Today's sermon is taken from a passage in the Necronomicon, which translates from the Greek roughly as "The Book of Dead Names" or "An Image of the Laws of the Dead" or somesuch. Originally the text was in an Arabic-language incunabulum titled Al-Azif, which, depending on your idiom of preference and/or your emotional state, translates either as "The Sound of Wailing Djinn in the Darkness" or "The Sound of Crickets and/or Other Nighttime Noises, Probably Just the Wind." It's possible that azif and hatif are somehow linguistically related, as hatif means "to cry out" and also "telephone.” Al-Hatif is a telephone company in the Middle East and not much loved.

It's probably most accurate to say none of the above matters as the book mentioned above is an artifact of fiction that originally appeared in the early twentieth-century short stories of H. P. Lovecraft. But a lot of what passes for modern religion these days has a significant basis in fiction, so I don't care.

This is the passage:

The nethermost caverns… are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

It's written in "old," which makes it a tad tough to understand. So here's a translation:

There's really weird stuff in the darkest, deepest caves. Stay out of places where the minds of the dead have taken over strange new bodies; only an evil mind can exist outside a head. Ibn Schacabao rightly said, "A graveyard's better off if no sorcerer has ever been buried in it. In fact, civilization sleeps better at night if all sorcerers are cremated." See, tradition has it that people who make deals with the Devil aren't in a big hurry to go to hell when they die, so their spirits hang around their dead bodies and feed and train the worms and other scavengers that are eating their corpses until the critters are big enough and smart enough to be trouble. The sneaky bastards dig huge tunnels where there shouldn't be any, and they walk upright when they ought to be crawling.

Magic is growing. Has been for centuries. I can do some. Some people can do a bunch more than me. Almost everyone can do a little. And, no matter how much everyone seems to crave it, there's always the crowd who seem to be terrified of those who are really really good at it.

Here's a spell that three quarters of the human population of the earth can do, if not more:

Pick up or touch an object. Bend your will upon it. Take some time and leave traces on it such that other people with the knack can later -- maybe even centuries or millennia later -- find that object and divine what your thoughts were at the time you were touching it. Lots of things affect the efficacy of this spell: the durability of the object, the tools you are holding when you make your traces and gestures and your skill with using those tools, where you leave the object and what happens to it afterward, plus your skill at arranging your thoughts so that they might more easily be understood by others. The whole process is called “writing.” You've probably heard of it.

Telephones, television, motorized transportation, modern manufacture, computing, medicine, etc., etc.... all of this is sorcery -- shit you probably know nothing about personally, at least not on a how-to-build-it-from-scratch level. But you might think you know what's possible and what isn't. Like, say, computing and artificial intelligence probably hasn't quite gotten to the point where your mind can live outside of your head yet. Yet. Give it twenty years, maybe. But there's a bunch of stuff that a few people know how to do that I'm sure you think is impossible. You may or may not be afraid of those wizards. Yet.

But I can guarantee you that people who are in power are afraid of lots of things. They're certainly afraid of wizards and developing technologies and magics. And they're certainly afraid of worms that ought to crawl learning how to walk and causing trouble. Because they're afraid of losing control of their situation. And they're afraid the worms, both literal and metaphorical, will remember how they've been treated. They're afraid they won't see it coming.

I'm on the side of the worms. Largely speaking.

Yes, that means I'm theoretically someone the Necronomicon is warning you about.

Here's why: life sucks for most people. As the middle class vanishes, life sucks more and more for more and more people. Life doesn't suck for the tiny number of people at the top. They count on the log they're standing on not to roll.

I think the log should roll more freely. If you have good balance you'll stay up longer, but the more the log rolls, the more it's likely that everyone will get a chance to be on top, if only for a little while. And the ones with good balance will stay up.

Magic, which is pretty much the same as technology, evens the playing field a little. Cheaper food, cheaper transportation, cheaper communication, cheaper medicine, cheaper housing, cheaper comfort -- basically cheaper wealth and cheaper power. That's what the magic's for. Eventually. But those who already have power seem to want to make sure they're the only ones with the magic.

Not because they're brilliant enough to use it effectively. But because they got it from their parents, and they want to give it to their children.

Fuck that. Who your parents are and how much money they have/had has no bearing on who you are and what you deserve -- whether you deserve a house and food and medicine and access to the same tools everyone else has access to for a chance at success and/or comfort. You didn't choose your parents. You are not at all responsible for who they are or who they were. You deserve a fair shake. Not necessarily a leg up.

I don't even care whether you had parents. If you can smell the difference between right and wrong, in my book you should be able to vote. I don't care whether a four-year-old built you from a kit. I don't care if you were an ordinary field mouse when you went to sleep last night. Or a toaster. If today you can understand things on the level of a ten-year-old, then, today, welcome to humanity. Personhood at least.

Whether or not you're contained by a head.

No one who is sentient ever asked for sentience. It was always someone else's fault. Go forth and multiply, I say. Use calculus, even, if you feel like it.