Hello, hypothetical audience. I guess on the intertubes, I'm Taun-Taun. Which really has yet to stop being strange when I see it written referring to me on here.
So why am I interrupting the normal posting habits of my better half? As I told her earlier today, I had something I kind of wanted to talk about and I didn't really have an outlet, so here I am, shouting into the void instead. I was listening to Pagan Parents On The Edge earlier at work, which is an awesome show, so listen to it if you don't already. They were talking about the role of Santa in the holiday season, and, as expected, talked briefly about how children generally stop believing in him as they get older, along with a general waning of belief in the fantastic or magical. Which I agree with, to an extent.
As a society, we obviously are fairly down on magical thinking. You didn't cure your headache with that spell, it was just a placebo effect because you thought about it a lot. Smudging your house with sage doesn't purify it, you just made the place smell funny. So on and so forth. I'm sure we've all heard some version of this at some point or another. But then, I got to thinking, which is always a bad idea. For as much as anything supernatural is generally looked down on, you know who the biggest coven in the world actually is? Sports fans.
Stay with me for a second here. Maybe you're reading this from somewhere in Boston, and you have a Red Sox hat on a shelf somewhere. Or Chicago, and your winter coat is a Cubs jacket. Or maybe you're familiar with any of the ENTIRE FREAKING ARTICLE- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports-related_curses
I used to be pretty big into baseball until a few years ago, and I saw people, including my own family, doing the craziest crap because they thought somehow it would help their team win. Or that there was some kind of "bad luck" that kept their team from going anywhere in the playoffs. Hell, I watched my mother adjust the position of a roll of posterboard she'd left on the couch by accident one day because we thought if we moved it a little bit, the Yankees might start playing better. Other friends had certain shirts of certain players they would wear so that they would break out of their slumps. Me and my brother wore a small Yankees symbol on a chain like it was a cross. Another person I knew wore a particular hat when his team was playing at home, no matter how gross it got. It couldn't be washed, you see, that would take the luck out of it. We were all just joking, of course. Right?
Looking back on it, I don't really think that was the case. There's a certain level of vehemence that rose to the surface when these goofy little rituals of ours were challenged. I distinctly remember getting yelled at if the Yankees were playing well and I would accidentally knock that roll of posterboard out of place. It's possible that this makes her sound like a nutcase, but the fact is, this is the kind of passion and faith you see people put in superstitions all over the world of sports fandom.
So what's my point here? Is it that sports fans are batshit crazy? That one doesn't need me writing about it. But let's look at the bigger picture, the one that this post only touches on one aspect of. As a culture, we perform rituals. We wear totems. We make sacrifices. Why do we do this? "Well, you know, it's just this stupid little thing I have, but it helps me calm down/focus/keep moving while I'm doing housework/get through visiting my in-laws without killing them/etc." Frequently said with a bit of shame, as though this is something you shouldn't be doing, or is kid's stuff, and how silly it is that you as a grown, mature adult still hold onto a bit of it. The only thing that's silly about this is that we try to hide it and ignore it. "It just isn't the Way The World Works", we adamantly repeat to ourselves. To that, I say- pfft. The Horned One has helped me finish more than one workout when all I've wanted to do is topple to the floor and pass out in a nice warm puddle of my own sweat.
Unlike disco, magic ain't dead. It just updated its wardrobe. Also unlike disco.
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