The Crafts: Wixes, Spells, and the Weaponized Placebo Effect

Resident awkward atheist who spends most of their time trying to not be rude and blunt, so.

 

Good enough for me!

@Morven ehhhh, no promises. It's kinda a thing I'd like to write without modulating for tact. Spoilered for anyone who wants to avoid, though.

Spoiler: rude rambling. don't say you weren't warned! also, long

Well, for starters, like I said , I'm a pretty profoundly non-spiritualist person. I think the closest modes I have to spirituality are a kind of deep respect for age, and a pretty powerful sense of aesthetics, so that kinda puts me on the wrong foot with neopaganism from the get-go.

I've also got some associations with a certain kind of middle-class, bland-watery-green-and-blue, New Age, "yoga, homeopathy and crystals" Health People that I really profoundly dislike. I've got plenty of neopagan friends that aren't of that stripe at all and don't bother me much, but it's definitely An Association. There's also a lot of backlash against the prevalent expectation in the communities that I was growing up in that you didn't have to be religious but that everyone was some kind of Spiritual. I literally had a health class that list "belief in a higher power, like God or Mother Nature" as a thing you needed for "spiritual health" whatever the fuck that is! (As an aside, fuck that "Mother Nature" bullshit right up the ass. Nature has no plan, no balance, and certainly no agency. It's just a collection of shit that works well enough to get by, because the shit that doesn't doesn't make it.)

With "crystal" magic in particular there's also a bit of territorial "get your magic the hell away from my minerals!" geologist rage.

And then... honestly, a lot of neopagan stuff feels like playing pretend over the bones of dead gods, for lack of a better turn of phrase. This is the "respect for age" thing, mostly. There's such a massive break in the continuity of tradition and practice that it just doesn't generate the kind of distant respect I get for other religions or for older/syncretic forms of witchcraft like Raire was talking about. There may also be some level of concern about appropriation/"are those really your gods" here, but I don't know how much of that I actually feel or how much that I agree with what I may or may not feel there, so.
This might not bug me so much if neopagan traditions had a few more hundred years under their belt, I dunno.

Finally, I think about magic A Lot from an aesthetic/fantasy writing angle, so I have Opinions on the aesthetics of magic that tend to run into the ways that people practicing magic in the real world think about it. (side question: how does practicing magic in real life interface with thinking and especially writing about magic in fiction? Because that seems like it could get weird in a hurry.)

So that's kinda the angle that I'm coming at this from.


The black magic thing is really interesting to me because one of the things that bugs me about neopagan magic is that it strikes me as too "nice" in some ways?
Like I tend to conceptualize gods (in a fictional context. see: not religious) as things mostly of blood and smoke, and magic as basically like a sword: romantic, beautiful, mythic, maybe even occasionally heroic or defensive or "healing" in some way (not really the word I'm looking for, but it'll do), but fundamentally a thing for making other people bleed. (I'm only now seeing Tolkien's fingerprints on this as I type it out, haha)
Also, black magic is such a wonderfully evocative phrase. It seems a shame to toss it out with the blandsville "white magic" bathwater.
And then you've got the whole curses and malice and sacrificing things that aren't yours to give for power stuff. I can't see those not being a thing. Like, imagine if there was magic such that the people who tell other people to kill themselves over the internet actually had the power to kill over the internet.


I've got a similar problem with "crystal" magic, too. You mean to tell me that all these rocks and minerals do good things for you or have positive associations? Galena is a "stone of harmony"? Fucking seriously? That's lead ore. If there was ever a spiritually toxic mineral, it would be that one. (also, not a stone)
Not to mention that the positive associations are all kinda vague and general and, when you get right down to it, pretty much the same. blah blah prosperity blah blah harmony blah healing blah spiritual wellbeing blah blah blah something growth blah

