written April 17th, 2017 © Mitchell Pluto
Master of Reflections From my series The Hidden Folk, 12inx15in mixed media. Investigates suggestibility and sympathetic magic.
The Master has a forehead of mirrors that captures the on looker. Whatever the master says changes the shape of the viewers reflection. The warden of petals regulates and enhances scent and can influence specific moods of an entire group. The Prophet of mu is the last representative of mu. a close encounter with the medium has made people become more conducive to psychic waves.
The Poet Guillaume Apollinaire described a hidden world as Surreal. Although Surrealism became popular in the 1920’s there has always been an omnipresent clue among all cultures of a hidden world. The Icelandic phrase, huldufólk is a substitution for a name what would otherwise disrupt the hidden world and cause an encounter with it. While most of us are usually not suggestively affected by taboos there is a unique percentage of people in Iceland who do believe the hidden world is possible.
This is not far from asking someone if they believe in people from another space.
The Surrealist’s methods of accessing the subconscious were not new. Many of the techniques of surrealism rely on animism, pareidolia and apophenia.
These three special effects of our consciousness influence our beliefs and attitudes subconsciously. Animism is our oldest built in belief system. Under the suggestibility of the animistic brain every person. place or thing has spirit. This would also include power and expression as an ability to change events in an environment. As simple as sanctifying a successful hunt/crop by painting a picture of the future in the present. As animism believes that everything is an agent of expression or spirit, pareidolina impacts how one perceives this channel.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the faerie realm and what we would consider inanimate or motionless objects. Like seeing a face in a tree. Apophenia impresses upon how we organize what we perceive during pareidolina. Where as an abnormal encounter with a face in the tree that could be nothing at all, apophenia insists, sometimes obsessively, that this experience, seeing a face in the tree, means something more than it does. Apophenia places most people at risk because it can be dogmatic and unquenchable under a false conclusion.