As a Christian teenager, I did practice pacifism. The lesson I learned? Pacifism is for the popular and secure. I was neither. The worst time in your life to be a pacifist is in your teens, especially if you’re a girl. Violence is an absolute last resort after all other avenues are exhausted, and it is, like grabbing the fire extinguisher off the wall, for emergency use only. People still especially object to women standing up for themselves in this way; as men and women slowly discover the benefits of genuine social equality, this will change.

So in Wicca, where “harm none” is upheld as the salient value, it may seem strange to some that while I do not support war, any war, for any reason, I do support the basic right and need of my Wiccan and other Pagan fellows to go to war, to serve in the military, and to bear arms. I’m a fan of the first and second amendments. I am not, however, a fan of people who want to carry on about how many guns they own. It just tells me that that person has some really tiny junk. (Women included.)

It’s worth pointing out that the majority of military service men and women identify as Christian. “Thou shalt not kill,” does not get raised in their arguments often, either. The Bible here and there does say a few specific things about doing what you must to protect home and family; I believe that neopagan thinking may well fall along a similar line. Continue reading →

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There are still a ton of topics left uncovered by me this year, along with a few basic ways I might provide information in hopes of facilitating the blogging process for my fellow bloggers.  I am very much a US American in my acculturation, and this means I have the unfortunate tendency to either think “I can’t” (thankfully, this is rare these days) or “I’m going to DOITALLATONCE!” which is not just unrealistic, but can unchecked turn into a method of burning myself out until it really is a de facto “I can’t.”

I am working hard on moderating these qualities. My greatest challenge is finishing a work, and after that, sustaining the sorts of projects that are intended to be ongoing. In the efforts of caring for myself and my personal energy, I have learned that consciously only doing a little bit at a time takes me farther, faster than trying to apply massive effort and then just resting.  I will hopefully remember to refer back to this when I put up a “tips for Pagan Values bloggers” post after this one.

In the meantime, I consider this a value that goes well with my philosophies of opposition to domination and control: free will. Just as domination and control have some small grey areas¹ outside the sexual arena, so does the influence of free will.

Hopefully to best communicate my perspective, I want to lay down the following suppositions, concepts, and/or ideals. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the time to explore this as in-depth as I’d like, so I will lay this down as a rough outline for an in-depth discussion, possibly next year:

• Free will is actually a pillar of belief that can and does connect Christianity and Paganism. I’m willing to venture that most Christians believe in free will, and that most Pagans do as well. Although evolutionary biology/psychology are used as the Pagan version of the Christian concept of pre-destination, a the core of our ethical and moral decisions and discussions revolve almost entirely around the strong belief that we do have a choice about our choices.²
• Free will is sacrosanct. It is the center of the soul and mind, and is precious and private in the same way that we consider our genitals.
• At the core of our beings, we always have a choice. Depending on the situation, we may not have choices we are happy to make. Even in the throes of drunkenness or on a high, we have a choice about our actions.
• The core spiritual struggle to do moral right comes in the negotiation between what other humans want from us, and what our core will/connection to the Divine or free will most want. This is what sane Muslims mean when they speak of jihad. While to them it is struggle to do right in the eyes of God, to Pagans this conflict is the struggle to moderate between the demands of the overculture and the struggle to honor our own sense of what’s right.

Free will on the surface appears a pure topic. People should have the freedom at least to think what they want to think. But just as “harm none” can actually lead to immobility when applied the wrong way, free will can also lead either to immobility or worse, to just handing yourself over, if you misunderstand it.

Every single human being that interacts with other human beings is in a negotiation for his or her free will all the time. This isn’t because we are all consciously at war for domination. Certainly, some of us are, but for the most part the behavior is at least unconscious if not unintentional. It’s the pressure many Pagans know by loved ones who want us to convert to their religions and thus relieve the pressure of having their assumptions challenged by our very presence; it’s the lady at the supermarket trying to persuade you to buy her brand of frozen food; it’s the politician that knocks on your door in a handshake campaign; it’s even your neighbor calling you to ask you to keep the noise down after 10 pm.

