"A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest... because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her." – Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
Who are you writing this for, anyway?
My postings about magic are definitely intended for an audience that already believes in gods and magic, for whatever your personal understanding of that may be, and if you're a hardcore atheist or of a faith that forbids such things, you're gonna have a hard time. If you think I'm crazy, you're probably not my audience. That's okay; there's plenty of internet to go around.
If you're a newbie witch or a seeking pagan, not sure where to start or what's out there, this may not be the site for you either. I tend not to be very good at disclaimers and starting at 101. I'm especially bad at the thing where people who believe in weird stuff are expected to start off everything with disclaimers about how we know we sound wacky and here's a list of all the stuff I know ISN'T possible so please take me seriously. I'm bored of that. I'm gonna assume you can evaluate a source on your own and you don't need me to hold your hand. Here's a grain of salt, I guess.
My polytheism is easy. No quibbling about definitions of gods or spirits; they’re all powers, they’re all addressed the same. The powers that talk to me are the ones I talk to. What I perceive, I consider real. What works is what works.
My polytheism is difficult. It’s timey-wimey, squishy, non-linear. It’s occasionally psychotic, often uncomfortable, always complicated. No answer is complete unto itself. The opposite of a great truth is also true, as Niels Bohr said.
My polytheism is taking out the trash and doing the laundry. It’s finding the energy to cook dinner and tell my daughter to say night night to Mara. It’s gods who know I am able to do my best for them when I am able to do the best for myself.
My polytheism is Norse and Hellenic and eclectic, it is Buddhist and Taoist and Catholic, it is Narnian and Rainbowlander and Wild. It is undeniably the product of my life to this point. It is pop cultural because I am pop cultural, the product of growing up in a sitcom. It is academic because I threw myself on the mercy of academia trying to figure myself out.
My holiest of places is the Library, because it encompasses both fiction and non-fiction, and doesn’t say one or the other is more important. My sacred act is writing. My ritual is plugging in the keyboard, booting up the laptop.
Also my polytheism is taking my meds and talking to my psychologist, and my polytheism is experiences that most people would call crazy, and there’s no conflict in that.
Is there still magic in the midnight sun
Or did you leave it back in ‘61?
There are so many things I used to know, that I’ve forgotten, that I’m relearning. Some of them are things I knew elsewhere and forgot when I came here, but so many of them are things I knew and I let myself forget because it was easier. Because I didn’t want to argue with parents, or with schoolteachers, or with friends or significant others.
I have always been a cuckoo, though I didn’t know why or how to explain it. I always knew my father was not my father; my mother, I let myself believe in eventually. I never trusted adults as far back as I can remember. I remember being babysat by my grandmother, so I must not have been in kindergarten yet, and locking myself in her bedroom while I played so no one would know what I was doing.
I remember long summer evenings sitting up in the trees, hoping that somehow the sun would not set if I didn’t come down, that I might never have to go home. I remember coming home after I left the first time, and no longer knowing how my room was supposed to smell, and thinking that the jig was up, certainly now they’d notice I was faking it and I wasn’t really their child.
Be their daughter.
Nothing’s harder
I remember long high school afternoons in the drama room, in the library, in the computer lab, in the guidance office, anywhere but in class. I knew all the tricks to make them leave me alone; I have long been Someone Else’s Problem, the invisibility, whatever it is, has been there for a long time. Since I stopped dancing, probably. I think it would have been somewhere between the end of my junior year and the beginning of my senior year that it began.
I remember discovering synchronicity in Sunday School, before Communion, when I decided that angels were kin to gods and gave my teacher headaches.
I remember outlining water, earth, fire and air, and their alignments to darkness, light, chaos and order. I dreamt of how life went on after the end of the world before I could even write the stories that went with it.
There were gods before I knew they were gods, who taught me and made sure I knew someone was watching out for me, even if I didn’t trust my parents to do it. Professor Dark drew me out, and Jareth held me back. And the Dark Lady was always there to wrap sleep around me, back when I could sleep so easily and well no matter where I was.
I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form
“Come in” she said “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
I understood that the line between fiction and reality was blurry, and that we could do our best to blur it further. I knew gods in the guise of fictional characters weren’t any less real than the ones in my Bulfinch. In many ways, they were more real to me.
And I’ve always known the Library. I’ve always had the sense that moving correctly between the stacks will get me lost. Oh, the tiny one in the next town over didn’t have room for that, though I always seemed to manage to find a quiet corner anyway, but the one in the city nearby was gloriously old and gothic, with floors that didn’t quite extend to the walls. I spent whole days there just sitting, breathing with the books.
I believe in the elements and their aspects.
I believe in words, and in stories.
I believe in family, but not in blood.
I believe the gods choose their faces.
I believe in burning up, and coming back.
I believe there’s always another adventure.
Writing Myths and Finding New Gods