Likewise, they're all so detached from anything like the actual history or properties of the mineral in question. Like, take the existence of super-mature quartz sand that's been incorporated into sedimentary rocks, then eroded back out and then reincorporated into rocks so many times that everything but the really durable quartz and a few stray grains of magnetite has been broken down by water and washed away and that the continuous working and reworking of the grains has rounded them to almost perfect spheres and sorted them to almost exactly the same size, so you get this really uniform sand of almost all quartz, maybe with a layer of hematite coating the grains and dyeing them red. I, personally, find that a lot more fascinating and aesthetically compelling than Generic McQuartzneedle, divorced from any sort of geological or manufacturing history, being good at healing or whatever.
Honestly, despite my kinda territorial attitude re: magic and rocks and minerals, I'd probably feel like a practice that incorporated some sort of specific history or context was more "legitimate" and worthy of respect in some way, even if I still didn't buy it as an empirical thing.
This is also modulated by the aesthetics and respect-for-age things. Like when I was in elementary school we had a Navaho? (I think, I don't really remember) speaker come in with a drum made from a tree that had been struck by lightning, and he mentioned that there was a little bag of turquoise inside as "water" for the lightning spirits to drink, so they would stay in the drum and give it its voice. And I really liked that and it's really stuck with me in a way that turquoise being a "truth stone" really doesn't. (also, as an aside, while I'm looking up these "crystal meanings", the way crystal meanings sites talk about "Native American" or "oriental" traditions is some seriously sketchy shit. also, no two of them ever agree on the specifics, despite everything being worded in the most vague, generically wholesome kind of way)

Similarly, I'm kinda salty about how everyone always only goes for the sparkly shit. Like, yes, please stay away from my minerals, but this potassium feldspar is way more geologically important than your dumbass diamond, but one's kinda a dull brick pink and the other's all sparkly, so....


(Wixbloom, if you read this, I'm really sorry for dumping this rant all over the place just when you said you wanted to get in to crystal magic. :/ I don't want to yell at you about it, it just made me think about all this and I wanted to get my thoughts down somewhere. Please don't feel dumb or bad or twee or guilty about that on my behalf! Or bail on getting into it if you want because of this rant.)


Of course, I'm not as uniformly down on neopaganism/magic stuff as all that ^^^ might imply. If I was, I wouldn't be reading this thread! There's a lot of other stuff that falls under the more "well that's not my religion, but it certainly is a religion and it seems fairly cool as such things go, so I'm just gonna stand awkwardly over here and watch" umbrella rather than the "eyeroll" umbrella.
I do have a really nice piece of malachite that helps me calm down when I'm flipping out, and as my religion professor pointed out, that's basically a talisman any way you slice it. I'm not really inclined to systematize it by mineral or assign it any metaphysical properties, but it's still a thing.

Spoiler: second spoiler because... I dunno, a kind of 'this shit is seriously personal' delineation

I've also had a sense of being able to call up the wind since I was very young. I've talked to my sister about it some years ago, and she said she did it too, only more talking to the wind. This is really, really not a thing I talk about often, and I'm kinda perennially awkward about the disconnect between it and the rest of my worldview. One one level, I sincerely doubt that I have any influence on local wind patterns distinct from what would be predicted by chance, and this is the sort of thing that's super susceptible to "eh it didn't work that time because [x reason]" type confirmation bias, but on another level, it's totally a thing I buy into and do pretty regularly and like doing, so.
:?
stuffthings

Incidentally and possibly interestingly, this is still devoid of anything I'd categorize as a "spiritual" component. It's just A Thing I Can (maybe) Do.

I dunno how much I really wanna talk about this particular bit, but I'd be interested to hear people's reactions to the rest.

 

This is probably going to be long. Also not spoilering because discussion.

Eh, most "mother nature" stuff acknowledges there's no plan outside of the cycles. Like, you can't really do nature worship without acknowledging that, sometimes, you get eaten.

Not faulting you for this at all.

So, some of it? Totally. There's a term I use: fluffy bunny.

These people don't have a tradition, they don't have a history, and they don't have knowledge. They're shaking at shadows, and while I'm being derisive, most pagans I know go through that phase. Because, frankly? The real information is often buried in archaeology texts, and for most part, those are not sexy or interesting. The rest is passed down orally, and not many people I know personally come from cultures where there's a lot of the practices left.

Also, I occasionally have moments of "shit, does this count as appropriation?" when I deal with Bast, but I figure I'd rather stick to the personal imagery than change it strictly because it's not politically correct. This comes back to my beliefs, which I think I'll cover in more detail later?

Well, I have two approaches when dealing with magic in fiction:

Path one is play it straight. Magic works more or less like the real world with more easily identified effects. It's not big, it's not flashy, it just works. All the time.

Path two is it's fucking fantasy. Go with what makes sense and make it up as you go.

That's just me, though!

