I am nothing if not eclectic.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My ritual construction is firmly rooted in the pseudo-Gardnerian Outer Court Witchcraft of the sixties and seventies \u2013 Uncle Bucky\u2019s Big Blue Book, Ed Fitch\u2019s Book of Shadows \u2013 and certain modern plays on those themes.\u00a0 I have studied the \u201ccore\u201d 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.\u00a0 I am now studying the Western Hermetic tradition, and though I will not adopt it in whole, I will certainly take what\u2019s useful to me.\u00a0 I\u2019m increasingly fascinated by Chaos Magic (only ten years late to that trend, right?), but can\u2019t quite swallow the entire open-source, paradigm-hat-trading irreverence to tradition it seems to require.\u00a0 Dionysos and Rhea were present at my initiation, and I have spoken to Hephaistos and Apollon and to gods who still haven\u2019t given me their names.<\/p>\n
For fifteen years, now, I have searched for a tradition \u2013 one that will have me, or even one that I want<\/em> to have me.\u00a0 Initiatory covens are few and far between here in the Midwest, and I haven\u2019t ever gotten invited to their Outer Court parties (though, looking back, I might have totally missed the subtext of an invitation once or twice).\u00a0 I\u2019m\u00a0 a white USian, descended from the English on one side and the Germans (and Swedes) on the other.<\/p>\n But the gods who are mine by right of blood have never expressed any interest in me (being ogled by Freya\u2019s handmaidens after invoking them at a wedding so totally<\/em> doesn\u2019t count) \u2026 nor I them, to be fair.\u00a0 When I must defend my devotion to Hellenic gods \u2013 a rare event, but it happens \u2013 I cite the fact that my civilization<\/em> is descended from theirs, even if my family is not.<\/p>\n In general, I give little credence to those to whom I might need to defend my eclectic neo-Wiccan practice.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never had access to sealed rites, so I can\u2019t possibly have stolen them, and I think the effectiveness of my rituals says all that needs to be said about their validity.\u00a0 Are some eclectics idiots?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Do I struggle with the dissonance between Wiccan praxis and my queer feminist spirituality?\u00a0 Frequently: the whole Goddess-God thing fucks with me a lot.\u00a0 Do I have trouble fitting sacrifice to and propitiation of my patron and matron dieties into the Wiccan frame?\u00a0 Absolutely.<\/p>\n The biggest problems start when we get into my shamanic work, which is where Gordon\u2019s post on ethical syncretism<\/a> comes in.\u00a0 Simply put, there\u2019s a lot of problems with my pasty white ass practicing anything that I could call \u201cshamanism\u201d.\u00a0 There are the problems with the word itself: cribbed and Anglicized from a group of Siberian nomads.\u00a0 There\u2019s the whole scholarly debate on whether or not it\u2019s even a thing, on whether or not the category works in the real world or if it\u2019s just a way for anthropologists to lump together things that aren\u2019t actually the same (which is a debate to lengthy and complicated for me to point you to any one or two sources).\u00a0 And then there\u2019s the part where most of the people who practice things we call shamanism don\u2019t like us (that is, ignorant white people) stealing their rituals.<\/p>\n I strive to keep to what\u2019s called \u201ccore shamanism\u201d \u2013 the magical and psychosomatic techniques that transcend culture \u2013 but even that is iffy.\u00a0 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\u2019t see anything but the roughest outline of its memory on the oldest rites we have.\u00a0 I strive to re-contextualize it all, to provide the cultural and spiritual meaning<\/em> in which all effective magic is rooted.\u00a0 I disdain ayahuasca, datura, and peyote as entheogens in favor of flying \u201cpotions\u201d such as absinthe and marijuana \u2013 drugs that, to the best of my knowledge, no subaltern group has staked out as their own, exclusive, spiritual tool.\u00a0 I claim no titles, use no names.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 That my refusal to participate in reconstructionism \u2013 study it though I may, as a Classicist and an historian \u2013 ought bar me from calling upon the Olympians.\u00a0 In my particular case, there are fewer who would argue that lack of blood-ties forbids me \u2013 Hellenistikos are less prone to that than, say, Asatruar \u2013 but it is still an issue.\u00a0 Many of the most legitimate heirs are tied to the Greek Orthodox Church and disdain attempts to resurrect their old gods – you know I\u2019m not going to listen to them.<\/p>\n Still, however carefully distanced I keep myself from the worst forms of cultural appropriation, I don\u2019t know that I can actually divorce myself from the that legacy.\u00a0 And yet \u2026 I cannot help but persist.\u00a0 It is through this madly syncretic set of rituals and techniques that I have had my most profound spiritual experiences.\u00a0 It was in a circle cast by Wiccan rite, using Harner\u2019s shamanic techniques, that I entered the spirit realms in preparation for my initiation, and descended until I was greeted by Briareos*, Dionysos and Rhea.<\/p>\n The gods are the final arbiters of whether or not our rites are acceptable.\u00a0 So why can\u2019t I stop worrying so much about this?<\/p>\n *I don\u2019t actually know that it was Briareos.\u00a0 Possibly one of his brothers.\u00a0 Regardless: he did me a favor once, and I needed to pay him before I could descend further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am nothing if not eclectic.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My ritual construction is firmly rooted in the pseudo-Gardnerian Outer Court Witchcraft of the sixties and seventies \u2013 Uncle Bucky\u2019s Big Blue Book, Ed … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,76,94,164,258,265,296],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-chaos-magic","tag-ethics","tag-gods","tag-michael-harner","tag-stories","tag-talking-to-spirits","tag-white-people-steal-shit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1h","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n