Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is upon us and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week.  This is my seventy-fifth published book, the sequel to The Witch of Criswell and thus the second Ariel Moravec occult mystery.  Once again, it's eighteen-year-old Ariel and her adept grandfather on the case, investigating the theft of a rare magical book and a trail of clues that might lead to a pirate treasure hidden somewhere in the odd old East Coast port town of Adocentyn. Ariel and Dr. Bernard Moravec aren't the only ones on the trail, though, and the others will stop at nothing to get there first...

In case you can't tell, yes, I'm having enormous fun with these. You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere. 

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

A query on particular accents/elocution

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

My to-the-point question: Is there a history of elocution as a form of magical training/practice?

It’s dawned on me, after having watched a lot of British television shows via PBS in my youth, then eventually VHS tapes, DVDs, and now video on demand, that I often feel soothed (disarmed/pacified?) when listening to particular British accents, and certain British actors and actresses in particular.

I have listened to British audio recordings of royal biographies, many spy thrillers, various short stories and novels, as well as a Trollope novel that I have no interest in, and still I am soothed when I’m listening. I’m guessing I’d come under the same effect with an autopsy report and a crochet book.

This, plus my amusement that the British Royal Family seem to have an unusually large fanbase in countries that gained independence from their Empire, has led me to grossly speculate that the Received Pronunciation accent/elocution of the British Empire’s ruling class was a deliberate and conscious magical practice.

I have a similar feeling/attitude with the RP-related Transatlantic Accent.

I often wonder if a politician whose views I disagree with would get more persuasive traction with me if he or she spoke like FDR or Orson Welles.

Thoughts? :-)

-Eugene

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[ecosophia]

That's a fascinating question to which I don't have an answer. I've never encountered anything suggesting the conscious practice of elocution as part of a system of magic, but secret traditions tend to be, well, secret...

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe this is why some people go on and on and on about David Attenborough's voice!!! I never got it personally, but different strokes...

(I don't mind the posh British accent but I'm more soothed by those who speak in cockney rhyming slang ; ) I also like the voices of Snoop Dogg and Samuel L. Jackson... I think it has something to do with being from the westside of Cincinnati)

There might be something to this though. In my research for my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory, I learned about Melville Graham Bell's work as an elocutionist and how his creation of his system for Visible Speech, to help the deaf, linked back to the quest for a universal language, that itself had been part of various hermetic and occult traditions. In my research throughout the book, what Joscelyn Godwin called "the mystery of the vowels" came back as a thread over and over again, in the development of communication technology, and the electronic instruments that were an outgrowth of that.

If nothing else, the active use of will in speaking a certain way may have certain effects as opposed to speaking "unconsciously." As a broadcaster, I know I talk differently when I'm on the radio than when I'm not. (Though I can slip into that mode.) Or the different ways you speak when giving a talk or reciting poetry. There is something potentially Bardic that can emerge.

Certainly I think that whether or not elocution had a magical dimension or not, a magical dimension could be brought into it now. But it would be interesting to see if there is anything in the literature about elocution. I imagine there might be something connected to the New Thought movement at least, as speaking well might have been an aspect of self-improvement.

Justin Patrick Moore

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[(Anonymous)]

I personally know one teacher of magic who had a strong drama background, and who used to give her students advice in how to speak, especially when teaching or speaking to a group. I don't know that she ever worked up a formal system of magical elocution; however, in connection with speaking, she did have clear ideas about the role of magnetizing, the solar plexus, polarity, and so on. But they were dropped into discussions in a "casual" way, and as far as I know were never written up in manual form.

LeGrand

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[earthworm_uk]

Bene Gesserit - The Voice?

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[ecosophia]

It's occurred to me more than once that occultists in the future might take Herbert's ideas as a set of goals to work on. That strikes me as a good idea!

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[jprussell]

Not necessarily occultists, but Ron Hale-Evans explicitly wrote Mind Performance Hacks as a "how to become a Mentat" guide, and I found a pdf manual years back on "How to Become a Bene Gesserit" (from my skim, it seemed mostly to be a combination of stuff claiming to be ninjitsu and practical psychology), so such efforts may be even closer still!

