Is the cyber witch dead?

on black boxes, becoming human, and something more

Becoming the cyber witch led me to my body and now that I’ve found mybodyself I wonder, is the cyber witch dead? Am I now just human? 

My last year has been full of classes on herbalism, pleasure, and somatics. Since I found my body, I have become almost obsessed as it feels like an endless source of magic, information, and wonder. I feel the imprint of the entire cosmos within me and recognize it in others.

But why did this reconnection take me so long? And what does technology have to do with this or at the very least my own journey?

Some time ago I became intimate friends with the glitch, exploring the idea of the digital glitching process and the glitches that also happen away from keyboard and in the everyday. I wondered if the act of “projection” (most notably the master’s projection,) was to blame for the prioritization of a violent disembodied reality that became the normative world that we are forced to also inhabit.

That inquiry made me sink into a pit of resignation until I remembered that the benefits of being a cyber witch was access to magic. So I returned to magic. I wanted to collaborate with mystery and enchantment not an eternal death which was what I thought the glitch caused.

And I was tired of hitting the all too familiar walls of the black boxes of technology, of bumping up against all that was hidden and not moving toward the otherside. Too tired of the “magic” of technology being propped up via what was occluded. This idea that the less you know, the more magical it is.

So I distanced myself from this realm and killed the cyber witch in my head.

It is better to know.

It is better to know.

It is better to know.

Photo of me from “Conjuratio” taken by my friend Ize Commers

I have been with the same therapist for almost three years now. For the past three months, I have been telling my friends I should and will leave her but I haven’t. There’s something about therapy now that makes me hate it and I know it’s not her fault. It feels like I am in conflict with its unspoken limits, more black boxes. 

I think what hurts the most about therapy is that it conjures up all the many emotions across all timelines both known and unknown and doesn’t resolve them. I am left with them while the session time ticks. Trauma on capitalist time. I spit up my trauma and there is no place for them to go, no somatic integration. It does not feel good to bump up against shadows.

Is it better to know?

Is it better to know?

Is it better to know?

Something tells me awareness is not enough.

My biggest takeaway from my brief foray into Chaos Magic was the idea that every tool has within it limitations and affordances. Everything is useful insomuch as it is useful.

I was not ever taught to think about the limitations of therapy

¹

, although I feel aware of its affordances. From the looks of it, it also seems like so many of those that make technology also do not seem to look at its limitations either, seeing it instead as the mythical endless realm that can satisfy all needs, all desires. It's almost like they are using eros in a realm that is ultimately thanatos

²

heavy.

But we know what it feels like to bump up against the edges of a box because we have a body and that’s one thing that so many of our tools seem to forget or rather ignore. To me our bodies are more infinite than any technology they’re trying to sell us could be. And this all along was what the cyber witch was revealing to me. Revealing a path that was more than any language could put to being dead or alive or even human.

To learn more about Cy’s work in herbalism, pleasure, and somatics visit Pleasure Ceremony.

1. I was not taught to think about the limitations of therapy or rather how to understand which kind of therapy is right for me. Maybe you relate to this or maybe your therapy is different. I think often about how we tell people to go to therapy and yet not all therapy is the same. Each type may have different ideas / values / understandings / protocol for how they treat the mind and the body and how they understand the relation between the too. My form of therapy acknowledges I have a body somewhat but offers no somatic resolution perhaps because it takes a mind centric approach with the idea that even if the mind and body are connected, they should be treated separately.

2. Quote from a random Professor Easton’s humanities syllabus: Eros and Thanatos—Freud identifies two drives that both coincide and conflict within the individual and among individuals. Eros is the drive of life, love, creativity, and sexuality, self-satisfaction, and species preservation. Thanatos, from the Greek word for "death" is the drive of aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death. At the conclusion of C&D, Freud notes (in 1930-31) that human beings, following Thanatos, have invented the tools to completely exterminate themselves; in turn, Eros is expected to "make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with an equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?