do something that is
impossible to do
directly, like say,
making it rain?
Indirect
actions, like
rain-dances or whatever else you might do to try your hand at
rain-causation, are
analogous in my book to
Universal hacking. You're doing something you know the
servers can do, you just don't have
rights to the
executable and you're trying to
hack your way around that. I respect that, whatever way you'd go about it. Nobody
stuck us on this Earth and told us we
couldn't at least try to become
superusers.
And then there are the
Wiccans, who with one
stupid exception do the same things as
all the other hackers and script-kiddies. They add an
addendum to their attempts at
hacking, conveniently forgetting that you can't just
say something and make it so--that's what
gods do, not people--and, as far as I can tell, they simply
pretend that their little spoken "
An' it harm none" is just as good as the Universal C that the
gods speak in. Well, it isn't.
Stop and think about it. My
pipe breaks; I'm going to call the
plumber. So before I pick up the phone, I look at
my ceiling and I say reverently, "
An' it not cost me money." Now, of course, no-one that I call will
answer the phone unless the
service is going to be
free, right? Er...right?
Two major points here: One, what you probably call
magick and I call
indirect action works on one
principle: The Will. The Will is the
known part of the human soul that, unlike our
ever-conflicted emotions and thoughts,
only goes one way. If you can manage to
point the will, it flat
goes that way. If you aren't
strong enough to point it, if you stay
conflicted and
whiny about it, the
Will is not yours to control. If you put the Will
in the same room as a
wussy addendum, well, it LEAVES. And the poor Wiccan has just
sabotaged hir own
ritual--sHe might as well have just
laid in bed and wished.
Two, if you *think* you
want rain, but you can't handle the thought of it
possibly ruining a
farmer's crop or a
little girl's birthday party, you don't want rain, now, do you? Not enough to be
hacking with the Big Servers. No, if you aren't even
that sure, you got no business fucking with the
Universe, the
weather, or
magick, for that matter.
I don't
know Universal C. But at least I don't wistfully
mumble wasted requests over the LAN. At least I don't
insist on believing that I can
attach a disclaimer to an action, and poof! it will be
filtered through the Universal Server's
known set of functions for the term "Harm"...then the
server will run a
time-forwarding simulation to determine whether my
action will
cause harm...somehow it knows
when to stop...and if it finds something that I would probably call
Harmful, it will immediately know to
cancel my last request. The Universe doesn't
babysit, silly. If you want to
play gods (which is what magick is all about), you'd better be more
sure of yourself than that.