Showing all posts tagged ethics

In witchcraft

HPF 2012: When Public Ritual Goes to the Bad Place

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

[Trigger Warning for discussion of gendered violence in a ritual context.]*

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not categorically opposed to cutting-edge ritual.  I think anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows that I’m willing to take magical risks … sometimes just to see what will happen.  Frankly, when done responsibly between consenting adults, I’m pretty much down with any sort of boundary-pushing you can think of.  But I don’t think many of you are going to argue with me when I say that the main public ritual at a festival is not the place to try being edgy or experimental.  That’s how people—unwitting bystanders—get hurt.

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In scholarship, witchcraft

Shaman: My Uncomfortable Relationship With a Problematic Word

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

[This one gets a little rambly.]

These last weeks have seen a bit of traffic on a subject near and dear to my heart:the relationship between modern neo-Pagan animism and magic, cultural appropriation, and the word and figure of the “shaman”.  It “began”—so to speak; I don’t know that any of the authors read one another—with Alison Leigh Lilly and an interesting vision of where a combination of steampunk aesthetic and neo-Pagan praxis might lead (and the follow-up).  Next were Lupa Greenwolf’s posts (one and two) on her own discomfort with, first the word, and then the militant and un-self-critical reaction to her use of it.  Finally, VVF weighs in heavily but thoughtfully on the other side of the issue.

This is an issue that I, too, struggle with.  I since first being introduced to shamanic visionary techniques by a friend in St. Louis—fortunately, after I became at least tangentially aware of issues of cultural appropriation—I have always avoided the title “shaman”.  I don’t come from a culture that awards that title.  Actually, strictly speaking, no culture does: “shaman” is a bastardized Anglicization of the Siberian word “saman”.  It was adopted in the late 19th Century as a catch-all term for indigenous religious healers and, over the course of the 20th Century, came to be associated with particular types of trance-induction and spiritual mediation.  It was in that latter sense that I was first introduced to and familiarized with the word, and—because that was what my sources told me the word for the kinds of magic that came most naturally to me was—came to describe my visionary practice as “shamanic”, or “shamanic witchcraft”.

But there are anthropologists who don’t even think it’s a real thing (damn, why don’t I have my full library with me so I can fucking cite that?  please forgive me and use your favorite search engine): that “shamanism” is a social construction created by Western scientists as a way of understanding and conflating certain kinds of indigenous religious and magical practice which have no Western analogue (well, unless VVF is right about fairies, or unless you count theurgy).  This argument carries more weight the more research I do.  Yes, it’s helpful to create categories of like things so that we can better understand similarities, but … At the very least, one must simultaneously acknowledge that the categorization is alien to the system being observed.  Better practice would require a more proactive attempt to first understand the “shamanic” practices as the people to whom they are native understand them.

A number of my religious/spiritual/magical practices are rooted in what is known in some circles as “core shamanism”—that is, the use of drums, dance, rhythm, and/or drugs as techniques of achieving certain states of altered consciousness, stripped of their original cultural context and any elements or trappings that are most obviously cultural appropriation.  This is the work advocated by, for example, Michael Harner and Roger Walsh.

I’m not called to work with remains and spirits of animals, as Lupa is; nor am I as well known either she or Allison.  These two facts shelter me from an awful lot of the bullshit, allowing me to work my way through these issues in relative peace.  But my magical talents seem much better suited to exploring the Otherworld than anything else, and when spirits appear to me as animals and refuse to give me names, calling them “totems” and referring to them as Wolf or Leopard are pretty much the best I’ve got in terms of precise language.  And, though there are problems with it, as someone who identifies as a writer first and foremost, precise language is kind of a big deal to me.  Hell, the pursuit of precise, accurate, and affirming language is a huge part of my feminism/anti-racism/social justice effort.  When my need for precise language pushes me into dangerous territory, all I can say is “I’m sorry.  I’m working on it.”

I’ve spoken before on how uncomfortable I am with the the parts of neo-Pagan practice that dance around and over the borders of cultural appropriation, and of my personal relationship with those elements of practice. Increasingly, I find myself referring to my magical practice as “visionary” rather than “shamanic”. “Visionary” has it’s own problems—there’s these pesky associations with leadership and hierarchy, for example—but at least it doesn’t reek of colonialism. At the same time, though, I—like Lupa—struggle with the idea of bowing down to people within my own community who seem more interested in being the morality police than in actually serving social justice.