These aren’t all bad things, these aren’t all good things. What these are are negotiations, part of the billions of lifetime transactions that over and over define the lines between your will and the will of those who live around you. In fact, it’s the absolute core of all ethical decisions and discussions: it’s all about what actions you decide to take.

Sometimes, people will try to even get you to think differently. The Greek and Roman art of rhetoric, a long-honored tradition that defines the US and other legal systems, is built around changing the minds of the people. When we practice persuasion or manipulate emotions for any reason, we are essentially tapping into the free will of others.

While manipulation is spectacularly rotten, it is also extremely common, so common that many people can no longer distinguish between persuasion – an appeal to a person’s highest ideals to change a thought or feeling – and manipulation, which is a provoking of emotions to prompt a specific response or result.

A short example

Most of the ethical discussions around magic actually do boil down to free will. We witches worry a lot about whose mind we might change and how, sometimes to the point where we over-confuse what we do.

For instance, in binding magic: I’ve read the argument that when you bind a thief from robbing your home, you are “thwarting the thief’s free will.”

Absolutely not.

The thief will still want to rob you. If you’ve performed the binding properly, he/she will simply find him/herself unable to succeed at robbing you. I seriously doubt I will get bad karma from sending out energy that gives the thief a flat tire as s/he is driving out to my home to grab my stereo.

Now, if I’d bewitched the robber to lose interest in robbing me, yes, that might be more effective – but I’ve also then screwed with his/her free will. I’ve also stolen from the thief an opportunity to grow/change by changing his/her mind about robbing me.

If I chose to be nice and not perform a binding, I’d have dishonored myself – and by that, I mean, did a poor job of caring for the life I’ve been charged to take care of the entire time I’m on this earth – and then there would be the karma of having my stuff stolen, and the feeling of violation resulting from poor self-care. Please do not take this to mean I think ALL people should bind thieves. For non-magical people, the basic effort of locking a door is sufficient to honor the self and the home. This scenario would also be one where I somehow saw the theft coming: unexpected actions by others are one of the many prices and challenges of life.

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1. self-defense has a hierarchy of response in my mind with domination magic as one of the last resorts [↩]
2. This fails to explain why those that believe in predestination evangelize anyway. I think they just want more people to make babies and thus church members with. [↩]

There’s always a fuzzy point where my own values come in: they are not necessarily Pagan values, but they are values that belong to my person. I am a Pagan, and I express those values. Just as politics and religion may not separate so easily, neither do my personal and religious values – after all, just as some people can’t distinguish between their political and religious inclinations, others can’t quite distinguish between the religious and the personal. I am Pagan. Are these my values because I am Pagan? Perhaps. Am I Pagan because of my values? That may well be the stronger argument. I did not change my emotional beliefs very much at all upon my religious conversion; what changed was my understanding of history and science. (Evolution was never a point of contention when I was Christian, and most certainly not now.)  After 16 + years practicing Wicca, the line has gotten so fuzzy it might classify as a new form of penicillin.

One of those values in action that may be personal and may in some way be Pagan revolves around the apology. Here, I need to acknowledge the source: a friend recently posted to her Livejournal about apologizing to someone she felt she treated poorly. (I have no idea whether or not she treated him as she felt she did.) I said that I thought it was a classy thing to do – and I wondered why so many people, even when they do know they did something that caused real harm, refuse to apologize. I have been genuinely mystified by this for years.

Another poster did explain it to me. To paraphrase, “Whenever you apologize, you risk hearing a litany from the other person of how much you suck.”

This was illuminating for me.  Especially since it seems that we are rapidly losing protocol for delivering apologies, and if what this person said is true (and I think it probably is) the protocol for accepting apologies may well have disappeared completely. Continue reading →

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I generally don’t miss Indiana. The near-caste system mentality of the town I lived in guaranteed I never made an authentic connection to anyone, and while I know living anywhere else in Indiana would have produced different, happier results for me, we lived where we lived and my happiness and health was not a factor in that decision. As it is now, when I’m approached by people from my childhood via Facebook (they are why I hate Facebook), it’s strange, distorting, slightly nauseating: these beings that were never really friends want me to be interested in their children, their litany of health problems, the trivia of their daily lives. Even the interests I share put me off when they express them: I want them to keep their hands the hell off gardening and Doctor Who.

