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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in pop culture paganism
Political pop culture power or how to counteract the pop culture power of Trump

Last March, I wrote about the pop culture magic of Donald Trump and how he was trumping American politics. When Trump won the election, I wasn't surprised. He had the momentum of emotion as well as his celebrity status behind him and that was enough to push him toward victory. 

The question that we currently face is: What now? What do we do now that Trump is in office for the next 4 years?

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Posted by on in Studies Blogs
How to unlock hidden universes

I recently visited Disneyland for five days. During those 5 days all I did was go on rides, and experience the magic and wonder of Disney. It was a liminal experience. I wasn't engaged in my usual routine and in some ways it very much felt like I had entered a pocket universe. When my trip was over it took me several days to get back into my regular routine.

If you've ever attended a Pagan conference or festival, you've undoubtedly had a similar experience. Once you go into the conference, you enter a different space and you encounter a difference sense of time. It is a space and time that is sacred in its own way, created by the intentional consciousness of the people participating in that space, similar to a ritual, but different as well, because you participating in this group consciousness, but it may or may not have required an overt ritual to occur.

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Symmetry and Magic: an example of a pop culture magic rule

I've been rereading The Dresden Files lately and as I've been reading the books I've been paying attention to the rules of magic that are part of that pop culture magic universe. When you practice pop culture magic, its important to pay close attention to the rules of magic within the given pop culture you're working with because those rules apply to the pop culture characters you work with and how they'll help you magically. It may seem odd that different pop culture universes have different rules of magic, or that those rules should even matter.

However they do matter because you're working in a specific context generated in part by the pop culture you work with. And if you want the aid of the characters you work with, you need to respect the context that is part of the mythology you're working in. Let me share an example to illustrate this.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
An Accidental Pop Culture Beltane

While I had no plans to incorporate pop culture magick into my Beltane celebrations this year, the powers that be had other plans.  Apparently, when you get a group of Seattle Pagans together and ask them how to come up with a way to clear blocks to abundance and build foundations of prosperity what they come up with is magickal scrubbing bubbles and the nanobots from Big Hero Six.  How you ask?  Well, let me tell you.

For those of you who don’t know, I am part of a duo of facilitators that puts on public rituals in Seattle.  We call ourselves Illustris and do most of our rituals at Edge of the Circle Books near the University of Washington.  Instead of having a large team performing scripted rituals, we co-create our ritual with the participants just minutes before performing it.  This means we never really know what our rituals are going to look like until we’re in the middle of them.  It’s quite exciting and our attendees come up amazing things sometimes. 

For each ritual we establish a magickal purpose for the working to be designed.  This time around we had two: 1) working with the energies of Mercury retrograde to remove blocks to wealth and abundance (whatever that looked like for each participant), and 2) building a sturdy foundation to grow true prosperity.  My brain was totally fogged by allergy medicine, so I was utterly dependent on attendees coming up with good ideas because I had nothing.  I looked around the room and saw one of our regulars snort and say, “Well, the image that immediately comes to mind is a foaming toilet cleaner bomb.  It gets rid of anything.”  Immediately everyone in the room smiled and knew exactly what she was talking about.  Oh yes, we would clear energetic blocks with magickal scrubbing bubbles!  Whoever said commercials were useless?  They get stuck in our heads so well that they make shockingly good common imagery and vocabulary.  We decided we would collectively create an energy ball that we would essentially detonate in the middle of the group to foam away blocking energies.  It worked shockingly well.

For the second part of the ritual one of our new participants suggested using the energetic equivalent of the nanobots in Big Hero Six to build a foundation for prosperity.  I loved the idea and about half the room immediately nodded their heads in agreement.  The other half of the room went, “What’s Big Hero Six and what do the nanobots do in it?”  So, we spent a few minutes explaining the reference and got sidetracked talking about carbon nanotubes (it was awesome!).  Then a gal brought up the issue that she’d only seen nanobots portrayed negatively in sci-fi and asked for an example of nanobots doing something positive.  Thankfully she was a Doctor Who fan so all I had to say was, “just this once Rose Tyler, just this once everybody lives,” and we were good to go.  (If you have no idea what that means watch the episodes “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances” from the 2005 run of Doctor Who - some of the best television ever made. This clip shows the scene:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhklrve5xmw

The whole situation really highlighted one of the most common problems in doing group pop culture magick - common culture.  People of different demographics have different things in their pop culture baskets.  Hell, people of the exact same demographic are likely to have different things in their lexicons.  We all like different things and thus remember and attach importance to different bits and pieces of pop culture.  The more diverse a group of people is the less likely they are to have a lot of common pop culture (though there’s almost always something there - think blockbuster fandoms like Star Wars or Mad Max).  I don’t generally bring pop culture magick into big public rituals for just this reason, but this time it happened organically and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the results.  A little explanation to make sure we were all on the same page and we created the common imagery we need to make the magick work.

