Steampunk Magic: Working Magic Aboard the Airship

[sailor]

I was giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that it just didn't occur to her, rather than actively embracing it, but... Yeah, either way it's uncomfortable.

 
From a historical point, rather than a steam punk point, I'd expect the general members of the coven to be wearing fancy civilian clothing ala Sunday going to church.  

I could see using class structure to play into the Wiccan degree system - new members start as street urchins, steerage class then when they've been there a year and had their 1st or 2nd initiation they move up to something more 2nd class. then to 1st class as full members. Although she is talking airship so I'd play that off of Victorian & Edwardian passenger ships though.

[MadZealot]

It sounds to me like, far from ignoring class issues, she's enthusiastically embracing them as a model for coven hierarchy. Leadership requires fancy clothes... but the non-office-holding coven members are street urchins?? Eww.

It does seem a bit... forced.  Also... a bit militaristic, which can certainly fall into steampunk lore but, like leadership diagrammed via class distinction, does not look very egalitarian.

[Jack]

Moving on...

 
Chapter four is all about your tools.

The altar layout is very reminiscent of your bog standard Wiccan altar, with a giant "directional" gear in place of your standard pentacle. She specifies that it should be non-ferrous because otherwise it will throw the compass off. The wands she recommends are made from thin brass piping with a crystal at the "fore" and a grounding stone like hematite at "aft".

Then we get to goggles. She includes three different sets of instructions for making your own goggles, the most basic of which is "cut a toilet paper tube in half and put string through it".

That is... look. I understand wanting to give the newbie a low-cost way to put together the equipment. And maybe there are people who could take themselves seriously in ritual while wearing a completely unadorned piece of toilet paper tube on their face. But you can buy goggles by the pair for six dollars at Harbor Freight. There are internet tutorials for making goggles from toilet paper tubes that are actually pretty classy-looking. Teague states that "goggles enhance the sight of the practitioner and enable the individual to perceive obstacles that may be looming beyond normal vision." (56) This is all that is said on the use of the goggles; presumably we'll get something useful in a later chapter?

For cakes and wine she recommends Victorian lace cookies and absinthe. I'm just gonna leave that alone.

The rigging knife takes the place of the traditional boline, there's a compass for "aligning divination" which I assume we'll also get to later, and a spike that takes over for the athame. There's a lamp "for light," which I assume means it replaces candles, a "small airship or balloon" for air/gas, censer for fire, brass bowl with water for, well, water, and a salt cellar (followed by instructions for "making your own salt crystals").

There's a key, which rather than being a normal key has the handle cut off and replaced by more brass tubing and another crystal. My initial reaction to this is fairly skeptical-eyebrow; I've done plenty of key magic with normal keys. I'll wait and see what the explanation for this is, though, since once again there's not really any THEORY to go with the items, just an offhand mention that the crystal focuses the key's energy.

There's an offhand reference to storage boxes, and that's about it for this chapter.

Okay, look, I'm gonna be honest. I have used virtually every tool outlined in this chapter. I have goggles that I enchanted for "true seeing" (and for other things... I have a lot of goggles, actually, it's kind of a thing). I have used nearly identical wands of brass tubing with crystals. My go-to compass for magical work is actually a modified feng shui compass, and hilariously enough I built it to mimic something a character in my steampunk novel uses. My favorite ritual knife is actually one I made from a railroad spike. I should be enjoying the crap out of this.

Maybe it's because there's absolutely no theory or explanation of how she expects to use these things yet, but the whole chapter feels shallow. I know why I use these things, but I have no idea if her reasoning is the same. It's all recipes and crafts with no real explanation. I'm still hoping there will be something a little meatier later on.

[RandallS]

Maybe it's because there's absolutely no theory or explanation of how she expects to use these things yet, but the whole chapter feels shallow. I know why I use these things, but I have no idea if her reasoning is the same. It's all recipes and crafts with no real explanation. I'm still hoping there will be something a little meatier later on.

The lack od theory is disturbing, although I find theory (or even just simply explanations of "why") lacking in a lot of 101 books.

