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The Rough Music of the Digital Age

The Rough Music of the Digital Age

Last updated on: May 18, 2026 at 4:06 pm by Heron Michelle

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The Rough Music of the Digital Age 2026-05-18T16:06:16-04:00 Heron Michelle

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to live inside a culture that never stops talking.

The modern human nervous system absorbs more information in a single day than our ancestors might have encountered in months. News alerts scream from our pockets before we’ve had coffee. Algorithms study our fears and feed them back to us with terrifying efficiency. Every tragedy, every outrage, every opinion, every conspiracy theory, and every hot take is flattened into the same glowing stream of urgency. The world now pours directly into our consciousness at all hours, without pause, context, digestion, or integration.

We are all cooking in this poisoned soup.

We are unwell, folks, and it shows. Sensitive people like witches often notice cultural imbalance first. The canaries in the coal mine tend to be artists, mystics, healers, poets, storytellers, and those whose nervous systems remain porous enough to still feel the weather of the collective psyche moving through the atmosphere. I love it when the internet feels like an all-access pass to a global Library of Alexandria.

Lately, the internet feels more like a psychic food court during a riot.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly anti-technology. I am writing this on the internet. My work exists because of modern tools like blogs, podcasts, and Substack. I love that witches across oceans enroll in my online Elemental Witchcraft course, and we can chat about magick on Discord in real time. I love digital archives, online classrooms, goofy pet reels, obscure scholarship, and the ability to order a rare occult text at midnight while wearing pajamas and eating leftover pasta. Modern technology has preserved folklore, amplified marginalized voices, and connected isolated practitioners in genuinely beautiful ways.

But my neurodivergent brain also knows how a desire for awareness can become obsessive over-consumption. I know what it feels like to scroll too long and suddenly feel spiritually inflamed. Mentally bloated. Emotionally dysregulated. Like my psyche has been force-fed so much information that I can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. My body already knows this language all too well.

Which got me thinking about human digestion.

When something poisonous enters the body, it reacts by purging. Ever eaten iffy gas-station sushi? Cue the sweating, vomiting, and diarrhea. There you lay, inflamed and praying to the gods of cool porcelain, as your body tries desperately to expel what it cannot safely integrate.

I think modern outrage culture is like food poisoning.

The internet produces a kind of psychic indigestion. Information enters faster than discernment can process it. Emotional reactions surge before reflection has time to occur. People become trapped in algorithmic echo chambers that reward reaction over reflection, and performance over genuine transformation. Awareness collapses into binary thinking: absolutely good or absolutely evil, ally or enemy, the righteous or the damned, with no in-between. I was raised in that kind of Fear Cult, and so I reject those same bully tactics wherever they show up.

Have you heard the Rough Music?

Terry Pratchett described mob mentality in the Tiffany Aching books about witches as “the rough music playing.” I think about that phrase constantly now. You find it in online witchcraft spaces on the regular: the sudden pitchfork frenzy, the ecstatic certainty of collective outrage, and the intoxicating pleasure of belonging to the “correct” side of a conflict while the designated villains are symbolically burned at the stake.

My first rule of personal sovereignty is: don’t burn the witch.

After my escape from the dominator religion of my childhood, I sought refuge in what was described to me as the Craft of the Wise. In Hermetic philosophy, and especially within witchcraft, transformation has always been understood as a range of alchemical processes, as inscribed on the arms of the Baphomet image: Solve et Coagula. Solve refers to dissolution into component parts. Coagula is the recombination of those parts into a new and more potent whole. Both ends of that spectrum are necessary: the breakdown and the reintegration. The old forms dissolve so that something more whole may emerge.

Every genuine transformation requires time inside the cauldron.

Which brings me back to witchcraft. Witchcraft wisdom requires slow digestion. Cue the old-world pagan default metaphors for the slow ways wisdom blooms. Bread rises slowly. Wine ferments slowly. Herbs steep slowly. Metal tempers slowly within the forge. Even the human body metabolizes through cycles of breakdown and recombination. Digestion itself is alchemy: our elemental fire transforming substance into nourishment we can actually use.

