cultural expectations Archives

Witches and Media

As a community we spend quite a bit of time discussing modern media and debating the possible lessons that can be taken from different shows or movies. And this is a good thing. Because despite the all-pervasive and easily-accessible nature of this particular consumable, the media we produce and consume as a society is important.

You see, I don’t think that there is any such thing as “just a TV show”, “just a book”, or “just a story”. Storytelling, in whichever form it takes, is inherently magical. It is the mirror that shows us who we are, shadows and all. But most importantly, it can be an agent for change. Especially when millions of people become emotionally invested in a story.

Take a moment to think about the last spell or magical working you carried out. Think about what you did, and (more importantly) why you did it. Think about the reasons why you used the materia magica you did, or why you performed the actions you did, or approached the deities you did (if you did). I’m betting there were parts of the backstories of those deities etc. that fit with the story you were trying to tell, right? What is magic if not changing the plotline of one’s life or current circumstances? (Congratulations, you’re all fanfic authors!)

If anything, we should be thinking about media and what is being presented to us more, not less.

The Witcher and Witches

Like many people, I kicked off my Yuletide by watching Henry Cavill wielding a big sword while wearing leather pants (just kidding, I also finished a spinning taboo-along and did religious things too). It was pretty much everything I like in a show: swords and sorcery, humor, likable characters, and at times, absolutely balls-to-the-wall weird.

But despite its fantastical nature, I think there is an important lesson to be gleaned from the show, and one that is becoming increasingly important.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Geralt of Rivia is a Witcher – a mutant created through mysterious and deadly processes in order to fight the otherworldly and monstrous on the Continent. It sounds like the stereotypical D&D dungeon crawl (but on TV), right?

As a dungeon-crawling fool myself, that was my expectation too. But then I noticed something about how Geralt dealt with the beings he encountered that I think more witches need to take to heart.

Geralt doesn’t just kill/drive out indiscriminately. Again and again, you see him trying to walk a middle path between the monstrous or otherworldly, and the humans who are all too often selfish and uncaring. Instead of just seeing the monster, he sees beings with needs and motivations, and only kills where necessary.

And this is where I think we can learn from him.

Banishing as Default

If you’re a witch and your life is anything like mine, you’ve probably been called upon to clear houses or deal with troublesome spirits more than a few times. I’ve been that person that people go to for that kind of thing since I was about nineteen ( I’m almost forty now), and I’ve dealt with situations that quite frankly belong in a horror movie. I have a whole bunch of XP in scary shit and a fucked up sense of humor to boot.

Like pretty much everyone else coming up in our cultural paradigm, banishing, binding, or trapping was a default response. That’s kind of our predominant cultural paradigm when dealing with those we consider ‘other’? Hell, even the infamous BBQ Becky is engaging in this on a mundane level when she calls the cops on Black people for having the audacity to have a BBQ.

The knight always kills the dragon, the exorcist always drives out the demon, and the otherworldly or monstrous is pretty much always slain. That is what our media typically shows us, and it’s also the message of the dominant religious paradigm.

But these methods of “dealing” aren’t the only ways to deal, and they’re not necessarily the best in most cases. Like Geralt of Rivia, I think we need to start thinking in terms of needs and motivations, and seeing what we can do to address them.

In other words, we need to be walking our talk and actually treating the other as people.

(Warning: Some reflection of how you treat other people may occur.)

Leaving the Magical Murderhobo Life

I’ve been working on this for about five years now, and I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy. However, my life has been much easier since I adopted this approach. The simple act of asking a non-human person what they need or if there’s anything to be done to make amends and potentially lay the foundations for friendship is powerful. It’s also in most cases (in my more recently acquired XP), far more successful.

But it is hard to change approach. Because if I’m being honest, I have quite a lot of knee jerk reactions and trauma there that I have to clamp down on. I may have become the person people go to for clearings at around the age of nineteen, but it really didn’t start there for me. I was very…popular…with all manner of beings as a kid, and a good percentage of them were quite harmful. So it’s a work in progress, and a lot of dealing with the old shadow baggage.

I don’t think I’m alone in finding this change difficult either. Others I’ve spoken to about this have expressed similar sentiments. Trauma or not, cultural paradigm and habits are difficult things to break from.

And I’m not saying that you should never use more wrathful methods – it’s good to be able to handle yourself when things go wrong. But it should never be your first instinct to fight someone just because they’re different.

It would seem that there is something of a “zeitgeist” moving a number of bloggers right now. I have been blogging about the matter of Spiritual Authority and Hierarchies for the past two weeks. John Beckett dropped a post yesterday entitled “Get Over Your Fear of Religion!” which basically exhorted people to address their religious baggage. (Yay! Glad to have you on board, Mr Beckett!) And Laura Tempest Zakroff dropped her own take (“One Order of Witchcraft Medium-Rare, Hold the Gods please”), which seemed to come at the same matter from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Like I said, it feels like a number of us are poking at the same nebulous mass (albeit from different angles). I was going to post the third part of my series on authority and hierarchies today, but after reading these posts, I have things to say, and say them I shall.

Religion and Baggage

I’m going to begin with John Beckett’s post, as that is the post I came across first. On the one hand, I couldn’t agree more with his points that Pagans need to get over previous religious baggage, and that there are very definite benefits to religion. However, I have real issues with looking to the framework of other (typically monotheistic) religions for a model of how Pagan religion should look now. Granted, this may not have been Beckett’s intention here, however, I don’t think you can extol the virtues of religion for Pagans without also going into what Pagan religion could look

religion - holy book — Religions have holy books, right?

like.

To my mind, this is an important distinction to make too, because when you use a word like “religion” – like any word – it comes with certain expectations of what that thing looks like. And after something like 1500-2000 years of predominantly Judeo-Christian religion, we really need to ask what that looks like for a good chunk of us. In other words, how does the shape of Abramic religion affect the shape we give to Pagan religion?

