Evolutionary possibilities aside, planning for scarcity must be total and continuous. It’s no good planning at the last minute. Civilisations have been built on warding off disaster through social massing, agriculture, commerce, and technology. The granary, the barn and byre, the cold store, and processes such as pickling and fermentation were discoveries of necessity, whether accidental or not.
Soil must be cultivated and irrigated. Seeds must be sourced, sowed, husbanded, reaped, used now, or stored against a ‘rainy day.’ After a lambing, a calving or a hatching, there has to be ceaseless care and vigilance of husbandry, actions taken for future increase until the crop, whatever it might be, is ready for reaping, milking, trade or slaughter.
But ‘what Man proposes God disposes’. In hoping to head off bad luck, a flood, a fire, a locust or mouse plague, we play the ancient cards of our mystical nature; our imaginative or magical responses.
The outer reality of physical existence is so vast it’s frightening to think about. We turn to inner mirrors in trying to comprehend it, through songs, dance, stories, dreams, wishes and magic. Whatever our own cultural tradition and choices, the great world myths of light and dark are there to draw on, sustenance for the spirit, and their pull grows stronger as the days grow shorter. It’s in our hard wiring.
Magic, or ‘magick’, could be defined as a directed investment of wishful attention, or energy, generally involving some symbolic action or ‘ritual’. To anyone who suggests we are or should be beyond magical thinking, I’d suggest that if ever you ‘touch wood,’ or articulate a wish or prayer, you are luck-making. Given the odds of winning anything substantial, every time someone buys a Lottery ticket, they are luck-making.
It may work by empathy, an imaginative identification with the force we hope to align with. But nothing is for nothing. See the Tarot’s Empress reclining at ease. She is Gaia, Demeter, Brigid, Pomona and Isis. The bounty surrounding her has been cultivated by effort in harmony with nature. We see only her ease, not her effort. What are we ready to do or forego, asks the Tarot’s Hanged Man card, to achieve our desires?