Jeff

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[ecosophia]

Good. I expect the first skirmishes of the Butlerian jihad to break out by, oh, next Wednesday, so the sooner we get Mentats and Bene Gesserit witches in training, the better.

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[(Anonymous)]

That's sort of what the Yudkowsky generation of the rationality movement was trying to do, and for more or less that same reason. But bridging from a STEM intellectual toolset to the necessary kind of introspection would have required people with knowledge of some combination of cognitive science, (differential) game theory, signal processing, and stochastic control engineering. There weren't enough people interested in those topics for there to be a self-sustaining community of practice. There were people enough who were interested in decision theory and universal algorithmic probability, which in theory should have motivated many of them to acquire an engineering understanding of those other things, which are the details of how efficient implementation would work "close to the metal", so as to be able to find the corresponding patterns in what their brains were doing. But I guess they didn't know about the necessary connection, or at least they didn't know about that deeply enough to find it motivating.

(The general field of study at the point of connection there is called "computational cognitive science". But I only know of one person in the movement who actually recognized that there would be a point in going into into that part of academia, and then mostly only for other reasons. And, instead of becoming a mentat, they just eventually ended up in a social circle which had what I surmise to be a substantially-malefic spiritual contact, did a lot of LSD with the intent of demolishing their ego, had a psychotic episode (including a part where they believed they were a demon), picked up that social circle's typical creepily-disjointed(-as-though-unconsciously-extrinsically-puppeteered) judgementalness, and started using bizarre self-referential framings of other people's motives and shoulda-knowns to post accusations against that social circle's local competitors for moral authority. (Weirdly, they somehow unconsciously stated the accusations using phrasings precisely misleadingly worded and vibed so as to enable third parties who didn't care about whether the details added up to use them as ammunition for takedowns and hit pieces, but still consciously believed that they were against ostracism dynamics and weren't actively trying to play into ostracism dynamics at all.) And of the three other people I know who knew some of the close-to-the-metal details and were vaguely interested in inner development, one fell in with the Zizians (with their related strain of judgementalness) and then left over the katana incident and went to ground, and while the other two seem to have done okay, they weren't really into the intersection. Come to think of it, two of the people who I was in a vaguely related study group with went crazy a few years after we stopped meeting, in two other ways related to judgementalness.)

Or maybe it's my fault that nobody ended up learning the closer-to-raw-psychology mathematical and engineering principles of rationality? Maybe I did very wrongly by not being more involved myself, to promote that connection using what I knew? But I had a lot of other problems going on that might have made that a bad idea.

(A lot of those problems were caused by the situation where rationalists mistrust the judgement of people who can't back up their positions with evidence that would have been less likely to be available in some alternative scenario, and where the universe in Its inscrutable judgement had meanwhile left me in the position of the guy in Carl Sagan's thought experiment who had the invisible flour-permeable dragon in his garage that refused to inflict burns or leave footprints in a third-party-observable way, unless it could tell in advance that it would do so only in such a way as to force plausible alternative explanations to exist. I needed to avoid visibly doing anything that might raise questions about why I believed in a supposed phenomenon, if that phenomenon hid itself from the eyes of other rationalists by purposefully and consistently weaving circumstances around itself to cloak its manifestations behind a very plausible appearance of human delusion. That was radically crippling for me, far beyond what someone who hadn't thought about it might imagine. It was like being an illegal immigrant who couldn't afford for any disputes to rise to the attention of the police, and so correspondingly couldn't do anything that might potentially lead to disputes at all, even indirectly. Never in fifteen years was there anyone functional and knowledgeable whom I could seriously talk to safely about the intersection between the supernatural and the norms and judgement-principles of rationality, who could afford the time.)

The rationality movement tried to buy us Mentats and time to prepare for [discouraged topic] so that nothing like a Butlerian jihad would be necessary. But what it got us instead was a bunch of attention and runaway investment in [discouraged topic], and an ironic situation like that joke with the Torment Nexus:

> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
>
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

The more developed people in or near the scene now, looking back, say things like "the collective attentional processes of humanity seem to be unable to effectively represent the concept of 'don't'," or "[Yudkowsky's] whole thing is about not raising eldritch super power gods, and I think he learned a lesson about how hyperstitioning elides negations".