[Jack]

The lack od theory is disturbing, although I find theory (or even just simply explanations of "why") lacking in a lot of 101 books.

 
Chapter five is about setting up the altar, and includes a lot of fiddly discussion about an object having primary and secondary elemental associations (candles are air but also fire, goggles are light and void and go in the east because sunrise...). If I had no idea how I liked to set up an altar, I suppose this would be useful, but at this point I'll admit my eyes are glazing over a bit.

Then we cast and cleanse the circle and call the quarters. There's a brief discussion of casting the circle before cleansing because we're "on a ship" so the ship has to be air-ready before we can clean it, but that's all the theory about WHY you do any of these things.

Chapter six is rituals and circles. Rituals include: Birth, coming of age, joining the crew, handfasting, leaving the crew, and death. They all look adequate and thematically appropriate and blah blah blah. There are also what the author calls "Victoria circles," which appear to be basically ancestor rituals honoring Victoria on her birth and death days. This is something I see a lot in heathenry and almost never in Wicca, so I'm in favor of a group choosing to honor those who are thematically appropriate to the work the group is doing. There's also discussion of celebrating your own birthday with a "circle."

Chapter seven is about visioning and divination. It kicks off with the heading "Preparing for Visioning" without explaining what visioning actually is, but from context it appears to be guided meditation and journeywork. It outlines a five-element system (earth, air, fire, water, void) in which you invoke whichever element is thematically appropriate for the subject of your work. The divination section has a gear-shaped tarot layout. And... that's it.

Chapter eight is spells and whatever, I don't even care anymore at this point. They're spells! They have steampunk words sprinkled through them! I'm sure they're perfectly fine if you've never done a spell before and you really want to do one with a giant gear!

And that brings us to the conclusion, then the flavor text, then a list of other things you can read about steampunk.

In conclusion: I spent no money to read this book, and I do not feel ripped off. Mostly it has served to give me ideas for things I want to write about. But if you really like steampunk and you also want to be a witch, this is probably not a terrible place to start. (Except seriously, don't make your goggles out of toilet paper tubes.) If you know a thing or two about magic and you're looking to get some steampunk flavor, it's not a terrible skim as long as you're not paying for it, but it's not going to give you anything but the vaguest of inspiration.

[Jabberwocky]

From a quick look at this book at the bookstore a few weeks ago, it looks like it is just steampunk fiction flavored Neo-Wicca -- which at least makes it one of the more original types of Neo-Wicca.

That would make sense, as I believe Neo-Wicca is very much the background Teague is coming from.

[Jabberwocky]

I wasn't aware that being part of the steam punk sub-culture required one to confront race, gender and class issues (presumably of that era).  I'd expect a person to be aware of how different society was with regards to roles / places for women, working class vs rich, and non-whites. And maybe how many of what are now considered white groups were not white then.  Maybe I'm reading to much into your statement?

 
You're touching on what's currently something of a hot potato among the steampunk crowd.  Largely, the argument is between two camps.  The first concentrates very much on the aesthetics of steam punk and the role play aspect.  The second sees it as a dystopian critique of modern society, as much as any kind of historical reenactment.  

Cory Gross's overview is good:

]Where this leads us is to our first, and by far the most popular, variety of Steampunk: Nostalgic Steampunk. In Nostalgic Steampunk we find the creation of the Victorian Era as a Romantic myth infused with utopian desires and generally ignoring the more uncomfortable genuine history of the era. Nostalgic Steampunk—which can operate under the guises of most other terms for Steampunk, such as Victorian Science Fiction, Scientific Romance, Industrial Age Science Fiction, and so on—makes technology the portal of elegant exploration rather than the industrial torture rack of the poor, as brave soldiers and scientists of the Crown go on expeditions which don’t enslave and destroy the cultures they come across.  …

Nostalgic Steampunk revels, much like Victoriana itself, in the elegance and the spectacle of the Empire.  It forgets, or chooses not to remember, the dirtiness and the imperialism of this same Empire. …  

As Melancholic Steampunk then, we see the very things Nostalgic Steampunk tries so hard to ignore brought out into the glaring sun. We see the corruption, the decadence, the imperialism, the poverty and the intrigue. And we see them not as much as an indictment of the Victorian era but as an indictment of our own, whether directly or by chopping away at our society’s Victorian roots.

