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Real Change in the Real World

Reader, I'm casting a spell as you read this.

That's how word-magic works.

Every post's a spell.

Why do I blog?

Easily told: to bring about change, real change in the real world.

Not only to bring about change in consciousness, as odious old Uncle Al would have it, though certainly it begins there, but real change in the real world.

Ye gods, how grandiose is that?

Word-magic only works when someone is listening.

Therefore, in order to work word-magic, you have to make them want to listen.

You have to give them something.

You have to make what you're saying worth listening to.

In other words, you have to establish a connection.

Before hitting the “Publish” button, I always stop and ask myself first: is what I'm saying here likely to bring about the kind of change that I want to see? i.e. have I said what I'm saying in such a way as to open the reader to Posch and his ideas? Or am I just blowing off steam?

If the answer is B—as it not infrequently is, especially when I'm writing about matters that I care too much about—then I don't publish.

Well, mostly not.

A word to would-be workers of word-magic: alienate your reader, and he'll stop reading. Alienate your listener, and she'll stop listening.

Then your spell has failed from the outset, and the change that you want to see, won't come about.

It is the coven's first meeting since the election.

In the darkness, we howl. We keen. We rage.

Out of the darkness, a spark. We light, first one light, then many.

We sing a hymn to the Lady of Witches, She Who Shines for All.

“It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for those who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we may forward into the darkness and the wind.”

Were you surprised? You shouldn't be.

People are tired.

People are tired of hearing—even by implication—that white people, men, and America are villains.

(They're not.)

They're tired of hearing that there are 72 genders.

(As if anything so amorphous as gender could possibly be so tidily quantified.)

They're tired of hearing that men can be women and women can be men.

(They can be trans-women and trans-men, but that's not the same.)

And, believe me, people are thoroughly sick of hearing about your f*cking pronouns.

Folks, the Left has let us down, and that badly.

"I feel like we're waiting for the results of an STD test," said a friend the other day.

I've been looking for the perfect metaphor to capture my sense of the harrowing ride we've been on here in America for the last while. So thank you, Keridwyn, for giving it to me.

The Dangers of Icon Deficiency

It's arguably the single most shameful episode in American Evangelicalism's brief (less than 100 years), unedifying, and hypocrisy-filled history: its disgraceful (not to mention idolatrous) besotment with a lying demagogue that critics have called their “Orange Jesus”.

In these waning days of the 2024 election, it's well worth asking: where does it come from?

It's part of a larger question: why are aniconic religions—Protestant Christianity, Islam, even Judaism, to some extent—so prone to personality cults?

You may be old enough to remember the cult of the Televangelists in the 1980s. (One could, of course, contend that Christianity itself is, in essence, a personality cult writ large, but let's leave that aside for now.) We've all seen footage of Muslim crowds carrying pictures of frowning mullahs. Hassidic Judaism has, since its inception, been organized around charismatic rebbes.

Here's my theory: they're suffering from icon deficiency.

Let me tell you something about human beings.

We go everywhere. In our travels, we meet others of our kind.

When we meet, two things happen: we fight, and we have sex.

America is a Great Rite of Peoples.

From this, we derive our vigor.

The Great Rite: the Hieros Gamos, holy marriage, the Conjunctio Mysticus, the mystical union.

The Union of the Gods renews the world.

Witches are a Great Rite of Peoples.

Even back in old tribal days, we were already a mixed people: the Dobunni, the people of the two bands. Later, we became the eponymous Hwicce: Celt and Saxon together—Angle, actually—not to mention the flotsam and jetsam of the Roman Empire who just happened to wash up on these shores. Meet my friend Tree: his grandfather comes from Numidia.

These days, people of all sorts call themselves witches: a mixed and mongrel lot, just as we always have been.

In recent days, I've attended three different Samhain observances. At all of them, I was impressed to notice that not once—not even once—did anyone bring up the Election.

No, this was not some taboo in operation, though anyone with any experience in such things can tell you that politics profanes the sacred every time.

The reason? We're tired. We're sick of it.

We're sick of the divisiveness, the vilification, the mean-spiritedness. We've got work to do, hard work, the hard work of making a living in a hard world; we simply don't have the time or mental space for such childishness any more.

So we've moved on.