Our Morrigan Moment

This is a personal story about a statue of The Morrigan we acquired at Pagan Spirit Gathering.

The New Morrigan Statue

Taking a break from the heavy shit of PSG to talk about a cute thing from PSG.

This year Deer Camp had a group shrine that was well populated for the first time.  I initially set it up with my primary Gods--Set, Sekhmet, and Wepwawet--and a little section for the Venus of Willendorf who I honor as a Mother Earth Goddess and the Sorcerer of the Cave of Three Brothers who I honor as a Horned Earth God.  Ben then contributed statues of Hekate and Hermes.

But my girlfriend did not have a statue of her Goddess--the Morrigan--to put on the shrine.  I started looking for one as a gift, and she started bidding on one at the silent auction.

Then came the Magickal Gift Exchange, in which you wrap a gift, put it on the ground, and somebody else picks it up to keep.  We all walk around the circle and I pick up one that stuck out to me for whatever reason.

We all sit down and open our gifts, and I could immediately tell when I looked inside it was a statue.  I silently hoped "please, please be The Morrigan."  I'm not super familiar with The Morrigan so when I saw the statue I thought "I... think that's her?"  I sneaked a peek at the base, and yup, that's exactly who she was!  So she went right to my girlfriend and then right on the shrine.

I don't have any lesson or anything here... I just really like this memory and wanted to share it!

Happy trails,
-- Setkheni-itw

How To Behave Around Skyclad Women

This post talks about clothing optional Pagan events (and probably clothing optional events in general) and how to avoid making women who go skyclad/naked feel uncomfortable.  A note that I gender this post--with cis men making skyclad women and trans people uncomfortable--because it's generally how it goes; the same definitely goes the other way around in such cases it exists.

A few years ago there was a high profile article going around questioning why people stopped going skyclad to Pagan events.  Decades ago, going to these things naked was extremely normal... naked worship was a notable cultural signifier in the Pagan community.  In my five years at Pagan Spirit Gathering, the only clothing optional event I attend regularly, I can count the number of people I have seen fully naked in general festival space (not counting swimming, showers, or changing in one's campsite) on my fingers, with more women going topless but still not a whole lot.  There is a skyclad issue with quite modest attendance which, while full nudity is practiced during it, is done away from the main village area in the dark to make it more comfortable for attendees.  People just don't do this that often.

Part of this is just a cultural shift.  Festivals aren't as Wicca-centered anymore, Wiccans themselves are starting to reject the more dubious things Gerald Gardner believed in, and there is less pressure to make your body available than there would have been in the past.  Basically, "change happens."  But there's one reason people don't go nude at Pagan gatherings that I don't think gets talked about nearly enough:  People being fucking creepy.  Largely men, although I am not saying there aren't creeps in other genders.

What I want to write about here is what you can do to prevent being one of the folks who makes skyclad women feel uncomfortable and unsafe.

First, understand why somebody might go skyclad.

Too many men believe that women who go skyclad are doing it for the benefit of men, and that informs the way they behave (this will become apparent in the section where I talk about the cringeworthy practice of thanking naked women for being naked).  If you see a skyclad woman and assume she is advertising sexual availability or offering herself as a convenient source of soft erotica, it will inform the way you treat her in ways that are quite frankly creepy as fuck.

There are plenty of reasons people go skyclad that have nothing to do with cis men's gaze.  My first public skyclad moments were practical:  It was goddamn hot outside and even if I hadn't sweated through all my shirts already on the first day, they were uncomfortable.  It was a banner year for topless women, not because everybody suddenly had resolved their body issues for the week, but because it was unbearably hot.

Going nude did teach me that it is very good for my body image as a transgender person, and it's extremely validating to me emotionally.  This is another very common reason women in particular might go skyclad; it is a way of claiming one's body, of throwing off the cultural shame that causes us to hide so much skin in our daily lives, and so forth.

Of course, there are also folks who do it because they do strongly believe in it as a central part of Wicca per the Charge of the Goddess--as a sign that ye are really free, ye shall be naked in your rites--and that, as well, has nothing to do with the male gaze.  In fact, some of the groups that are most likely to go skyclad are woman-only groups.

So to conclude this section, remember first and foremost that other people's nudity is not about you.

Don't thank people for going skyclad.

I have seen this happen a couple times and it always gets my hackles up.  The first time was the very first day of my very first PSG and somebody kneeled in front of a nude woman who was walking down the street bowing to her and thanking her profusely for being naked.  I have no idea what this guy was even really thinking... it was so obviously gross.

Now, are there cases in which it is appropriate to thank somebody for being nude?  I can think of a few "maybes," but none of them involve men talking to women, which will hands down come off as the man being creepy.  Somebody who thanks me for being nude as a trans person because it increases visibility or makes them feel more confident in their body, or a woman thanking another woman because she really wanted to go skyclad but didn't want to be the only one are very different things to just thanking somebody for being your eye candy.

Even then, you should be extremely careful about it, because you may very well be pointing out or implying things that they don't like.

Don't stare at people.

Every once in a while somebody will bring up the problem of random men leering creepily at women, how it makes women feel unsafe, and some dude will crawl out of the depths of hell to complain "What, so I can't check someone out anymore?"

I'm not saying you can't check people out.  Look, as a pansexual man, when I'm around skyclad folks... yeah, I check them out, just as I check out clothed folks.  But there's a huge difference between looking at somebody, seeing they are naked, and recognizing they are attractive... and staring at them.

First, if you're looking at a skyclad person, resist the urge to dramatically make a creepy "checking you out" expression.




People do this stuff a lot.  In addition to the dramatic bullshit of the guy I described above thanking a naked woman for bEiNg A gOdDeSs, my girlfriend has also encountered people who very deliberately and openly look her up and down in a super gross way.  And having this happen results in discomfort that lasts, because we had to route our way around the guy who did it for the rest of the damn festival.

If you are actively looking at somebody, pardon the cliché, but her eyes are up there.  Just sitting there having a conversation with somebody's tits is extremely disrespectful.

Recognize that being skyclad is for everyone who wants it.