The more research I do, the more I come to understand that, while many of the techniques have been lost, “shamanic” practices are not absent from the Western tradition.  Witches with flying potions, fairy familiars like those VVF talked about, Hellenistic theurgy, astral projection and pathworking.   I’m not a theurge.  I may worship the gods of ancient Hellas, but I don’t buy the ideas of a fallen/impure world from which one MUST ascend to reach the gods.  Some gods are Up There, sure; and some are Down.  But there are plenty of them Right Here With Us, too.  I don’t to much pathworking because it’s too structured: I don’t like having my conclusions fed to me the way much of the pathwork I’ve seen seems to do.  And I’m just not very good at astral projection (yet).  But the fact is, I have the raw materials from which to build a cultural context for my visionary work.  Until some spirit teaches me better ones, though, I’m pretty much stuck with the “shamanic” techniques I learned from Harner.

And, as long as I’m stuck with Harner—and Wood, and Walsh, and all the others—I’m pretty much stuck with the word “shaman”, no matter how much I dance around it.  No matter how uncomfortable it makes me.  And I don’t really know how I feel about that … let alone how I should feel about it.

In witchcraft

Tradition, Technique, Appropriation, and Exploration Part 2/2

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The last post was already in the works when when Gordon, Jason, Jow, and RO began their discussion of the simplicity, complexity, and relative eclecticism of their practices.  I seriously sympathize.  If you’ve read my previous post, I imagine you can see why: eclectic Wicca, years of unverifiable personal gnosis (both my own and that of those I’ve worked with), Hellenic gods, neo-shamanic spirit-journeys, Chaos- and Hermetic-inspired sigils, masks and hammers and things no one else has ever thought to do with a circle.

As I said before: I’ve spent years searching for a tradition.  I’ve played with Cunningham and Conway, dabbled with Crowley, Carrol and Kraig, mocked Lady Sheba and Silver Ravenwolf alike.  I am a student of Tarot and astrology.  I’ve experimented with candle magic and sorcery and astral projection, with auric healing and magically enhanced massage.  I’ve tuned myself to the elements and grounded into the astral plane – invoked the cosmic forces of the quarters and cast spells with nothing but the power of my own aura.  I have gone on spirit journeys and hung out with gods and spirits.  No one tradition I’ve found covers half these things, let alone all of them.  So, while the search continues, I’ve been working on my own: a systematic breakdown of the things I’ve done (as best as I can with my substandard journals), and maps of the things I want to do in the future.  I doubt anyone will ever want to join, but it will be perfect for me. And who knows, maybe I’ll find the perfect apprentice some day.

And yet … I still wax poetic, sometimes, about Traditions and Orders.  I share that strange jealousy for those who can name their path and have it recognized.  Envy for those who’ve found a teacher or a system that they can adopt in toto – even if they still need to look outside that system for new techniques to fill its inadequacies, addendums and appendices to a finite and discrete system.

I’m white, (apparently) cisgendered, and from a (lower) middle class family.  The list of spiritual traditions that I have any “legitimate” claim to are relatively few.  Unfortunately, none of them are to my taste.  Which leaves me either blazing trails in a dark and moonless wilderness or seeking refuge in other spiritual lands … and trying to avoid the ones where the locals would just as soon I curled up and died.  Or, as always, all of the above.

Does it sound a little like I’d like someone to do the hard work for me?  Yeah, it’s a little bit like that: I envy the people who can just accept a prefab structure.  For whom any of the existing systems have meaning.  Satyrs are not, by nature, hard workers: we like to drink and dance and fuck (nymphs, eachother, mortals, deities … I deal exclusively with enthusiastically consenting humanoids of legal age, myself, but other satyrs aren’t so picky).  So, yeah, I wish I could take a lazy rout.

But I can’t.

