The Answer Will Not Be Traditional Because The World Is No Longer Traditional

Sitting by Lake Titicaca with Orland Bishop's words

There is another video from my recent South American adventure over on my YouTube channel.

This one uses a visit to the famous Floating Uros Islands on Lake Titicaca as a launchpad for a discussion that has long interested me:

How we track changes and continuities across time depends on what we measure.

That is very much the work of Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits as well as Ani.Mystic.

Regulars will know I am electrified by Tyson Yunkaporta’s differentiation between products of thought versus ways of thinking. In Sand Talk, he sits with what actually constitutes ‘Aboriginal’ food. Is it ‘Aboriginal’ ingredients like finger limes and native peppers?

No. It is whole foods, locally sourced, cooked with love for tribe and family. Measured in that way, Aboriginal food -in a best case situation, as for all of us- represents a continuity rather than a break.

In this video, I look briefly at what a similar approach might mean for grimoire magic, based on the continuities I saw when I visited the Uros Islands. Because, if you bother to go and check the travel blogs or vlogs -and being millennial I pore over them like holy writ- you will see people complaining about how ‘touristy’ and ‘fake’ the experience is now.

This irritated me and I actually enjoyed the visit way more than I expected to, so I put these thoughts together in the context of Orland Bishop’s observation, which I quoted in Ani.Mystic, that the answer will not be traditional because the world is no longer traditional.

Expecting the Uros to remain ‘traditional’ makes them zoo exhibits. But finding their continuities? Well, that was awesome and teachable.