Mostly I ignore the overtures these days. A friend request without a note gets ignored. Yet there is one way to work around my resistance: an act of courtesy. One woman who was my first experience with female competitive syndrome and betrayal got through because she acknowledged my father’s death when I was at a weak moment.¹  A few got through just because we at least made motions of friendship, and never did anything intentionally cruel to each other, or had made some effort to stay in touch during college. For the most part, the tribe of my birthplace consists of the persons most foreign to me in the world, and associating with them or even witnessing their lives through the filter of Facebook actually disgusts me.

Yet, paradoxically, these people harbor a few cultural habits, gestures of daily interchange, that I quite miss. Minnesotans did not do the following at all when I first moved here, and still don’t most of the time. These actions are small, simple, create a temporary sense of community – and when I do them in this state, I often get strange, suspicious reactions.

The two gestures from my Hoosier history I miss the most?

Waving “thanks” at stop signs, and putting a groceries divider down for the person behind you. Continue reading →

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1. I still think she’s sniffing for when my family’s property goes up for sale. [↩]

One of the knottiest areas of human interaction involves a game I’ve come to think of as “where’s the line?”  At what point do you strike the perfect balance between respecting the freedom of others to make their own decisions, and defining your own boundaries so that you can live harmoniously with the inevitable differences that surround you?

The whole of politics from petty office gossip to elections that end in violent coups tell the story of this struggle. Who has the power? Who has what right to tell me what to do? Without someone to say “do this?” what crucial things, like road repair, might never get done? Without the basic right to say “no,” I risk having situations where my body, soul, health and anything that passes for property winds up for grabs. At the same time, others have the basic right to insist on a fair exchange of energy themselves: I can’t just go driving off with your car, take the stuff in your shop without paying for it, or do things to your body without your explicit consent.

The whole “free will” perspective of Wicca itself runs into limits that make this difficult because of the authoritative structures of some traditions/covens. While personal sovereignty is an ethic to discuss on its own right now what I’m discussing is social contract. This is the world beyond coven, or family, or partner: what agreements are we bound to keep, and what are we, on a social level, owed? Continue reading →

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While others are exploring Pagan ideals in terms of Pagan values month, I think my Writer Self  is leading me to “how those values work in action,” or at least “what complications arise from those values.” A lot of my posts, from looking over them, do talk about my ideals, yes, but focus on human behavior, how people react to these values, and at times how people consciously or unwittingly ask for others to compromise their values. Continue reading →

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My first encounter with what I often see billed as “the Witches’ Pyramid” came from Doreen Valiente’s “an ABC of Witchcraft.”  Valiente calls these ethical commandments the “Four Powers of the Magus” and says some also called them the “Powers of the Sphinx.” In order, they are:

To Know

To Dare

To Will

To be Silent

The idea is that these powers, like the airts and elements, are intended to act in harmony within the witch: no act of ritual can succeed without each of these qualities in balance, and out of balance you end up with a formula for disaster: knowledge into ignorance, daring into cowardice, will into fear and silence into arrogance.

The one that has always given me the most trouble among these powers and their balance is silence. It is not that I think silence has no value, and I’m far from a 21st century exhibitionist. It’s that I think silence is either misunderstood, or misused. There are times, in fact, that the only way to right a wrong, to protect yourself or to break a negative pattern is to break silence.

Says Valiente in her brief explanation, “In fact, it has been said that the fourth power, to be silent, is the most important of all, and the most difficult to attain. Silence is a potency in itself; the silence of the great, timeless desert beneath the stars; the silence of the snow-capped mountains on the roof of the world; the silence within the vaults of the Pyramids. These are the silences of secret treasures, laid up for the initiate. NO chatterers or boasters will find them. People who blab their plans and ideas to everyone disperse their own forces. Occult operations in particular should not be talked about, or they will never come to fruition.”

