Witch Science on the Moon, or why I made Elektron Oracle, an installation for the goodwitch/badwitch show at @Momartseattle, curated by Greg Lundgren & @thehoodwitch. #elektronOracle #meghantrainor #seattleart #witchScience

About a year ago, in the Before Times, I was asked to talk about travel to the moon for The Salish Sea Anti-Space Symposium. The event was held at local anarchist art gallery and included speakers like co-founder of the Seattle Black Panther Party Elmer Dixon.

My first thought was of the Inuit word ikiaqqivik or "Travelling Through Layers" Both for its intersection with the Apollo mission and the use of traditional language to talk about digital concepts. https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1769/1889

I began to think about the associations we have between witches and the moon...and how that iconography has morphed over time, from the Greek & Roman roots of some European paganism to the propaganda of The Hammer of the Witches to present day practice.

Most specifically I began to think of Apollo, both the god & the mission, and the god's sister, Artemis, often conflated with Diana.
[Images: Artemis Ephesia, Diana the Huntress, Bernardino Cametti]

How did the worship of moon goddesses morph into the strange flight of the village botanical expert into the night sky...and perhaps the moon itself?

And what were the exact mechanisms of this flight?

I also began to think about the quartz crystal-tipped Ishango bone, possibly the world's oldest mathematical object. It was discovered in present day Democratic Republic of the Congo on the Semliki River, which empties into the Nile River.

One theory is that this 20,000 year old device is a lunar calendar, created by a woman, crafted from the fibula of a baboon. If knowledge drifts north, where might we see evidence of this object later?

I continued to wonder....
Here is Thoth, sometimes ibis-headed, sometimes baboon, god of the Moon. Thoth was patron of scribes and magicians, and secretary of the gods.

Later we arrive at (not that) Cleopatra in 4th century Egypt, possibly one of the greatest alchemists in history. Did she invent the alembic? Did she create the only functional Philosopher's Stone, a device to transmute base metal into gold and extend life or grant immortality?

And I began to think as well about the origins of familiars, so maligned as demonic agents in the Medieval period. They were once genies, or daemon or djinn.

[Woman holding a mirror and a tambourine facing a winged genie with a ribbon and a branch with leaves.]

In Plato’s Symposium the priestess Diotima to Socrates describes daemons as "interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above.."

Daemons are also described as...love.

We also associate witches with the five-pointed star...but this too comes to us from the Greeks via the philosopher & mathematician Pythagorus: this is the Hugieia Pentagram or the "health star."

The five elements may seem simplistic when we contrast them with our Periodic Table, but consider the Grand Unified Theory: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces with perhaps the addition of dark matter...that elusive Aether, or spirit or power?

I, myself, as a digital hedgewitch, think about this symbol differently, especially the corelation between the earth or ground symbol from this star and the ground symbol in electronic circuit diagrams. Is power...just that? Power? Volts? This ancient electromagnetism?

What is to be made of the similarities between sigils and circuits?
[Sigils from the Key of Solomon & a modern circuit diagram]

In my practice
a CIRCUIT
is a SIGIL
is a CIRCLE
is a SPELL

And in my practice
Witchcraft is the root of STEM

While Alchemists busied themselves with the pursuit of gold & immortality, Witches set about healing, divination and protection.

My thoughts on the endgame of the Alchemists are well covered elsewhere... http://bit.ly/familiarAlgorhythm

Which brings us to the emergence of witch robotics that only slightly predates the period of witch hunts and witch trials coincident with the Reformation & Counter-Reformation.

In my practice I honor these old investigations into the mysteries of electrical control and communication.

While a medieval robotics practice hidden, or occluded, in the works of the weird folks of the hedge may seem startling it's important to remember that automatons date back thousands of years and these healers were keeping knowledge afloat that was shunned by the church.

But let's circle back around the original question: Witch technology got you to the moon?

