Articles Archives -

Where Your Witches Come From

J.R. the Nerd — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 09:40:29 +0000

I have a confession: I will devour any show, good or bad, with even a drop of magic in it. But after watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Satanic Christmas special on Netflix, I decided I needed to take a step back and look at the origins of magic and what happens when it grips the popular imagination.

It’s fair to say that magic is never written on a blank slate. When writers decide how to imagine their mages, they’re drawing on ideas that have not only a history of their own, but present-day consequences. Magic has been alive and well as an idea for a very long time, and its past has more than a few skeletons, especially in the West.

Like elsewhere in the world, Europe has always been rich with magical beliefs. Legends of powerful sorceresses like Circe and Medea predate Christianity, but magic was and still is a part of everyday life. Tales of untrustworthy fae, told to children at night for centuries, continue today in shows and books like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. But magic has always been more than just tales. Centuries ago, Westerners practiced their own lesser magics: agricultural rituals, amulets to protect from the evil eye, and in some places they relied on the counsel of druids, depicted dramatically in Amazon’s exciting Britannia about the Roman conquest of the British Isles.

Eventually Christianity made its way across Europe often via missionaries targeting the nobility. As monarchs violently expanded their domain, Christianity spread, trickling down to the rest of society and fusing itself with folk beliefs. The Christmas tree, for example, has pagan origins, rooted in Nordic legends featuring a pine tree. The pentagram and pentacle, ancient Sumerian symbols, made their appearance in Christian texts as a representation of the five senses, the five wounds of Christ and the five joys that Mary had of Jesus. Magic still remained, with the poor often holding on to their old traditions, using both Christian and non-Christian explanations for their spells, incantations, medicines and herbs. Even monks practiced “natural magic” recording the magical uses of herbs in folk traditions and making monasteries centers of healing.

The Arthurian legends capture this relationship well. While the legend of Arthur may have arisen from a 5th century Roman-affiliated military leader, it is the wizard Merlin who set the mold for what most of us in the West think of as “magic.” Some say he might have been a Welsh bard, others hypothesize that Merlin was a title, not his name. A merlin, according to these historians, was a wise man who knew magic and lived in the woods as a hermit… very much like a druid. Merlin is typically celebrated as a magical aid to Arthur’s Christian rulership. Perhaps the most disturbing re-imagining of the Arthurian legends is the BBC’s Merlin, in which a young Merlin happily aids a Christian monarch’s persecution of magical creatures, a proxy for the pre-existing culture of the British Isles subdued by Christian “civilization”.

Several centuries later, the persecution of magic became very real and very violent. By the 14th century, charges of “witchcraft” were at the forefront of a cultural war against European folk traditions and Romano-Persian science. Priests who practiced folk healing traditions were among those accused of witchcraft (one might see echoes of this in the plotline of Netflix’s Castlevania). By the 15th century, the European witch hunts were in full force, heralding 200 years of torture and murder. People of all stripes were accused of witchcraft, the witch hunts often inflected with sexism and personal conflicts, but in broad strokes it was an act of cultural genocide. Everything non-Christian was viewed as Satanic–an idea some people still hold today–and dehumanized to the point that it was acceptable to torture and kill people in the most brutal ways.

In 1486 Heinrich Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer Against Witches) used as sort of a witch hunting guide, heavily relied upon by the Inquisition. Kramer took existing traditions and perverted them into descriptions of Satanism. “It is always necessary,” Kramer insisted repeatedly: “for the demons to cooperate with sorcerers.” Magic, previously derived from nature, was increasingly thought of as demonic. Some of his assertions are lesser known (Kramer concluded from Egyptian fertility rites that male redheads were considered vampires with voracious sexual appetites that should be burned at the stake), but many popular conceptions of witchcraft derive from this document, making their way into stories by the Brothers’ Grimm and Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Stories of the Black Sabbath and the Malum Malus (the evil apple of knowledge) were most likely inventions of Christian extremists to rationalize the persecution of people practicing folk traditions. Today they are key story elements in TV witch stories like Salem and the new Netflix adaptation of Sabrina.

