Unrelated, but boy do I wish I were an anthropology major in college right about now so that I could write a bombing thesis on why doing the hokey pokey at Hurricane Florence in the hopes that she’ll turn herself around is a seemingly legitimate modernized attempt at animistic folk magic.
As an anthropology minor and psychology major I can absolutely assure you that it is. A large portion of magic particularly folk magic regarding weather and tragedy is about meaning making and reassurance. It drives humans up the walls to have no control over our environment and for bad things to happen for no tangible reason because we’re normally so good at controlling our world and noticing cause and effect. Because of this even just joking about “Let’s blast “Florence at the Machine at Hurricane Florence until it leaves” makes us feel better because it gives us an illusion of meaning when its not there.
Lets break that joke down into some different language though. “Let’s play the music of a woman who bears the same name that was given to this storm in the hopes that it leaves us in peace.” Suddenly it sounds really legit. Or the joke used above “Let’s play a song we’ve all known since our youth and pray that the storm is compelled to follow the steps.”
Animistic folk magic and other things that we consider to be long gone like sacrifices to beings for safety (many modern approaches to recycling and composting focus on ‘giving back’ to an unnamed source for future safety), reverence or fear of spirits or the unknown (fae/ghosts/demons/evil in general), and the worship or reverence of certain sites (monuments/national parks/memorials) have stayed with us because they’re an inherently human part of the meaning making process when confronted with our world.
At the end of the day it’s more comforting to think of a hurricane as a sentient entity sent to wreak havoc rather than an unfortunate byproduct of greedy people not listening to a hundred years of scientific warnings. You can reason with a hurricane.
Published
foolish-identity 