I was looking at some forum questions regarding whether an upcoming hippie gathering was going to be clothing optional.  Somebody replied "Yes, but only for women between 18 and 30 and under 150 pounds."

Christ on a cracker.  Don't be this guy.  I don't care if you think you're just joking, you are contributing to a toxic atmosphere for everybody who doesn't have a magazine-ready body... fat folks, trans folks, old folks, disabled folks, folks with embarrassing skin conditions, stretch marks, scars, loose skin, all are just as entitled to the freedom I quoted from the Charge of the Goddess above, and nobody should feel obligated to cover their bodies just because you are a prick.

Jokes like this, as well as expressions of disgust and gossip afterward, reinforce not only the myth that nobody finds people with diverse bodies attractive, but that people are necessarily naked for others' enjoyment rather than the myriad of other reasons one might go skyclad.

Just don't do it.  Seriously.

Don't touch people inappropriately... what's wrong with you???

This one is not limited to being skyclad, it's just a particularly bad problem when people are skyclad.

This started off without the "inappropriately" because of course you shouldn't be touching people without permission... but what if it's a part of a ritual?  What if somebody asks for a hug?  There are times when touching is perfectly appropriate.

But like... don't do it like a creeper.  If you don't know somebody who comes in for a hug, give a friendly hug-and-release... don't sit there sliding your hands on them, shoving your face places it doesn't belong, and so forth.  Only touch as much as the ritual is written to have you touch somebody (and honestly, if you're writing a ritual, you should rethink having people touch at all outside of holding hands).

Don't assume politeness is consent.

Women wind up being trained--for self preservation purposes--to talk to men as if walking through a field of eggs.  There is a real risk that a man will become angry or violent if a woman hurts his feelings, and although every woman knows that not all men are like this, it's easier and safer for them to just behave as if we all could snap at any minute if our egos are bruised.

Because of this, many women will not tell you if you're making them uncomfortable.  They may very well even pretend that you didn't do anything wrong to avoid the above... thanking you for compliments they didn't want, not pulling away from contact they didn't want, just going with what you say or do, in hopes that you'll just stop on your own.


Anyway, that's just scratching the surface.  Just don't be a dick, let women be naked in peace, and don't assume it's about you.

Happy trails,
-- Setkheni-itw

Facilitating Real Trans Inclusion In Pagan Spaces

This post includes observations about how the Men's Ritual and other stuff at PSG this year didn't fully succeed in being as trans inclusive as I feel it was attempting, including some things you need to think about when trying to create an inclusive ritual or space that aren't as obvious.

In I think 2012 Pagan Spirit Gathering had a serious issue in which trans women were excluded from the Women's Ritual, a central ritual to the event.  After this, the festival went to much greater lengths to make things inclusive for trans people, including a very clear policy indicating that all events that are limited to a gender must allow based on self-identity and not expression or anatomy.  Since then, there have been a lot of changes made, including things like the All Gender Ritual which is inclusive to folks who are in the "both or neither" category or who do not identify with gendered rituals.  I was involved in some of the very early work to get trans-inclusive things off the ground back in 2013 where there was an ad hoc meeting of trans folks and allies talking about this need, and one thing I was very clear about was that I very much wanted options for nonbinary people... but was adamant that it not be at the expense of trans women's right to women's space or trans men's right to men's space.

Because of the extra options and the clarity of policy, for the most part I think things are going great; my trans woman friends at PSG go to the Women's Ritual and other women's programming, I and my other trans masculine friends go to the Men's Ritual and programming, and those who don't identify with either of those spaces go to the All Gender ritual, and most of the issues seem to have gone away (although if anybody says they haven't, you should certainly listen to that perspective).

That said, I'm being a little nit-picky here, but there are a couple of things that I want to point out that can be improved.

First, be very careful with what language you use to indicate inclusion.

This was the program blip for the Men's Ritual this year (emphasis mine):

Calling all men, and those who identify as men! Rise Up! Join in as we come together to honor not only the divine but each other, our community, our tribe and our part(s) in it.

The first sentence here is the problem... this makes a separation between "men" and "those who identify as men," which implicitly puts folks like me in the category of "non-man who identifies as man."  I think it's important to acknowledge that this was clearly an attempt at making trans men aware that we were welcome in the ritual, but it used phrasing that is a very common sore point in our community.  It would have been better to just say "calling all those who identify as men," which includes both cis and trans men, although a lot of people don't like the phrase "identify as..." at all.

Compare this to the program blip for the Women's Ritual, which also had a sentence at the end that is meant to be inclusive that does not make this distinction and is way better:

To Know, To Will, To Dare...and silent no more, we rise! The seat of a woman's power is in the complexity of her mind; the spiraling labyrinthine vessel of her vast and holy spirit. The Goddess has arisen! She comes in infinite forms and a thousand-thousand faces reflected in this community of women as we gather in reclamation and in celebration of the power, dignity, and witchery of sisterhood. All women in all bodies are welcome!

Now, at PSG technically neither of these should be necessary with the inclusion policy written as it is, but because of the recent shitty history it makes sense that this extra clarity would be wanted... it's just important to make sure that you aren't accidentally othering us when you do it.

Recognize and accommodate the fact that dysphoria exists (in other words, don't force us to show other people our bodies!).

A long time ago for a different blog I wrote something called "how to make a bathroom that's (really) inclusive for trans people."  Because people love neglecting men's restrooms, a suggestion I can't believe I had to make was "make sure your bathroom stalls have doors, and that those doors lock."  I've in the past held my bladder until emergency level hoping I would be able to avoid some bullshit bar restroom that had no stall doors and a bunch of drunk guys stumbling in, worried they'd see I was trans. 

Dysphoria in a trans person is discomfort with the forcibly gendered aspects of our bodies.  There are multiple things that can cause dysphoria:

• An inherent sense of "wrongness," in which regardless of how others feel about our bodies, we do not like engaging with or seeing their gendered aspects.  For example, there are trans people who shower in the dark to avoid seeing their bodies in the nude.
•  Anxiety about how other people view our bodies or about being treated like an exhibit.  Even if people know we're trans, we may very well not want people to actually see what our bodies look like.
• Anxiety about the possibility of being "outed."  Many of us do not want other people to know we're trans and therefore dress in a way that prevents other people from seeing us.