Valiente probably never initiated anyone from Texas, the land of “If you done it, it ain’t braggin’.”

While Valiente’s description does not speak only to magical practice, but to the entire demeanor of the magic worker throughout life, I think that this command and the very good reasons behind it still gets misinterpreted. The times in life to keep your mouth shut are many: when no one is actually harmed by an action (even if offended), when speaking will lead to irreversible physical or emotional harm, when the information you have just won’t do anything good for the big picture – or when it’s just not your information to share. This hardly exhausts the limits of “shut up” situations.

Yet often we enforce silence for exactly the wrong things. Just as naming something in certain folk traditions gives you power over that something, speaking out instead of keeping your mouth shut also breaks the “spell.” An example of this is substance addiction: in the various 12 step groups, the first step is to go in front of a room of fellow addicts, say “I am ___ and I am an addict.” The very first act of breaking the spell of addiction is to name it.

In cases of abusive relationships, as in addictions, we often find ourselves in denial. Denial is a form of negative silence, one where we hush our inner voice and ignore the voices of truth spoken both outside and within. “Oh, I’m sure all men have screaming fits when they’re depressed,” “He was just a little drunk,” “It’s not THAT big a deal. He scared me, but it’s not like he hit me.”  These are silencing maneuvers we use on ourselves, that we use on each other, that those who would dominate use to maintain dominance. An inner theme of mine is all about stolen voices – the villains always take away the ability of the their targets to speak, to express – to break their spell.

In my own life, I grew up in a family where my mother advocated  and enforced “Keep your feelings to yourself.” She once told me that she fully believed emotional suppression was good, that “We just don’t talk about it” was the best solution to her family issues. At first, I thought she was just identifying a problem – and there were many, many problems with my extended family because the avoidance of conflict led to the making of assumptions that always in the end came at the expense of my own family. I realized, after I asked my uncle point blank about a train set he stole from her in the hopes of arranging a positive dialogue or at least negotiating a ransom, that my mother was actually praising the act of constant emotional suppression and silence. She would yell at my sister and I for fighting (and my sister has years of me screaming at her that she is owed in repayment for the abuse I was required by my mother to take from her)   but only when I fought back.  I don’t know if the woman is brainwashed or just stupid, and I have no idea if she has the self-awareness to realize that it is her actions based on this suppression that have ruined what should be her most important relationships. Even though my mother was miserable, she fought to prevent any change to the behavior, to continue the tradition of silence and oppression even though it not only didn’t work, it actively damaged her own family.

The demand for my silence and the increasingly absurd behaviors of my childhood home drove me to talk to one or two adults that might actually listen to me. I was completely miserable living there; I wasn’t allowed to talk back – because breaking the silence meant that mother and sister were then accountable for their actions – and so if I was home, I lived in constant danger of their mood swings, constant demands for service and attention, constant demands that I somehow be pleasing, and for some reason, every time the two of them fought, I would get called on the carpet and then they would demand I say something – and then be verbally abused for saying anything. Our church choir director noticed something obviously amiss, and asked me about it during a private rehearsal section. One or two teachers overheard me vent to my friends. They tried to talk to my mother about it, tried to say “Your younger daughter is really, really unhappy and we’re concerned.”

My mother took it back to me. “People are concerned about the stuff you’re saying about your sister.” I knew at the time that that’s sure as hell not what those people meant – but my mother’s response to “You have a real problem in your family, and you’re hurting a family member,” was “Silence the person who is suffering because it’s more convenient than solving the problem.”

I struggle with it, but for the most part these days I err on the side of speech rather than silence.

My mother’s silence is not the silence of power. It is the silence of abuse, the silence of the troll counting on you not knowing it’s there, not being able to scream for help.

Understanding silence as a power of its own – and understanding it as humility – is just as important as understanding that breaking silence is its own power. Often, we must learn not only when to speak, but at what times speaking is actually for the greater good.

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Remember the old bumper sticker – last time we mixed politics and religion, people got burned at the stake? I used to have a button that said that, that I wore in college for about a month before I got tired of it stabbing me.

