incantantions, or writing from the spirit(s)
by mar
Growing in a atheist family in a christian country is both a blessing and a curse. Sure I have never been through the motions of baptism, mass, communion, and any expectations regarding this spirituality. The absolute contempt of my mother’s mother, her mother and the mother of her mother, for christianity is so deeply entrenched that I cannot help but believe one or more of our ancestors may have died by fire, as customary in the case of witches. But unfortunately, along with this type of position regarding the catholic church, any type of spirituality was inevitably lost specially amongst political movements of gnostic communism, whose concern for the integrity of all living things does not account for any type of life touched by any type of magic.
I wonder, how can one reconnect with a spiritual conscience that one does not know?
Searching for any residues of magic in the “western world” is a cursed task, as the ghosts of all powers rest on top of its voice like stones. But context is important when remapping the steps of our ancestors, and history holds many clues and breaches where some light passes. Bare with me
In the iberic peninsulae many different beliefs and practices communed in peace for millennia, and the passing of many civilizations and societies sedimented in a rich tapestry of knowledges and rituals, many forms of magic and a vast imaginary that travelled from mythology to cosmology in the blink of an eye. The knowledge of plants, stones, planets and stars was sacred, astrology and divination were blessings. Alchemy was illumination: the knowledge of mutation and change, the passing of one state to another, the repetition of difference, the instability of being and becoming, the (in)conscience of cosmic relations that transform every moment into another one always different and same. Existence was fluid, as many bodies were, and subjectivity was dissolved with the faint touch of spiritual or cosmic beings.
The christian colonisation undertaken firstly by the romans, then by the Church as Institution, was relentless in the destruction and erasure of all magic. Herbalism, divination, cults of the natural, even astrology (a practice that was brought to Iberia by the Arabs, but which was developed by the Ancient Egyptians) were prohibited, persecuted and punished. You can kill a practice, but you cannot kill an ideia, and the Church’s insidious designs knew this well: in the case of beliefs, as in the cult to ancestries or to cherished/magical figures from the communities, stories of metamorphosis of transubstantiation, all were taken apart and remounted in an extended process of appropriation, resignification and expropriation for the Church’s devices. While witches burned, their magical ancestors became Saints and holy figures, and their spells and alchemies became miracles that attested to the existence of this God that was to, alone, take the the place of all beliefs related to earth and spirit. This are some examples of what I would call (auto)colonisation processes, which are based on the imposition of cultural, social and political norms to people who were previously free to practice their spiritualities, cult their ancestors, and live with and within the lands and all their inhabitants. These forms of violence are both prior and contemporary to the processes of overseas colonisation, as in many ways the european catholic-feudal territory was a lab where a lot of these processes where created, rehearsed and experimented.
This historical erasure of multiple ancestralities and knowledges that crossed the territory played a big part in the development of the West’s colonial project, as it also jumpstarted the erosion of community and connection, of sensibilities and attunements with nature, of expansion through difference. The loss of magical belief, the process of disenchantment, equates with the loss of the conscience of being a part, of being in the world. We now live to work, produce, consume, dispose, and only some type of magical thought can bring us back from the torpor of this un-existence.
Slowly, I started picking up a pace. Weekly rituals for the most relevant entities, poems/spells/ songs that have smells and colours, candles and little fires, essences for the sun, Sappho’s poem to Venus. I continue learning, through books and friends, all the magic that can be contained in a card, in a word, in a gift. I translate hymns to my mother-tongue in which magic feels so much more like poetry, I collect songs that sound like enchantments and stories that weave different narratives with more-than-bodily sensitivities. To decolonize is also to rescue our spiritualities, to reclaim our ancestries, not leaving any stone unturned.