At PSG this year there were two main things that did not take dysphoria into consideration.  The first was the shower situation.  And the second was the format of the Men's Ritual.

So, the shower situation.  I already talked about it in my last post... it was a big group shower that was all-gender, and the alternative more-private showers had their own slew of problems.  The giant unisex shower was awkward enough for cis people, but when you have a body that isn't what people expect, it can be downright traumatic to be stuck in a situation where you're trying desperately to avoid other people looking at you.  Seeing other trans people try to navigate these showers was actually upsetting.

I'm a nudist-wannabe... and I love the idea of being naked and representing trans bodies.  But most trans people are not me, and this was not a good situation for them.  The PSG organizers didn't have a hell of a lot of control over it, but I wanted to bring it up because it was A Thing.

What there was control over, though, was the Men's Ritual.  Don't get me wrong: I loved the ritual, it was dramatic and powerful and honestly one of my favorite rituals ever, but it also mandated a bare chest for part of it.  I had top surgery months ago, and even if I hadn't, I am still subject to that nudist-wannabe stuff I said above.  I was going to go regardless, titties or no.  But I did think about how I would have felt about that before hormones, or at my first PSG in 2013 when I even had a binder on the whole time despite it being extremely uncomfortable to wear it.  For those of us trans people who feel very strongly called to Men's Mysteries or Women's Mysteries, these rituals are extremely important and validating, so the fact that this one was designed in a way that potentially drove away folks like pre-op and binder-wearing trans men is disappointing.

Vet your presenters for transphobia.

I believe that PSG has basically blacklisted some high-profile transphobes from attending, but I did just get word that a recent presenter (not from this year) was pushing bullshit TERF logic on his Facebook, and there was still a workshop dedicated to the work of this asshole (to be fair, this workshop takes place every year and was probably submitted long before the word vomit of the writing in question).  Please be mindful of the fact that Pagan culture has a very deep thread of transmisogyny in it and plenty of very popular figures in our religion(s) have said incredibly bullshit things about trans people, usually trans women.  Even with all the policies in place, having people there who we know have said extremely harmful things about us can take us out of the whole experience.

This includes stuff that you might find "iffy."  Somebody who says things like "there's nothing wrong with trans women but they should have their own spaces" is promoting transmisogyny and exclusion (even if they genuinely don't think they are).


Anyway, that's it for now.  Again, as far as this year is concerned with relation to myself, this is nit-picky stuff, but important stuff nonetheless.

Happy trails,
-- Setkheni-itw

Pagan Spirit Gathering 2019 Recap

This post talks about Pagan Spirit Gathering (PSG) 2019 that took place near Oxford, Ohio, including a quick run-down and stuff I intend to write about in the future (whether I actually do or not).  A warning that in the "camping stuff" section I talk about a nasty wound I got; I also talk about racial insensitivity and trans-exclusion, albeit quite briefly as these will get their own posts.

I (and the rest of Deer Camp, my girlfriend Nakiiya and bestie Ben) got back from Pagan Spirit Gathering yesterday, freshly renewed again.  I tend to view the Summer Solstice as my "New Year," not because there's any real basis for it in antiquity, but because I go to PSG and it resets my spiritual clock in a way to be surrounded by other Pagans for such an extended period of time.  In fact, Deer Camp periodically refers to PSG throughout the year because of the amount of planning and expectation we put into it, and you may have noticed I write more in this blog about this time of year.

Not always good things, unfortunately.

The Camping Stuff and Location

I'll be honest... although I will attempt to go to PSG wherever it winds up, I was not a fan of the new location and pined for Tall Tree Lake.  I'm not blaming the organizers (there are a few things I think they should take into much more consideration than they have been, but that's a subject for a different time).  A heads up that not only will I talk about a nasty wound in this one, but a lot of my description is colored by the fact that I was very cranky the first couple days (I mellowed out a lot after but the criticism I'm about to give is extremely important).

First off, despite our best attempts at planning, it took us a very long time to get to PSG's new location in Ohio.  We had stops planned on the way there that we had to put off until the return trip because apparently accurate GPS reporting of time dies somewhere in central Indiana.  We got there early enough to enter the gate but too late to register until the next morning; we also had very few picks for spots because so much camping space had been washed out by rain.  We wound up pitching my huge yurt tent on what was basically a mud puddle.

Things got wet very fast and never really dried... drainage just wasn't a thing.  My sandals were unwearable within ten minutes and after trying to go the first night barefoot I wound up sinking into the mud where I busted the cuticle of my middle toe... the next day I woke up with nasty pus as I hadn't noticed how much mud was caked into it.  Luckily the guardians at the med tent fixed me up, dug out the wound twice (first right after the pus incident and then after the bandaid fell off and I got more nasty mud in it), and applied copious amount of colloidal silver.

I've never made a supply run during PSG before.  I like the whole week to be in "Pagan Town Space" and try very hard to pack enough to not leave at all.  But we wound up needing to take a supply run... luckily there was a store very near this year and we were able to get rain boots and other stuff we didn't expect to need.

So now that I've given you this initial picture, let's talk a bit about this setting.  This campground is probably the least accessible location I've seen PSG be located at.  It's on a hill with three flat levels... I was camping on the top level.  The middle level--which had the workshops and stage space--was only accessible by golf cart shuttle or a set of muddy stairs flanked by lots and lots of poison hemlock, a plant I'd never seen outside of books before but which I'm rather intimately familiar with now.  The lowest level had the vendors (including both Pagan goods and food) and the meeting place, and although there were no stairs between it and the middle level, there was a giant mud puddle between it and the workshop areas, a massive barrier for folks using wheelchairs and any other disability aid.

I also want to talk about the showering situation.  The main showering area is a gender neutral group shower, something I didn't know actually existed anywhere, and while I, being a full-on "fuck it" type of trans guy, was pretty comfortable in there, I know that a lot of other trans people weren't (I assume plenty of cis people weren't either, but I noticed particularly with trans people).  I'll talk more about that when I talk about considerations festivals need to be making for trans people, which is upcoming.  There were alternative showers that were separated, but they had their own problems (the men's only had one shower that wasn't broken, for instance).