Politics and religion have continued to mix, both before and after, with, if possible, even worse things than solo human barbecues. By the 1940s, human technology had managed to make those barbecues group affairs. The whole “burning at the stake” has been upped from taking out a few dissidents to genocide more than once in distant history and current events. While no recordings exist of the actual verbal conversations that went around drafting the US Bill of Rights, I have a hard time imagining that the burning of heretics was not a factor when the authors of the document established the freedom of religion clause.

Yet politics and religion are inseparable, even among Pagans – and that makes it even more important that we do separate them, somehow, just so we know the truth of our own actions especially when our actions do impact people not directly connected to us and thus not directly consenting to us. Continue reading →

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A woman in my water aerobics class recently discovered Doctor Who, and now avidly shares my love for it. One of the points we both like about the show? It’s not about good versus evil. As Steven Moffat (the current head writer and producer) explained, the show offers up villains to understand, rather than villains to conquer. Not only does that make the show materially different from the vast majority of science fiction out there, it completely unplugs the nihilist universe where the good fight for the sake of good, knowing the battle never ends.¹ The world doesn’t need to end with only some victor standing over a conquered body – and a healer of any worth can and will find another way if there’s any other way to be found. I do have to acknowledge here though that there’s no hope for Daleks, Cybermen and fundamentalists. Still, most of the world and even the universe really does come back to a true possibility of common goals. Achieving common goals can eradicate evil. Continue reading →

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1. I realize Torchwood dives right back into nihilism, as evidenced by Owen Harper’s arc. I also love the Buffy universe and the whole Whedon family anyway. [↩]

Back in college, a young woman used quite a bit of nasty social manipulation and pressure to get mutual friends to drop me altogether.  It really only worked on her original group of friends, and the one genuinely mutual friend we had and I fell out eventually for reasons that had nothing to do with this original person. I was, as I always am, sad at a lost friend, but her long diatribe-driven phone calls never left her satisfied because I wasn’t doing what she was demanding I do, which was confess to a lie I had not told. You know the logic behind the Salem Witch trials? Yeah, it was pretty much like that. It boiled down to one of those bizarre Mean Girl female domination games, and since at the time I had a fiance’ with a serious neural condition, a mother ill-wishing our relationship because we’d moved in together without her blessing and a bachelor’s degree to earn, I dealt with her issue with the respect it deserved: absolutely none.

Unfortunately, this girl gained power via attention by making a Big Deal out of Everything. So if I crossed paths with her, she’d actually do things like yell “I hope she knows I use mirror shields!”¹

She couldn’t even fathom that one, I did not and DO NOT case curses over petty social disagreements. I have friends who disagree with my outlook, and I understand it. I save more negative magics for when lives and livelihoods are at stake, but most of the time, I just leave it the hell alone. Karma has done things to people that are so much better than anything I could concoct. Also, when it comes to the petty social stuff –  no matter how well I think I’m 100% in the right, if I’m not, there’s a good chance that what I put out will turn on me not so much in a law of three way but in a nasty domino effect that can drain me for years.

This woman also could not fathom that she just wasn’t that important to me. Her issue with me was petty, she was never a particularly positive or good friend, and while I would have preferred a quiet exit from her, her loud one assured me I was not making a mistake in feeling glad of her disappearance from my life. She spent quite a deal of time going on to friends about how she was utterly convinced that I was going to “Doooooooooooo something!”

I never did. As irritating as it was to hear about it, I really did have much bigger fish to fry, of the kind that would make my life better in a way that mattered to me. And it had nothing to do with some guy that made out with me at a party and then called me a domineering bitch when I said I didn’t want to hang out with him again, whose cause she took up for reasons of personal ego.

Eventually, to vent the aggravation, I posted an essay on Medea’s Chariot titled “She’s gonna DOOO something!” The jist was, “Of course I won’t you stupid fuck. You’re not that important.”