So I’m ecclectic.  I look to the past and to the modern Western Hermetic and Witchcraft traditions for inspiration.  I learn techniques from anyone who is wiling to share – god or mortal – and try to make sure all my sources are ethically sound.  Still … inevitably … I’m a transgressor of spiritual boundaries even as I am of social ones.  I’m bisexual.  Although I’m male-bodied and I present (mostly) as masculine, I actually identify as “fuck you and your stupid gender dichotomy”.  I am a hedonist and an intellectual in a society that simultaneously condemns both pursuits and sees them as inherently incompatible.  I am a historian in a religion that is (understandably) skeptical of mainstream historiography (a post of its own for another day), and which in its attempts to acquire popular and legal credibility is increasingly absorbing the overculture’s anti-intellectualism.

I am a queer, hedonist, shamanic witch.  The party’s at my place, and we can talk Plato in the morning … maybe hung over, maybe still smashed.

In witchcraft

Tradition, Technique, Appropriation, and Exploration Part 1/2

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I am nothing if not eclectic.  My sacred calendar follows the Eight Sabbats of Wicca, even though those dates have nothing to do with the actual seasons in which I live.  My ritual construction is firmly rooted in the pseudo-Gardnerian Outer Court Witchcraft of the sixties and seventies – Uncle Bucky’s Big Blue Book, Ed Fitch’s Book of Shadows – and certain modern plays on those themes.  I have studied the “core” shamanism of Michael Harner and Gail Wood (to name two), and learned tech at festival workshops and from friends whose linages are dubious at best.  I am now studying the Western Hermetic tradition, and though I will not adopt it in whole, I will certainly take what’s useful to me.  I’m increasingly fascinated by Chaos Magic (only ten years late to that trend, right?), but can’t quite swallow the entire open-source, paradigm-hat-trading irreverence to tradition it seems to require.  Dionysos and Rhea were present at my initiation, and I have spoken to Hephaistos and Apollon and to gods who still haven’t given me their names.

For fifteen years, now, I have searched for a tradition – one that will have me, or even one that I want to have me.  Initiatory covens are few and far between here in the Midwest, and I haven’t ever gotten invited to their Outer Court parties (though, looking back, I might have totally missed the subtext of an invitation once or twice).  I’m  a white USian, descended from the English on one side and the Germans (and Swedes) on the other.

But the gods who are mine by right of blood have never expressed any interest in me (being ogled by Freya’s handmaidens after invoking them at a wedding so totally doesn’t count) … nor I them, to be fair.  When I must defend my devotion to Hellenic gods – a rare event, but it happens – I cite the fact that my civilization is descended from theirs, even if my family is not.

In general, I give little credence to those to whom I might need to defend my eclectic neo-Wiccan practice.  I’ve never had access to sealed rites, so I can’t possibly have stolen them, and I think the effectiveness of my rituals says all that needs to be said about their validity.  Are some eclectics idiots?  Yes.  Do I struggle with the dissonance between Wiccan praxis and my queer feminist spirituality?  Frequently: the whole Goddess-God thing fucks with me a lot.  Do I have trouble fitting sacrifice to and propitiation of my patron and matron dieties into the Wiccan frame?  Absolutely.

The biggest problems start when we get into my shamanic work, which is where Gordon’s post on ethical syncretism comes in.  Simply put, there’s a lot of problems with my pasty white ass practicing anything that I could call “shamanism”.  There are the problems with the word itself: cribbed and Anglicized from a group of Siberian nomads.  There’s the whole scholarly debate on whether or not it’s even a thing, on whether or not the category works in the real world or if it’s just a way for anthropologists to lump together things that aren’t actually the same (which is a debate to lengthy and complicated for me to point you to any one or two sources).  And then there’s the part where most of the people who practice things we call shamanism don’t like us (that is, ignorant white people) stealing their rituals.

I strive to keep to what’s called “core shamanism” – the magical and psychosomatic techniques that transcend culture – but even that is iffy.  Even if shamanism is/was the universal root of all religious experience and expression, my culture left it behind so long ago that you can’t see anything but the roughest outline of its memory on the oldest rites we have.  I strive to re-contextualize it all, to provide the cultural and spiritual meaning in which all effective magic is rooted.  I disdain ayahuasca, datura, and peyote as entheogens in favor of flying “potions” such as absinthe and marijuana – drugs that, to the best of my knowledge, no subaltern group has staked out as their own, exclusive, spiritual tool.  I claim no titles, use no names.  The fact is that a certain rhythm of drum-beet can drive the human brain into places it is much, much harder to reach otherwise.