After the rain toned down things got a lot better and if PSG is there again next year I'll certainly go... but it's not my favorite location for these reasons and many more.

The Consent Atmosphere

I forgot to write about it last year (despite saying I was going to).  PSG and in fact all Pagan spaces I've attended have had some serious problems regarding consent, staring, and touching, especially with folks who decide to go skyclad or topless.  I haven't had problems with this for a few years now (I even wore a kilt, which was a big fear of mine because of how many women had been sexually harassing kilted men), although my girlfriend--who enjoys the freedom of going topless in such hot weather--consistently has problems with men leering at her, including a Pagan elder cartoonishly eyeing her up and down like a total creep, leading us to avoid him the rest of the festival.  I'm actually extremely upset about this because his work was extremely formative for me as a young Pagan... so it's been a banner year for Pagan figures disappointing the fuck out of me.

Still, I believe that the overall climate has been getting better with regard to this.  I'm not well positioned to actually definitively say, though.

Other Stuff I'll (Hopefully) Be Writing About

Look, I can't actually make any genuine human promises here because I write when I want, but these are the other things I do intend to write about when I get bit by the inspiration bug:

• How To Behave Around Skyclad Women - One thing that has happened every goddamn year is somebody will either make my girlfriend extremely uncomfortable or I'll witness some other skyclad woman being treated super creepy.  Although I feel like this should be obvious stuff, clearly it's not obvious enough.
• Facilitating Real Trans Inclusion In Pagan Spaces - Since "the incident" in 2012 PSG has been very actively trans inclusive, which I appreciate... but there are some oversights that people made that I want to talk about.
• Why Don't People Of Color Show Up To My Space? - While we were eating we accidentally attended a portion of an extremely awkward event where many white people stumbled to answer a question about racial diversity.  This piece will be a collaboration between me and my girlfriend.
• A List Of Things I've Learned I Need At PSG - Any multi-day festival is going to have a packing list... here are the things I've learned I need throughout the years.
• How To Create A Successful Workshop For Pagan Kids - We do at least one kids' workshop every year to fill a wide gap in programming, something I strongly suggest anybody stumped on a workshop do.

I may think of more as I let everything percolate, but that's what I'm working on for now.

Happy Trails,
-- Setkheni-itw

After The Shouting, The Ignorance

This essay talks about a recent blog post by John Michael Greer that is intensely and irredeemably transphobic.  Although I don't talk much about exactly what he wrote, a warning that I summarize some of it, and extreme trigger warning for any trans person who decides to read the blog post, which I will not be linking to.

Yesterday I started writing a point by point response to John Michael Greer's essay "After The Shouting, The Silence."  I got probably about halfway through the transmisogynistic diatribe before, exhausted, I realized it was actually quite useless for me to do that.

Because it's not a good faith argument.  He doesn't even do a good job of pretending it is... the whole thing starts with a couple paragraphs implying that the problem is merely that "the left" is too harsh on people who aren't "the left" enough before launching into paragraph upon paragraph of extreme transphobia, particularly transmisogyny.  So he's set it up in order to proclaim that people on the left are rage junkies, probably specifically to weaponize against trans people (and particularly trans women) who criticize him.

Believe me, though:  If you feel rage toward him for writing this?  You are in your right.  Because it's a piece that's worth rage.

If you don't want to read the article--and I do not blame you--Greer presents a menagerie of different arguments pulled right from transmisogynistic feminist playbooks, including a refusal to call trans women "women" (he uses terminology like "somebody with a penis and testicles who identifies as a woman"), referencing "the cotton ceiling" (a wildly misunderstood concept that transmisogynistic feminists have used to claim trans women are trying to force cis lesbians to have sex with them), a bunch of inaccurate garbage about transgender athletics (he should have probably Googled "transgender athletics" instead of "cotton ceiling"), and eventually goes entirely off the rails suggesting that Trump could suddenly declare himself a woman and how would we like it then?  Huh?  And yes, he includes an obligatory "Trump in makeup" photoshop.

It is vile.  And then something else happened... I started wondering "should I have suspected this?"  I felt guilty.  "Have there been other trans people who followed this blog and had it thrust on them, too, because I recommended Green Wizardry to them at some point and it resonated with them like it did me?"  I started thinking of various things that should have tipped me off when I first learned about him at a PSG workshop a few years ago before realizing that I was blaming myself for having liked his work... in short, I was punishing myself for assuming somebody who writes about environmental issues would consider me and especially my trans woman friends human beings deserving of basic dignity rather than thought experiments to trash at will.

John Michael Greer apparently does not, and he enters the crate of Pagan oriented figures I can no longer recommend because, regardless of what "Aunt Becky" figures or "trans friends" they have in their lives, they clearly do not actually support them.

Why You Should Teach Cursing 101... To Your Kids

This essay talks about Pagan ethics, notably the ethics of cursing, with an emphasis on how we teach magick to children.

My Pagan Spirit Gathering friends and I were talking about Nakiiya's and my plan to continue heading tween workshops at the event due to a dire need for programming for that demographic and the fact that it was in fact very fun.  Ben remarked that he should also do workshops for tweens, joking that he could do a workshop... on hexing.

Alright, listen... no, they're not going to do a tween workshop on hexing at PSG, none of us are.  But it did bring up something I consider important:  We should be teaching these skills to Pagan kids.  In an age-appropriate manner, of course.

I know some of you will probably recoil at this, because Witches have a lot of hangups about cursing in general.  Because of the way solitary Wicca was initially brought to mainstream society, we have developed a strong belief that cursing is inherently, always bad.  I mean, one of the last high-profile things Raymond Buckland did before he died in 2017 was complain that a bunch of feminist Witches hexed a fucking rapist.  We have some deep-seated issues here.

I already wrote about this in February, so if you're thinking about things like The Threefold Law or karma or ethics, I'd encourage you to read through that for some background regarding where I'm coming from; the short story is that Pagan moralizing regarding the Threefold Law, curses, and so forth is a form of victim blaming... if the Threefold Law exists the way people claim it does, there is no way to read it as anything other than "people who are oppressed deserve it."