A far cry from the Archie spinoff comic of the 70s and the cute sitcom of the 90s, Sabrina was recently rebooted both as a graphic novel and as a Netflix show… depicting Sabrina as a Satanist. Throughout The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, nature is the domain of witches and Satan, while mining is the centerpiece of the mortal town and symbolic of its dominion over nature. In the Christmas special, Sabrina’s family celebrates the winter solstice and lights the Yule log to keep out evil spirits, while praying to Satan in the same breath. The problem here is that people who practiced the tradition of the Yule log were most certainly not Satanists, and I’m not sure but I doubt that Satanists would ever light a Yule log. Only the people responsible for the witch trials and the Inquisition would actually conflate these practices. And that’s where Netflix’s rendition of Sabrina (and the graphic novel upon which it’s based) becomes troubling.

As the show goes on, it’s revealed that witches are archaic and highly patriarchal, and Sabrina, the modernist half-mortal, is an iconoclast feminist icon. But what if the older power structures were actually more matriarchal than their Christian successors? In Ireland and Wales, it may have been female power among the Celts, especially as druids, that Christians found reprehensible. Moreover, historians view Christian accusations of witchcraft as an instrument of patriarchy: during the Salem witch trials, sixteen women were accused, thirteen of whom were past child-bearing age, largely in an attempt to seize their property and influence. That’s why it’s so troubling that Sabrina re-casts witches as agents of patriarchy instead of its victims.

In contrast, the Showtime period piece Penny Dreadful handled magic in a very different way. From the Renaissance through the Victorian era, there had been a strong interest in re-discovering ancient knowledge.The rediscovery of Greek philosophers brought about the Enlightenment and the advent of science, but with it came a parallel interest in re-discovering the Occult. In Penny Dreadful, the central character Vanessa Ives struggles with her own powers, and the ethics that surrounds them. The story is very much an example of the Victorian fascination with the occult, prominently featuring vampires, the devil and inner struggles with evil. But the show breaks from the mold of the Malleus Maleficarum and the genocide of the Inquisition in Vanessa’s backstory, where she studied under a hedge witch who practiced “natural magic”, modeling magic as a tool for good in the right hands, a key element of Vanessa’s inner struggle to use mystical powers for good or evil. In the magic of Penny Dreadful, Christian and non-Christian mythologies and moralities interact, instead of one subjugating the other.

Much like Vanessa Ives and perhaps the occult aficionados of the Enlightenment, today self-described neo-pagans, wiccans, and witches seek to reconnect with long-lost traditions. Some find Sabrina‘s latest incarnation all in good fun, but others are disurbed by the way that the victims of witch hunts and inquisitions of the past are now re-imagined as perpetrators. It’s only been a few decades since the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s and 90s, with three Wiccan high school students in Memphis, Arkansas being not only wrongfully conflated with Satanists, but convicted of murder with questionable evidence.

“They weren’t witches!” Tim Robbins’s character in the Hulu show Castle Rock insists as people in a bar tell ghost stories of dark deeds done in the past. “They were Satanists.” With a single line, Castle Rock is much more mindful of the distinctions, and to a lot of people that tiny bit of effort makes a huge difference.

The post Where Your Witches Come From appeared first on .

Four ways to play DnD with yourself

J.R. the Nerd — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 12:26:34 +0000

So what if you’re a bit of a loner, or maybe just no one’s free to play with you DnD right now? I’ve got you covered.

#1 The WikiHow Method

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a WikiHow article on how to play roleplaying games with yourself. It’s aimed primarily at six-year-olds however, so if you’re older than that you might want to move on to the other options.

#2 Play with an AI

Latitude has developed something called the “AI dungeon.” Type in actions to interact with a completely unpredictable text-based dungeonmaster in settings ranging from mystery to fantasy to cyberpunk. Unfortunately, it’s a bit like trying to play DnD by with your phone’s Google Assistant and the AI is more of a random word generator, which can sometimes break the immersion.

