#3 Succession, TV Benders, Witchcraft, and ADHD
Can witchcraft cure our dis-ease?
(Here it is again! The Voice Over for the email. It’s kind of like getting a long, and can I also say, brilliant (#LeoMoon) voice memo from a friend. It’s raw and conversational, but also fun. There are some digressions from the text, why not check them both out?)
ADHD and Screen Addiction
Recently I’ve developed an addiction to Succession, the HBO series loosely based on the Rupert Murdoch family media empire. I don’t use the term addiction lightly, it’s compulsive behavior and it causes me pain.
In the evening, I want to play guitar, pull a tarot card, journal, eat vegetables, cast spells, do bedtime yoga … things I look forward to all day. But when evening comes, often an inner demon will rasp from the shadows, “You could just watch one episode.”
But, it’s never just one episode. I cave, and then feel guilty when I go to bed having just sat on the couch eating popcorn.
The ADHD mind is more vulnerable to screen addiction, we have less dopamine available to us, and so we’re always out hunting for it. And the media empires of the world are only too happy to help us score.
Social media is addictive, we’ve all heard the thing about how the infinite scroll of Instagram is like a slot machine. But narratives are addictive too, that’s really what gets me. The promise of a resolution to a narrative problem. They dangle me from their own cliffhanger.
Those cliffhangers at the end LITERALLY hook your dopamine centers, they promise the satisfaction of your need to know what happens that many with ADHD (and people in general) just can’t resist.
Sometimes, I can only pull myself away by stopping in the middle of an episode.
Combine all of this with disassociative tendencies from childhood trauma, plus Gen X latchkey kid syndrome, and you’ve got a recipe for a serious media addiction.
When I was a kid, the television was my friend. Oprah greeted me when I came home from school. Then I’d spend the afternoon hanging with my friends from Three’s Company, their innuendo about threesomes going straight over my head, like hanging out with your cool aunts at cocktail hour.
The time in my life I was at my sharpest, creatively and mentally, was when I was in my early 20s. I was dancing every day, didn’t have a television, my only access to computers was at the computer lab at my college, and smart phones hadn’t been invented yet.
In the evenings I would listen to whole albums on audio cassette (Manu Chao, Portishead, Belle & Sebastion), stretch, read, and roll around on my floor day dreaming and drawing and practicing magic. Do kids do this anymore? Do they even have time? Our media addiction even follows us to the toilet now.
Addiction and the Wetiko Virus
So where does Succession and magic come in to all of this? Stay with me. (It’s a great opportunity to practice extending your attention span. 😉)
Succession is a show about addiction.
Obviously, the oldest son Kendall is a cocaine addict, and he may be the identified patient in that regard, but the whole family are addicts. In fact, they – WE – live in an addict CULTURE, victims of an addiction disease the indigenous social theorist Jack D. Forbes calls Wetiko. [1]
Wetiko is the Cree word for cannibal. Forbes defines cannibalism as, “the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.” Forbes argues that Wetiko-ism is the true pandemic of capitalist colonialism, a disease which spreads and infects whomever it touches.
A disease of loneliness, Wetiko-ism functions in the same way that alcoholism or drug addiction is does. If you eat everyone around you, you end up alone.
Wetiko-ism destroys the life of its host, it harms the people in the hosts life to such a degree that they may become diseased themselves - and it is a disease rooted in trauma.
The entire Roy family in Succession is infected with Wetiko. They eat each other, they’d eat the whole world if they could. Their hunt for more power, more money, for the ability to destroy or control whomever they wish leaves them perpetually unsatisfied. Nothing is ever enough, they can never rest; like sharks, they must be perpetually moving and hunting for new pray.
(But the world needs sharks, it doesn’t need more Roy families).
Remember those pictures they’d show you in sex ed class? The ones with advanced stages of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis or HPV? Most people have actually been exposed to HPV by the time they reach 30, but High Schools show you the advanced cases to scare you (into abstinence I guess). The Roy’s have the advanced stage of the Wetiko disease, but we’ve ALL been exposed.
Even though members of the Roy family and their minions have occasional moments of lucidity – where they know they need to get out of their social dynamic or risk losing their souls – they can’t bring themselves to leave. They may try, but they always come back. Because the lure of Wetiko is like crack - it changes the way you think, what you want, who you are, it convinces you that you need it to live.
This is where witchcraft comes in.
I want us all to spend a moment thinking very seriously about how to resist the Wetiko disease of capitalist colonialism. It’s everywhere, in everything. We’re already carrying it, as is everyone we know. How do we resist it? This thing destroying life as we know it on this planet. What are our tools? What is our medicine?
Our medicine will not be provided by the CDC, it will not be taught in institutions of higher learning funded by the military industrial complex, it will not be published by media-conglomerates seeking a large profit margin, the Popes and tech gurus of the world will not recognize it. Our antidote to Wetiko will not be found in the master’s medicine cabinet.
Instead, we need to learn to want different things. See reality from the perspectives of the animate pluriverse. To return to an enchanted world.
We should seek the antidote to the Wetiko virus in the venom of the snake hissing its riddles from the branches of Tree of Knowledge. We should seek it in the graveyard dirt and burial mounds of our ancestors; it bubbles up from the holy wells remote enough to be untouched by DDT. Horned Huntress Diana will chant the medicine over us as we visit her temples in a trance. Hobgoblins hidden in the roots of the Yew tree will trade us the medicine for saucers of milk. We find medicine in our menstrual blood, our sweat and funk, in wormwood smoke and the shriek of the crow who comes to us in our dreams.
My point is, witchcraft isn’t just a tool to get what we want, it’s a medicine to save our souls.
We need the courage witchcraft gives us, and the community. Fundamentally, witchcraft is about enchantment, and enchantment IS the practice of reweaving the webs of relationship between all beings.
Relationship is the most potent ingredient in witchcraft medicine, and love is the soil it grows in.
We are here to practice our medicine together. So mote it be.
Love,
Amanda
P.S. Okay, so, Monthly/Yearly/Founder level subscribers, please scroll down because I’ve included a video and an MP3 download of a simple daily practice you can do this month to develop a more intimate relationship with witchcraft medicine and the transformative power of fire, as mentioned in your New Moon downloadable PDF. Hope you enjoy!
P.P.S. Also, my Full Moon ceremony is coming up soon, on Tuesday December 6th at 6pm PST. Paid subscribers get in automatically. More info on that soon!
P.P.P.S. I know there may be a bit of a contradiction to the above missive in only having these techniques available for paid subscribers, but I need people to be in reciprocity for this work because it takes a lot of time and effort to produce it and I need money to live in this wetiko-driven-world. However! I don’t want to turn anyone away for lack of funds so if you want to subscribe but honestly can’t afford to, shoot me an email and we can work something out, no problem.
[1] Columbus and Other Cannibals, by Jack D. Forbes.
FIRE MAGIC BASICS: VIDEO INSTRUCTION AND MP3 DOWNLOAD
Inside:
20 minute video describing the basics of a daily fire magic practice you can use to increase your witchcraft skills
A downloadable MP3 of the video so you can listen on your walks or practice in nature
Time markers so that you can just listen to the three minute practice on its own and have a VERY achievable magical practice you can do everyday to help build your relationship to fire (will, inspiration, warmth, desire, passion, transformation)