Gypsey Teague, from the quoted parts, is definitely in the nostalgic camp.  Hence stuff like the class based coven hierarchy.  In that section of the steampunk community, this stuff generally goes unremarked on.

Nostalgic steampunk is pretty easy to find.  Anyone wanting to look at the Melancholics should probably start at Steampunk Magazine.  http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/

This is all actually stuff I've taken from an academic essay I wrote on the subject.  If anyone is interested, I'm happy to send them a copy.  It's only an undergrad essay (I'm currently considering using it as the basis for a masters research degree) so it's pretty basic.  But I think it gives a reasonable introduction to the debate in terms of who's saying what etc.

[Jabberwocky]

It sounds to me like, far from ignoring class issues, she's enthusiastically embracing them as a model for coven hierarchy. Leadership requires fancy clothes... but the non-office-holding coven members are street urchins?? Eww.

So far, it sounds like this book's most outstanding merit might be that it is prime snark material.

Sunflower

Considering that one of the most prominent steampunk occultists currently is Andrew O'Neill, a melancholic anarcho-socialist, I can see potential fireworks on the horizon...  At the very least, I suspect that his new steampunk anti-steampunk fanzine "Fuck Steampunk" may get a ranty article or two out of the subject.

Does the fact I kinda hope this one does kick off make me a bad person?

[sailor]

Considering that one of the most prominent steampunk occultists currently is Andrew O'Neill, a melancholic anarcho-socialist, I can see potential fireworks on the horizon...  At the very least, I suspect that his new steampunk anti-steampunk fanzine "Fuck Steampunk" may get a ranty article or two out of the subject.

Does the fact I kinda hope this one does kick off make me a bad person?

 
My hope is that I can still see Steampunk costumes at SFF cionventions and get steampunk books without having to see lots of political drama.

[Jabberwocky]

My hope is that I can still see Steampunk costumes at SFF cionventions and get steampunk books without having to see lots of political drama.

Considering that the dressing-up side of steampunk is massively larger, I suspect you aren't going to have much to worry about.

[Jack]

My hope is that I can still see Steampunk costumes at SFF cionventions and get steampunk books without having to see lots of political drama.

 
Don't worry, you'll probably always have the option of ignoring the marginalized. That's pretty much the definition.

[Jack]

Considering that one of the most prominent steampunk occultists currently is Andrew O'Neill, a melancholic anarcho-socialist, I can see potential fireworks on the horizon...  At the very least, I suspect that his new steampunk anti-steampunk fanzine "Fuck Steampunk" may get a ranty article or two out of the subject.

Does the fact I kinda hope this one does kick off make me a bad person?

 
If you are, I am also a bad person, because that's a debate that I would find really interesting.

[sailor]

Don't worry, you'll probably always have the option of ignoring the marginalized. That's pretty much the definition.

 
No, I just want ignore the politics.

[Jack]

No, I just want ignore the politics.

 
I'm a little surprised to hear that from you, to be honest. You seem pretty interested in politics everywhere else.

Ignoring "the politics" is largely synonymous with ignoring the marginalized, though.

[dionysiandame]

I'm a little surprised to hear that from you, to be honest. You seem pretty interested in politics everywhere else.

Ignoring "the politics" is largely synonymous with ignoring the marginalized, though.

Well if those marginalized people can act "in period and in character" than that's okay. For some strange reason I could imagine Sailor having a fantastic time at Paula Deen's Antebellum wedding party. You know, since it would be historically accurate and ignore the politics and all.

And damn that must be nice. I mean shit, my existence and experiences, as well of that of my family can be summed up as something "political" made to bring drama to the normal everyday lives of caring, fantasy loving, white folks. I should be proud or something...but I'm too busy singing negro spirituals and picking cotton out of my hair.