But about kids... well, kids need to be taught simple, black and white ethics... you can't just teach a kid to hex... right?

I disagree.  I think we definitely need to teach our kids to use defensive curses, and if we don't, they will learn about those subjects from far less controlled sources.

Some backstory.  I got into magick when I was a late tween myself... of my own accord.  I had just gotten the Internet and my use of the Internet was not particularly monitored by my parents.  I found Witchcraft through a long string of advertisements for love spells and hexes.  It eventually developed into me being a well-rounded Witch who doesn't go around throwing hexes at people, but my very first spells?  They weren't particularly ethical.  Some of the hexes I threw at my bullies were in fact extremely unethical.  They're embarrassingly awful.  I don't like to think about them let alone talk about them.

Although I was not experienced enough for them to actually work, I was casting some serious edgelord shit... I was collecting spells that were intended to cause people's soul to be trapped in torment after they died and other off-the-wall stuff.  And the background noise of Wiccans talking about ethics and the Threefold Law did not prevent this one bit, because I had been tormented at school since fourth grade even though I was a generally kind and loving person and saw through it as total victim-blaming bullshit.

How different could that have been if I were taught Witchcraft in a way that didn't assume justice will just happen?  Where I was given magickal tools to defend myself from the get-go instead of just being told I needed to live with it and let the Goddess take over?

Teaching kids to curse should done in the way kids are taught martial arts.  People stick their kids in martial arts dojos all the time where they learn to defend themselves while also learning discipline; they learn how to use their bodies in a way that potentially can physically harm others, but also learn appropriate times to use it.  Little kids in martial arts are often taught to block attacks first, and when I went to my old dojo a good 75% of what the littlest kids are taught are blocks and not attacks.  Teach kids binding and warding first.  I know people don't want to think about it, but these are hexes!  They're spells that remove people's agency and sometimes even cause harm to them.   They're hexes.  They're hexes.  They're hexes!  And you should not only be using them yourself, you should be teaching them to your kids.

And as they get older, as you become reasonably confident they're using that knowledge responsibly or going around saying weird things to their peers, teach them other things.  You wouldn't take a kid to a martial arts class and not eventually teach them how to kick somebody back, so don't teach kids to bind and ward without also eventually teaching them how to hex.  Teach them to do the minimum necessary to disarm somebody... again, just like most martial arts classes geared toward children and teens do.

Kicking and punching are fundamental martial arts skills... in the same way, hexing is a fundamental magickal skill.

Realize that there are more people hurting children than you know, and that the ways they hurt children are insidious, traumatic, and often perfectly legal if not socially accepted.  In my own case, some of the people hurting me the most were teachers, and they were hurting me in ways that I could not fight. Hexing them was a way that I helped affirm to myself that they were doing bad things to me.  It is OK to teach kids to have that kind of self-empowering agency.   I'm not saying that you shouldn't also fight what's harming your kids, but giving them an outlet that empowers them is super important.

-- Setkheni-itw

No, Witches Don't Collectively Condemn Ilhan Omar

This essay is about a recent article I read on The Daily Caller in which Janine Nelson from the Covenant of the Goddess (The CoG) interviewed about allegedly antisemitic statements by Ilhan Omar, a member of the United States House of Representatives from Minnesota.

I had a really shitty night of sleep last night, spurred on both by Daylight Saving Time crapping on my sleep schedule and because I had attempted to write a post I was woefully emotionally unprepared for regarding a Daily Caller article titled "Wiccan Community Expresses Outrage At Ilhan Omar's Comments: Anti-Semitic And Unacceptable."  I stumbled upon it because I had read a number of comments on my own feeds about Ilhan Omar, most of them arguing on a range between "she said nothing wrong at all" to "she should have thought about her wording to avoid antisemitic tropes but was otherwise not wrong," and I decided to delve into it a bit.

This is when I learned that apparently Witches had a vote sometime and consistently agreed:  We, a group of people who can't agree on fucking anything, were outraged--outraged--at Omar's comments about Israel, a subject that even Jewish people do not have a consistent, unified opinion on.

Firstly, it's important to mention that the Covenant of the Goddess doesn't really represent Witches in general, or even just Wiccans, and quite frankly their advocacy isn't always a pinnacle of accuracy.  Reading their information about Witchcraft, as a non-Wiccan Witch, is a headache-inducing chore, so to see the opinions of one of their members applied to all of us as a collective whole is frustrating at best.  I basically know nobody who is even a member of the CoG, despite Witches and Wiccans making up a good half of my social circle, and although it's hearsay, when I brought it up the consensus seemed to be that this organization is dwindling.

From the article:

"The statements of Rep. Ilhan Omar were anti-Semitic and unacceptable.  Through our members, a collective voice shared their shock at such hurtful anti-Semitic rhetoric and that this discriminatory, prejudiced language is unacceptable from anyone, especially any public figure."

What did Omar actually say?  She said that United States support of Israel was about money and that it's ridiculous that we're expected to pledge undying loyalty to a foreign country.

One of the reasons I was up so late last night over this is because carefully wording anything about Israel is, quite frankly, a necessary chore.  Because antisemitism is so deeply rooted in our cultural mythos, basically every negative quality a human can have has at some point been promoted as a uniquely Jewish stereotype.  I think it's important that Omar listen to the criticism from Jewish people, but I nonetheless think that it's a stretch that her statements were uniquely antisemitic.  Instead, I believe they're targeting Ilhan Omar not because they care about stopping antisemitism, but because they hate that she is a black Muslim immigrant woman criticizing a country that is well documented to be committing extreme human rights abuses against Muslims, a population the United States not only tolerates, but actively supports oppressing.

"We should crush criticism of the marginalization of a minority religion" is not something I support as a human being let alone as a Witch, so I am more than a little pissed off to see Janine Nelson attempting to speak for me in such a way.  To be fair, this is The Daily Caller we're talking about, so there's a good chance Nelson may have not fully understood what her words were going to be used to say, but it was woefully irresponsible regardless.

Later there is another statement by Nelson that might--I can't be sure because of the limited information provided--suggest Nelson's opinions are more about the resulting resolution than Ilhan Omar's original statements.  To quote the article:

"[We are] pleased at the outcome of the passing of H.Res. 183. While it does not specifically include Wiccans, Witches, or Pagans, it expands the rejection of intolerance to all religions.

