Welles and Freud

Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles share a birthday of May 6. Of course, even if you believe in astrology, the fact that they were born in 1856 and 1915 respectively would mean different star charts. I saw the birthdays on an almanac site this past week and out of pure curiosity looked at their Taurus description. It said strong work ethics, reliability, and an appreciation of life’s pleasures. Not a bad description of them. My deeper thoughts went to considering if there were any connections they have around psychology, movies, or magic.

From what I read this week, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Welles, a pioneering filmmaker, lived during about the same time. Freud died in 1939, so there was some overlap and certainly Freud’s influence ran through all of Welles’ life. Both were significant cultural figures of their time. They never met and didn’t seem to directly address each other’s work, so I’ll do it for them.

Some people know that Welles was an accomplished magician, and member of both the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians. He often did magic in his later year on TV talk shows. He never let his sleight-of-hand skills get rusty and joked that he might need them one day to make his living.

Freud wrote about magic in his essay “The Uncanny” where he explored the psychological concept of the uncanny. The word meant for him feelings of eeriness or discomfort caused by something familiar yet strange. He discussed how magic, particularly stage magic, can evoke feelings of the uncanny because it challenges our sense of reality and rationality, tapping into our subconscious desires and fears. Freud believed magic exploits our unconscious thoughts and desires, blurring the line between reality and illusion.

Those things are certainly part of all films from the earliest experiments that showed that a series of still images project could give give the illusion of fluid movement. Today’s movie magic involves complex illusions from green screens, CGI to AI-generated people and settings.

Welles was used to creating illusions on stage before his film career. I think of how in Shakespeare’s time they needed to do some stagecraft magic for ghosts and other manifestations of the bicameral mind. Did Hamlet see the ghost of his father? It seems the ghost was real and that others on guard duty also saw something, but maybe this hallucination of Hamlet, and also Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III were pre-Freudian use of psychology by Will.

Freud didn’t write much about movies, as they weren’t prevalent during his lifetime. However, he did write about the concept of “screen memories,” which are vivid but possibly distorted memories from childhood. The use of “screen” because the memories are visual is interesting. Some later scholars have drawn parallels between Freud’s ideas about screen memories and the experience of watching movies, suggesting that both involve a mix of reality and imagination. Additionally, Freud’s theories about the unconscious and dreams have influenced the interpretation of films, especially in the realm of psychoanalytic film theory.

I couldn’t find any direct quotes by Orson Welles about Freud, but several articles said that he expressed admiration for Freud’s work and was fascinated by psychoanalysis. There are certainly Freudian themes and ideas in some of his films. That’s not unusual since Freud’s influence can be seen in all the arts of that time.

Citizen Kane (1941) features complex characters and explores the depths of the human psyche. Its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, is dissected psychologically through flashbacks and multiple perspectives. Kane’s relationships seem to often return to “screen memories” with his mother and his trauma could easily generate a paper on Oedipal conflict and the influence of early experiences on adult behavior.

Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) is film noir and Welles goes dark and deep into themes of obsession, desire, and betrayal. The characters of Michael and Elsa Bannister, involve psychological tensions and power struggles reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalysis.

1958’s Touch of Evil is another noir thriller about corruption, guilt, and the dark corners of the human psyche. Welles’ character, Hank Quinlan, embodies Freudian notions of the id gone out of control, with his unchecked impulses leading to destructive behavior.

What an interesting conversation over scotch and cigars I might have heard if the two of them had met for dinner, watched a movie, and let me join them.

From Agrippa’s Cabinet of Curiosities

When I was reading an article on publicdomainreview.org by Anthony Grafton who is the author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, and Inky Fingers, in order to write another essay here about a different Agrippa. I was intrigued by this man who I had encountered many years ago as an undergraduate. I forgot about him until I wrote that earlier essay and my knowledge of him back in college and until recently was superficial.

Below are some adapted excerpts from the Grafton text that I first posted on another of my blogs, One-Page Schoolhouse.

Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers arranged correctly can harness the planets’ powers. 

Agrippa was a Renaissance polymath. His occult insights into the structure of the universe were his attempts to discover a path that leads both upward and downward. Up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s manual of learned magic, De occulta philosophia (1533), explicated the ways in which magicians understood and manipulated the cosmos more systematically than any of his predecessors. 

