We’ve gone from a flood watch to a heat watch within the span of a few days. Many such cases!
Anthropeum.com · Jul 13 2026
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I type this on the Tram; the gentleman in the seat across the aisle is quietly rapping the lyrics to “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” (Eminem, 2002). He’s surprisingly good, I think if he wrote his own stuff he could be going places. I’ve decided today is yet another blue monday insofar as I’m wearing my short sleeved Hawaiian-adjacent navy blue shirt and my navy blue slacks, with ultramarine socks. The bard just left at the Ardmore Junction stop, Godspeed to him. My dreams were enthralling last night, and I slept in so that they would continue, but eventually it was 7:30 and I had to get ready so I could leave Anova by 8. I’ve managed to condense the essentials of my routine into 15-20 minutes, 10 if I prepare in advance. Worst case scenario I tousle my hair for a few moments once I reach the office, but honestly my hair’s fine. I’ve been trying a new shampoo given that I’m side parting my hair (really more of a mid part and a side part today).
It was a fairly packed Tram when I boarded but less than a handful of us remain as we draw near to Norristown.
As I write this, it’s almost 11 AM. Work’s been going well, fairly slow day right now, although I’ve been a little on edge. There’s a pizza party tomorrow, which is exciting, although the snide Gen Xer in me thinks pizza parties are how the Man keeps the cogs in the machine chugging along. On an unrelated note, I have the Ring Poem (Tolkien, 1954, from Tolkien 1954-55) stuck in my head.
…
One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them;
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
As I write this it’s almost noon. I’m building up case law for the project I’m currently prioritizing. I’m thinking about skipping lunch today, since I snacked a bit this morning.
I don’t think this is a particularly controversial statement but the Ring Poem is a kind of spell in the classical sense: in its abridged form it is engraved upon the Ring in the tongue Sauron devised to unite his empire, it sets out what the Ring does and its relationship to the other rings of power. For a while now some of my acquaintances from SporeWiki with academic interests in occultism have been working on a unified theory of magic (and comparative theology/mythology) across cultures and world history, originally to add verisimilitude to the Fantasyverse (Various Authors, 2019-present). Thanks to feature creep, the aims of my acquaintances have broadened considerably. Heavily abridged, the crux of our model are the concepts of emergence and submergence.
Emergence is when a system has properties different from its component parts, e.g. liquid water having viscosity and surface tension which individual water molecules lack, those water molecules similarly having properties not possessed by their elementary particles (hydrogen and oxygen atoms), and so on and so forth all the way down to the standard model (and possibly beyond, but I’m the only one without a STEM background so that’s out of my pay grade). The sum or set of these emergent properties is the macrostate, while the sum or set of the properties of the system’s component parts is the microstate.
Supernatural phenomena require that the interactions between microstates are insufficient to determine the macrostate. Conventionally this position is called strong emergence but it’s really more of the opposite. To quote one of the papers (still being drafted):
Instead of forces that act on the microstate causing a change [to emerge] in the macrostate, such as water molecules being given energy and thereby turning the macrostate from a liquid into a gas, forces act on the macrostate [submerging into] the microstate [and it] has to behave accordingly, like a liquid being enchanted to boil and thereby forcing its molecules to spontaneously gain energy.
As you may have already noticed, this breaks locality (that things are only directly affected by their immediate surroundings), and may also break conservation laws and unitarity. As this write-up is an abridged summary of our model, at this time resolving the great debates in theoretical physics is left as an exercise for the reader.
As described by Frazier (no relation to the excellent TV show or to Giara’s bastard first ex) in The Golden Bough (1899), “sympathetic magic” refers to the belief that the change in one object causes a similar change in a similar object. The archetypical example would be sticking pins in an effigy or poppet representing one’s biggest opp to cause them injury. In such a case, the change in one macrostate (the pins stuck in the poppet) affects the linked macrostate (the opp), causing the microstates of the opp to move in accord with the poppet and not the usual intermolecular forces. From this, most “magic” can be understood as interactions between macrostates:
- In ceremonial magic (e.g. theurgia–goetia) names and symbols are coupled with the wills of angels, demons, etc.
- In [Western] alchemy, properties like “wetness”, “dryness”, “hotness”, and “coldness” are made into elementary substances (e.g. water is wet and cold, fire is hot and dry, etc.)
- In astrology, the movements and positions of celestial bodies relative to earth influence events “below”
- “Psychic powers” are mental macrostates affecting another (telepathy, etc.), or affecting physical macrostates (psychokinesis, etc.)
Between macrostates and microstates are parastates, used here to refer to what’s colloquially called “energy”. To simplify: a microstate is particles and their individual properties such as their positions and speeds, a macrostate is properties that a group of particles has such as temperature, pressure, etc., and a parastate is properties without particles. Alchemy, for instance, traditionally deals directly in macrostate-macrostate interactions, while something like astrology involves an intermediary (the parastate).
To loop back around (pun intended) from theoretical occultism to Sauron, the inscription on the Ring gives it a parastate that is an extension of the Dark Lord’s will through which he can dominate the other ring-bearers: one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. (Emphasis added.) Because the Ring is an extension of Sauron’s will, Sauron himself is bound to it, especially after his defeat at the end of the Second Age: no Ring, no Sauron.
Work went well, my hair tousled by the hot wind as I walked from the office to the train station. As I write this I approach 69th Street. I’m debating what to do for dinner tonight, if I’ll cook something new or heat up some leftovers. The conductor wished everyone a good day over the intercom; I hope he has a blessed one.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 