I know I've asked the qusstion several times, but I actually don't think it can be asked too often. I think its good to come back to things. I am thinking of several things. I am thinking of all the videos by people who are doing things very different from what I'm doing, and I mean different not in practice, but in tone, in sobriety, in depth of way even, who are very keen on calling themselves witches. And then there is the fact that I am not greatly concerned with the word, though I own it, and not greatly concerned with the substance of what many people say they do, though I know in a strong way that what is going on in my home and at my altar and in my life is witchcraft. And then there is the statement by Maxine Sanders, enigmatic, slightly pompous and yet with the the ring of truth: "There are many people who think they are practicing witchcraft who aren't."
I've come to this topic many times and will come to it again. The purpose is not to, at the end, camp down on a list of answers about what witchcraft is, but to explore the question. I just finished wading through Margot Adler's tome Drawing Down the Moon, a thick book subtitled witches, druids, goddess worshippers and other pagans in America. It manages to be dull and disorganized all at the same time, long and overly detailed but shallow. It covers every weird white group of the seventies and has a few updates to deal with people of color. It seems like what a journalist from NPR would compile. Reading the book I felt no magic and little wisdom in it, and and had the feeling that these strange people were no more druids than they were pagans or witches, that these contrived words were taken up by people who didn't really know what they meant who, by Adler's own latter day admissions in her revised version of the book, were frankly too white and too middle class to really know what magic even was. Very old, strange magical traditions she most passed over and settled on talking about feminist movements and strange new--and possibly defunct groups founded by elitist hippies. Many of the people she interviewed have since come under fire for fraud and sexual abuse.
But this shouldn't be a surprise. Adler was, in later life, by her own admission, an aspirational witch, and the old phrase, the fifth point of the pentagram is secrecy still applies. How could you put on the page the workings of real magic, and how many actual mages would deign to be interviewed or be comprehensible if they were? Middle class elitist white men, and a few women, are always willing to ramble, and so this is who she found. In the intervening years, there have been better books. But there is a whole movement of writing witches, of (white) people who think their whole task in magic is to write endless books and make endless videos about it. I think this is a mistake and there is little power in it. I do believe in the power of the Fifth Point of the Pentagram.
But then I know that one of my problems with the word witch as it is currently and frequently used is its pairing with the word pagan. There are so many You Tube witches especially who want to tell you what paganism is, who want to style themselves as pagans and set up a dichotomy between "paganism and Abrahamic religions" to say one is this and one is that. But this is just a sort of ignorant agreement to view the world the way that Christians decided to see it from the fourth century onward, Christianity, Judaism and later Islam as something very special with little attention to the diversity of religions all around the world or how Christianity and Judaism were tied to them. This imaginary distinction between "Abrahamic religions" and "pagans" I do not acknowledge nor do I believe in the mostly white reconstruction of a pagan world based on very little evidence, centered around fantastic (usually Christian accounts) novels and movies. Looking at what is called neopaganism it looks, at best shallow and at worst, deceived and self centered.
I would replace the word pagan with "traditional" and say that traditions cross a great many borders. Anyone involved in a tradtion is going to be looking at and doing things which seem from a shallow standpoint "pagan" and "Abrahamic". I feel a little silly using those words. In going down into traditions you may even cross breed the thou shalt not cross breed Abrahamic religions, elements of Judaism and Christianity playing side by side. Islam showing up as well. The Bible speaks of the witch of Endor. It speaks of several witches in fact. These creatures always lived on the border of society and convention. In Greek myth, Jason had to go to the edge of the world to find Medea who not only lived on the borders of society, but on the line between god and mortal. Witches live on the edges and the crossroads, off the beaten path of orthodoxy, and at the nexus of things which seemed to have no intersection. This is why I find the idea of pagan clergy and pagan community so.... stupid. A witch is, in many ways, alone. I don't much believe in covens or books of shadows so even Maxine Sanders, who says that there are many people practicing the Craft who aren't... I tend to hold what she does in suspicion as well. A witch isn't always writing books to tell people how to be witches, and she or he shouldn't always be reading them either. I know that as I paint it the path is difficult and for very few. It isn't self actualizing or support system, at least not in any easy way. It isn't for normal people. It doesn't not change your life. It isn't a church or a community. It wasn't meant to be.
When I was looking for a picture to go with this post, I looked up witch, which yielded me commercialized and silly pictures, and then next I looked up wizard, which gave me even sillier images. At last, I looked up Ged the Wizard, referencing Ursula K LeGuin's classic A Wizard of Earthsea. Get, the intentionally non white wizard and his best friend the black wizard Vetch, images not immediately commercial or nearly as famous as Ian McKellan's Gandalf or the movie versions of Harry Potter and his friends. These wizards are wholly literary, not made for lighthearted stories and actually close to the magic and folk mages of the ancient stories and magic all around the world. But they are dark, dark skinned and dark in their doings, and so not accessible to a white and commercial world. And therein lies the point I'm making, or at least the place I'm trying to get to. It isn't really something you call yourself either, and use the term without challenge. It is a thing felt and known around you. Of course, maybe I am too strict. From the Bible to medieval stories to moderns ones there are as many quack magicians as there are true ones. In fact, everything I said is a con has been represented in old stories. So maybe all of these people are indeed witches and maybe I am looking for something better, higher, wiser, realer. Maybe I am looking for the wizard, the mage, the enchanter. The person of wisdom and power. After all, Robert Cochrane who is the more or less parent of my path was very explicit about saying that magic and witchcraft were PART of what he did, and that he claimed to be part of a tradition following after people who were called witches. He was very serious about that phrasing, and so am I, and maybe in the end, rather than insist that the foolishness I see about me is not witchcraft, I should say it is not wise, and it is not powerful and that these are the things which interest me. Maybe I should seek another name, but for now, which will have to do.
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