Powers of Trance
A placebo, the eucharist and bitcoin walk into a bar. “Three non-alcoholic beers please.”
What the anthropologist had once named sympathetic magic has had many names and guises throughout history, often hovering at the margins of society—if not in its very glue. To name a few of them: ritual, possession, witchcraft, animal magnetism, mesmerism, hypnotism, hysteria and so on. Uh, but there is so much more, please continue… fashion, haute couture, virality, mob rule, mind control, creed and sect, being slain in the spirit, faith healing, snake oil, investment opportunity, money! and of course, known more technically as belief, identification, the order of the Imaginary, the enigmatic signifier, the Zero Symbol. And so on and so on. Suffice to say that all these reside under the weird star called Trance.
What are these occult powers? Is identity itself a kind of trance? That certain scholars have spent whole lifetimes trying to answer these questions is perhaps a clue precisely to the supernatural quality of its effects. Those who wield this trance have the extraordinary power to heal. Or the brute charisma to produce the believer, the apparatchik, the soldier, the cult-follower, the zombie. Who are these people if not your next-door neighbors? Why hadn’t you been so entranced? Or had you? We are seeing first-hand that the worst and most intractable form of trance leads to and arises from violence. Certain forms of culture, religion and politics should come with a user advisory label; WARNING: Powerful Enchantment in Effect. But who would heed such caution? Everyone wants to be enchanted, very few can admit to being in a trance.
take this bitcoin in remembrance of me…
