The War On Magick

Magic(k) as metaphor has been used by countless writers, often enabling them to address issues which otherwise would be impossible to touch with a forty foot pole, such as racial differences, cultural differences, and a host of other things. Those writers have included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and, of course, J.K. Rowling. By setting their stories against a backdrop of magic and magical creatures, these authors have been able to address issues of racism, classism, social stigma, and a host of other topics, which otherwise would likely have been highly unsuitable for younger audiences, and scary to tackle for the older audience as well.

What does magic(k) represent, as a metaphor, then? Can we quantify it? Well, most often it represents almost a sort of rebelliousness; even a willingness to be a social outcast. It represents differences which set a person/character apart from the status quo; the “larger world”, if you will. It’s also representative of power, and an implied choice when it comes to that power: whether power over others, or personal empowerment.

Now, let’s plug that into a real-world magickal worldview. What the heck do I mean by that? Most of us who consider ourselves Pagans, much less Witches, hold a magickal worldview which indeed sets us apart as willing outsiders and rebels, generally quite different from the status quo and the residents of the “larger world”. In fact, it could be said that we indeed live in a much larger world, and that such a worldview is personally empowering. At least, it can be or it could be. We believe that we are co-creating this world and its “fate”; that we have the power and ability to make things happen beyond the scope of the “normal”.

Which is where the war on magick in the title of this post comes in….

In order to explain this thoroughly, I’m going to have to get super personal, so fasten your seatbelts:

I came into this world with a magickal worldview: I believed in faeries and unicorns and ghosts and demons from a very early age, largely because I had actually seen, with my own two eyes, at least three out of the four by the ripe young age of three. And that was fantastic, so long as I was at home with Mommy and Daddy and Mema. Then a dreadful, wonderful thing happened: I started school. I was subsequently bullied from the ripe young age of five until I turned eighteen. I was called “weird”, “stupid”, a “devil worshipper”; a “witch” (and they didn’t mean it in a good way!). In the eighth grade, I was literally surrounded and beaten and kicked by a group of ten other kids. In the tenth grade, a group of boys threatened to burn me at the stake, and they weren’t kidding. You get the idea….

But then another wonderful thing happened: I went to college. There I met other people who shared my magickal worldview, and, for a short span of time, I found peace. Unfortunately, I graduated and had to move back to small-minded-small-town-America. By that point, I had added channeling (via transformative mediumship) the dead people I had come to know and love to the mix. I found myself once again constantly bombarded by disapproval. Over the course of the next twenty years, this became so bad that I became agoraphobic.

So, in 2014, I moved North, to Massachusetts. Once again, as I had in college, I encountered an entire group of other people who actually shared my magickal worldview. These people not only believed in the same things as me, they actually accepted and respected me for all of the things that I know and can do. Once again, I found peace, and slowly began to recover from my agoraphobia. It was bliss.

But it didn’t last, because in 2016, I took the leap alongside Connla into the not-terribly-wonderful-as-it-turns-out world of Norse Practice, and all hell once again broke loose in my little life. Suddenly, I found myself encountering person after person who willingly paid lip service to the concept of a magickal worldview on the one hand, while on the other hand (and at the same time) making hard and fast rules about what one could and could not include. In the same breath, they would talk about Dwarves and Gods and Elves and then call someone out on “UPG”. Just when all of the pieces of my personal practice were finally coming together, I discovered that absolutely none of the Truths I had come to know as precisely that would be accepted by their supposedly “intended” audience. Clearly, it was time to crawl back under that rock which I had come to call home between 1994 and 2014.

All of that is, of course, a very personal story, but I tell it here to you that it might come to illustrate some very real and important points:

• If you dare to be different, you must be prepared to pay the price for that difference, and very few of us truly are. I certainly wasn’t. The truth is, none of should have to be! Our differences–our “specialness”–are what make this world a beautiful place in which to live and none of us should ever be made to feel that we must fit into someone else’s “cookie cutter” in order to survive.

• Power is for empowerment, not power over. Seeking power over others is the mark of the bully: it is a sign that one is not empowered themselves. Only the very small seek such a life, for if one is truly large in and of one’s self–empowered–they find no reason to crave such things.

• None of us rules the world, and, therefore, none of us get to make rules for the world. The only real “laws” governing our existence are those of physics, and even scientists are still working to figure those out! I cannot define the world for you, and you cannot define it for me, and all those varied individual definitions of existence are yet one more beautiful difference.

When I say there is presently a war on magick, I mean that we are living in a time when individuals who are different are being summarily punished for those differences on a regular basis, whether those differences be a belief in magick, or one’s race, cultural background, religion, gender identification, or sexual preference. Power-over-others is more routinely being sought than empowerment. Everyone wants to be a rule-maker, in the hopes that they can become a ruler. This isn’t just happening in the magickal community; this is happening everywhere, on a grand scale. It has become the macrocosm, and those of us who actually maintain a magickal worldview? Well, we’re once again the microcosm, as we so often have been in the past.

And we need to take care, not only of each other within our magickal communities, but of all those other “outcasts”: all those others out there who dare to be different. We need to remind ourselves to seek empowerment always, but power-over-others never. We need to recognize all the beautiful differences out there in the world, instead of trying to bring them under the banner of someone somewhere’s thoroughly made-up rules. Otherwise, we’re going to lose. Not just a battle or even the war, but everything that makes us good as humans.