I Haven't Seen Dancing Pumpkin Guy ONCE This Year, Are You Guys Okay?

the wicked movie teaches important moral lessons like "be bisexual in college" and "don't trust politicians" and "if you push someone who's in a wheelchair without their permission, someone might throw a bench at your head with their mind"

small things you can add to your worship/work with lady hestia

try to look through your wardrobe pretty often, take out the pieces you don't love, free up the space for things that actually make you feel good, cozy & comfortable

protect your hair when outside, i know when talking about lady hestia it's usually about veiling and covering, but veiling is also a protection for you hair, from wind & sun damage, if not veiling, protective hairstyles,

don't do your hair in a bad mood, doing your hair can be stressful even without additional factors, taking care of yourself is a necessity, but it can be a pleasant necessity

if you find yourself being bored, instead of being on your phone, try to find a comfortable position, with you back & neck supported, and simply relax, let yourself be bored, cause most of the time it's not boredom, you're just overwhelmed,

keep a journal dedicated for her, digital or physical, make moodboards, write prayers and poetry, write your questions and write about your day

think of your space as yours, don't think of the future tenants. decorate, furnish, put this painting on the wall, both you and lady hestia want this place to be yours

have more dimmed, warm lights around you, they are far more relaxing. at night they ease you for sleep, and in the morning they help you ease in the day, also they feel far more cozy than overhead lights

dedicate some space on your desk to her, even if it's going to be just a candle, she is here to remind you about rest and ease your work

find a special nook in your space that will be dedicated to your time with lady hestia, somewhere you can sit and have a nice warm cup of tea, where you can have a snack while watching a cozy movie, where you can comfortably lounge

Ok but Camila’s talk with Luz in For the Future, and Eda’s talk with her in Separate Tides?

They’re pretty similar. In that both mothers are telling Luz

“I don’t give a shit that you messed up, I love you a lot”

Hell, the scenes have similar lighting!

But then again, Camila’s talk also parallels the talk at the end of O Titan Where Art Thou, in that it also ends with the beginning of Stringbean’s creation.

The cruelty of racist white men.

My Personal “Pillars of Hellenic Polytheism”

You may have seen or heard of the “7 Pillars of Hellenism”. The creator of these pillars, Timothy Jay Alexander, is known to be extremely homophobic and bigoted, and therefore these pillars aren’t seen in a positive light by many Hellenic Polytheists, including myself.

That being said, personally, I like to have sort of guidelines to follow, and Alexander isn’t the only one to have created “moral pillars”. So I took inspiration from multiple sources, including @/hyakinthou-naos in one of their recent posts, to make my own pillars. These are things that are important to me, personally, and they may differ from yours if you have some. I chose to have 5 pillars as it is a number associated with Lady Aphrodite, and the pillars will be listed in alphabetical order.

Hekousios- Ε´κουσίος

ἑκούσιος translates to “free will” or “voluntary”. To me, this means to do things at your own pace, and to always have worship be a personal choice, not something put on someone.

Kharis - Χάρις

Kharis can be translated to “grace, kindness, goodwill, elegance, favour, joy, charity, beauty”, “reciprocity”, “grace, favor, goodwill”, or a reciprocal relationship with the Gods. To me, this means to not ask for things without offering something in return, to not take advantage of gifts from the Gods.

Periergia - Περιέργεια

Periergia translates to curiosity and is often associated with devotion to researching something. For me, this means to always be curious, open to new ideas, and never stop learning new things. It also means to never claim that I know everything, and be willing to research things I don’t know much about.

Symmakhia - Σύμμαχία

Symmakhia translates to “allyship”. It also happens to be an epithet of Lady Aphrodite! It is usually used in the context of military and war, but here, I am using this word in the context of allyship and support towards marginalized groups. Allyship is active, and so to me, this pillar means to show active support to those that are a part of marginalized or minority communities.

Xenia - Ξενία

Xenia is the concept of guest-friendship or hospitality. For me, this means kindness and hospitality towards those from all walks of life and lived experiences, as long as it is safe to do so.

The Science of Magick: Implicate Order

“What is, is always a totality of ensembles, all present together, in an orderly series of stages of enfoldment and unfoldment, which intermingle and interpenetrate each other in principle throughout the whole of space.” David Bohm

Spooky Action at a Distance

In the 80s, theoretical physicists first observed the paradoxical behavior of subatomic particles known as quantum entanglement, or “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein called it.  This phenomenon has been observed whereby the properties (quantum states) of a set of particles will never be independent of each other, regardless of distance, after they have interacted. This observation would be like taking a set of twins, dying one’s hair black, and then discovering that regardless of where the twins were located, the other’s hair turned black instantaneously as well. Spooky! This property of non-locality could not be explained by the current theory of quantum mechanics, so many physicists proposed their own respective models to explain the observations.

