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Note to self: Have appointment at Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders on March 6th, 11 AM, with Doctor Robert Pierce. Have no other place to write this down. Person who took appointment claimed that I could not be tested for Asperger's without a recommendation from a doctor (something that hadn't been pointed out to me when I actually walked in there), so I suppose this is the appointment that will get me that note.
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Prof. Berk approved my idea for a final paper for Folklore class--studying Internet memes. Specifically, tracing their dispersal through the Internet. Need to figure out how to structure research, since there's not a lot of formal documentation of, say, the path a cat macro takes from a "Post pictures of animals with captions!" thread on SomethingAwful to an 88-year-old grandmother's forwarded E-mail. Interviews? Backtracking? Reading wikis? Getting an SA account?
We did a section on witchcraft and spells last night, focusing on the social function of witches (someone to blame when things go bad!) and the nature of spells (rhyming is good because it alerts the Forces That Be that there's something unusual happening and they need to pay attention). Interestingly, the basic function of witchcraft has nothing to do with Satan or any sort of pagan god or even spirits; it's simply a matter of knowledge being power, and not being at the mercy of the elements and an unknowable world--anyone can say a spell or do sympathetic magic and have it work. It just so happens in folklore that the people who used these spells on a regular basis tend to use them for apparently petty purposes--making milk go sour was a popular one. (Granted, the scope of the world for these antiquated peoples was small. In a more globalized society, you have savvier "bad" witches doing things like going out with Jayne Mansfield and writing Stairway to Heaven.)
Anyway, the point of this atavistic witchcraft is that the universe will do what you tell it to because you tell it to; it is programmed like a computer to make your neighbor's milk go sour if you cast a glare at her butter churn, or to make your neighbor sick to her stomach if you take a pin and poke it into a little doll you made of her. You don't even have to do anything that directly leads to this; it's spooky-action-at-a-distance, a holistic form of quantum entanglement. (And for that matter, some people have taken this old idea of sympathetic magic and applied it to their hazy ideas of particle physics, suggesting that the origin of witchcraft and spells have less to do with the human mind making connections than they do being able to magically influence the universe through scientific principles. The gedanken that suggested this idea have since been disproved or explained more clearly, for the most part, but it's still clearly a highly compelling idea.)
Folklore is about roots and mythology and context, yes...it's about learning where you came from, not just your family or your people, but where all of humanity comes from, and how those attitudes and superstitions and cultural quirks affect all of your contradictory, insane, and pretty customs and beliefs today. It's also about how that lore changes even as it stays the same, revealing patterns of belief that seem almost hardwired into the human brain. Each superstition is a handful of graphite blown onto a clean piece of paper, revealing the indentations of a basic need.
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Prof. Berk approved my idea for a final paper for Folklore class--studying Internet memes. Specifically, tracing their dispersal through the Internet. Need to figure out how to structure research, since there's not a lot of formal documentation of, say, the path a cat macro takes from a "Post pictures of animals with captions!" thread on SomethingAwful to an 88-year-old grandmother's forwarded E-mail. Interviews? Backtracking? Reading wikis? Getting an SA account?
We did a section on witchcraft and spells last night, focusing on the social function of witches (someone to blame when things go bad!) and the nature of spells (rhyming is good because it alerts the Forces That Be that there's something unusual happening and they need to pay attention). Interestingly, the basic function of witchcraft has nothing to do with Satan or any sort of pagan god or even spirits; it's simply a matter of knowledge being power, and not being at the mercy of the elements and an unknowable world--anyone can say a spell or do sympathetic magic and have it work. It just so happens in folklore that the people who used these spells on a regular basis tend to use them for apparently petty purposes--making milk go sour was a popular one. (Granted, the scope of the world for these antiquated peoples was small. In a more globalized society, you have savvier "bad" witches doing things like going out with Jayne Mansfield and writing Stairway to Heaven.)
Anyway, the point of this atavistic witchcraft is that the universe will do what you tell it to because you tell it to; it is programmed like a computer to make your neighbor's milk go sour if you cast a glare at her butter churn, or to make your neighbor sick to her stomach if you take a pin and poke it into a little doll you made of her. You don't even have to do anything that directly leads to this; it's spooky-action-at-a-distance, a holistic form of quantum entanglement. (And for that matter, some people have taken this old idea of sympathetic magic and applied it to their hazy ideas of particle physics, suggesting that the origin of witchcraft and spells have less to do with the human mind making connections than they do being able to magically influence the universe through scientific principles. The gedanken that suggested this idea have since been disproved or explained more clearly, for the most part, but it's still clearly a highly compelling idea.)
Folklore is about roots and mythology and context, yes...it's about learning where you came from, not just your family or your people, but where all of humanity comes from, and how those attitudes and superstitions and cultural quirks affect all of your contradictory, insane, and pretty customs and beliefs today. It's also about how that lore changes even as it stays the same, revealing patterns of belief that seem almost hardwired into the human brain. Each superstition is a handful of graphite blown onto a clean piece of paper, revealing the indentations of a basic need.