[...]

"The Covenant condemns intolerance and discrimination of any kind.  We are also acutely aware that words matter, and every individual should have the liberty to pursue their spiritual calling without fear of persecution based on religion, race, or place of birth."

This is an ironic statement, because it's clear this whole thing is about punishing Omar's reasonable opinions as a Muslim, but I think it's important to look through this anyway, because it's unfortunately common for Pagans to assume any old "religious tolerance" win is going to affect us in a meaningful way.

This has rarely been the case, though, because it's almost always written with a particular event or goal in mind that has nothing to do with us.  Because we weren't in the spirit of why they were written, we wind up becoming "exceptions" because people do not view our beliefs as genuine religious expression.  The goal of H.Res. 183, of course, is to punish a Muslim woman, not to protect religious minorities, and as such it has no hope of ever being usefully applied to hate speech against Witches, Wiccans, or Pagans, at least not without an insufferable fight.  Hell, it probably won't even be used against hate speech toward Muslims, which was added as an afterthought to the original resolution because it was just so brazenly obvious why it was written.

Finally, I want to talk about the bizarre implication that Witches, Wiccans, and Pagans collectively support Israel and everything it does, because this is quite frankly nonsensical bullshit.  I'm baffled that Nelson seems to believe this is a widespread enough opinion among Witches to even make a comment about it, because it's certainly not how any of my Wiccan or Pagan contacts see it.  Almost all of them are on that same "said nothing wrong" to "said a correct thing but badly" spectrum I was talking about before, with most who say anything immediately pointing out that Israel is a religiously-motivated ethnostate, a concept that is wildly harmful to any minority religion within that state, let alone an unpopular one like Wicca.  Perhaps the most pro-Israel thing I've seen among Witches were the Jewish Witches and Pagans of Jewish descent whose opinion was merely "we need to clean our own house first," a reasonable reminder that even though Israel commits human rights abuses, the United States is basically the cartoon villain of the world.  All of these statements have come from Witches who have a long-documented hatred of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and are merely critical of antisemitism disguised as pro-Palestine activism.

That's not to say there aren't extremely pro-Israel Pagans, Wiccans, and Witches.  I don't know any, but Witches exist in all political corners and don't have homogeneous political beliefs or opinions about our relationships to other belief systems, so they certainly exist.  But are we collectively of this opinion?  No.  And there are plenty of Witches out there actively standing with Ilhan Omar, too.

To summarize, regardless of your personal opinions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict or Ilhan Omar's comments, there is no unified belief among Pagans, Witches, or Wiccans.  The Covenant of the Goddess does not speak for all Wiccans let alone all Witches, or even most Witches, and although I'm not convinced she understood what it would be turned into, Janine Nelson's statements were irresponsible.  I would argue that Pagans in particular should be critical of any religious ethnostate or attempt at creating one, and that vague religious tolerance statements rarely in practice apply to us.

That said, happy trails,
-- Setkheni-itw

Please Step Away From The Essential Oils

This post is about why I scaled back my use of essential oils considerably and urge caution with their use, some alternatives to essential oils, and a good chunk of why you shouldn't join multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramid schemes because they're creepily relevant to this topic.  Note that there are casual references to death including infant and pet death in this post.

I've been on a huge anti-MLM kick lately, mostly because I listened to the first season of the compelling podcast "The Dream" but also because I have seen family and friends completely ripped off by them.  My mom, notably, is a serial MLM flop... she has spent thousands over the years trying to start "home businesses" for things like fancy powdered vitamins.  On a personal note, listening to "The Dream" really punched my in the gut because it brought to the forefront how much of this problem was ultimately not really her fault; these are designed to make you really feel like you're going to make a living while ensuring you fail miserably.  Once, when I was still in Literal Poverty, I tried an MLM, too, and I have definitely considered others.

This post is, though, only partially about MLMs.  It's mostly about essential oils, although the connection will be made in this essay, trust me.

When I was a baby Witch essential oils carried a lot of mystique for me.  Being a broom-closeted early teen too young to secure a job or drive a car, I relied heavily on DIY solutions and the Internet to practice, and so I lusted over this concept of "essential oils" that I kept seeing in ritual and spell instructionals.  Since I couldn't get my hands on them I just steeped kitchen spices in vegetable oil and used those whenever an essential oil was requested.  I could get away with being at the supermarket with my parents and spending my allowance on average herbs, but essential oils?  Didn't want to explain them, and furthermore, expensive as fuck.

Having gone so long without acquiring these, when I was a young adult I obtained an enviable stash of essential oils that I used for practically everything.  Why would I use messy ground herbs for stuff when I could just use essential oils?  It was quick, it was convenient, and it was cheap in the long run.  My room smelled like a lavender hellhole (to this day lavender essential oil triggers memories of dorm room magick) but I felt like a more genuine Witch.

It turns out I was using them super irresponsibly.  I didn't use them internally--we'll discuss that with the MLMs, though, I promise--but I did use a lot of them, used them topically without understanding whether that was a good idea, I did use some of them in my mouth (even if I didn't swallow), and used them without diluting them enough (if at all).  I was lucky and didn't have that many extreme reactions at the time (my first reaction was when I made a deodorant that had a great deal of essential oil in it including some that are not nice for the skin at all, and I convinced myself I was allergic to arrowroot powder instead somehow).  I was convinced that these oils were concentrated plant magick and did this stuff for many years.

They are concentrated... too concentrated.  The vast majority of home users of essential oils are not really equipped to understand how strong an essential oil is, we have this underlying assumption that natural medicine is inherently safe and gentle.  Essential oils are neither, especially when used in wantonly irresponsible ways.  You are also losing out on a big part of the plant when you use them... one of the appeals of plant medicine is that rather than concentrating out one particular chemical that affects your body you're using a whole matrix of chemicals grown in that plant together.  And even some of the safest ways of using essential oils--through diffusing them--can be unsafe or even deadly for pets! 


