Roots and Spirals

The Triple Hekate: William Blake

I was listening to Micheal Greer’s The Book of the Occult last night. It got me thinking about what a witch is, about what our mode of composing a religion is.  The ancestral train of the occult that leads back thousands of years is a broken one, un pristine, filled with villains and racists, megalomaniacs, misogynists and mad men. Maybe even later this year there will be time or necessity to detail a fuller history of the occult? There is no doubt that Aleister Crowley, from whom all modern witches get at least a few things was not well, was mad and miserable and died a wreck, and yet it does not matter. Many of his rituals and spells and insights still work, still inspire. It doesn’t matter that Gerald Gardner may have been a voyeuristic nudist mildly obsessed with sadomasochism who made his mythology up based on Margaret Murray’s semi—and only semi bogus research. It doesn’t matter that Alex Sanders was a confused and somewhat dishonest megalomaniac who ripped of Sanders to create his own version of Wicca and his own Book of Shadows, and we do not have to pretend that Robert Cochrane was not a disturbed thirty something year old who claimed to hate Wicca while restyling it into what he called Traditional, and then the poor man killed himself with belladonna before her was thirty-six. These are the people only in the last century who litter the craft as troubled ancestors, not to mention the stories, the stories, the stories, about how ancient what they were doing was, about miracles and wonders they may have never done, and get this, none of that makes the Craft less. None of that matters.

I am listening to the poorly written, dull past chapter four Lady of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, now that I’ve made my way through her not quite as atrocious work, The Forest House. I listen to these books, and I read The Mists of Avalon long ago to return to what it means to be draoi, what it means to be priest and priestess, druid, witch, to return to Avalon.  They put me in touch also with the Gnostic Christianity I am always trying to reunite with. And of course, if you have any sense, you should be saying to me, uh, these books are fiction. She made this shit up. In addition, we now know that not only do we now know Bradley was a mediocre writer who prized making a buck over actual skill, was unable to develop the majority of her characters and recycled the same goddamned plots over and over again, we also know she was a child molester who made it possible for her husband and other neopagan fingerfuckers to molest not only other peoples’ children, but her own.

Anyone reading carefully will see that she got her rituals from those of modern witchcraft. And yet there is great power in her books, perhaps because her rituals were the rituals she performed with her own circles, perhaps because intentionally or unintentionally this wicked hag in the truest since of the word was working a magic when she wrote them.

And though it would be wrong to say the flaws and sins of these spiritual ancestors (more aunts and uncles than parents) don’t matter, what I can say is they don’t destroy the tradition. They do not kill the wisdom, and this is because ultimately we are not relying, as orthodox Christianity or Judaism or some other faiths do, on saints, on a perfect line of pristine transmission. We are not relying on those who received wisdom long ago from a God on high being perfectly right as they pass the wisdom to us. After all, while other paths delight in tracing straight unbroken lines, we witches use the labyrinth and the spiral. For us, the learning, the work, the transformation always occurs for the first time with us, in our hearts when we are meeting the divine. We are, after all, witches and not Girl Scouts or Unitarians, and we should never have expected the ancestral line to be straight, pure, or free of sin. We recognize the truth in others because we are recognizing it in ourselves, also flawed, often sometimes weak, maybe even a little bit mad.

Having had mercy on my own path, I can have mercy on others, perhaps more mercy than those who practice them. I don’t have to believe Judaism or Christianity’s stories about themselves to value them. I can see the two thousand years of misogynistic bullshit that have made them and still see a brilliant value underneath. May the Mistress of the Maze who leads us into darkness bring us out into the light. May we, who have compassion on our ancestors and on the path they walked that led to us, have compassion on others, and true compassion on ourselves.