The modernisation of the Fae

I like science. I love finding out how things work, and more importantly, why things work. I am also a witch, and work magick, and to many people, science and magick are incompatible. I just think that magick IS science, just that we just don't know how it works yet.

There was a time when magick would be conjuring fire from a stick, or light from a tube...today these are just a lighter and a torch. One day, Newton's laws will be applied to the Law of Attraction, and the Threefold Law.

We witches have moved with the times. We have embraced our modern technology, you're embracing it right now by reading these words. We use our computers is so many magickal ways, to learn, communicate, to manifest (though you might call that shopping). We can even conduct rituals over the internet, powerful rituals, with a circle comprised of people spread all over the world.

Yet, the magickal world we tap into, that never changes, it remains the same to us as it was to our ancestors. Or does it?

Back in the second world war, the US Airforce coined a phrase to describe the mysterious mechanical and electrical malfunctions that their machinery suffered. They called them gremlins. We're all familiar with gremlins now - they infect our computers, our cars, our electical tools at home and work. For no apparent reason, our computer products will decide not to work properly. Especially for users of a nervous disposition. Computers are like dogs and horses - they KNOW when you're out of your depth. Except, perhaps it's not the computer, perhaps it IS a gremlin, and the fae have joined us in our modern world.

And why shouldn't they? They are experts at finding a niche to inhabit. What better shadowy new place for the fae to move into than our own technology - that we don't really understand how it works. We've all seen, the gremlins like to prey on newbies. Once we've gained in confidence, in knowing what should be happening, and how, and more importantly, what shouldn't be happening, the gremlins go away.

Then we get a special kind of gremlin...we get a Glitch. Glitches are particularly nasty, and usually require expert help in order to evict. Glitches are those things that we're all secretly a lot more afraid of than we should be, we try to ignore them, but the very act of pretending they can't happen, not anticipating their appearance, is generally what invites them in. I'm not going even touch the subject of computer bugs, the typo fae and the modern bogeyman of artificial intelligence.

Of course, we can protect ourselves and our property against the modern fae as much as we can against the old. I can't remember where I heard it, but it was a tip to use synthetic materials in magickal workings that were intended to protect electrical objects. Utilising in our spells man-made crystals or even, perhaps, plastic - the many different colours, lustres and shapes of the dice that gamers use with their role-play games. Elizabeth Barrette called this Synthetic Technomagick. As our technologies advance, then perhaps so too should our technomagick.

Love and hugs

Blaidd