Through no intention of my own, I ended up having a Beltane ritual that was filled to the brim with pop culture magick.  The ubiquity of commercials gave us our first working and a combination of Disney and Doctor Who gave us our second working.  What a great time to be a pop culture practitioner!

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Thank you for sharing. I got the scrubbing bubbles reference and I have both the Big Hero 6 DVD and the Manga so I got that refer
  • Emily Carlin
    Emily Carlin says #
    We did have a lot of fun Unfortunately, since our rituals are created on the spot there's no script to share. I would if I could

Posted by on in Studies Blogs
How pop culture predicts the future

I've always been fascinated in the predictive aspects of pop culture. Recently I watched the latest season of House of Cards and found that it eerily predicted some of what was happening in the current political climate. Even the actors of the show noticed those same parallels. Such predictive aspects aren't limited to the latest T.V. shows. Jules Verne wrote about submarines before the first one was invented. In various fiction books, games, and shows you end up finding that pop culture is predictive of something that shows up in our lives down the line.

I think that what pop culture really does is orient the consciousness of people toward manifesting what it shows. So it's not even so much of a predictive function so much as it plants a seed in your mind and if that seed is planted in many many minds than it makes an imprint on the superconsciousness of humanity and from there finds its way to someone who can create it.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I enjoy superhero movies. I enjoyed the recent Batman vs. Superman movie and I'm looking forward to X-men Apocalypse and Captain
  • Taylor Ellwood
    Taylor Ellwood says #
    Interesting perspective. Certainly one wonders what would happen if we had such people in our world.
4 Reasons to work with Villains in Pop Culture Magic

Sometimes, with pop culture magic, you want to work with the bad guy, the villain, or the monster. The reasons why can vary from person to person, but I think one reason that stands out to me is that the villain is a character people relate to. S/he is flawed and shows those flaws more readily than the hero might. At the same time, there villain rarely thinks of him/herself as an actual villain. S/he has reasons for taking action and those reasons are sometimes quite valid. The problem is that the action is what makes the character villainous because it isn't the right action (at least according to the mores of society). Working with a villain can be very effective because the villain isn't bound to societal standards and may come up with some creative solutions (as Emily Carlin shares in a post she wrote on the same topic).

Recently Vincent Piazza wrote a post about horror magic, where he explores the history of horror film. One point he makes is that horror films show the ills of society and what happens if we don't learn to work with the shadow within us. That's wise advice and the second reason to work with villains because sometimes what we learn from them is something about ourselves and how to avoid making the mistakes the villain has made. Of course, if we do choose to work with a villain or a monster, some caution is warranted in how we work with them, but in all honesty the same cautions apply to working with any pop culture character.

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How to Build a Pop Culture Magic System part 4

In part onetwo, and three of this series I covered how spaces, characters, and symbols could be used to create a pop culture magic system. In this part of the series, we'll explore the role of pop culture tools and how they can enhance your pop culture magic workings. One of the benefits of pop culture is that you have a plethora of tools you can draw upon. These tools don't need to be conventional magical tools either, but can be specific to the pop culture you are working with, and you'll usually find that you can draw some type of correspondence between a traditional tool and a pop culture tool, though you may also find it more interesting to come up with your own specific purposes for using a tool as it relates to the pop culture you are working with.

With your given pop culture, you can usually find pop culture tools in toy stores, comic book stores, as well as conventions. And if you can't find it in those places, you can usually either find someone making and selling pop culture tools for your fandom, or you can get crafty and make your own tools. For example if you work with Dr. Who, you can easily order a sonic screw driver or create your own variant and have that stand in as a wand. In the case of Batman, you might have multiple gadgets you utilize for various purposes. Part of this comes down to your creativity and your ability to recognize if there is an actual magical purpose for the tool. For example, I might use the batarang as an athame or sword. Alternately if I don't want to rely on a traditional correspondence, I still need to determine what purpose the Batarang would serve as a magical tool in my pop culture magic system. If the tool has no purpose, it becomes a distraction to the actual work.

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