If the base AI isn’t working for you, one of the cooler features is community generated dungeons, like these:

#3 Play Beyond Zork: Coconut of Quendor

Alright, maybe it’s not DnD, but I swear, this game is just as fun as when I played it when I was twelve. Best of all, the folks at dosvideogames have put it online with an emulator and you can play it for free! And if you need a soundtrack, try this one from MC Frontalot:

#4 Play Baldur’s Gate 3

Okay, you gotta wait a while– early access isn’t even until September 30th–but Baldur’s Gate 3 will use DnD’s 5e rules and it looks like a blast. Developed by Larian Studios, some of you might recognize some game mechanics and features from Divinity: Original Sin 2, but that’s definitely not a bad thing. I’m crossing my fingers hoping that they’ll have a Dungeon Master mode like they did in Divinity so that you can play your own virtual campaigns with those pesky friends who are too busy or too far to meet in person!

If none of these work for you, you can always do what I usually do and ~~procrastinate by re-playing Skyrim for the 100th time~~ write fantasy novels and short stories. Whether you’ve got dice, a computer, or just some paper and a pen, adventure awaits!

The post Four ways to play DnD with yourself appeared first on .

Writing for Nerds

J.R. the Nerd — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 09:52:30 +0000

Writing does something great for the writer that’s hard to explain. It’s a reflective art, drawing on the writer’s instinctive knowledge of how the world works, how psychology works, to convey a feeling to the reader. You’re channeling the sum of your existence onto the page, and no matter how dark or surreal your creation may be, the act of creation connects you to your core. It’s a form of art therapy we all should practice. I do it because I love it.

I started writing for myself in elementary school, I’d just moved to a new neighborhood where being good at school was suddenly a liability. Even my father never understood why I would rather be reading a book that learning to fix cars or do carpentry. I’m the type of kid that would be sent off to special centers to do math, by High School I found myself slapping a buzzer at the Science Olympiad, competing with other students to answer questions about the chemical composition of plants.

I was definitely a nerd. And that, I think, is my best quality.

Sure, I was on the soccer team and I ran track. But as soon as I got off practice I ditched my teammates to play Dungeons and Dragons which, if you’ve never played it, is awesome. You create characters, entire worlds, set up epic challenges, and try to find a way out of them. It’s like watching an intense action adventure movie, but instead you and your friends are telling the story together. My little brother tagging along, my friends and I would spend hours in our basement playing that game.

Like writing, it is a great mental exercise. A place to fight the brutalities of authoritarianism, to work out our own approaches to doing the right thing. Because in real life, sometimes those answers aren’t so clear.

“You want bitches, I get you bitches. You want drugs I get you drugs.” I had helped Humphery, our resident high school gang member with a math lesson in seventh grade. He was grateful.

Humphery’s small kindnesses aside, high school was not a kind place. Thick chains held open bathroom doors, inside were shattered mirrors and stalls ripped apart by angry denizens. The denizens ripped each other apart as well—the threat of violence was constant. I sat next to Corey in Geography—his father was the teacher. They were both colossal dicks.

“Flames,” he would say the word with such vitriol he would get spit on my face. I have red hair. Sure, I got called Fire Crotch, Opie and a whole number of names, but somehow nothing compared to the rage and contempt in which Corey used the word flames. “Prove you’re not a faggot, Flames.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response. If I was gay, it shouldn’t matter.”

In reality, all of my unrequited high school loves were women. From fifth grade to sophomore year I pined for Lindsay, from tenth grade on I admired Cheryl from afar. But for the guys in my school, gayness was more about misogyny, not love.

At track practice, the guys loved to trade sex tales about the sluts they’d banged. I’m sure they were completely invented, but still I felt the need to say something.

