Books on plants, books on survival, and now this kind of stuff ends up on her reading list. His most famous work, The Magus, deals with “the natural magic of herbs and stones, magnetism, talismanic magic, alchemy, numerology, the elements.” Misty’s been pulling all kinds of weird books out of this cabin they’ve been staying in. Francis Barrett was an occultist who also studied chemistry and metaphysics and was described as an eccentric who gave magical arts lessons out of his apartment. In 1965, a writer named John Fowles published a book called The Magus that, according to Wikipedia, is about “a young British graduate who is teaching English on a small Greek island … and becomes embroiled in the psychological illusions of a master trickster.” And there’s another book called The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer by Francis Barrett, which was originally published in 1801 and details symbols that look a lot like the symbols carved in the trees, cabin floor, and painted in red in a hidden room in Taissa’s basement above the severed head of their family dog. Once I typed this title into Google, it was like a whole world of context came to life in front of my eyes that directly relates to the most mystical aspects of Yellowjackets’ story line and its symbolism. I took a screengrab of the book and tried to blow it up to read the author’s name but couldn’t. Misty, shunned from the group for trying to poison Ben again and accidentally poisoning everyone else in the process, stands in front of the cabin reading a book that caught my eye and sent me into an hour-long Google investigation. The morning after “ Doomcoming,” we see the Yellowjackets picking up the pieces of the celebration that got away from them under the influence of shrooms and hormone-fueled hysteria. But dead or alive, rescued or remaining, no one fully made it out of that wilderness. Especially in the case of Lottie Matthews. It can’t be stated as a hard fact yet that certain survivors of the crash chose not to be rescued and remain in that cabin in the present day, but I wouldn’t doubt it. And some people continued their lives within those woods and outside of them. The surviving Yellowjackets are navigating their adulthood on a sort of dissociative autopilot, and after spending this first season of the show attempting to draw conclusions based on information doled out by entirely unreliable narrators, it’s still uncertain what really happened out there in the wilderness of their crash site, or even what’s happening now beyond how it’s framed in their shell-shocked memories, but there are a few facts we know concretely: There was a plane crash. You still have to take a shower, choose a mask of normalcy for the day, and reinsert yourself into life as it’s happening around you. The worst thing in the world can happen to you, and you can find yourself in a situation where you yourself have done the worst possible thing, and even in that madness, regret, and grief, you still have to get up in the morning and make yourself breakfast.
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