Immaterial Traces

A multi-disciplinary wandering concerning the nature of knowledge, the self, spirituality, ritual, embodiment, sensory experience, the occult, death, material culture, place, memory, and storytelling. Research, philosophy, experimental archaeology, occultism, craft, art, storytelling, and whatever else catches my interest along the way. Not inherently NSFW but not guaranteed to be friendly to minors.

[immaterialtraces]

A. They/them. Knowledge seeker.

A multi-disciplinary wandering concerning the nature of knowledge, the self, spirituality, ritual, embodiment, sensory experience, the occult, death, material culture, place, memory, and storytelling.

Research, philosophy, experimental archaeology, occultism, craft, art, storytelling, and whatever else catches my interest along the way.

Not inherently NSFW but not guaranteed to be friendly to minors.

Credo

✒

Current obsessions: ritual, sacrifice, hauntings, ghost stories, grief

Currently reading: Horror and the Holy, Kirk J. Schneider; The History of Magic, Chris Gosden

Ongoing Projects: TBA

Find me elsewhere: Material Traces (art-focused sibling blog)

[nyxshadowhawk]

Diagrams from a thirteenth-century version of the Ars Notoria.

[maimonidesnutz]

There’s a teaching in Judaism that one should carry two notes, one in each pocket. One should say “I am but dust and ashes,” and the other should say “the whole world was created for me.” They are seen as opposites; you check one when you’re feeling down on yourself and the other when you’re feeling especially full of yourself. The idea is to maintain balance, but I think the way to achieve full harmony is to realize how they are saying the same thing.

That’s why I have imagined them as a carbon atom. Carbon is a main component of dust (and ashes), but also one of the main building blocks of life. Carbon simultaneously encompasses all. It’s in us, it’s in the stars, the planets, the trees. We are built to exist, yet we are also the building blocks of existence. If we keep both in mind, we can live in balance all the time.

[derangedrhythms]

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘Mystic’

[eukafkasialtii]

“It is a rather perverse moment in some religious traditions to view the victim as the one who sacrificed his moral principles. In such cases, the very fact of sacrifice purifies a crime with the illusion that the criminal is the victim since he has sacrificed his conscience.”

— “On Sacrifice” by Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"A past sacrifice can be a genuine motivating force for a political purpose; it can serve manipulative and dangerous functions as well. The source of its danger lies in the sacrifice sanctifying something that is unworthy and then holding future generations captive to its lingering onus. A primordial sacrifice—not original consent—might become the strongest glue adhering individuals to a political project."

- On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"A pleasure that has a memory numbs our ability to repeat it."

-On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"The past is never a closed event; its meaning continues to unfold and retroactively change in relation to new developments. This is as true of personal life as it is of historical events. ... This open-endedness of the past means, in effect, something much more radical than the common claim that we don't control the future of our efforts, given our finitude and limits. Rather, it is a more daring assertion: whatever we accomplish in the past is at the mercy of future action."

-On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"War is a perverse, though powerful, form of confronting birth and death. By risking their lives, soldiers earn their right to live. They become, though this baptism of fire, owners of their own lives. What was given to them at birth arbitrarily and without choice belongs to them now. In risking their lives they mock death, and in killing they own death by taking life; it is as if they work out the drama of rebirth and death in that same action."

- On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"...the connection between self-sacrifice and violence is established through a dangerous yet common reversal between two claims: since it is the mark of the good that it deserves sacrifice, the reverse must be true too—namely, that sacrifice makes something into a good. ... Self-sacrifice, with all its subtleties and complexities, enables violence because it allows a role reversal between the aggressor and the victim."

- On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"Ecstasy is a glimpse of the infinite; terror is full disclosure."

- Horror and the Holy, Kirk J. Schneider

[immaterialtraces]

“Sacrifice is an essential phenomenon of religious, ethical, and political life. In its two senses, as “sacrificing to” and “sacrificing for,” the linguistic use of the term covers immensely diverse experiences. It touches on ritual, atonement, substitution, self-transcendence, war, the responsibility to the past, and the state. Yet there is something at the core of this varied, rich phenomenon that justifies the use of the same word to express both meanings in so many languages.”

-On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[cryptonature]

I love science.

I also love the concept of magic.

I don't find that these ideas conflict.

Fact and magic go together like sound and song,

like ink and poetry,

like truth and metaphor.

A good metaphor does not destroy the truth.

It brings it home to a human context.

For me, magic is about meaning.

An interpretive act.

An intentional cultivation of awe and gratitude.

Understanding the physics of a heron's flight is lovely and enriching,

so too is contemplating the subtleties of why seeing a gliding heron transforms a moment into a poem.

There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods. Paying attention is about intentional noticing. The geometry of a beehive. The perfect slowness of a vulture. The feel of life inside a tree.

Magic requires our intention, our choice to participate. We must choose to meet it halfway. And when we do, we often find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning. A nod to the unquantifiable.

[immaterialtraces]

"Ritual is an attempt to grapple with the inherent unpredictability of rejection. ... The magical reading of ritual introduces a causal dimension that closes the gap between giving and receiving, thereby insuring acceptance of the gift and leaving nothing voluntary to the recipient."

- On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

[immaterialtraces]

"...it is the inevitable fate of all scientific explanations to appear dull and ugly beside the poetic imaginations of hagiography.”

- L'Odeur de Sainteté, George Dumas in The Paris Review (1907)

[immaterialtraces]

"The organism and the environment are not actually separately determined. The environment is not a structure imposed on living beings from the outside but is in fact a creation of those beings. The environment is not an autonomous process but a reflection of the biology of the species. Just as there is no organism without an environment, so there is no environment without an organism."

- The Dialectical Biologist, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (1985, rev. 2008)

[immaterialtraces]

Nostalgia (detail), packed cord binding preserved in alcohol and water of the lake that holds my heart, 2019 and ongoing