There are those who would argue that it is wrong of me to call upon the gods of Hellas using any rites but their own.  That my refusal to participate in reconstructionism – study it though I may, as a Classicist and an historian – ought bar me from calling upon the Olympians.  In my particular case, there are fewer who would argue that lack of blood-ties forbids me – Hellenistikos are less prone to that than, say, Asatruar – but it is still an issue.  Many of the most legitimate heirs are tied to the Greek Orthodox Church and disdain attempts to resurrect their old gods – you know I’m not going to listen to them.

Still, however carefully distanced I keep myself from the worst forms of cultural appropriation, I don’t know that I can actually divorce myself from the that legacy.  And yet … I cannot help but persist.  It is through this madly syncretic set of rituals and techniques that I have had my most profound spiritual experiences.  It was in a circle cast by Wiccan rite, using Harner’s shamanic techniques, that I entered the spirit realms in preparation for my initiation, and descended until I was greeted by Briareos*, Dionysos and Rhea.

The gods are the final arbiters of whether or not our rites are acceptable.  So why can’t I stop worrying so much about this?

*I don’t actually know that it was Briareos.  Possibly one of his brothers.  Regardless: he did me a favor once, and I needed to pay him before I could descend further.

In witchcraft

The Concerns of Being a Man-Witch

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It bothers me, sometimes: being a man (however queer) with aspirations to leadership in the NeoPagan community. 

Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn’s Religion. We honor a Goddess before a God, exalt the role of the High Priestess, assert that the “feminine principle” is the dominant power on the inner planes.  And yet … too often our leaders and teachers are men.  Gerald Gardner.  Alex Sanders.  Raymond Buckland.  Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner.  Raven Grimmassi, Ed Fitch, Oberon Zell.  There are great women, too, of course: Doreen Valiente, Margot Adler and Starhawk and Z Budapest.  But what does it say that I – a man who once called himself Scholar Mage, who has read as many histories of witchcraft as how-too manuals – can think of so few ladies who had as much influence on modern NeoPagan witchcraft as these.

(I’ll leave alone entirely, for the moment, the overwhelming preponderance of gentlemen over ladyfolk in ceremonial magick which has been so influentialon the NeoPagan movement as a whole.  I’ll also leave for another time the discussion of such inseparable couples as  Gavin and Yvonne Frost, or Janet and Stewart Farrar, and the erasure of Rosemary Buckland and so many other influential wives and partners.)

To make matters worse, when we think of the grand disasters, whose are the names that come to mind most readily?  Amber K, Edain McCoy, Silver Ravenwolf.  Really, what makes Ravenwolf (whose work I won’t touch) so much worse than Penczak (whose work I’m embarrassed about, but make extensive use of)?

Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn’s Religion.  So where are the women?  That’s a silly question: of the groups I’ve worked with, women made up a little more than half their number; of the solitaries I’ve known, women made a solid 2/3 majority (leaving Heathens and Not Wiccan Damnits out of the count for the sake of this discussion).  Instead I should ask: where are the women leaders?  The lady-writers reshaping the movement with their brilliance?

There’s a part of me that wants to cop out and take an easy answer: the good ones are at home, leading covens – too busy with the real Work to publish self-aggrandizing through publishing.  But Deborah Lipp (brilliant and under recognized, at least in the circles I run in) manages both; that’s part of what being brilliant is about.  An even easier answer is that they’re squeezed out by a sexist publishing industry that’s too afraid of risk to print anything but another idiot Witchcraft 101 – With a Twist!  This feels closer to the truth, at least.  Maybe a portion of the truth, a part of the problem.

But I wonder sometimes … if I’m not part of the problem, too.  Not me, personally (I hope), but man-witches in general – still struggling (or not) to escape the patriarchal paradigm that privileges our worst ideas over any woman’s most brilliant.  If the preponderance of male writers and leaders is a passive (or active) force keeping women out of the public sphere in this community, even as it is in the mainstream world.

