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“What do we talk about when we talk about love?"
For me, examining how language is used and how different people perceive reality isn’t a way of evading the consequences of my actions, or just a fun parlour game. It’s a way of *extending* my consciousness of reality (including the consequences of my actions) and a way of increasing my understanding of other people. It plays an important part in my attempts to act ethically, my attempts to treat others right.
As an example of this: when I used the word “love” in my post, I meant to refer only to the feelings of affection and sexual attraction that we call by that name. But now I know that when you hear the word “love”, the concept that you think of involves not only feelings of affection or sexual attraction but also actions that are informed by those feelings.
...Bertie casts a love spell. His statement of intent: “that Celia should fancy me”. In other words, he desires to influence the feelings of Celia.
Bertie mentions to Charlie (a friend and work-mate) that he’s after casting a love spell. Charlie thinks “Bertie has attempted to determine Celia’s actions.” He perceives this as an attempt to restrict Celia’s free will, and gets (understandably) cross.
Charlie scolds Bertie, and compares him to a Neanderthal rapist, among other things. Bertie feels hurt and angry, and becomes defensive. Charlie and Bertie’s friendship is severely damaged; their work relationship comes under strain.
…I believe that a concern with understanding where other people are coming from is vital to relating to others intelligently and ethically.
The story about my former colleague and her fiancé was intended as an illustration of that point, not as an argument that “In some cultures, love spells are considered—with justification—socially acceptable.” In the anecdote, a single phrase was being used by two different people to refer to two different things, resulting in confusion, anger, and undeserved moral denouncement. When my colleague heard “you’ve cast a spell over me” she thought of witchcraft; her fiancé (I imagine) had intended a “mundane” interpretation of the phrase. But even putting aside “mundane” meanings, people mean many different things when they use words such as “witchcraft”, “magic”, “spell”, etc. What do we talk about when we talk about magic?
For me, the analogy between love spells and rape drugs, hypothetical ray guns, or caveman violence does not hold, for at least two reasons.
1. The way I understand it, the distinction between the magical way of perceiving and acting in the world, and—say—the scientific way of perceiving and acting in the world, is that the scientific model considers things in terms of linear cause-and-effect, while the magical model considers things in terms of all-over-at-once pattern and synchronicity. Thinking of a love spell in terms of a chemical or mechanical soporific is missing the point, from my perspective. (I should note that “my perspective” here is influenced, to say the least, by Ramsey Dukes’s account of magic in his book SSOTBME.) A sigil or talisman “goes with” the desired material end-result, rather than causing or “forcing” it. Given this definition of magic, anything that could be understood in terms of crudely “forcing” is not magic.
Bertie sigilizes “Celia having wonderful anal sex with me regularly”. Here, obviously, he’s not just trying to influence Celia’s feelings for him; he’s trying to influence her actions. So is this unethical?
To edge towards a “cause-and-effect” account of magic, one way sorcery might work is by invisibly inducing a set of circumstances that are conducive to the sigilized objective coming about. In the weeks after he performed the ritual, Bertie finds himself relaxed, energised, charming. The couple of times he meets Celia, he doesn’t get into an argument with her—he finds that he’s being more sensitive and aware of her needs and feelings. Meanwhile, a number of little incidents have been reminding Celia of the good times she had with Bertie before their "temporary separation": a business meeting in a hotel brings back a happy weekend she spent with Bertie in the same hotel last year; “Unchained Melody”, their song, seems to be playing on the car radio all the time; a big spider she finds in her bath reminds her of Bertie’s comical arachnophobia, and the many times she had to comfort and calm him when he woke up in the middle of the night, screaming “Sticky cobwebs! The eyes! Oh God!” Celia had had her eye on a young man, a new employee, for the past few weeks, but after a bizarre near-accident, in which a taxi she was sharing with this young man was struck by a BMW that came out of nowhere, she had an opportunity to glimpse a nasty side of the fellow’s personality: though no one was hurt, and little damage was caused to the cars, the young man let loose a number of foul racial slurs at the driver of the BMW—a black Nigerian—and the racist diatribe continued all the while the taxi drove back to their office. Celia was glad she’d had a chance to see this side of the new employee before she’d become involved with him…
…You get the idea. In the end, Celia freely chooses to invite Bertie back to her bed.
By my standards, while Bertie may be preoccupied with sex, he has done nothing that deserves being struck with impotence, loneliness, or even a mild scolding.
2. As you’ve probably gathered, my ethical sensibility is primarily concerned with consequences. I recoil at the implication that a magican who casts a love spell is similar to man who uses a rape drug, because the “mundane”-world consequences are so very different.
I’ve never cast a love spell on someone, and have no intention of doing so in the foreseeable future, and I may well be generalising my own taste to that of other people, but I imagine that when someone casts a love spell their intended result is neither a semi-conscious “object” nor, for that matter, a zombified robot that’s screaming “No!” somewhere deep inside.
I feel a little embarrassed at playing the “personal experience” card, but: I have had to deal with a “stalker” type situation, and it was—in the end, when my “admirer” was in my flat and refusing to leave—upsetting and scary. I may also have been the target of a “love spell” of some kind, I think, if I’m not fooling myself out of vanity or paranoia. The two experiences were nothing like each other, for me.
I definitely do not wish to suggest that all that falls under the name “love spell” is harmless and ethical. But I do suggest that when we’re talking about stuff that cannot be seen, heard, or felt – possible crimes that involve invisible weapons (magic) – invisible property (my free will) – an invisible world that many people allege does not even exist – given all of this, when we’re attempting to judge whether we’re acting ethically, let’s look at what actually results from our actions. And by all means, let’s look as closely as we can, doing our best to make sure we’re not evading the consequences of our actions—or our words.
Shit, I’m starting to sound like Jerry Springer. My apologies.
Over to you. |
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