I guess I wouldn't be going on at such length about this, but I don't even really currently have anywhere to tell anyone my regrets about having not somehow managed to square enough of the circles in question.

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[ecosophia]

To my mind that entire movement approached the whole question from the wrong direction. The crucial point, it seems to me, is to start with the human body and mind as they are and work up from that, rather than doing it from a top-down abstract understanding of how things ought to work. The latter approach almost always fails in practice, and not just in training minds -- there's a reason why an experienced plumber who doesn't know a bit of physics is much better at repairing plumbing than a theoretical physicist who knows, in the abstract, all about the laws governing water under pressure!

I think it's one of the corollaries of Murphy's Law that any large system that works will be found to have grown organically from a small system that works. Building the small system is therefore the first step.

There's also the far from minor fact that we don't have to begin from scratch. An ordinary Renaissance intellectual who had mastered the seven liberal arts and the art of memory, could process ideas using the conceptual algebra of the Lullian art of combinations, and had a working knowledge of three or four languages and so could compare different linguistic structures for understanding any phenomenon, could run rings around most of our modern hotshot thinkers. That might be a workable small system to start with; once it works, build from there.

That is to say, your regrets, real as they are, may be misplaced. The entire approach may have been fatally flawed from the beginning. That being the case, it may be worth considering another try from a different direction.

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it works for some things, like using the laws of mechanics for setting up finite-element analyses to validate the design of a bridge, right? (At least, as long as you have data from materials science that runs for as long as the intended lifetime of the bridge. And you manage to shut down runaway-feedback errors that invalidate your analytical ontology, like the wind resonances that made the Tacoma Narrows Bridge stop being correctly analyzed as a problem in static mechanics and start being only correctly analyzed as a problem in dynamic mechanics, and shortly thereafter stop being a bridge at all.) And I was mostly hoping to figure out how to convert the systemic scale-independent norms to implied special-case implied norms at the smallest intellectually graspable bottom level.

I'm still in "true X has never been tried" territory, but now it's more like "turns out to require a lot more effort to correctly try than it's realistic to expect almost anyone else to independently produce".

Here's a claim related to yours, that came up for me earlier when I was trying to source one of the quotes above. It's from one of the secondary leaders of the movement, looking back on what went wrong:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jash4Gbi2wpThzZ4k/cfar-takeaways-andrew-critch?commentId=vEBouTPEzwqP2kBsG

> [...] I have a theoretical model in which there are supposed to be cycles of yang and then yin, of goal-seeking effort and then finding the goal has become no-longer-compelling and resting / getting board [sic, should say "bored"] / similar until a new goal comes along that is more compelling. [...] people today seem to me to often try to stop this process—people caffeinate, try to work full days, try to have goals all the time and make progress all the time, and on a large scale there’s efforts to mess with the currency to prevent economic slumps. I think there’s a pattern to where good goals/wanting come from that isn’t much respected. I also think there’s a lot of memes trying to hijack people, and a lot of memetic control structures that get upset when members of the professional and managerial classes think/talk/want without filtering their thoughts carefully through “will this be okay-looking” filters.
>
> All of the above leaves me with a belief that the kinds of not-wanting we see are more “living human animals stuck in a matrix that leaves them very little slack to recover and have normal wants, with most of their ‘conversation’ and ‘attempts to acquire rationality techniques’ being hijacked by the matrix they’re in rather than being earnest contact with the living animals inside” and less “this is simple ignorance from critters who’re just barely figuring out intelligence but who will follow their hearts better and better as you give them more tools.”

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[ecosophia]

1) It does, but only because we have thousands of years of practical experience with bridges undergirding those analyses. Abstractions that work are always developed out of concrete experiences that work; abstractions that don't rest on that kind of basis very often turn out to be empty air.

2) That's also a useful model, since it takes into account the real social and economic contexts in which these theoretical structures have to work. Once again, a more gradual evolution would make that easier to function. I also note that in Herbert's universe Mentat training had to begin in early childhood, when the mental structures are more labile -- just as languages are much easier to learn then, cognitive habits might be easier to establish. Less pressure and more play, too.