Let’s take Christianity, for example. Christianity is universalist, in fact, new adherents are actively sought. It’s also orthodoxic in nature, meaning that having the “correct” belief is of the utmost importance. Relationships with deity require submission, and the end reward for good behavior comes after death.

Now compare this with what we (think we) know of Heathen period religion. Here “religion” goes hand in hand with

religion - orans — The orans posture, common to both Pagans and Jewish people in the ancient world.

community, and is made up of the reciprocal relationships held by that community and the customs by which they are maintained (orthopraxy). Religion is not universal, and though there are common threads between groups that are culturally similar enough, it differs by tribe. There are no active attempts to seek out new adherents either, as it is handed down from parent to child. Joining the religion in these cases, is more of a case of tribal enculturation. Afterlife beliefs vary from group to group.

See what I mean? That’s quite a difference! However instead of exploring that, as a group we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and make weak arguments about “being spiritual instead of religious”.

Along similar lines are the following statements:

“I don’t pray, I chat with my gods.”

“I don’t kneel, that’s a Christian thing.”

“I don’t worship, I honor my gods.”

And it doesn’t matter that the acts of prayer and kneeling is well attested among multiple pagan cultures, or that worship (meaning “to give worth to/acknowledge the worth of”) is the perfect word for what we do, we just keep running.

So I see this issue as twofold: on the one hand, we avoid anything that looks a little too much like the religions we ran from; and on the other, we allow those religions to continue defining our worlds for us.

Don’t believe me on the last one? Consider the Devil for a moment. How do you feel about him? If you’re getting an icky feeling, where do you think that’s coming from? And yet from the probable perspective of someone from the Pagan period, he’d be another animistic power to trade the troll market with (as always, terms and conditions may apply).

Hold the Gods!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Laura Tempest Zakroff’s post argued for the validity of witchcraft without deities – or at least, devotional relationships with those deities.

I’m not going to lie, I think that’s also a problematic approach to take. As I discussed in my last post on Authority and Hierarchies, having reciprocal relationships with higher powers was a part of having spiritual authority. Hell, even the virtue of piety itself was something that could be held up as a form of authority when trucking with the dead.

This is not to completely slate Ms Zakroff’s post (apologies if that is the wrong honorific, I’m happy to amend accordingly, as I do respect her). I do think she makes an excellent point about the duotheisms held dear by the earlier Pagan revivalists, and their incompatibility with both modern and ancient ideas on deity. But does that mean that we should once more throw out yet another baby with the water it was bathing in? (Which per this account was a dirty dirty water, possibly filled with spunk and other sexual fluids.) Does that mean that we let (this time) Wiccan ideas on deities in witchcraft define the matter of deities for all witches? Because witch or not, you don’t have to have a god and a goddess. And while it’s true that witchcraft can be practiced without deities, in the old accounts and old charms, there was always the matter of the witch requiring the authority to work her craft (be that authority the Devil or Fairies, or Yahweh).

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again
Isobel Gowdie, of course.

The most striking thing for someone who spends a lot of time reading both old grimoires and ancient texts about magic though, is how much our expectations of magic have lowered over the years. There was a time when it was perfectly reasonable to have spells for getting your animated divinatory skull back under control. But now what do we have? To quote Ms Zakroff, “magic as an every day practice to change you, your living space, and the world around you. There’s no chapter on “how to choose your patron deities” – but there may be one on finding your inner goddess.”

So were those earlier spells just delusional?

I’m not so sure; let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, I was perusing the vendors at a Pagan convention. One vendor was selling (among other things), little sequined books that she was calling “wish books”, the idea being that you write wishes in them and they would come true. Nice novelty, but no one who is magically operant is going to take that seriously. However, as I was looking through her wares, an African gentleman came up and honed in on these “wish books”, wanting to know if they really worked. You see, as someone who had grown up in a place in which witchcraft is a very real prospect that is routinely thought capable of things we might think fantastical, he was as serious as a heart attack. The vendor

religion - enchantment — This came up on pixabay for “enchantment”. IDK…

when faced with this, recognized her conundrum: she could either admit that her products were bunk, or she could lie to the gentleman and potentially face his wrath down the line. Because in his culture, you can bet that bought magic is considered the same as any other product that doesn’t work when it doesn’t work!

So were those older spells delusional? I doubt that gentleman would think so – or any number of people around the world actually. As a community, we talk a lot about “reenchanting the world”, as though the whole world is missing its enchantment, but maybe it’s just our bits of it?

Final Words

I’ve covered a lot of ground here (that’s happening a lot at the moment), but if I were to boil down my points, they would be as follows:

1. Religion itself isn’t a bad thing, but we need to stop running and start figuring out what that can look like for us.
2. We also need to stop throwing out bathwater babies because of how others define things (seriously, we’re creating an army of Útburðir). Don’t like Wicca-esque duotheisms? You don’t need to dump all ideas of forming relationships with animistic powers.
3. It’s about reciprocal relationships, and no matter how awesome your inner goddess is, she probably is going to still be useless if you ever find yourself up shit creek without a paddle with things going sideways faster than the fools at my gym who try to use the treadmills sideways. Plus side though, you can always try shitting yourself, so there is that.
4. It’s also about expectations, and we cannot reenchant the world if we’re not only removing the animistic powers, but also simultaneously lowering our expectations of what magic can do.

So there you go! My Monday ramblings about all the things. I’m still aiming to get the third part of my series out this week (probably on Thursday), but the posts by Mr Beckett and Ms Zakroff were too relevant to ignore.

Have a good week, everyone!

Tag: cultural expectations

What Witches Can Learn From Geralt of Rivia