I have two classes of godform in my own vocabulary. One is the pie in the sky God. Think Abrahamic interpretations. The other is more like what you're talking about, I think? They're things. Things in the realm of possible and probable. They're not omni-anything. That's literally the point. Now they might not be physical, but that's part of spirituality for you.

I also wouldn't describe magic as a thing to make people bleed. It's a means to an end. One of those ends might be harming someone. But it could be keeping the back porch standing for one more summer.

I like the drama of the Wiccan classifications. There's a charm to treating it with white and black and simple understanding. But it clashes with my reality where the most powerful magics are symapthetic, and high ritual is probably the least powerful, but most important to those of us who need the spiritualism.

Uh, depending on who you're reading? Yeah. . .

Those books have a bunch of various issues, even Cunningham.

The first one is tradition: Different stones have different uses in different places and peoples. Most magic has to have a tie to the person performing it otherwise it's next to useless. Some people can use the meanings in the books and get exactly what they want. Others, get nothing, or a totally different effect.

Example: I used to use hematite in spells, mostly because my mentor had an affinity for it. I didn't. Literally every time I used hematite in a spell, it cracked in half within a month. I don't know how I could break so much hematite, but that's what happened.

This is more or less the other problem for me.

In my esteem, THAT is magic. That's the real stuff that everything is built on and thank you for sharing it.

As someone who did gem magic, and did work on a diamond once, it's gross and kind of boring from a spell work perspective.

I also, I think the sparkly comes back to human instinct. We assign value to the shiny, and that value is actually what makes it magical, not anything necessary inherent to the gem.

Being a skeptic AND a practitioner is weird, but this right here is the cut of it.

My "stone magic" mostly is plain quartz and amethyst and that's it. Plain quartz is used almost exclusively for focusing and "energizing", and the amethyst is more or less my talisman stone. Magic doesn't need to be fancy or showy, most magic is little things people do every day.

 

ZERO problem here. Pretty much all my friends are atheist and I don't think a lack of shared beliefs is a personal attack.

I'll add, though, that magic isn't really about discovering innate properties of things that exist in the world, it is about, in a way, creating these properties.

Think of the craft as any other art: understanding the history of the techniques and the properties of the medium you're using helps, but what really makes a painting is that you show up in front of the blank canvas and focus your intent into bringing about a painting. All my understanding of different pigments, how to mix colors, color wheels etc. does nothing if I don't imbue the color with intent when arting starts!

I tell this to everyone that asks me for a tarot reading: the point of tarot is that when you look at the cards, the very way you look at them brings knowledge you already have to light. That's exactly why their meanings are complex and often vague - how you, in particular, "specify" them sometimes says more about your query than the cards themselves.

 

@Wiwaxia: Nothing written in that was being an asshole, just blunt, so don't worry :D

(besides, if I couldn't deal with assholes, I'd keep far away from Norse stuff, because there are a lot of people in that scene who take pride in honing their asshole skills)

 

In other news - out of curiosity, I just read Satanic Bible.

Did not like: Its occasional language of "tell the helpless to go fuck themselves; you are The Superior Being" annoys me. The concept of a "deserving target" for cursing grosses me out a bit. And the part on magic practice sounds so cartoony and phony? Like yeah, absolutely, wear black robes and light black candles and point a fucking sword at the cardinal directions and also do all your spells at like 5am, why don't you*. Also, the sexism. Oh god, the sexism.

Did like: Its tone of "do not shy from confrontation, do not feel guilty for not loving people who make you miserable, do not pretend to love everybody, do not try to be righteous, indulge in the strenght that excess and desire give you, live on by being hella impressive and don't be a fucking hypocrite" is pretty great. ALSO: "It is this child-like vitality that will allow the Satanist to peek through the curtain of darkness and death and remain earthbound." was a very moving thing to read, because it's been on my mind a lot.

Overall: I remain a weird non-congregating Christian with a tendency to worship through magic and definitely not a Satanist. I will, however, embroider THE GOD YOU SAVE MAY BE YOURSELF somewhere.

* I understand not everyone sees these practices as cartoony, but for me, personally, that's how they feel. I don't like too much ritual; simple and improvised works best.

