(Back to Articles Index) Survivors Guide to the Magical
World PART 5: Survivors Guide to the Magical World: “I’m Not
With Them”
by Azzerac
Second-Class Sects in the Magical World
You walk into “Trinkets R Us”, or should I say “Your Local ‘Conscious Living’
Store”. You’re buying some High-John, some Low-John, and a bit of myrrh. You
strike up a conversation with the counter help... kind of cute, but a little
young. You’re thinking about a little side job, and one that will help get you
in deeper contact with the pagan community, so you ask, “Are they hiring here”?
The mood turns slightly sour as you pick up on just a hint of territoriality in
the teller’s cute attempt at a glare. Reclaiming their composure, they state
proudly, “Oh, we don’t get paid. We volunteer our time in exchange for our
apprenticeships”.
“DO WHAT?” your hind-brain screams, but your mouth is able to tune it down to,
“I beg your pardon?"
“Oh, yes”, they reply. “The owner, Moonshadow-ShadowWolf-SilverMoon let’s us
work here in exchange for teaching us. She was taught by an ancient gypsy woman,
and is passing down her secrets to us”.
You pay for your goods and are on your way, resisting enlightening them. You
fail to tell them about the Rede. You refrain from spouting the Witch’s Pyramid.
You even held back from slapping them across the face and yelling, “Snap Out of
It”, in a Cher reenactment. You simply go on your merry way to that night’s full
moon, reassured in a simple mantra, ever-though but never spoken:
“We’re not with them”.
You see them at Messy-Physical fairs, and open full moons. It even becomes a bit
of a game. If you could only steal-away the security tapes, it would make a
great drinking game!
“Every time you see a Velvet Cloak, you gotta' take a Shot”!
“Each time someone says ‘Namaste’ or blessed-be …”
“Every time someone says ‘Native People’, …”
“Every time you spot a pamphlet adorned with the commercially-stereotyped
‘Ethnic-Child’, …”
That’s when you know it’s gotten bad!
You don’t even ask yourself if you should try to make it better. There just
seems to be too damned many of them! You feel outnumbered. How could you
possibly scratch the surface? For every One that you help, there are fifteen
more lined up behind them! Try and bring reason, one person at a time, and you
will be washed away by the flood of followers. No one ever put out a forest fire
with a bucket and hose.
They are everywhere you go. Their badge is the triskele jewelry from that
popular TV show. Their mantra is straight from the latest
Crescent-Moon-publications Inc spirituality mill pulp. Their style of dress is
from Hot Topic, crossed with an S.C.A. Event.
They are the “Lost Soles”. Not Lost-Souls, but truly Soles, as they are the
trod-upon.
We have laughed at them, even patted them on the head with a sarcastic, “Poor
Baby”, on occasion: It has to stop! “Why”, you ask? Because it’s not going away!
In fact, it’s growing! They are becoming the “Old Guard”, as the twenty-somethings
are teaching “Their Ways” to the teenies! In a few more years, they will be
patting us on the head, if we can’t quote the latest pulp-novel or
Holly-Wiccan
Drivel.
They came from the same places we did. They were tortured in the same schools,
degraded in the same hang-outs, un-invited to the same parties, outcast by the
outcasts, just like you. This illness, that weight problem, the other family
stigma, they are reliving what made the “Olde-Guarde” rebuffed by their peers.
They are walking your footprints, but with one exception: The path is confused
by popularity.
When we Olde-School Pagans started, there was little to dissuade us from the
truth. The landscape was clear. Hollywood would barely touch the topic, save for
campy horror films. Respectable publishers wouldn’t look twice at our genre. You
had to have something really good and historically accurate to get in print. Our
numbers were so small that people didn’t look at us and say, “Hey! One half-way
pretty Tarot Deck or Astrology Rune Set, and I can make my boat AND House
Payments”! We were safe.
By now, you’re starting to realize that this article isn’t aimed at the Newbies.
It’s aimed at you, “Olde-Guarde”. It’s aimed at me, your coven, and your
teachers. It’s aimed at those that would stand up and call themselves the “Us”,
that “aren’t with them”.
It’s aimed at everyone who ever winced at a novice quoting movie-scripts as
scripture. It’s aimed at all of the blue jean and t-shirt pagans who ever
laughed at the “Gloom Cookies”, or was cornered by a zealot in an inverted
pentagram, talking Chaos Magic. It’s for each of us that refused to crack the
pages on a neophytes Manifesto, because they mandated “Magic” be spelled with a
“J”, a “K”, a “Y”, and Three Silent-Q’s, and a Hyphen. All they wanted was
guidance. All they get is silence.
Even if we could stop the authors of the tradition-of-the-month-club, how do you
stop the glam? With twenty-dollar Spells-in-a-Can, complete with lip gloss and
Sparkly Stickers, how do you compete with a stick and rusty cauldron? Root magic
isn’t as flashy as the Industrial Light and Magic CGI Effects Budget.
How do you approach a generation so annulled by computer effects that they
wouldn’t recognize a miracle without the fairy-dust sparkles? Mass marketing has
blinded them to only recognizing a potion by the color of Glittery Bits in it.
