I recently joined several popular Pagan/magical groups on social media. After a long hiatus from most communities, it’s been fascinating to re-enter the conversation today and see what people are saying and what the strange, hodge podge state of magic is in the Western world today. Engagement with these groups has gotten me thinking about the means by which ideas spread within closed communities (and WHICH ideas are most prone to spread) as well as how people learn to posture for one another based on the accepted practices of the group.
Before social media was really a thing, I first heard the word “meme” in a 1993 Terence McKenna recording: “The English biologist, Dawkins, invented the word meme. Do you know what a meme is? It’s the smallest unit of an idea. It’s like what a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology. Our task is to create memes.”
Our task is to create memes.
Terence McKenna
Appropriately, today’s memes owe part of their popularity to their ability to quickly and concisely convey an idea- often a joke- in a brief pairing of words/images.
Scrolling through the newsfeed I see a lot of memes that are more directly aligned with the idea of concisely conveying an ideology- in this case a Pagan/magical topic, sometimes meant to educate, often meant to empower or merely drive home a certain idea that unifies the group. I found a few to be useful/educational but many to be just familiar pings in the echo chamber, and worse yet a few were downright factually incorrect.
If we’re going to be engaging with these digital formats, my suggestion would be to not underestimate the ability of these types of visuals to have an effect on you one way or another and to prepare your own sets of mental checks and balances to weigh and filter this input instead of just unconsciously accepting what you see. That includes just having a good BS meter for anything that’s just verifiably incorrect. As magical practitioners we adopt paradigms with some pretty “out there” belief systems by the Western standard, but knowingly expanding our notion of the nature of things should not be mistaken with gullibility, nor for willingness to accept the ideological conclusions of another practitioner just because they posted it over a generic digital picture of a woman in a cape.
On the other hand, if “our task is to create memes”, what will our message be to the world? What message, idea or even joke do we want to share with the world and can we do it effectively? What’s the most concise and compelling means to do so which will appeal to the correct audience?
galchemy 