Topics discussed in this essay include compulsory positivity, optimism, victim blaming, and various oppressions including physical abuse.
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| Fluffy fluff about optimism. |
Several years ago I had a friend who was really,
super into
The Secret. I'd heard a couple of stories about people who had destroyed their lives over the kind of reckless optimism
The Secret promotes, but he seemed mostly responsible about it so I just kind of rolled my eyes about it and most people forgot about the hot garbage that was
The Secret.
But something hadn't changed, as evidenced by the continuing pile of Facebook posts extolling the virtues of positivity, many of which imply (if they don't outright state) that bad things happen to people
because they are pessimistic. In addition to the "think your way to happiness" pieces came the virulent slew of "what's your excuse" posts, usually featuring a disabled person doing something abled people don't expect disabled people do to, like an amputee climbing a mountain with a prosthetic leg or something.
The short and obvious story is of course that, no, you aren't going to make things better by merely imagining them better, being optimistic, or even in many cases just trying hard. If thinking happy thoughts and collecting hopes and prayers made people's lives great, oppression would not exist.
Because Witches often absorb or believe many of these same things, there's some discourse among left-wing folks about Witchcraft in particular and whether belief in it is inherently victim blaming. After all, a big component of Witchcraft is the belief that we can use our
will (through strong, focused intent) to change the tangible world around us. They argue that in the worldview of a Witch, an oppressed person just isn't magicking hard enough to relieve themselves from that oppression, which--if it were true--would make Witchcraft an extremely problematic belief system, basically "The Secret" with candles.
While I disagree that this is inherently the case, people who talk about this are actually making a very important point:
Witches as a community have a lot of problems with implied victim blaming when it comes to the way we talk about magick and spellcraft. Many of us hold beliefs that, when closely examined, blame people for things that are not their fault or insist that reacting negatively to oppression is blasting energetic backwash at them.
What follows is a list of things Witches and Pagans commonly do and say that (inadvertently or not) victim blame, and how we can change our views on them:
Believing in things like the Threefold Law and karma.
This one's important because it's hinges most of the other victim blaming garbage Witches do.
I'm not going to rag on people who come from longstanding traditions involving karma and karma-like concepts (there are plenty of people within those cultures to rag on it for me), but especially when it comes to western Neopagans, we really latch onto concepts like the Threefold Law or oversimplified western interpretations of karma. The Threefold in particular didn't really become popularized until Raymond Buckland's books, although it wound up sticking stubbornly in lots of corners of our community.
And you know what? It's bullshit. It's not just bullshit, it's obvious bullshit. And maybe that's upsetting to you if you're really attracted to the Threefold Law or if you're under the impression that Witches should never ever preach to others, but there really is no way to interpret the Threefold Law in any way other than "bad things that happen to you are because you did bad things in the past," which is absolutely 100% victim blaming hot garbage.
Somebody who makes millions of dollars exploiting the poor (a category which includes about 100% of people who make millions of dollars) did not get that way by doing a bunch of great things that were returned to them by three, and there are people facing massive oppression, people who have their whole families slaughtered or their houses bulldozed because they're the wrong nationality or race or religion... and there is no reconciling the Threefold Law or any similar concept with believing these people aren't at fault for their prior actions.
How do you fix it? Well, for one, if you for some reason cannot bear to stop believing in the Threefold Law... shut up about it, and I mean that in the kindest yet most serious way possible. I have yet to encounter even one circumstance where a Witch lectured another Witch that they were "not heeding the Threefold Law" that wasn't brazen victim blaming, such as the time an older Wiccan woman lectured a friend of mine for wanting to curse somebody who legitimately destroyed his sister's life.
Moralizing about curses.
Modern Witches are really squeamish about curses... well, a lot of us are. Today's Witches often have an edgy streak to us due to the decades-long hold Wicca has had on Neopaganism in general, meaning many of us strongly reject being called "Wiccan" (even if our practice looks damn near identical), but folks learning from books especially wind up indoctrinated by folks like the aforementioned Raymond Buckland who shortly before his death took a righteous stand against a group of Witches for... cursing a rapist who was not going to be punished by mundane means. Yeah.
Curses are a tool that have been around for thousands of years and have excellent applications in fighting oppression. Some of the more robust magickal traditions out there are rife with curses designed to bind abusers, keep agents of oppression away from your home, or send retribution to people who should have gotten it by mundane means but have not.
The most successful and scariest curse I ever cast was on somebody who was literally abusing some of my relatives while the family courts treated him with utmost leniency. This was somebody who was not going to stop abusing without intervention, which I did through the only means accessible to me at the time. This curse was in defense of people being actively harmed, and I do not regret it at all.
Does this mean you are obligated to hex? I honestly think more Witches should be doing it, but of course not... like with the Threefold Law above, the most important thing is to mind your own business and realize that your opinions on how people react against abusers and oppressors do not add anything to the discussion other than implying that we should just let it happen.