It's also important to mention that essential oils--especially cheap ones--are a massive environmental hazard, because depending on the herb one little quarter-ounce bottle of that shit could have taken a whole shed or more full of plant matter, and for some plants it's damn near impossible to ethically source them unless you grow them yourself, and buying a bottle of essential oils with them is dozens of times worse.

I'm definitely not saying that essential oils aren't useful.  Do I use them?  Of course.  I use them very sparingly, I'm much pickier about them, and I use fixed oils instead, but I'll talk about that way at the end when I talk about how I think you should reduce, reconsider, and replace essential oils.  First...

What does this have to do with MLMs?  It turns out, there are some very popular MLMs right now that focus on essential oils.  I had them on my mind this morning because I noted a local Pagan shop I go to posted about a bad review they got on Facebook, which said:

Lack of knowledge regarding essential oils and why it is necessary to take them internally.

And I immediately knew right away:  This person is selling either Young Living or doTERRA.  I checked out her Facebook and... yup.  This is a Christian woman who sells doTERRA.

"Why does it matter that she is Christian?!"  I think it's important to mention that both doTERRA and Young Living are deeply based on exploiting the treatment of women in fundamentalist Christianity.  Many of these women are not allowed (by their husbands, their churches, or of course their own personal beliefs) to take jobs outside of the home, and so MLMs have created a kind of loophole to, well, take their money, and a lot of them are built on Christian beliefs.  If you want to read some prime what-the-fuck, here's somebody justifying marketing Young Living essential oils basically because she's allowed to preach while she sells them.  Young Living, by the way, was founded by Donald Gary Young, who made claims his essential oils could cure before dying a good ten years before the average male life expectancy in his state.  He also accidentally drowned his newborn daughter while his wife was giving birth.  Perhaps they should rename the company to "Young Dying?"  doTERRA, by the way, was founded by people who left Young Living.

(Seriously, if you listen to that podcast, so much of the reason MLMs are popular is because of Christian attitudes toward women)

Anyway, this combination of faith healing and repression of women turned out to be a winning combination for making essential oils the in thing again, but one of the many problems of MLMs is that sellers need to keep hemorrhaging money, and so the products wind up being promoted way beyond their original scopes.  There's only so much aromatherapy somebody can do, but what if... hear me out... what if we start eating them?  Just full on eating a whole fucking bottle of doTERRA.  Please buy my doTERRA.

The first time I was in an anti-MLM group and saw somebody post a picture of doTERRA oils being used to brine a turkey, I thought "this couldn't possibly be a normal thing."  But no, they literally are trying to get you to eat essential oils.

So what should I do instead?  Essential oils are not a very old concept and therefore are not really integral to Witchcraft at all.  If you're like me, you already have a lot of essential oils and I'm in no way suggesting you just throw them out or anything, but tone it down.

First and foremost, don't fucking eat them. There are culinary essential oils out there you can get at, say, a candy shop or something, but there are very few essential oils that have any evidence to support taking them internally for health benefits.  For those that do, you really can't wing it and will need to talk somebody who has actual training (not an MLM consultant).

When you do use essential oils, use very little, and always put it in a carrier oil when applying topically or anointing, say, a ritual tool with it.  If you use it topically, do a patch test first because some people react more than others.

I've stopped using essential oils in most ways that would involve putting them on any sensitive areas (in the mouth, on the lips, etc.) but if you do (like, say, in a lip balm) do not

My own technique?  I went back to what I did as a kid... I make steeped, or "fixed" oils.  This, again, has huge historical precedent... essential oils are fairly modern, so ancient talk of plant "oils" are often plant matter steeped in a carrier oil anyway.

Take the spice or herb you want, dry it a bit, and steep it in oil (olive, avocado, sunflower, coconut, animal fat, flax, almond, they all add their own scent and have their own repercussions but they'll all work) for a few days.  Strain out the plant matter and use it any way your Witchcraft books say you should use essential oils... you can use more of it, if you want, and if you use a foodsafe herb and foodsafe oil in a foodsafe location you can even use them internally if you want to make your gross "healing turkey" or whatever.  When you make a fixed oil you don't need a carrier oil because you already have a carrier oil!


Anyway, that's all for essential oils today!
Happy trails,
-- Setkheni-itw

Case Oversensitive: Why I Capitalize "Paganism"

This essay talks about pedantry in the Pagan community and why I honestly could not care less if my capitalization techniques are "bad grammar" or whatever other argument you might use.

It's been a while... I had top surgery finally in November and have been dealing with some motivation issues since then.  But I at least have crawled out of the woodwork to talk about something that is marginally topical in that there are increasingly some weird takes about it.

Over the past twenty-plus years I've developed a sort of capitalization standard that I use when talking about words Pagans tend to use... and I capitalize pretty much all of it.  Pagan?  Capitalized.  Witch?  Capitalized.  Warlock?  Capitalized.  Goddess?  Capitalized.  This isn't that weird in the Pagan community, although in a lot of cases people are just capitalizing those words because they don't know how capitalization really works.

In my case, though?  It's a deliberate choice, and I capitalize these words when talking about them within the Pagan community but not in reference to things not a part of that movement.  Me?  I'm a Witch.  Elphaba in Wicked?  She's a witch.

There's a bit of a snarky movement against this, in which folks who do capitalize these words are criticized for Not Using Proper English, on the grounds that it makes us look nonacademic and poorly researched.  This attitude is often also associated with some other killjoy beliefs, such as that we shouldn't be calling ourselves "Pagans" at all and should always use "neopagan" which is A Separate Thing Altogether.  And I get it... I went through a thing several years ago where I was really adamant about using Proper English when I wrote about Paganism, insisting the whole world was laughing at us and we needed to respond by doing everything "right."  I wrote an article for Witchvox in which I didn't capitalize "Pagan," "Witch," or any of those other words even though they explicitly had that as their standard (I merely wrote a note to them explaining why I wasn't going to do it and they let it through).  In fact, around that time I was pretty obsessed with writing that way all the time, becoming entirely insufferable if anybody dared to so much as replace "you" with "u" in AIM.