Wisdom traditions like Hermetic alchemy understood something modern culture keeps forgetting: awareness requires slow digestion over the fire. Wisdom and truth require quiet time left to steep.

So lately I’ve been trying to reclaim slower forms of knowing. I’ve been wildcrafting flowers and herbs from the woods to dry in my kitchen. Reading physical books more slowly. Letting new information steep without rushing to post online. I create graphic art with pens and paper at night instead of doomscrolling myself into spiritual heartburn. Some days I fail spectacularly. Some days I am absolutely the woman eating old gas-station sushi from the algorithm. But I think the practice matters anyway.

The cauldron does not rush the soup, and neither should we.

This is why old witchcraft practices remain relevant.

Listen, witches aren’t the cosmic keepers of all answers…or, at least I certainly am not. Besides, right belief is the business of the orthodoxies; witchcraft is an orthopraxy of suggested practices. The traditions of witchcraft preserve ancient technologies of rhythm, reflection, embodiment, and metabolization that modern culture desperately needs. Lunar cycles slow awareness down into phases. Ritual creates intentional space for reflection. Divination interrupts certainty and invites dialogue with mystery and paradox. When we craft things by hand, we restore focus. Tending our gardens reconnects our nervous systems to seasonal time instead of algorithmic quicksand. Taking a Hermit’s respite in silence allows our psyches to settle enough to hear our own authentic voices again.

Witchcraft practices are not meant as escapism from modernity.

The witchcraft practices I find most helpful are stabilizing within my modern life. I have no intention of following the Amish example of societal retreat. I do not want to abandon the modern world and retreat into some fantasy of pre-industrial purity. Y’all, I enjoy antibiotics and electricity tremendously. I simply believe the old pagan tools still belong in the toolbox. I’ll tend my crock-pot cauldron all lunation, long and slow, but there will absolutely be 90’s Star Trek streaming in the background because Mama needs her “space socialism” medicine, too.

The global village still needs witches as wisdom-brewers.

The village still needs us to be the storytellers, the herbalists, the poets, and the truth-tellers. But mostly, the village still needs witches to be the compassionate cultural irritants, asking pointy questions, listening carefully, and engaging in nuanced communication so healing can happen.

So let me be the witch standing beside our collective cauldron, saying:

Slow down. Chew your food. Think carefully. Tend to your spiritual ingestion with discernment. Not every factoid, sound bite, or opinion launched into the void is necessary, true, or useful. Some of it is poison. Then again, even some poisons, with enough time, heat, and tending, can be distilled into a necessary antidote. There is wisdom in discerning the difference.

As this new lunation pairing the magick of Gemini and Sagittarius dawns, and the Path of Awareness begins, perhaps this discernment is the magick we need most right now.

Solve et Coagula.

Let’s learn how to metabolize knowledge into wisdom again. Dissolve down to the truth what is false. Recombine what is useful. Build something wiser from the fragments. As we navigate our sovereignty within the cooperative culture we are building together for the New Age, please, for the love of the God/dess, resist playing the rough music. Set down the pitchforks and torches of performative outrage. Reject the patriarchal weapons of reactionary mobs.

Let’s take time to listen carefully again to the voice of the God/dess. They sing through sincerely asked questions and shared dreams for a better way. They are heard in softly bubbling brews of inspiration, crackling forge fires, and stories thoughtfully exchanged between fellow travelers. Perhaps within that gentler music, we will find our soul’s true voice again.

— Heron

Technology and Religion

About Heron Michelle

Heron Michelle is a witch, teacher, artist, and author of Elemental Witchcraft: A Guide to Living a Magickal Life Through the Elements. Through her writing and classes on Hermetic Witchcraft she explores the intersection of ritual, embodiment, spiritual sovereignty, and cooperative culture in the modern world. Find out more at HeronMichelle.com You can read more about the author here.

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