He attempted to map the entire network of forces that passed from angels and demons, stars and planets, downward into the world of matter. Agrippa laid his work out in three books, on the elementary, astrological, and celestial worlds. But he saw all of them as connected.

It includes a massive taxonomy of magical animals, plants, and stones, with ample instructions for their preparation and use. 

Though I read them once thinking I would uncover some ancient secrets, most of the information means nothing to us today, other than being curiosities.

Would you want to cure a sore throat by touching your neck to the hand of someone who had died prematurely? I have an early winter cough this week, but I don’t think I will be putting my spit in the mouths of green frogs and then letting them escape.

A natural history cabinet or “cabinet of curiosities”.

Grafton says “Any reader could find something of interest in this paroxysm of parataxis, a good bit of it taken directly from Pliny and none of it explicitly verified by anything resembling a test.” Agrippa gave his readers anecdotes and practices.

He also thought knowledge of mathematics was required to do magic. For example, the Pythagorean number patterns that gave the universe structure. 

The therapies in Agrippa’s book often required the invocation of celestial or angelic powers, either to awake the slumbering, hidden forces of the magical things he wished to manipulate or to protect magus and clients against the more frightening sorts of supernatural powers. 

Magic squares originated in the Arabic world, long before Agrippa’s time. Often they had their top row of cells filled with the letters of a divine name or with the first letters of a verse from the Koran, and the lower rows with permutations on them. Since Arabic letters, like Hebrew, have numerical values, each magic square automatically forms a mathematical figure, and it was in this form that they became most popular in the West.

All the stars have their own natures, properties, and conditions, and through their rays, they also produce signs and characters in inferior beings as well, in the elements, in stones, in plants, in animals, and their members. Agrippa’s book not only became the manual of magical practice, but it also made the formal claim that magic was a kind of philosophy in its own right. 

Alan Moore – Art Is Magic

“Art is magic. Magic is art.
A writer or artist is the closest thing in the modern world to a shaman.”  – Alan Moore

Alan Moore is an English writer primarily known for his critically acclaimed work in comic books. He has produced several series including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, his crime novel about the London Ripper murders. Although he is often described as “the best comic writer in history” and also as simply “one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years.” But that is not the part of his life that I’m writing about today.

Alan Moore is also a Neopagan, occultist, and ceremonial magician. Let me give you some of his writing background first though, because the art leads to the magic.

He wrote British underground and alternative fanzines then got hired by the American DC Comics, for Batman and Superman. there he penned original titles such as Watchmen. His work helped develop the “graphic novel” as a genre that received more crossover respectability than the “comic book”.

At the end of the 20th century, he went further from the mainstream with the epic From Hell, Lost Girls, the novel Voice of the Fire, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the occult-based Promethea.

Lost Girls is an odd series and is considered to be erotic fiction. The girls are Alice, Wendy and Dorothy who guided us through Wonderland, Neverland and Oz. But they have grown up and now guides through the realms of our sexual awakening and fulfillment.

Though I know of and have read a few of those titles, I’m not a big fan of graphic novels. But I heard a segment on To The Best of Our Knowledge about that other side of Moore that brought me back to him.

It seems that on his 40th birthday, he announced that he was a ceremonial magician having been inspired by research he did while writing From Hell, a book full of  Freemason and occult symbolism. Rereading a line in his book – “The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind” – it suddenly seemed not to be a line he invented, but the truth.

He decided that becoming a ceremonial magician was the next step. In a film, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, he said “I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.”

That radio program I listened to led me to the guest’s book, Alan Moore: Storyteller. He has been mixing his writing and his beliefs and has created what he calls his “Idea Space.” He took up the study of the Qabalah and the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley. From Crowley, he took ideas about True Will being connected to the will of the pantheistic universe, and in his magical rituals, he began using psychedelic drugs. He has since given up on the drugs, as he feels he can achieve the same effects without them.

According to accounts online, Moore took as his primary deity the ancient Roman snake god Glycon, who was the center of a cult founded by a prophet known as Alexander of Abonoteichus.