What changed?  I stopped looking at English that way.  I started to understand that the obsession with using Proper English for everything was based in a tag team of classism and repression of unpopular dialects of the language, and that it would be better for everybody including myself if I just gave it a goddamn rest.  That doesn't apply to Paganism exactly, but did plant a seed regarding the hierarchy of who gets to play with the English language.  Here's what I ultimately concluded.


First you need to understand that Christians capitalize pretty much everything.  If there's a religious group out there that plays fast and loose as fuck with capitalization, it's Christians.  I have even seen blogs that lamented the lack of "proper Christian capitalization" because typically devout Christians capitalize damn near everything that has anything to do with God, and although it's often annoying, they do it for a reason.  Capitalization of proper nouns is a tool of respect in that community and has been used that way since long before grammar, capitalization, and spelling had consistent rules.

This is improper English, if such a thing exists, but it can be a tug of war in religious studies discourse, where there is always vague strife between the comparative and divinity (usually Christian divinity) tracks of that field.  Things like whether you should use C.E./B.C.E. or A.D./B.C. to talk about time are hot button issues because a great deal of that study is being crafted and controlled by, quite frankly, Christian supremacists.  And that leaks into everything.  If you use "proper English" to talk about Christianity, they consider that disrespectful.

What "proper English" Pagans do not properly address, in my opinion, is how the exact opposite is also true... the reason Pagans are expected not to capitalize "Pagan," "Gods," "Witchcraft," and so forth isn't just because it's proper English, but because doing so puts our faiths in the realm of "not real religion" among folks who have for a very long time used capitalization as a sign of respect.  I'll show you a particularly egregious example from Billy Graham's website:

Indeed, Muslims who speak languages other than Arabic use “Allah” as the name of god. But as soon as the Christian begins to explain that the true living God is the Father of Jesus Christ the Son, the Christian is making clear that the true living God is not Allah, but our Heavenly Father.

[...]

Muslims do not speak of God as their heavenly Father. In the Islamic faith, Allah is not only a different name for god; the deity it designates is far more impersonal than the God of the Bible.

In this piece, there is an extremely deliberate capitalization of God when it refers to the Christian God and de-capitalization when the same word could be applied to Islam.  In religion, capitalization is used like this to make this point almost constantly, and going the opposite direction--de-capitalizing improperly capitalized instances of "God," "Father," and so forth--looks so awkward in a Christian supremacist society that it's hard to get away with doing it unless you are writing exclusively for other non-Christians.  There is only so much lecture I can handle from my fucking aunt or whatever.

So when I am told that I need to stop capitalizing words referring to Pagan religion because it's "Not Proper English," I reject that, because if I can't get away with using proper capitalization when talking about Christianity, I'm going to at least equalize it and use the same conventions for my own religion.

"But people will not take us seriously if..."

Listen:  People don't take us seriously because we're Pagans, not because of our capitalization.  If capitalizing too many things made people think a religion was ridiculous, Catholicism would cease to exist, and yet here I am right down the street from St. Elizabeth's even still.

And it gets worse.  Not only are people being dramatic about our capitalization practices, we're also being told that we can't call ourselves "Pagans" or call "Paganism" our religion.

We need to call ourselves "neopagans."  Yikes.

"Pagan" is, well, a slur.  It's been used for hundreds of years to indicate a member of a religion that is backwards at best and evil at its most usual, which is why it's wildly inappropriate to refer to believers of Indigenous religions as "Pagans" even if they kind of technically meet the definition.  I meet the dictionary definition of a lot of things that you should not call me.  Me using the word "Pagan" is a deliberate reclamation of a hurtful word that I reclaim much in the same way I reclaim "queer."  Like other reclamations, the point--at least for me--is to say "you call me this which means that... well, I am that, and there's nothing wrong with it."

"You're a faggot."  "Oh, I'm a man who loves men?  No shit, I'm a faggot."  There is of course a lot to unpack here.  Having been a Pagan for over twenty years I'm acutely aware that there are plenty of people who genuinely have no idea that "pagan" is a slur Christians use to hurt people, but the same can be said about most reclaimed slurs.  It also fits me better than any other word a Pagan might use... I'm not a member of a particular Pagan religion.  I don't follow the rules of Wicca.  Saying "you can't just be Pagan, you have to be something underneath that umbrella" is absurd.  There are Wiccans, there are Asatru practitioners, there are people practicing Hellenismos, but I assure you, there are also "just Pagan"s, just as the existence of Catholics and Methodists doesn't mean there aren't folks who are "just Christians."

But one thing I really don't like being called, on an individual level, is "neopagan."

Now, if you call me a neopagan as a general label to include me in discourse about other neopagans, that's fine.  It's important sometimes to make the distinction between historically "pagan" beliefs and the modern movement of neopaganism.  I'm not ashamed of being a member of a new religious movement, and no, I don't care if you capitalize it.  But policing that we all need to constantly make sure that "neo" is there ignores the power of that prefix and how it's used to undermine the credibility of movements, for better or for worse.

To use a flip side example (just because it's a really poignant example), when you think about the difference between a "Nazi" and a "neo-Nazi," what do you assume?  Are you under the impression that neo-Nazis are less extreme?  Less dangerous?  Just a poor man's copy of the National Socialist party of World War II Germany?  That's the power of a "neo."  It takes whatever a group represents and then waters it down to a n00b version of it, implying incompetence.  "Neo-Nazis?  Ah yes, Nazi LARPers amiright?"  That's dangerous thinking.

In the field of religion, it's mean-spirited thinking.  The first time I saw "neo" weaponized it was against practitioners of solitary Wicca.  Many Gardnerian or otherwise lineaged Witches have a problem with solitary Wicca, and some of those have devised the convention of referring to any non-lineaged Wiccan as a neo-Wiccan as a way of implying they are less-than other Wiccans.  Again, it's not that it's never important to have a distinction, but the enforcement of always including "neo" in front of anything that happens to be a new version of a religion or a reconstruction of a religion regardless of whether a comparison is actually being made serves only to put that religion in the category of "less than" and imply that it is a watered-down version of it.

And you know... a great number of the people who are advocating the strongest for us to drop "Pagan" and go "neopagan?"  I have no doubt they really feel that way about the religion/s.

Happy trails,
-- Setkheni