Believing magick always works if you just believe hard enough and that failure is your fault... or that magickal failure.
Witchcraft has a lot of components that affect how successful your spells will be. You need to be in the right frame of mind, you need to believe that what you're doing is going to have an effect, and you need to use the right ingredients and tools, and because of all this, it's tempting to believe that when things don't work out we just
didn't do it right.
Talking about when magick fails is difficult not only because it's annoying to deal with non-Witches who use these problems against us, but because we have a sad troubleshooting streak about us. All of us who have been practicing for a significant amount of time have had wacky Witchcraft experiences, like spells turning out too damn literal or getting what we asked for only to have it blow up in our faces later, and if you're community-oriented you probably have experienced the Witch lectures people can get over it.
The reality is this: Sometimes magick just doesn't work, and it's not the practitioner's fault or a sign from the Goddexes at all. Because magick--like all prayer--only goes so far.
I
love hexing politicians, for instance, and it feels
great but is unlikely to have much tangible effect (maybe I gave a couple of them nightmares or something, but none of them have fallen into the Grand Canyon yet so not a great success). There are too many people supporting these politicians with their own energies, too many Witches who are totally averse to participating in such an action, and my relationship to these people is not close enough to effect much change. But the legislation they pass, the things they do, they aren't "my fault" just for having failed at hexing them.
Sometimes there's really nothing you can do magickally to stop something that was already set into motion. This is something I call the scratch-off effect... it comes from having watched family members pray over scratch-off lottery tickets hoping to get a win, even though the ticket itself is already purchased and set. As somebody who likes engaging in the occasional gambling magick, it's ridiculous to cast a spell on a scratch-off I already possess. I could have cast a spell before so I would only feel like gambling when I have a higher chance of winning, I could have chosen a different game with a result that isn't finalized yet, I could use divination to pick the gas station I purchase the ticket at and which ticket I purchase, but once the ticket is in my hand there is no spell in the world that's going to make it a winner if it isn't already.
Speaking of gambling, there's also an odds problem. In many cases the odds of something happening are
just so slim that even if I cast a spell that increases my odds a hundred times it's probably not going to happen.
So yes, improve your skills by practicing Witchcraft often, and you will increase your odds of having great things happen from it... but if people don't get great things from it, if they're still impoverished after that prosperity spell, if they're still being harassed after that binding curse, if they get fired for being trans after that employment spell, don't act like it's them being incompetent Witches who just didn't believe enough.
Basically, have the same discretion appropriate for somebody who struggles in the mundane world. There are people who work extremely hard and are able to scramble their way out of poverty and strife, but there are people working
equally hard who cannot do that.
Believing that magickal failure is the Goddexes telling you something.
A tempting thing to believe that I get sucked into a lot is that when things don't go your way it's the Goddexes or The Universe or some other entity telling you something.
"It's not time yet."
"You don't need this."
"You need to wait because you did this."
So I'd convinced myself things like that I'd hit a deer and mangled the front of my pickup truck because I wasn't adhering well enough to my diet, or that I didn't get a job I had cast a spell for because it wasn't a good job for me. The latter was pretty innocuous, but believing that caving on a diet was enough for a Goddex to both end the life of a deer so violently it destroyed the meat so I couldn't eat it and compromise my ability to get to work by destroying my transportation was, and continues to be, seriously fucked up. And if you have talked to your Goddexes and they agree they they have done something like this to punish you for petty shit, that's an abusive relationship.
When I was in a Reconstructionist community people talked about their deities hitting them with a "cosmic 2x4," using the imagery of an extremely violent act with reference to the divine being angry at them for their behavior. I thought it was super funny at the time.
It wasn't until later when I was in psychotherapy to get cleared for transgender hormone replacement therapy that I finally realized how absolutely fucked up it was. I told my therapist I'd have to postpone my therapy for a couple months because I had run out of money for the time being. She told me it was fine and continued by saying that my financial difficulty was a divine sign that I was "not spiritually ready for hormones." Basically--and I didn't even register this at the time she said it--because I was poor I didn't deserve the medical treatment I was desperately seeking.
I'll be writing a lot more about abusive and authoritarian relationships with Goddexes, but the gist of it for this essay is that as Pagans we tend to talk about these relationships in ways that unintentionally victim blame.
Conclusion
One of the tricky things about spirituality is the notion we've been taught from a young age that we don't have agency in these matters, that this is just the way things are, that the divine entities we work with should be untouched by the type of socio-political analysis we would give the mundane world. This leads us to do and say things that reinforce victim blaming, abusive relationships with the divine, and social inaction. Through a long process of critiquing the way we talk about these things, we can make Paganism as a set of religions a much less toxic environment.