Moore’s politics are anarchy (see V For Vendetta) and he has embraced conspiracy theories in his writing (see Brought to Light). His own belief is that there is a global conspiracy that is more frightening than a “banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control” because it’s a conspiracy where “no one is in control and, the world is rudderless.” (from the film The Mindscape of Alan Moore)

And Moore is still involved in our very real world. Worldwide, the Occupy protesters adopted the Guy Fawkes mask from his V for Vendetta and so have Wikileaks and anti-globalization demonstrators. Moore has described Occupy as “ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it – they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people whose lives this is actually affecting.”

Alan Moore: The Books

The Transfer of Force (or Magic)

This video was made at Ikeguchi Laboratory in Japan a few years ago and resurfaces online occasionally.

It shows 32 metronomes that are started, all out of sync. They shift and synchronize as the video progresses (it’s only 4 minutes, but you can jump ahead a bit if you get anxious).

Magic trick? Nope.

It’s the science that seems like magic. It’s physics. The video shows that the transfer of force can align the metronomes over time.

Transfer of force?  You give a toy car a push. It rolls across the floor on its own. It hits another toy car halfway across the room with some force.  Wait. How could it exert a force? The only reason it moved was because you pushed it.

After you pushed that first car, a force was transferred to the car. When it had that collision, it exerted a force on the second car. That force came from the hand that pushed it. Forces are transferred.

And yet, the metronomes syncing is still kind of magical. Most of the science I like best has some magic to it.

Not That Kind of Magic

The first thing that comes to mind for most people when they hear the word “magic” is a magician doing tricks with cards or a magic hat or wand. It’s entertainment. And it can be fascinating and amazing. Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) does some tricks that fascinate me because they are so simple (see video below). On the other extreme, you have the David Copperfield gigantic illusions that take an hour to perform.

But this post is not about that kind of magic. It’s also not about the magic that we might associate with books like Harry Potter or the sorcery that takes place when people try to influence the world using rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and language.

Modern Western “magicians” are more in the New Age part of the magic shop and tend to view magic’s primary purpose as personal spiritual growth.

It is an ancient practice that has been present since the earliest human cultures. It can’t be tossed off as silliness because it still has an important religious and medicinal role in many cultures today.

I know very devout Christians, for example, who would not allow their children to read or see the Harry Potter books and films because they saw it as being in direct opposition to their beliefs.

“The concept of magic as a category separate from religion first appeared in Judaism, which derided as magic the practices of pagan worship designed to appease and receive benefits from gods other than Yahweh. Hanegraaff argues that magic is in fact ‘…a largely polemical concept that has been used by various religious interest groups either to describe their own religious beliefs and practices or – more frequently – to discredit those of others.”

And so, magic, whether it is white (good) or black (evil) magic, is still viewed with suspicion by many people and is often still practiced in isolation and secrecy.

But the magic that I was thinking about this past week came from a post on Facebook to an article about the “traits of magical people.” In the article, Carolyn Elliott lists traits that she feels describe magical people, and this has nothing to do with sorcery or showmanship.

Here is my take on those traits. Do you see them as describing something in a person that you would call magical? Does this describe you?

First off, magical people know that they are magical. Sounds obvious. Children seem to know, but school and society do a pretty good job of convincing them otherwise.

I am a firm believer in synchronicity (as a number of my posts show).  It is the experience of two or more events being meaningfully related (rather than the case that they are causally related) and sometimes occurring simultaneously in time.  It is when we see an experience as being a “a meaningful coincidence.” The concept of synchronicity was first described by Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s.

Magical people seem to have these synchronicities happen more than others. Maybe they are just more attuned and open to their occurrences.  The article suggests that meditation, art, ritual, intentional movement (like yoga), or prayer open you to the experiences. As with magic in general, part of the population dismisses “synchronicities” as meaningless coincidences, but for others, they can be life-changing and dramatic.

Another trait is being attentive to seasons and lunar cycles. Again, this blog is evidence of my sensitivity to lunar cycles, which I try to pay attention to each month, and to the solstices and equinoxes that bring us the seasons.

A part of me has always felt ancient when I look into the night sky the way others did thousands of years ago with the same awe and wonder.

I try to turn that attention to the ground too. I want to know about the plants, trees, insects and animals and the signs that nature gives us. To me, this is a kind of ancient magic that we have lost.

