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I don’t want to sound like a total fanboy but I’m going to sound like a total fanboy: I absolutely love everything that Dana and Greg Newkirk are doing with the paranormal. I could take or leave bigfoot kind of stuff, and haunted objects, which is what else they’re known for. However I think that both Hellier and The Unbinding are really, actual legit pieces of magic art. You can even watch Hellier Season 1 and Hellier Season 2 for free, which is quite nice of them. I did just buy the blu-rays having waited forever for them to come back into stock. They also live close-ish to some old stomping grounds so the sleepy town vive is another thing I love. Weird stuff does tend to happen in smaller towns.

Hellier and The Unbinding are the same story, in some ways. Both of them take place roughly in the same period of time, which makes me wonder exactly how much the mythos are overlapping in some way. Certainly the use of some of the techniques are shared between the two. Think of things like the “human spirit box” which we see used in Hellier and in The Unbinding. Hellier seems to get more attention from the magical techniques rather than The Unbinding, which is sort of curious considering that I put The Unbinding closer to “magical weirdness” than I do Hellier which is more like “creature weirdness”. It would have been nice to see something like a ouija board or seance operated near the statue just to see if it wanted to talk that way. Even just spending more time with the thing might have led to more interesting results. However unlike Hellier, their experience seem much more straightforward, and unbounded by technology. They are, actually, more pagan in that respect.

I know I’ve written about this before when I was on the Hellier kick but one of the things which I find genuine about the presentation is that they’re not afraid to be wrong. They’re not afraid to go down little rabbitholes and side plots and entertain an idea. A lot of occultism, especially “developmental occultism” like what we think of with John Dee or we see in Hellier/Unbinding is experimental. Try it, see what you get out of it, does it make sense, and go. This leads to a lot of other “High Weirdness” factors, like things not making sense immediately or getting answers to questions before you even know to ask them. Dana says towards the end of the film that “I knew the ritual started when we got to the mountain”. That really struck a chord, there’s been many times I’ve been planning a ritual and planning it to death and the simple act of planning and rehearsing it in my mind has seemed to effect the ritual in actuality. This is not an excuse to go and then have a pat on the back and say “well done” and not do the ritual. The ritual itself is important. But magic does have a “grind” phase sometimes and the rehearsal is important too. Magic is most importantly experiential.

The other thing I quite appreciated was that they didn’t chase myth. I think everyone who has been involved in the occult for any amount of time knows that there are broad tenants which must hold true which represent brass tacks and structure. Things like fertility cults are necessarily about fertility and they lose meaning when that component is removed to the point of becoming nonsense. The fertility cult cannot have meaningful myths about being a fertility cult if it’s not a fertility cult, as an example. We can find that core kernel of truth and find where the myths come from – a raison d’etre. The myth itself isn’t the gospel, and so getting the myth wrong isn’t a huge deal. However when they discover the essential quality of the idol, then the myth makes sense. The idol itself is wood and iron with bits of rope, but no-one would confuse a soul for a body. The same goes with the myth, there’s a difference between “what the story is” and “what actually happened”. There are entire legal systems and courts and history books written trying to nail that down, but stories serve as guideposts to approximate the truth and are not a substitute for it. The myths are supposed to help with guideposts, but they’re just that. I don’t feel, for instance, that I know them personally merely from watching the show. The show is their myth.

The last thing they do which I really like is they maintain a human perspective on things. It’s obvious during the ritual that they’ve immersed their emotional energies (and all their other energies) into their work. They’re actually doing magic even if they downplay it quite a bit. It’s not a show about magic per se. It’s a show about results. The result is covered in the end where they give the corpse of the ritual a respectful burial, which was absolutely the right thing to do. (Don’t think I’m not tempted to make the drive to that mountain…) They also stay grounded in observable materials. They don’t fall prey to “well I’m a Witch and so what I say is what is just going on”. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of ego with their work, and they’re OK admitting that they’re scared, or that they observed something, or that they didn’t observe something without immediately trying to hammer it into that little myth box. What particularly struck me as interesting was they generated all this documentation about phenomena, and that became sort of it’s own myth. There was a story there that held together on it’s own. Then they go on a hike because things “lined up” and then we later find out that the hike starts in the night before and ends on an auspicious feast day.

Absolutely everything about that screams to me that the magic of whatever it is – totally working. Coincidence is really the language of magic where things just seem to line up. Even Crowley says that he is beaten unto obedience to the Gods in the Book of the Law. That’s a real thing: These Gods get ahold of you and you end up having opportunities presented to interact with them in some way, shape, or form. When we got to the end and learned about the feast day, it just further confirms the myth. However, the myth itself isn’t present. They don’t know it. They don’t know who or what they’re dealing with until the end. What they do know is when things happened, and they know that things did happen like the footprints, and they make these very people centric observations. The Feast Day isn’t a feast day because that particular god pointed to it on a calendar, it’s because the people who were involved with that God realized that certain things tended to happen around certain times of year and so it became the feast day. I think the folks who tend to try to hammer mythology onto their occultism confuse this idea. Birthdays, for instance, are because something happened (the baby was born) rather than assigned to the baby and then the baby just happens to show up. Paganism is people-centric. It’s not something which has a written gospel. Recording all the observations and then not being able to readily google them all together I think lent a lot of credence to the story.

Was anything actually accomplished at the end? I think the stories are important on their own. I think that the story was the value. The people looking for “evidence of spirits” or whatever need to look beyond the trailcams and recreation of wet feet and embrace that flow. I’m sure there’s going to be another “zero stars: no goblins” sort of take that follows this around but if you’re interested in myth, The Unbinding is just absolutely a fantastic ride.