Consumerism has gone so far that they don’t even know essential oils from
straight olive oil! If the label is pretty enough, it must be the real deal.
They’re just looking for the same things we were. The only difference is that
now there’s money to be made in selling them religion. It isn’t about the path,
but the tourist traps along that three-lane highway to spirituality! It’s paved
in gold for anyone with the latest Flash, the coolest ethnic cross-cultural
combination, the perkiest breasts, and the snappiest theme song. Add a kid with
glasses and you’ve got built-in media appeal enough to make it a holiday
classic! (Sorry, ladies: He’s probably gay) .
It isn’t just FLASH and POW that leads anyone on the path. Remember when you
realized that that Monotheism Incorporated wasn’t selling the brand of Deity
that sang to your soul? A goodly-sum of these seekers is just as savvy as you
were, but there is a built-in clergy ready to snatch them up that wasn’t as
prolific in your day. Looking only for guidance, they are ripe for the picking!
When you turn from a religion populated with the dedicated, you assume that
every spiritual leader is dedicated, …well.. to Spirituality. They fall straight
into the arms of messianic sycophants garnering a roll call of apostles from the
cutest and most-naďve. Like any Texas Cultist, they’re here for the sex. Any
will do.
Those that slip that net are guided by the fast-food religious outposts that
call themselves “Universal”. Once there, they get to hear one sermon after
another about how the personal orthodoxy of that particular ‘deacon’ was
persecuted. “Shut Up and be Open-Minded, Peon, or you’re just another fascist,
like they are”.
When all else fails, there are always the bottom-feeders: “The Ten-Dollar
Tabernacle and their Mail-Order Ministry”. These are the folks that sent away
for their priesthood from a web site, or if they are the Venerable-Ones, the
back of a magazine. They sell ceremony for outrageous prices, and have even
convinced themselves that they are the true spiritual compasses for the
Nuevo-Spiritual.
“Break-Free from iron-fisted fundamentalism! Prove you’re better by paying me
$60 to officiate at your wedding!...er, Hand-Fasting!”
I’ve held correspondence with more of these than I care to admit to, and the
passive-aggressive approach to open debate that they inevitable display denotes
a person who was beat-up for their lunch-money well into their thirties! They
approach their duties in their ceremony-for-hire with more rebellion than
respect, more impish satire than joy in the union, and are about as useless in a
real spiritual crisis as an agoraphobic parachuting instructor!
So whom can they turn to?
You! Who Else?
The Ten-Dollar Tabernacle is a thing of the past, now that True Pagan Clergy are
being trained. Groups like Cherry Hill Seminary are but the first of what I’m
sure will be many Pagan Specific seminaries, training people in real theological
course and discourse. Soon there should be many tradition-specific seminaries,
where one must earn a Doctorate in Theology, and not just get it sent to them
for an extra $25. My hat is off to any who teach and learn in these spiritual
centers, dedicated to honest spirituality.
…but that is but a glimmer on the horizon.
The task still falls to you. It falls to me. It falls to anyone who knows the
difference between Wicca and Witch. It falls to anyone who sees a lie wrapped in
a pretty book, and sold for a teens weekly allowance on the shelf of a Barnes
and Noble. It falls on everyone who has had their year and a day, one on one
with a real practitioner, and felt like a fool for everything that came before.
How? (What would be the point to writing any Call to Action without a “How”?)
Offer to join. Solicit an invitation to the local “Human-Slavery Wicca Outlet”
Shop’s open circle.
The odds are that the leader is so self-impressed that they don’t realize the
loose chink in their Velveteen Armor. A few calm words of direction amidst the
ceremony, in just the right place, are all that’s needed to expose their
“Slave-ior” for the fraud they are. Hell, you can even gain some students for
free! Just remember: They have to be told to teach what They learn for free, as
well!
Turn True spirituality into a plague! Vaccinate the world with this anti-virus
of honesty!
Start a Pagan’s Night Out! Any time you get new witches in a room with old, they
are going to ask questions: Lots and Lots of questions! By putting it out in a
party setting, it simply helps to bring the information to a more intimate,
personal, and oft-times comedic level. Just remember that, as you guide, a
leading question goes a lot further than a laugh or accusation. It also helps to
be in a place where you don’t need to always be “On”.
This task falls on the shoulders of anyone who cringed in a convenience-store
checkout line at the teenage girls cooing over the latest installment of the
Twilight books, Azure Greed Jewelry, or Gods know what! It falls on anyone that
sat slack-jawed after a Terry Pratchett novel and gasped, “He Gets Us”!
Mostly, though, this task is for any with The Sight strong enough to look into
the coming decades, and see the moment when a group of kids scorns you for your
olde-school root-work, your tight-assed traditionalism, your working tools that
are so “Last Year”, and hear them say, out from the distance, …
“We’re not with them”.
Footnotes:
References? I've lived these situations, used these techniques, and seen this
shocking possible future. Help Me!
Copyright: Copyright
Lodestone and Lady's Mantle, 2009
