I originally posted this on my Tumblr, but after my last post where I hit on magick a little bit, I wanted to go ahead and copy it over to here.
I've been an agnostic for a little under a year now. I really love the ideological freedom that I have now, but I have also really felt the lack of a spiritual practice. So, I've been exploring atheopaganism. Atheopaganism (at least the version defined by Mark Green) is exactly what it sounds like - I hold a scientific materialist view of the world, but also practice religious rituals for the mental health benefits. I wanted to talk a little bit about how I view magick through a skeptical lens.
Knowing about a cognitive bias does not stop it from working. Even knowing that you are currently being affected by a cognitive bias does not stop it from working.
Not only do you have to recognize that you're being affected by a cognitive bias, you have to actively correct your thinking against it. In cases like propaganda, or the recency bias, or confirmation bias, this is a huge inconvenience.
But with the placebo effect, we can exploit this.
Consider the following scenario: You want to start working out. But after years of trying and failing to adopt the habit, with more than a little internalized fatphobia mixed in, the mere thought of exercising fills you with dread, guilt, and shame. You fully understand this at a rational level. But that alone does not make the feelings go away.
This is the ideal situation to exploit the placebo effect through a magickal working. If we want to alter our feelings or perceptions, all we need to do is devise some kind of ritual that feels like it should help. That will be enough to trigger the placebo effect - and because You Are Not Immune to Propaganda, it will work even if you don't really believe in it! Here is a ritual I devised for the exact purpose described above.
Remember that we're dealing entirely with feelings, attitudes, and states of mind here. The placebo effect won't cure cancer or anything, obviously. But it is extremely powerful as a therapeutic measure! The deeper, more primal parts of you that respond best to physical, tangible action. Think of this as a way for you, a conscious thinking human, to tell the lizard part of your brain what's what.
(You might notice the names of a few of my invented deities in there - having them as symbolic, metaphorical entities is super useful for me. I might go into more detail about that in another post!)
Mr. Rogers once said that “anything mentionable is manageable, and anything human is mentionable.” Or, to paraphrase, “being able to talk about a thing gives you power over it.” So, if you want more control over yourself and your life, you want a practice that helps you talk about them. Enter divination.
Divination, for me, is about introspection. Take tarot, for instance. In a tarot reading, you randomly assign symbols and concepts to different aspects of your life, and then find a way to make sense of that random spread. This forces you to introspect. Here's a reading that I took in the days leading up to coming out to my parents:
The spread here is Situation | Action | Outcome. My interpretation was that the inverted Ace of Cups showed how my gender dysphoria had been draining all the life out of me for years. The Action card, the Eight of Swords, showed how this situation had been caused by my inability to realize I was trans. And the Outcome card, the Nine of Swords, was a reminder that if I didn't change something, nothing would get better for me.
When I felt anxious and scared about coming out to my parents, looking back on this reading reminded me why I needed to do it, which gave me the strength to go through with it. Anything mentionable is manageable.
I'll also briefly mention that astrology can work the same way for a lot of people. Your natal chart is like a big, complicated tarot spread for your entire life. (And there are actually astrological correspondences built into the most common tarot systems as well!)
Definitely check out the Placebo Magick podcast, linked below - it was my source for developing an anti-procrastination spell, and it also introduced me to the uses of astrology as divination.
Also, if you want to learn more about atheopaganism, here is Mark Green's blog on the topic.
Also, the app I currently use for tarot is Labyrinthos, if anyone's wondering where that screenshot came from.
