As yet another post in the "What does "Witch" mean to you?" contest by @naturalmedicine, I wanted to clarify a couple of things before continuing with EvoKreationism II: Creation Boogaloo

This is a repost of one of my earliest works, so there's no need to upvote it if you don't want; I'm not trying to be a sucker. But the points made here are quite relevant to EvoKreationism, so I figured I would drop it to help. Feel free, however, to upvote my more recent post in the series: EvoKreationism 0.25, You aren't YOU.

Full Colour Witchery.

To my reckoning, magic is in no way supernatural. It is absolutely a part of the physical, natural world, but one that is not currently very well understood. There is a great deal of conjecture and wishful thinking involved in most definitions of it, and these faulty definitions are behind most of the world’s ignorance of it. Or seeming ignorance.

Magic is on full display in every place and time, but most people are so completely familiar with it that they overlook it constantly. Above all things, familiarity breeds contempt and complacency. When someone becomes so used to a phenomenon that they regard it as ‘something that’s always been there’, the sense of wonder fades, and eventually they simply do not see it. This is the problem with knowing everything. Eventually, you truly know nothing. The greatest torment of the information age, and the velocity of technological achievement; is that people now accept world-changing discoveries without so much as a batting of the eyelid. It is a sign of the times. Thankfully, the unstoppable concepts of Love, Beauty and Joy are reborn with every child, and as any parent can attest, their discoveries are delightful to behold. They spark within us memories of a simpler time. And simple is where it’s at.

Imagine if you will, going to the 1893 World's Fair.

It held many firsts, but certainly the grandest of them all was that the lighting of the entire fair was achieved using electricity. The attendees were stunned. Flabbergasted, even. At this point in time, dim yellow oil and gas lighting were the height of technology. Seeing the buildings lit, not by open flame, but by odorless, colourless, borderline heatless glass bulbs bordered on science fiction. It was simply too wondrous to be believed. It was only one of many technological achievements at the fair, things which most people simply hadn’t conceived of, but it was surely the most impressive. The same principle applies to everything in life, be it music, toys, fiction, or magic. Eventually the ‘new’ wears off of things, and a person who once stood in awe will find themselves blase’.

But all is not yet lost. For instance: If you were a bee, this is all you would see.

This is a computer approximation of what a flower looks like under ultraviolet light. It is not the real colour, because the human sensory organs, the eyes and brain, are completely unable to process those colours. No human being will ever be able to perceive UV light, period. But a bee can. So right there, is an entire planet awash in riotous colour that we can never know. Our planet, and yet utterly beyond our ability to see.

And it doesn’t stop there. For frequency ranges, we can hear from 20 Hz to 20000 Hz (20 kHz). This is due to a limit on the length of our cochlear basalar membrane. If it were longer, we may be able to hear a greater range. For loudness, using a standard pressure level (SPL) absolute value system, we can hear at soft as 20 dB SPL (just audible whisper) to about 120-140 dB SPL (which will begin to cause hearing loss and irreversible damage).

Go to your local store, and buy a dog whistle. No matter how hard you blow, you’re not going to hear a thing. Ever. The ultrasonic frequency is simply too high. But your dog will, and probably wonder what the hell is going on. Then there is infrasound, below our range of hearing. Ever wonder why you can be wholly silent, and yet the spider on the other side of the room will take off running? It’s because the quietest ninja in the world is making as much noise as a bull in a china shop. You will never know it. So there, another planet far beyond our understanding. And you’ve been walking on it every day of your life.

Now for scent. The hart has a sense of smell so far beyond our comprehension that many would consider it supernatural. In complete darkness, without even line of sight, the hart can know everything about you from just one whiff of air. Your age, biological sex, race, mood, injuries both new and old, illnesses, infections, hormonal fluctuations, and vastly more. Some dogs are even more adroit, due to structural features.

An utterly alien world: our world.

Taste: This varies widely based on species. Not all mammals share the same taste perceptions: some rodents can taste starch (which humans cannot), cats cannot taste sweetness; hyenas, dolphins and others have lost the ability to sense up to four of their ancestral five taste senses.

Yet, we can perceive these things, to some degree. By the oldest and most acute of all senses, the one from which all the others sprang. Touch. While the loss of any of your other senses would be traumatic, the loss of touch would be instantly fatal. Your heart would not know it was beating, your lungs cease to breath, your blood stop circulating. It is through this miracle of evolution that we gain more information than any other sense.

Our skin can detect UV light, and produce melanin to combat the effects of radiant damage to our cells. You can easily sense the infrared spectrum of heat. Both ultrasound and infrasound can have effects that you don’t understand. Some areas of great volume can cause heart palpitations and organ damage. Your body feels this, and your brain reacts in response. It can send you into a full blown panic attack, causing a freak out to spring into action. And you will never know why. It is theorized that this is behind the ‘haunted catacomb’ phenomenon, wherein you get that creepy feeling. It’s because of the tremendous volume in such places. Certain scents cause a visceral reaction, again without you knowing why. Inertia? Yep, we got it, via our sense of balance. Pressure, humidity, and the blowing of the wind. All these we know.

Still, there are far more senses that even these. Sea turtles and sharks have iron deposits which allow them to sense the electromagnetic spectrum in ways we cannot conceive. Humans do have such iron deposits as well, but we have evolved not to use them. And as surely as these senses exist, as these earthly sensations are real and wholly around us, there are more senses yet. We just don’t know about them.

My hypothesis is that the sense of Story, the realm of the Divine is absolutely as real as any other, we simply don’t have the technology to quantify it. We likely someday will. More on this later.

So that is why I say that magic is Full Colour. It is a reflection and an integral part of our world, based on the bottom end of physics. The black magic/white magic dichotomy, a common prejudice among witches; is a holdover of mainstream protestant religious values. To me this is nonsense. Our world is not black and white, with a mixture of grey between. Look out your window, and tell me what shade of grey those leaves are. Now also tell me whether or not germination is going well for it, how it's structural health is, whether or not it's been diseased in the past...

Because all of this information is readily available, plays an important part in your life, and yet you don't know it.
Our world is steeped in experiences far beyond our comprehension. And every part of it hits deeper than folks think.

To be a witch is to search things unknown, move beyond common human paradigms, to explore realities which are eternally present and eternally ignored. To be a witch, first, foremost, and honestly, last... Is to be brave.

So walk bravely,

Silas Danois

Also, @yidneth