The theory of implicate order, and its counterpart explicate order, were detailed by physicist David Bohm in his book Wholeness and Implicate Order in 1980. Implicate order theory provides a model of the universe as an “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders" in which space and time as we observe them are merely derivatives (unfolded, explicate order) of the deeper reality. It sounds complex, but Bohm provides an illustrative example:

Imagine a fish in a tank with two separate cameras recording from two separate angles and projecting onto two separate screens. Now imagine you can only see the tv screens and not the actual fish; two 2D models (explicate orders) of a 3D objective reality (implicate order). By observing only the 2D models, one can discern that the “two” fish are somehow interrelated: when the fish on screen A moves 90 degrees, so does the fish on screen B, etc. It is not that one screen is causing the changes on the other screen, just that all of the image content on one screen correlates with the other.

If we scale up the fish example to our observed universe, we might say that our 3D world defined by space and time is merely a lower dimensional model of a higher dimensional reality ie. the implicate order. What if the twins were never really twins? The “two” particles we compare in the quantum entanglement experiments may simply be an artifact of how our current explicate reality has temporarily unfolded, leaving us looking at one deeper reality on two screens.

The Quantum Observer Effect

Along with observations regarding quantum entanglement came other observations about… well… observation itself. The classic example of this is the double-slit experiment, in which single photons are allowed to pass through two parallel slits in a screen and the resulting pattern formed is recorded. This experiment is best known for its conclusion of the particle-wave duality of light:

“Sending particles through a double-slit apparatus one at a time results in single particles appearing on the screen, as expected. Remarkably, however, an interference pattern emerges when these particles are allowed to build up one by one.” The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene

When behaving as waves, single photons simultaneously pass through both both slits and then meet again (interfere) at the other side of the barrier. 

In one variation of this experiment, conducted by the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1998, researchers built a tiny detector which was able to observe which one of the two slits the particle went through. And here’s where things get interesting for us (my emphasis added)…

“Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it’s clear it didn’t go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being “forced” to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings.”  Source 

By observing the photons as they pass through the two slits, we are forcing the collapse of the wave function itself, turning a wave of probability into a point of certainty.

Holonomic Brain Theory

When we combine David Bohm’s Implicate Order and the nature of wave interference patterns, we come to Holonomic Brain theory of quantum consciousness developed in collaboration between Bohm and neuroscientist Karl Pribram. As opposed to Conscious Mental Field theory, which I discussed in my previous Science of Magick post here, Holonomic Brain theory models the brain as a holographic storage network. In this framework, the non-locality of memory is viewed as an inherent property of the system, since all parts of a hologram contain the whole of the stored information.

“Holography relies upon wave interference. If two wavelengths of light are of differing frequencies, they will interfere with each other and create a pattern… The hologram illustrates how “information about the entire holographed scene is enfolded into every part of the film.” It resembles the Implicate Order in the sense that every point on the film is “completely determined by the overall configuration of the interference patterns.” Even a tiny chunk of the holographic film will reveal the unfolded form of an entire three-dimensional object. Source

In essence, this theory proposes that the totality of human consciousness is enfolded into a neural hologram, making it a sub-implicate order of reality.  In fact, Bohm posits that there are infinite sub- and super-implicate orders, where higher orders organize lower orders and are also influenced by them. 

To summarize the main conclusions under these frameworks thus far:

1. Implicate Order is a hidden, all-encompassing, higher-dimensional reality which we observe only through a lower-dimensional projection (explicate order) dependent on space and time.

2. Events that are observed can be changed by the act of observation. In choosing to observe one possible quantum state, the observer defines it as such. (It’s our choices, Harry….)

3. Consciousness exists as a sub-implicate order, which is organized by and exerts influence on super-implicate orders.

Conclusions for Chaotes

Implicate Order provides a mechanism for magick. The basic definition of magick within the Chaos paradigm is the act of imposing one’s will on reality, ie. using your mind to create change in the world around you. Sorcery is performed using visualization techniques to focus the subconscious mind on a desired outcome, such as in Austin Osman Spare’s sigil methods. The practitioner, in an altered state of consciousness, visualizes the reality they desire and manifests it into reality.  Using the frameworks we have discussed, we can translate this definition into the following statement: Magick is the practice of defining a certain state of reality by encoding observational information within the sub-implicate order of consciousness which is then decoded within the Implicate Order and manifested in the explicate order of our observed reality.

It is interesting to note that David Bohm himself experienced a paradigm shift during his career. The results from his own work lead Bohm down a rabbit hole into the realms of spiritualism and philosophy, which drew criticism from his contemporaries regarding his reputation as a physicist. However, as a chemist and a chaos witch, I find his embrace of the overlap between hard-science and metaphysics relatable and inspiring.

“Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter… Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.” David Bohm

Abolish Tesla.