What, then, is my role as a male witch?  How can I serve the community that has sheltered me?  How do I pass on the knowledge I’ve acquired after a decade and a half of struggling with Mysteries and a sea of mediocre books (spotted rarely with islands of genius)?  How do I create the small, intimate, power magical community – the coven, ideally, or temple failing that – that I can’t seem to find ready-made?  How can I do these things without furthering the problem?

In witchcraft

Start the War Without Me?

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

[EDITED:  As I sat through the day I realized that this post – hastily pounded out as soon as I woke up this morning – didn’t really convey everything I wanted it to.  It has been edited from its original form.  The changes are in blue, lest anyone accuse me of “covering my tracks”.

Like most people raised in this society (there are other societies that suffer this problem, but I can’t speak to them in the same way), my brain is contaminated with the idea of the End Times.  Some day – and probably soon! – there will be an epic struggle to determine the fate of the universe: the Y2K Bug; the Second Coming of Jesus Christ; 2012 and the Mayan Calendar; whites becoming a racial minority; the Islamic fundamentalist takeover of the world.  A guy I knew in high school had been “assured” by his “spirit guides” that there would be a race war in 2013.  My own delusions of the Apocalypse always revolved around a battle between the One God and the Old Gods – or their followers, at least.  I don’t believe this any more – consciously, at least – but I’ve spent too many hours contemplating this and other end-time scenarios to wholly resist the power of the meme.

Now we have the New Apostolic Reformation, which is flatly declaring war not just against the followers of the the Old Gods, but against everyone who opposes their uniquely American Protestant Free-Market-Is-The-Hand-Of-God Capitalism.  (No, I won’t link to them directly.  I can’t handle the troop-carriers of trolls that might unleash.  Use yer Google.)   Some pagans – and not just our own troll-warriors – are talking about fighting back.  Others are framing themselves as conscientious objectors.  This situation takes me uncomfortably back to the age of eighteen – except that back then I would not have hesitated to join the fray.

 

Politically, I’m a pacifist: I don’t believe that there is any justification for two groups of people to line up and do violence against one another.  Personally, though, I’m a believer in self-defense: if you come at me swinging, I’ll duck, dodge, hit you with a fucking chair until I can run away, then destroy you from a distance (I am a Scorpio, after all).  So … I’m sympathetic to both sides of the argument. 

But … Allison Leigh Lilly, in particular, makes a lot of good points. There’s a lot of creepy nationalism in the idea of nominating any deity as the God of American Freedom; choosing Columbia or Zeus over Jesus and Jehovah … doesn’t really impress me any.  The eliminationist language on both sides makes me uncomfortable.  Further, the DC40 campaign does not parallel with either scenario above: it is neither a direct person-to-person attack against me, nor a move by one state against another.  I don’t want the NAR/Third Wave to curl up and die; I just want them to go away and let me live my life somewhere else.  And they don’t necessarily want me to die: they’ll settle for a theocratic state that subjugates me to third-class citizenship, or perhaps outright slavery.  The DC40 campaign is maleficent magic aimed at motivating lawmakers to do their dirty work for them.

Fortunately, magic gives us options that are more nuanced that “let them hit me, run away, or hit them back”.  We can shield ourselves – build a magical bunker, if you will.  We can try to bind our enemies from doing us harm.  We can do our own enlightenment-bombing of the Capital  … or even the NAR, themselves (problematic, but better than trying to give anybody cancer).

Unfortunately, I’m about to leave behind my base of power.  I’m not just leaving Aradia and our space where we’ve built up so much power.  I’m not just leaving Pasiphae and Aidan, with whom we’ve worked with for much of the last two years, and Chirotus and D – with whom I disagree about more and more, but who I think I could convince to work with me on this one – and the KU Cauldron and all the other local groups and places of power I’ve worked with for most of my life.

I’m leaving the entire state of Missouri for a city and state where I have no relationship to the land or its people.  I’m going to be rebuilding from scratch.  My altar may not be able to make the move at all; at best I’m going to be able to pack bits and pieces.

So …

Working alone.  With no relationship to the land.  With half my stored power left behind.  Attending classes full time at a badass school (full of hardcore pacifist Quakers, I might add) which will consume more time and energy than I can really imagine at this stage (and be the magical equivalent of trying to build a ballista atop a sinkhole).