 

Might be different with people actually doing nature worship as such (although I honestly kind of doubt it), but that's definitely not what I've seen out of people treating "Mother Nature" as some sort of generic "higher power." Like acknowledgement that sometimes you get eaten, but ascribing it to this kinda woo woo "balance of nature" bullshit. The part that really bugs me is the ascribing agency to "nature" thing, though. I've seen people talk about nature as a nurturing thing, even!

Diamonds are just kinda boring in general. :P They are strong contender for my least favorite mineral. I mean, there's some cool stuff there what with being an inorganic carbon crystal, and they've got some cool industrial applications, and I generally like them much better when approached from that prospective, but generally? eeeeehh...

Yeah, I can totally grok that position, but it kinda rubs me the wrong way for some reason. Like, just go with "it works for some reason" without getting in to magic at all, or go full on mythic. That middle ground feels really uncomfortable to me, for some reason.
Like, by way of explanation, I really dislike "spiritual alchemy"/Jungian stuff, because it's moving what was originally a very very physical set of theories and practices (I actually wrote a paper about this in high school that I'm still really proud of, if anyone wants to hear my thoughts on that bit in more detail) purely into the realm of the mind. It feels a bit too much like a "well, this has been empirically disproven in reality, so let's just make it ~spiritual~" god-of-the-gaps kind of thing. Like I feel a lot more respect for magic that has/claims some sort of concrete existential reality than the whole "weaponized placebo effect" thing, if that makes sense? It feels more "real" to me somehow. Like, not in the sense that it has more empirical reality, but in the sense that it has more... legitimacy? (not quite the right word, but I don't have one that works better)
edit: come to think of it, this might also be a factor in my appreciation of that turquoise thing i mentioned. it had a lot of physicality to it.

But then, I can totally see the value in ritual and practice without belief, and tend to think of "religion as series of metaphysical fact claims" as much less important than "religion as about practice and community and relationships," so :?

 

I could live the rest of my life without hearing "quantum" from New Agey lips and be quite happy, by the way. I am tired of pseudoscientific bullshit full of buzzwords that nobody understands.

 

I live my life in that middle ground. Works for me. Don't expect it to work for everyone.

Do you mean Green Book alchemy? (Just want to make sure I've got the context.)

I think we're talking about the same thing with different words. There's a concept that I learned from Buckland's books called "sympathetic" magic. The turquoise story? Straight up, old school, sympathetic magic. It doesn't need to be empirical, the power comes from the motions, emotions, and symbols. This is why I'm huge on finding symbols that work for a person and basically stopped doing stone magic that wasn't me putting together things that held meaning to me.

And this is where we agree completely.

 

Taking the things I have commentary on point by point, please hold. Same warnings for "blunt and possibly offensive" as original post.

Spoiler

I'm going to agree that the whole concept of "spiritual health" is a thing that really, really gets under my skin. Not only are there people who don't need that, but there are plenty of ways to be "spiritual" without throwing in belief in some kind of Owerpower. Of course, my personal horrible experience with it was The Aunt telling me that I should believe in God because most of the people who survived the Holocaust were religious, SO UM. YEAH. THAT'S A THING.

But even prior to that, I was really uncomfortable with the idea that's commonplace in the US that religion is some kind of requirement for health/morality. I've always felt that that was just one of the ways by which all major religions are kind of cultish and run off peer/conformity pressure, not just the minor ones we usually see held up as cults.

RE: magic working in our world as a fantasy writer: I just figure that the Rules are different in whatever world I'm writing? (By "the Rules" I mean things like, the physical laws of nature and how/if they can be manipulated.) So the two don't really interface at all, for me, because one is the world I live in and the other is a world [that I created/that someone else created and I'm fucking around in] and that I as a writer know is fictional.

And less so for crystals so much as in general, but: I tend to use my own meanings for things a lot and I find that that creates magic that feels more effective and personal to me. This goes doubly for crystals because, in my experience, a lot of the more obscure minerals just have properties completely made up, because there isn't actually a historic background to fall back on. So this results in things like, all the recently discovered purple gems are "third eye" or "spiritual awakening" stones, because that's what the chakra of that color does, right? (Which the whole rainbow chakra thing also makes me uncomfortable for Appropriation Reasons, but that's only slightly related.)

As far as the Thing You Can Maybe Do, IME, there's totally a thing there. Not exactly the same, but for me, my early confirmations that Supernatural Happens are My Mom Puts Out Streetlights and the fact that I can frequently sense the location of friends accurately enough to use as a compass, But Only At Night.

