In college, a girl in my Beckett class was wearing a necklace w an oxytocin molecule on it

I asked and she said it was a way to remind herself of the importance of love and connection in her relationships

I started seeing more and more of these the next couple years. A tattoo of a serotonin molecule. A silver ring with a dopamine molecule. An art student who filled a whole giant square with interlocked adrenaline molecules in neonbright colors.

Neurotransmitters like this are called Ligands.

The “Lig” there comes from the same root as the lig in “Religion.”

I didn’t find this out til last year, but I love the factoid

My basic takeaway is that there are certain human impulses that will never disappear. When we try to drive them out, they just shift over I to a new arena.

The Greek gods and the archetypes they represent, for example, were driven out by Christianity.

But in christian societies, these gods were just associated with metals as well as planets, and still used for spiritual practice within alchemy.

Sympathetic and associative magic are basic human impulses. They don’t go away.

When rationalism drives out the gods, the alchemists, and explicitly magical thinking—none of it goes away. It just shuffles around.

Instead of magic spells, you memorize types of biases and fallacies.
Instead of love amulets, you get an oxytocin necklace.
Instead of saying an imp is controlling you, you say twitter has hijacked your dopamine.

The next step after realizing this, for me, was to realize that neurotransmitters and named fallacies were not just magic, but weak-ass magic,

And to just go whole hog on what I was doing anyway and start invoking gods and making servitors and shit

Tarot cards and Spectrum of Ecstasy have done me much more good than Prozac or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy ever did