It's not fully understood when the witches stopped being able to travel to the moon with magic, or exactly why this act was so important. A fertility rite? A ritual for water? It is hypothesized that the emergence of logic traveling north interrupted some of their processes.

So the witches began to consider that their new, yet hidden, work with electricity might offer a different method to travel to the moon. Their longing for this journey can be seen in the centering of moon motifs throughout their practice.

However, the complexity of this plan to honor Diana/Artemis/The Moon with a massive electro-mechanical device was at odds with the material realities of these country healers at the edge of the village. A conspiracy was born...

These healers began to share their hidden electrical rites with the Alchemists like Newton, himself already half-witch anyway, in order to see their mission forward.

Johannes Kepler, the grandfather of astrophysics, was himself surely involved in the project, and was also, like Newton and Nicolaus Copernicus, deeply influenced by the philosophies of Pythagorus.

He was certainly raised amidst the desperate longing for the moon amongst the witches of his time. His own mother, Katharina Kepler, who was prosecuted as a witch in Leonberg, surely raised him with this nostalgia for travel to into the heavens.

This longing is expressed in his novel Somnium, possibly the first science fiction story written down. While it contains a rigorous understanding of lunar astronomy, it also tells the story of a witch & her son traveling to the moon through the Aether with the aid of a daemon.

The details of Somnium delight me. In particular the ask for sailors or dried-up old women as Astronauts as well as the tenderness of the daemon showing the human how to hold wet sponges against their nose & mouth to survive the atmosphere between earth and moon.

So what became of the moon mission? Did these witches simply hand their technology off to the Alchemists and disappear into mushroom circles in the woods? Not quite. They disappeared into longhand computing. Into difference engines. They even disappeared into Bletchley Park.

Consider Doreen Valiente, author of much of the early religious liturgy within the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca, a religious offshoot of witchcraft, who worked at cracking the Abwehr ciphers using a special version of the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park.

Consider the Hollywood magic of Hedy Lamar, who patented a frequency-hopping signal during WWII that emerged in later technologies like Bluetooth & Wi-Fi.

Consider the code that got us to the moon with electricity. That spell, I mean, ignition program that began: Burn, Baby Burn, an anthem for Black Liberation. https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminary099/BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc

But how was this code...encoded, who built it, and how? The Apollo Mission consisted of 2 main types of memory for the various types of data & instructions on the ship. Magnetic core memory [left] and core rope memory [right] used copper wire & magnetic torids to store 0s & 1s.

The mathematical and computational lineage of this programming framework comes to us from weaving...by and large women's work. I wonder if the cognitive ability of humans to do complex programming originates in thousands of years of complex fiber manipulation...

And while I can't speak to the trajectory of the Navajo/Diné women who transitioned from weaving to circuit building for Fairchild mid-Century....the relationship between their weaving traditions and mathematics is notable.

Magnetic core memory was built of copper wire and magnetic torids or "cores" that stored zeros as counterclockwise magnetism & ones as clockwise magnetism.

We are familiar with the Astronauts, but who was it that did all this laborious computer programming towards the moon?

Who were the Space-Age Needle Workers?

The weavers of moon bound computer programs were women. A circuit is a sigil is a circle is a spell.

After centuries of waiting in between their flights of magic and the thrust of logic, the witches would have their sacred moon back.

So my work and my practice honor this secret mission. The hidden spells that travelled down through time, from the medieval witch roboticists, to the witches of Bletchley Park, to the familiars & genies of the Mediterranean, to the mathematicians up the Nile River.

I think of the first woman to scribe mathematical symbols onto a crystal wand as she stared at the moon on the shores of the Semliki River. Was she a weaver too?

I still wonder at how ancient witches might of first experienced or detected the movement of electrons, our word from the Greek ἤλεκτρον [Elektron] for amber, the fossilized resin of pine trees. How their intersection of divination and investigation would have served them.

What would it have been like to sit in the fragile space between magic and logic and travel to the moon with the aid of smoke and plants and amber and transcendence and mathematics and electricity? I can only sit with this in awe and wonder.