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[baconrolypoly]

That's a very interesting idea, Eugene.

How people speak is something that I've thought about a lot and whilst I wouldn't necessarily say that a person's voice can 'do' magic, working on the tone and delivery of what's said can greatly increase its persuasiveness - for men, but especially for women.

This first occurred to me back in 1980s when I was sitting in a lively Student Union meeting. Most of the speakers were male but there was one woman speaker who had good ideas but was incredibly strident, to the point of being shrill, and almost everyone dismissed what she said. This happened at every meeting which must have been very frustrating for her. On the other hand the deeper tones of the male voices were listened to.

At that point I started to think seriously about my own voice and whether or not I was listened to. I'd heard that the then PM Margaret Thatcher had taken voice training classes to lower the tone of her voice in order to appear more authoritative, a tactic that worked very well for her. I read that her male MP's often called her 'Mummy' and many feared to contradict her. I tried it out myself, though without the classes, speaking more from the gut, and it has worked for me too; I'm treated with more respect. I call it my School Ma'am voice - slightly deeper than a woman's voice often is, warm, measured and a bit RP - but whilst using this method does get results, I wouldn't call it magic.

I've seen speaking that way called The Voice of Authority and there's a bit about it here: https://maryhartley.com/how-to-speak-with-authority-and-impact/

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[jprussell]

I teach public speaking and we talk a bit about this. Higher-pitched voices with more tonal variation (i.e. stereotypically feminine) tend to carry longer distances and over background noise, tend to be found more interesting, and tend to convey more warmth and friendliness, but as you've said, tend not to be taken as seriously as authoritative/powerful. Deeper voices with less tonal variation (i.e. stereotypically masculine) tend to be perceived as more authoritative/powerful, less okay to interrupt, and more reassuring that the person has things under control, but on the downside, can be heard as boring, discourages others from speaking up even if that would be helpful, and doesn't carry as far/over as much background noise.

Trying to tweak these things consciously often runs into a lot of resistance - our voices tend to be wrapped up with our self-identity (just think of how much most of us hate hearing recordings of our voice, since it doesn't sound "right"!), but I like to point out that we subconsciously change our vocal tone by context all the time. Think of how folks talk in a high-pitched voice to babies, or listen to the difference in a man's tone when he's talking to his wife or girlfriend versus his coworkers (this was especially noticeable with me when I was in the Army, when my work voice was rather deeper than my normal voice).

If anyone wants to give it a shot at home, here's what I recommend: pick a way you'd like to consciously change your voice (higher-pitched, more tonal variation, lower-pitched, whatever), then record yourself trying to change your voice in that way and exaggerate it to the point of absurdity (if, say, trying to talk lower, talk in the lowest possible tone you can). Then listen to yourself and see how you did, and repeat. The goal isn't to learn to actually talk in such an exaggerated way, but to change things obviously enough that you can tell whether you're making the intended change or not, and then it's easier to "back off" to something more natural if, say, you want to speak in a slightly lower tone to convey a little more authority. Finding specific people to imitate (like Margaret Thatcher, as you mentioned) also is an effective way to practice, and again, recordings can be helpful to figure out if you were actually doing what you were trying to do.

Cheers,
Jeff

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[emily07]

On this: when I am trying very hard to explain something that matters to me, I tend to talk faster and more shrill (that I already do :) This was pointed out to me a longish time ago and since then I foud that it was also a kind of muscle relaxation that did the trick of being better heard an not stress people out with my shrillness. After some years it even changed my singing-voice.
Emily07

Re: A query on particular accents/elocution

[robertmathiesen]

What you call "the voice of authority," Robert A. Heinlein called "the voice of command."

One of the formative influences in Heinlein's younger life was Captain (later, Admiral) Ernest J. King, of the Lexington. Captain King had mastered that voice fully. Heinlein later described it as "the authentic 'voice of command,' the flat tone of voice that conveys absolute, convincing conviction that there is no possibility of not being obeyed." (See William Patterson's 2-volume biography of Heinlein.)

So I guess one might develop it in the course of one's military career.