“If you like a girl enough to sleep with her, you probably shouldn’t talk about her like that.”

“Are you a faggot?”

The slur isn’t just derogatory, it’s a category used to dehumanize, to legitimate violence, and school was fraught with it. I could (sometimes) hold my own in a fight, but many of my friends were not so lucky. Even in the hands of children, violence is a tool of social control. But where was this coming from? There’s a psychology experiment by Philip Zimbardo funded by the U.S. Navy that sheds light on issue. A mock prison where university students were invited to play roles as both guards and prisoners, The Stanford Prison Experiment lasted only six days before it had to be aborted. The forms of psychological torture and degradation the youths inflicted on each other– guards and prisoners alike– was too extreme. The cruelties children inflict on each other draw striking similarities to the same cruelties of prison inmates. Treated like animals to be controlled, we act the part, just like Zimbardo’s subjects.

Luckily I got out of the prison from time to time. Breakdancing at underground raves and hip hop shows with friends from other schools, midnight trips to the train yards with graffiti artists. Stigma only extends to the network of people who participate in it, and with billions of people on the planet that’s a really small number. It’s easy to find a community that fits you. But my favorite community was Dungeons and Dragons.

Disempowerment comes in a lot of forms: social stigmas placed by children, racism, sexism, political exclusion. It’s relentless, and it can break some people. You have to find a way to remind yourself that you are not the person who others say you are. Creating is the greatest link to the self. Playing these games, having adventures in your mind is an opportunity to explore hidden parts of who you really are: both the good and the bad. You can find yourself in these imaginary epic struggles against evil. You can become the hero of your own story…. but I started to wonder if maybe the hero is the problem.

Writing, according to convention, requires a protagonist. We relate to the protagonist at the expense of the other characters… and of course we revile the antagonist. What do we lose in this one-sidedness? Fantasy, unlike its cousin science fiction, has many pro-establishment elements. The characters are sent on a quest by a king, to save the princess, protect the monarchy. Hierarchy is revered despite the gritty historical injustices perpetrated by monarchies, despite the injustices perpetrated by feudal-like social orders still in practice today, used to subjugate people on the basis of race, sex, or class.

I’m definitely the beneficiary of white privilege, but having endured high school as a red head, I know what it’s like to be sexualized and insulted based upon my genetic make-up, the way I look, who I am, my ethnicity. I know what it’s like for my physical appearance be used as a part of my own dehumanization. Dark menaces like Tolkien’s horde of goblins and orcs are painted as inherently, genetically evil in an almost jingoistic narrative of war. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Lord of the Rings, but am I someone else’s orc? What do the religious extremists, burning people alive in KFC’s in the Middle East see when they see me? What do U.S. nationalists see when they see people of Middle Eastern descent? Listening to the racialized way U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (or even those spectators watching from home on CNN or FOX) talk about Middle Easterners makes me decidedly uncomfortable.

In times of war, racism makes the killing easier.

I was 17 when I was sent to the military recruiter– just four years in the military could pay for medical school, I was told. I didn’t join, but some of my classmates did. I think we forget that soldiers are children, still trying to make sense of the world. They want to be heroes. But so do their enemies.

Now as an adult, I find myself in a new prison. The world isn’t the way I want it to be, and I feel powerless in this newfound dystopia. We all want to be the protagonist of our own story, but someone else at the top is shaping what it means to be “good” what it means to be the hero. It’s a trap I don’t know the way out of: the power don’t just have arms and money at their disposal: they have the hearts and minds of the people. We crave the acceptance of our peers, and that is how we are controlled. With this in mind, I started to write again. I began a fantasy series titled Shadowtales.

I call upon those memories of my childhood, those imperfect characters that my little brother, my friends and I created, having adventures together. We never got the chance to finish those stories—these psychological exercises are unfinished. I don’t know the answer to these problems of power and its abuse, but maybe Lade the thief and his swashbuckling companions can help figure it out for me.

The post Writing for Nerds appeared first on .