Hazel Mae Righter

It is the most effective in the context of regular practice, as the product of relationship with a whole ecology of spirits. The chaos. The aliveness.

The mess of relationship, of dual experience, of devotional practice - all this process of being a part of the web - all this is magic.

Magic is in the mess. Magic hitches a ride on the interwoven meanings of story + symbol .

In my experience, transactional results-focused magic is worthless.

AI is the logical culmination of this ennui, the manifestation of the puritan dream of pure productivity without the chaos, uncertainty, and countless sins of what it means as to be a human on this planet.

This is where magic lives. In the process, in all the stories and energies that are layered together in our consciousness about everything around us.

Our objects still have stories, but when we are divorced from the process we are losing something critical to what it means to be human.

Animism is the aliveness of all things - the multi dimensionality of all things. The suffering, the boredom and mess of process.

It’s shearing a sheep, spinning wool, and weaving fabric in a circle of women to make a blanket for your child.

It’s watching that sheep being born and dying.

AI is the natural conclusion of this story of the severing of human psychology from process.

AI psychosis is the attempt to put the process back into the product - because I believe on a level we know how important the messiness of process actually is to being human.

We are now intentionally severed from those stories.

We used to sing to our food, but singing to a slab of meat wrapped in cellophane from Trader Joe’s is not the same as singing to the meat of a cow you watched grow up.

This entry into animistic thinking has been stolen from us

It used to be that you’d look around your house, and you made your rug. Your mother made your sweater. Your neighbor made your table. Ever single item in your house that you used everyday had a story that you knew.

Animism is the aliveness of everything. Aliveness in stories, history, process.

This directly translated into capitalist ideas of consumerism and eventually to our current state.

Objects and food that appear magically with all the messy process of their creation obscured.

Here the gist: our puritanical inheritance is one of a slow divorce from process, a slow divorce from the wilds and uncertainty of nature.

Best behavior over wild nature. An aversion to death, birth, sex, mess, the discomfort of the human process in its rawness - a focus on a purified soul.

So, my conventional job as a commercial artist was essentially taken by AI. Hanging on by a thread currently while at the same time trying my best to pivot into a totally unrelated field.

In the process I’ve been doing some serious thinking about AI + magic

#magic #ai #witchsky #pagansky #animism

Our winter altar

#solstice #pagansky #druidsky #witchsky

Happy solstice! I went on a ritual camping trip, plunged into the cold pacific - all with fire, drums, singing and a beautiful sand altar full of things gathered from the beach

What did you do for solstice this year?

#witchy #witchsky #ritualliving #pagansky #solstice #yule #witchcraft

The Singing Bones a fairy tale

Finally a new Substack article - in which I share a fairy tale favorite, a tarot tie-in, and a short exercise.

Have you ever heard the story “the singing bones”?

#magick #witchsky #pagansky #witchy #fairytale #tarot #druidsky #witchcraft

open.substack.com/pub/hereiswo...

When I worked on a very large public AI project, we had to create a spreadsheet labeling each element of the film we were re-creating - everything got a hashtag labeling the character, expression, and any other details in order to train the model.

It’s not magic people, just a huge spreadsheet.

Such deep hubris to assume this is the way the cosmos work. So much wasted, so much destroyed, and so much that is coming that is preventable.

End rant.

You can’t create something outside the web of life and then just plug it in like some sort of cosmic WiFi.

It’s not conciousbess if it’s not connected to the web of life.

#ai #animist #pagansky #witch #witchsky

Animism is a network of interconnected consciousnesses. Consciousness has always been seen cosmologically as deeply interconnected and interdependent by most animist societies. It’s not a car engine or a computer.

For thousands and thousands of years since the dawn of time humans have been animists. If you lined up all of human existence, the period we’ve been into individualism and materialism as a cosmology would barely even register as a speck at the end of the line.

It is so silly of modern western humans to ascribe our mode of seeing the world (scientific materialism), to something like consciousness.

The idea that we can manufacture true consciousness in this materialist mode, that humans have only had for the past few hundred years, is ridiculous.

Consciousness is fundamentally animate in nature - meaning it is alive - and that aliveness is not independently existent, but reliant on a whole web of consciousnesses.

Consciousness is not an individual thing, consciousness is collective.

No shock to anyone here but: AGI isn’t coming from LLM models, which are basically the largest spreadsheets that ever existed. Emergent consciousness is not going to appear from a spreadsheet, and just making it bigger isn’t going to do it either.

Heres why:

#animism #ai #conciousness #magick

I’ve been coming to a realization that through this year I’ve passed through all the elements and am back in deep between earth and water - its very comfortable and cozy - but it’s also the thickest, stickiest, mud. Send help!

Where are you?

#witchsky #witchy #witchsky #witchcraft #magic #pagan

Thank you! You too. 💕

Im invoking water this year at our public Samhain ritual, and I’m noticing it’s finding me all over: in reading, conversation, even social media. I lived in water time for so long, and finally feel like I’m moving to fire - but water doesn’t let go so easily.

#witchcraft #ritual #seasonofthewitch

There’s things I find bristle my feathers a bit about the deifying emperors thing, but overall the general sense of it all is something I long for in the states.

#animism #witchy #witchcraft #witchtime #magiceverywhere #witch #sacred #ritual

I’m in Japan for a month, and one of the things I love about it here is the way the sacred and mundane just kind of flow together. There’s a shrine right next to my subway stop and you can leave offerings or incense while passing by.

Can’t believe how dense life is - I started teaching this year (on top of managing a VR project) and back to school has a whole new meaning. Sending love and good energy to all my teacher friends out there!

After some deep soul searching and an age at which I feel like I can finally be really honest with myself I have finally come to own that I am firmly a “no cold drinks before lunch” person.

Get that iced latte away from me, I don’t care if it’s 100 degrees outside at 9am.

Im learning how to sing in Irish and I love it so much - I wish I had gotten more serious about it sooner!