What is morally right? What is tactically feasible? What is the best long-term strategy? What are the odds that the answers to these questions are the same course of action?

What can I do?  What should I do?

The answers: I don’t have them.

In witchcraft

Buffy the Vampire

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

For about ten years now I’ve known a woman – we’ll call her B, for the sake of the pun – who is a rare example of a real-life psychic vampire.

It was subtle, when I first met her. Most folks would just describe her as “needy”. At that time in my life, I had a lot of friends with whom I was fairly physically intimate – these were the heydays of the WPA, and the couches in the dormitory kitchen/lounge where we met were almost always filled well beyond capacity. We greeted each other and parted with warm hugs, and no one thought anything of it. But as more and more of the group got into and out of relationships, and just as we got a couple years older, B’s hugs started to change. It wasn’t that she touched anyone inappropriately (not back then, anyway), but when she touched you … you came back diminished. And if you wouldn’t let her touch you, she’d give you the kind of look a kicked puppy gives you: uncomprehending disappointment. After a few months, it got to where I, at least, didn’t feel safe touching anyone when she was around.

The group met twice monthly, and every meeting I came home feeling exhausted. This was a rough period in my life, and the WPA was my only social outlet. I thought that it was dealing with people, putting on a happy face and pretending that I wasn’t coming apart at the seams, that left me so drained. But we had a lot of turnover, that year, including picking up a few people who’d been around the block more than us, and for reasons that escape me now (hell, maybe I never even knew back then), B began to miss about every second or third meeting. And we started to realize that on days B wasn’t there, we all had more fun and still felt good at the end of the night. Those of us who had been practicing magic for years – the group was always a mix of newbies and (relatively) more experienced practitioners – got to where we could feel our energy pouring into her.

We started meeting at people’s homes over the summer, and several of us warded our homes against her. One couple did the classic freezer-binding; I had her, and the rest of the WPA, cast a circle around the house I was living in, then used her part in the circle-casting to teach the wards what they needed to keep a lid on. House-level wards were effective, but almost nothing short was. Strangely enough, it was almost impossible to get people to join the group.

We tried calling her on it, in our various immature ways. “B, your aura’s sticking to me again.” “Can I have my power back? I wasn’t done with it.” She pretended we were joking, but by the time I was setting things in motion to move to St. Louis, I was being more direct: “You’re draining me again. Stop it.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t even know I was doing it” “I know. That’s what makes it even worse.”

Then I moved to St. Louis, and left her in everyone else’s hands. Their town, their problem.

I heard stories occasionally, of course. She found a group to do full, formal circles with, and it was filling her to the brim with power. Mutual friends of mine and hers moved, and found sticky cobwebs of her power after they’d taken down all their own wards. People would learn to shield against her, and she’d ask third parties why so-and-so didn’t like her anymore. Once, when supposedly casting a circle of protection, she ate all the mana out of a wall. On several occasions she has made people sick as fuck. People unaccustomed to her presence feel ill as soon as she walks into a room.

I saw her tonight for the first time in years. My lady-friend and a mutual acquaintance were hit first, almost as soon as she entered the room. It took a little while longer to overwhelm me, but not much: even working in the mall is not as toxic as half an hour in the same room as B. Before we all left, I had to pull tendrils off of each of them – sick, orange things that left a residue like fast-growing fungus.

Merely being in the same room as this woman made most of us exhausted, irritable, and even nauseous.

Tragically, there is not yet any conclusion to this tale. B remains at large, psychically assaulting everyone within reach, and driving newcomers away from the WPA – now the KU Cauldron. Something must be done, but what? Talk to her? Certainly the first step. Bind her? And be bound to her forever? Psychically assault her in return? All three, possibly.

How long will this go one before someone intervenes?

What troubles me most about B – what troubles me most about every one of the not quite half-dozen vampires I have encountered in the almost fifteen years I have practiced magic – is how similar their power is to my own. To heal, to weave … or to drain and bind … these things are not so different. I am partially resistant to her attacks, particularly aware of them, because I am perfectly capable of replicating them.