Monday, March 23, 2020

To Be the Witch





There are some times when the rites must be practiced again. Tonight I feel like they have more meaning than they ever had before. I remember the first time I went through the first degree and the second degree and the third degree. They were fumbling and odd and yet, after passing through them my life was changed. I remember them being arduous. I don’t believe you can do something only once, not something like initiation. You have to do it again and again, not simply go from novice to knowledge to sage and then sit there again eventually you must start again, remember why you came, go through these services and rites again.

The later half of lent is that time for me. Having passed through the first degree and the second, having moved in circles and lifted candles and worked the tools, lit the candles, knelt at the altars and been anointed, I sit at the altar, legs folded under me. Something has happened. Something has been done. I have made my vows. I have promised to keep secret the magic and mystery save to the proper people in the proper circle. Power has been placed upon me, the power of the tradition, the power of the Goat Footed One placing his hand on my head, my own power, long forgotten, I place upon me again. I feel it. You have been made witch and priestess, having been made witch and priestess, you are made witch and HIGH priestess, the knives, the wants the pentacles, the censor are yours, the summoning of the circles is yours. You are no congregant. You are no bystander. You are no theoretician. You are priestess and witch. Priestess I say because even a female Christian priest is called a priest. Priestess of of the Craft, of the Goddess, is the beloved of the God, and so I am priestess. I am witch. I feel it.

And yet?

What the fuck does it mean?

In a world where we have seen Samantha Stephens sit on a cloud with Endorra and fly to Paris for lunch, where we have seen Harry Potter dodge about on a broom and play Quidditch, what does it mean to assert, I am the witch? In a YouTube world of often shallow or silly or disturbed white people who have a great desire to sell pentagram charms and and call attention to themselves, who display much gullibility and greed and very little skill, power or wisdom, what does it mean to assert, I am the Witch? Once upon a time a witch was what one was called when people saw what you were doing and how you were living and called it witch craft. Now ex boyfriends who wear black and are afraid of he dark  or walking in the woods buy a Wicca book from Barnes and Noble so everyone can see and tell whoever will listen they are witches, so I must always ask myself what is a witch? And as a witch, derwydd, priestess and priest, what is my work?

Once you have moved past the static of this questioning, the answers may not be so difficult. For those of us who are initiated the first question is what is a priestess? What is a priest? For us the word witch is tied in and inseparable from this first question. So much of priesthood as we see it is defined by Christianity and especially Catholicism. The priest here represents the establishment and is empowered by the establishment. The priest here is said to have the power of changing bread and wine into consumable God. When the priest offers rites, they work because he has the power of God. When he forgives he forgives for God.  The priesthood is conditional. You must be male and a certain type of male. You must make it through seminary, be ordained. The priest is the mediator between the people and God.

This tends to be  something many priesthoods have in common. The Bible tells the very odd story that God formed his own religion in the Sinai desert, had Moses make of his brother Aaron a priesthood and of the whole tribe of Levi priests and stipulated how they were to be priests. Many people believe that ancient Israelites would have had many priestly clans to many gods, or many faces of what they would know as God. But some old glory remains in the examples we’ve seen. The holy person does not stand between people and god, but rather is the conduit of God. It is the difference between a shut water gate and the river itself. The holy one is living in the conduit and needing to remember that over and over again. The holy one does not stand for any establishment,  does not uphold the power of males or nations or that which is already in power. The holy one is the alchemist, changing bread and wine into God, changing the very ordinary into the holy, changing what was impossible, by her or his very presence, into what is blazingly apparent. But in most societies, and certainly he ones from which our western world descend, that holy one, when working outside of the bounds of male power and assumed established and approved ways of viewing God, the holy one who works beyond the pale of what makes most people comfortable and is unconcerned with orthodoxy, indeed is heterodox, and often enoughthe holy one who is a woman and not a man is called THE WITCH.   

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