OKAY let's see about the rest of these -

@ADigitalMagician My witchy circle of friends usually shorts "fluffy bunny" to just "fluff," but yeah, same concept. I personally find that most fluffs tend to be "you don't have to be initiated!" "Wiccans," but that's just my personal experience.

Also funny you should mention hematite, since that was my talisman stone all through highschool (I've now grown into purple stones, especially tanzanite, but I still have a lump of hematite in my belt for luck.)

(...I should clarify: I use a utility belt instead of a purse, because I Forget Purses.)

 

You don't have to be initiated, though. There's no magic spark that needs to be passed down from one practitioner to another; the magic is in us already, and in the world already. Teachers are useful, though, because there are sure a lot of dead ends and not-very-short-cuts.

 

Actual Wicca, The Real Thing, is a closed religion. So, yes, you do have to be initiated.

 

I find, as an atheist, that most people don't have a God/religion-shaped hole so much as a morality-shaped hole, a ritual-shaped hole, and a community-shaped hole, which can be filled separately by different groups but it is often more efficient to fill them with the same organization so most people just do that.

"Spiritual health", then, basically just means "most people fill these holes with a three-pronged plug". If you're an atheist who only takes a two-pronged plug or would prefer to fill them separately, yeah, that's... a thing that often gets erased. People tend to understand "you have a different religion" a lot better than "you have no religion"; I've been known to claim that I was raised Buddhist to get evangelists to shut up. They're used to poaching people who're lapsed Christians. This tends to flummox them.

(I ended up raised without religion purely by accident; my parents were both very quiet Buddhists who agreed on practically everything, each thought the other was going to do the Important Moral Education, and it never got done. This also happened with stuff like The 'How Do Babies Get Made' Talk, so this isn't an isolated incident.)

As to shiny stones: I like fluorite - not because I actually think it has magical powers of clarity of thought, but because it is pretty and it functions well as a mnemonic device for reminding myself to step back and think things through carefully. It's like a symbolic tattoo except it doesn't involve putting stuff into my skin.

As to ritual: I actually really loved the High Rites that my druid-type friend brought me to back when we lived closer to each other. I've been meaning to look into that once I move this time around; I'm mostly just worried about explaining that I'm an atheist pagan. I'd like to look into herbalism and edible wild plants some more too, but I'd need someone who actually knows what they're doing to get advice from.

Another ritual I like using is lighting a candle, worrying "at" the candle/sending my anxiety "into" the flame, and then blowing it out; I light it later when I have time to actually think about the problem and/or when the physical anxiety stuff has eased enough for me to think straight. (I actually got inspired to do this from a therapy book, in that they noted you could visualize "packing up" troubling memories outside of therapy and "opening" the suitcase in therapy. So this is, like, more "symbolism" than "spiritualism".)

As to "traditions" being more valid with history in them... I'm estranged from my family, they were minimally spiritual anyway, and the religion of the group they are descended from has long since been paved over by several religions' worth of missionaries. So I really don't have anything to go on here.

(If anything the archetypes of my favorite OCs are kind of... pantheon-like? Sorta. Other pantheons have themes like "all things shall change" or "everything in moderation"; the intertwined stories of my characters are pretty much all just 'how do you put your life back together after major trauma', expressed in many different ways. I could easily push up the power level a bit and have them be gods. I'd write up precisely how, but I am trying to keep this account away from Googlable names, and I've already written about this extensively in my usual identity, so.)

 

Ah, I didn't catch you were talking specifically about Wicca. Though I have trouble finding what Gerald Gardner pulled out of his ass any kind of 'The Real Thing'. He made 50% of it up and stole most of the rest, and not from any kind of ancient pagan sources, but from a mish-mash of mysticism and half-baked pseudo-history.

Now, I fully support one's right to make up a religion; it's more the pretense that he didn't that bugs me. All the "I'm descended from a LONG LINE of SECRET WITCHES that HID THE SECRETS for a THOUSAND YEARS!!!" stuff.

Which is also not saying that there aren't bits of pre-Christian religions that have survived in an unbroken chain, but precious damn little, and I don't buy most of the stories of ancient origins that aren't better attested than all that.