I don’t worship the Moon or Sun. And though I do feel an attraction to our Moon, I don’t feel any physical pull on my body and I don’t find that I can’t sleep on full moon nights. I don’t feel any “mythopoeic cycles” of emotional birth and death as the seasons change, but I accept that others may.

Magical people tend to have vivid dreams. But I believe they also pay more attention to them. I have kept dream journals since I was a teenager and first became aware of dream interpretation. I have learned over the years that books on interpreting dreams (from Freud’s to pop psychology) are not useful. You need to create your own compendium of personal dream symbols.

Elliott’s article goes a bit further, saying that “Magic people have at least partially developed aetheric bodies. This means, at the very least, that one or more of their chakras (Rudolf Steiner liked to call them “lotus flowers”) are open and active.”

I don’t really know enough about that topic to say whether or not I have a highly empathic heart chakra or if my third eye is open. In my experimental college days, I did try to navigate the astral planes, but never made the crossing.

And I am not knowledgeable enough about “prana” (AKA  creative energy) except it a rather academic way, to say whether or not I have more of it than most people. I think most of us would like to think we have it.

As the article points out, it has many names. It is Reich’s “orgone,” Kant’s “Geist,” Emerson’s “Soul,” and Mezmer’s “animal magnetism.” It’s also viewed as a kind of sexual energy, although prana doesn’t necessarily feel sexy and might manifest as a burst of creative energy.

I will also admit to not being exactly clear on the fifth trait that when magical people fall in love, it’s “psychedelic.”  I suppose that if two magical people fall in love it is a natural dopamine and oxytocin rush.

The trait that I feel may be most important, and that I feel close to as I type these words, is that magical people want to spread the magic around. People always ask me why I write on this and my other blogs. It can’t be to be rich or famous.

I have been a teacher all my adult life. It was what I was put on the planet to do. A lot of it has happened in classrooms, but over the years more and more has happened in the woods, in far less formal workshops and online.

I find things that amaze me and make me think and I just feel that I must share them in a thoughtful way. We have become a culture of sharing and over-sharing because of the Internet. I see some value in the retweet/reblog/repost of an interesting article or video. But I see much more value in a thoughtful remixing and explanation of such things for others. I see magical people as guides to the secrets of the universe.

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Robert Harbin’s Zig Zag Girl illusion at the London Palladium in the 1960s.

I Went Down to the Crossroads

The song “Crossroads” as recorded by Cream popped up on my Spotify playlist today. It reminded me 1) of high school and 2) of a college literature class where we got into a discussion of crossroads in mythology.

In myth and magic, crossroads often represent a place between the worlds. It is a place where supernatural spirits can be contacted and paranormal events can take place. As a symbol, it sometimes is a place where two realms touch and therefore is neither here nor there, or “betwixt and between.”

The song was written around 1936 by Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. The lyrics tell of a man kneeling at a crossroads to ask God’s mercy. Johnson had said it was inspired by not being able to hitch a ride into town at a crossroads. The blues mythology has said that the crossroads is where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talents. The lyrics do not support that interpretation but the myth continued.

Crossroads go back to Greek mythology where they were associated with Hermes and Hecate and shrines and ceremonies often were set at a crossroad. Hermes was connected to travelers, but Hecate’s connection to crossroads was ritualistic. “Suppers of Hecate” were offerings left for her at crossroads at each New Moon.

I have read that in the UK crossroad rituals date back to Anglo-Saxon times and continued until the early 1800s. Criminals and suicides were often buried at the crossroads. (Suicide was a crime.) This may have been simply because crossroads usually were outside the boundaries of the town and those people were to be kept apart. Criminals were sometimes punished and executed by gibbet or dule tree at a crossroads.

In Western folk mythology, a crossroads can be used to summon a demon or devil in order to make a deal. The 1587 Historia von D. Johann Fausten describes the character Faust inscribing magic circles at a crossroads and offering a copper coin in order to summon the devil.

Crossroads also appears in hoodoo, a form of African-American magical spirituality, and Brazilian mythology.

The myth has been perpetuated in fiction, movies, and TV. The U.S. television show. Supernatural, used crossroads demons in several episodes. In the Coen Brothers’ comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? the character Tommy Johnson says that he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for guitar skills, an obvious allusion to the legend of Robert Johnson.