While I’m less of a Wiccan purist than I was back then – there’s been a war or two since then, which forces a change in paradigm -  I’m still disinclined to curse. I’ve done it once, on someone else’s behalf. I had excellent reason to believe she was in physical danger if I didn’t, above and beyond protection work that she knew I did for her. That’s the only time I’ve done it, and I on that one, I’m 100% sure I’m in the right.

Phil Hine puts the mentality of this woman and many others in its exact right place:

“Positive thinking works. Negative thinking works even better and Paranoia works absolutely brilliantly as a magical theory. If you imagine a conspiracy against you, you will soon end up manufacturing one for real. You will lose friends and allies and things will go wrong for you.

In my experience very few people have the skill and the motivation to launch a successful magical attack. If they do have that sort of skill they actually do something else instead. They simply work to change the behaviour of the person that creates a problem for them. Anyone with the skill and intelligence to perform real sorcery will turn an adversary into a resource rather than a casualty. Thieves are fools and murderers are romantics, for both could achieve their aims more effectively by other means. Serious capable sorcerers simply change people’s minds.

And that of course also provides the only real means of defence against it as well. “

This wanders into free will, magic and influence, which is a rich discussion for the future.

Negative energy and magic DOES get passed around with and without intention. If you’re working up energy and a thought slips, stuff can slip. Not always, but sometimes it does. When you’re mad at someone and you haven’t sent anger back to its desk, it’s all too easy to obsess. It’s not an intentional cursing. Energy gets passed around all the time, and can be directed without intending to direct it. While some people have truly gotten themselves into that state of zen “doesn’t matter,” most people these days allow their emotions to govern them, rather than keeping emotions in their rightful place as informants and advisors to the throne of consciousness.  Even the ones telling other people to “chill” or “let it be” are completely different when something similar happens to them. It’s too easy to create your own snowball of negativity: when I go road rage too often, I’m locked in the car with my own negative energy. Increasingly stupid stuff happens. I’ve found it’s better to develop the skills to stay calm and not take it personally that someone on the road has depersonalized me enough that they’re driving around me like a total dick. My energy isn’t reaching them, just me. Besides, enough dickhead driving does eventually attract the police so my energy doesn’t need to reach them.

Situations have arisen since then where people are convinced I’m going to curse them. This is always from a person who has seen firsthand how I work, has never EVER seen me do any cursing or manipulation work, and knows that most of my talents lie in healing and herbalism. Yes, I know how to poison someone – it’s a knowledge key that keeps me from harming anyone. I am prone to macabre jokes of an extreme nature that should be obvious. It’s conveniently not obvious to the people who have seen firsthand how I don’t operate.

There are situations that have crossed my path that have left me feeling compelled to do something. Without going into specifics, these are standard bags of tricks that are strong alternatives to cursing, especially in situations where you just don’t know the whole story. Being a theist helps, but for those less inclined, the Egytpian Goddess Ma’at manifest more as a force than as a persona.

• Uncrossing

This is a routine practice I do to clean up the petty stuff.

• Reversal

A reverse all evil spell, in the event someone is really focusing angry energy on me. On my end, it clears out my environment.  I’m honestly not sure what it does to the other person. I think for some it chills them out, too, and for others it’s like what happens to me when I’m locked in a car with my own road rage.

• Justice

When in doubt, a justice spell where you petition the divine/the Universal equilibrium makes a great difference. If you don’t know the full details, or suspect that the truth might come out with some distortions, sometimes the best option truly is to just hand it over. I have in some circumstances asked for specific results and given compelling energy over to the gods to bring things about, and fed that energy – but I leave that energy in the hands of the godforms I called, for them to make the decision.

Have I crossed over into shadier areas? Yes, when I’ve felt pushed by persistent behavior. This has happened maybe twice in my life. While Hine above indicates changing people’s minds is the best bet, that’s a difficult road for a religion that upholds free will as the most sacred of the sacred. I tend to do things that leave the person all the free will s/he wants, and just make myself impossible to reach.  Attitudes can only be changed when someone wants to change them from within, and again, fishing about inside a person’s head is a complicated business – generally too complicated for me.

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1. I’m the one who told her about the technique. [↩]