 

Modern Western Paganism is by its very nature a (re)discovery. And that shouldn't be a matter of shame and faked-up ancient lineage. Even faiths like mine (strongly Norse-based) are trying to make a full practice out of scraps. Like those dinosaurs they only know of because of three leg-bones, six vertebrae and some teeth. If not less than that.

 

(and now I'm all worried that I was too angry there and y'all now are pissed at me. Sorry)

 

Most modern Wiccans who are actually worth their salt acknowledge that it's a Thing a Guy Made Up; I've encountered one or two. (They also acknowledge that they can't stop people who aren't initiated from claiming to be Wiccan, so they're actually pretty cool and laid-back people, as you might expect from a religion that requires Actual Adulthood to even begin the process of initiation.) But there are a lot of fluffs who call themselves Wiccans, and a lot who insist that you can be a self-initiated Wiccan, so that... muddies the water a lot.

Basically, it's like if to be a Christian you had to actually go to church, but there was still the attitude as there is in the US with "I was raised with a Bible in my house, therefore I'm Christian" people who are actually agnostics and just never use the right term.

My experiences with a lot of hardcore Christians lead me to disagree? Or at least assert that there does seem to be a faith hole for a lot of people, not just a ritual-and-morality set. I don't personally understand it but that doesn't mean it's not there.

I'd probably personally consider fluorite a "precision and accuracy" stone, because it forms up perfect crystals so commonly and easily. (for the Homestucks in thread - Vriska's dice are the right shape, they're just the wrong COLOR, as fluorite is usually purple-and-green rather than outright blue.)

...I might have to try that candle thing.

 

this seems like a good place for questions about the very mechanics of magic? Atheist ex-catholic with silly spiritual ex-flatmates here, be disclaimed if this counts as a disclaimer. I've had here a thread about karma that didn't end up with shouting, on the other hand. :)

Spoiler: wondering about how it all fits together

this is about fact claims and not psychological techniques with no claims about the outside world.

so I grew up (a certain kind of) Catholic, I understand how a highly abstract religion works, where the laws of physics rule, the Flesh of Christ is not chemically transformed and noone says so, and any miracle is caused by an agent at least as conscious as us, by its free will, sometimes following a conversation with a human, but where the human doesn't have power over them. It's very consent-y. (I guess you can do stuff to daemons, but that's the fringe that didn't influence my understanding much.

And then I ended up with some acquittancess who believed that big corporations make milk boxes pyramid-shaped form the inside bc it conserves the milk's energy. Their belief system inhabited the whole gray and muddy area between physics rules and miracles. Also, being forgiven for a sin was easier if you did something with fire, not bc fire helps you feel things, or bc making an effort shows that you care, but bc fire inherently had Qualities and Powers. And I got angry bc if the energies/agents/mechanisms were that dumb to just work even when summoned by a milk boxing machine, then they must be measurable by science, like how magnetism turned out to be measurable and usable.

I can see that my childhood's perspective is a product of a specific history in europe, and being squicked out by messy stuff is not a logical reason. (I won't end up believing, but it would be nice if I'd end up calmer).

so my question is: did I understand right that the stuff magic works with (not worshipping gods that have agency and freedom, but, say, gem stuff) is working with stuff that is less determined than physical rules, but more so than conscious agents theoretized by catholicism, for example? They can't be statistically proven bc you need too much belief for them to work, so putting gems on hospital beds is useless, but once activated they are kinda reliable? Or the framework is actually very different, I just know too little.

 

So, as previously mentioned, I consider myself an agnostic pagan. So consider this my fine print on the following answers:

I think there is a certain amount of measurable to the way magic works. If it works, there is SOMETHING going on and that has to be measurable. Whether we can measure it is a different story.

But because so much of magic is personal and will driven the idea of just putting stones on hospital beds WOULD be useless, without something specific. Of course, in general I look at faith healing as assistive to medicine, and not a replacement.

I know more than one person who uses the mental framework of calling on conscious entities to produce results. It's not more right or wrong in my experience than my views.

In general, my opinion on magic of all kinds is you can't put energy into the universe and just expect it to happen. You have to put some effort into the things you're trying to influence. Magic is a fulcrum, it's useless without the lever. Also, I developed said belief in my Christianity days. So take that how you will.

 

I like the idea of technology mattering. coming from me this is just a meaningless, aesthetic preference, but as such, I prefer it vastly to the vaguer alternatives.