Witches and Mediums

Friends,yesterday Loverboy and I received hate/fear mail!  It was a two page photocopy of Bible text highlighted with verses that state that witches and mediums are hated by Gawd.  Then a tract filled with "fear of death" with the reminder that we will die (what's new) and that when we do we will go to hell because Gawd is very, very nice to his children and very mean to dawgs of our banal sort.

I saved it, I put it in my special cupboard with my special ritual tools, for special spells (just kidding..well not really).  I did it because this hate/fear monger believes in what Dan and I are doing and in the story we make up (as the letter sender assumes it to be so) .  I digress momentarily....Our belief is that we all make up our stories, that when it all shakes down...there is only love left, not gawd, not goddess, not heaven nor hell.  Love and the Now.  Of course we make this up too.  We ask no one to believe what we believe, but this tree of mercy has sweeter tasting fruit falling to the ground than that tree of oppression that spawned this fruitcake letter!

I am studying what is known as "the burning times" (Supposedly some 9 million, mostly women were burned, tortured and banished for suspicion of being witches.  The true number may be much less and truth be told they were as much christian as they could have been witches, for what in Gawds name constitutes magick anyway?).  I am seeing that it was about illusion.  Illusions of grandeur (from the church and patriarchy) and illusions of fear and evil projected onto scapegoats (the traditional and perennial scapegoat i.e. the woman).  It was about power, as it all still is and "power-over" specifically.  We are to be the slaves of these ideologies or they will crush you.  

Having come from this mindset (being fundamentalists for many years) Loverboy and I had compassion and understanding for the person/s who sent this admonition (which we think may have been sent under the delusion of "love"), but I began to wonder if folk who think this way and then act on things like this understand that recipients may become concerned for their own safety.  Say for instance my darling cousin who has been quoted scripture indicating his sexual preference makes him a candidate for stoning.  I can't help but think that the "fear thing" is not lost on them at some level for the paper tigerish of it all does get results, it's a proven fact.

As for Dan and I being reprobate and anathema.  Yes it is true that we are no longer christian in it's present description (we don't obey the "authority" of the Bible in it's appallingly literal sense, we are also not under the authority of a pastor, we do not regular a prescribed place of worship to be indoctrinated once a week (giving money to keep a building and buy Danishes for the coffee table) and we believe that all people are good and on their perfect path, even the letter sender).  We get a kick out of our lives and don't take it too seriously, after all we did believe the way the letter sender did once, hook, line and sinker and found the belief to have holes in it later.  We think there may be quite a few holes in our present belief system too, so what!  This life we have been blessed with is not about getting it right, it's about something else (Love and the NOW).

When Dan was "under authority" (much like being a tamed circus animal) within the church his "gift" was considered in the light of Bible teaching in Corinthians as an office of the faithful.  The prophet, the one who speaks from the Holy Spirit.  Same gift, now no authority and he is considered evil.  Principally the Power-Over folk need everything and everyone to be controlled out of fear, fear of what?  Change?  What if the Bible is outmoded in many ways?  That would be a Pandora's box wouldn't it??  Should he pretend he doesn't hear what he hears, I suspect lots of psychic folk do just that.  Just what is the fear that the Authorities have with the mediums in their midst?  Are they afraid the flock will get hurt?  Are they afraid their power-over will be deluded? Who is the wizard behind the curtain anyway?  Just questions to ponder.

As for the accusation of being a witch,  (this is especially funny to me)  as you know, tongue in cheek, I have taken on the Menopausal Archetype of Witch.  A phrase I coined for myself as I headed into the stormy waters of my hormonal tides a few years ago.  I began to look at the Archetypical images that I unconsciously/consciously chose throughout my life and felt I needed to make a shift.  Not so different from many wimmin my age.  We are passing from the business of motherhood to another frontier. Changes and The Change necessitate thought.  The image that I "rode" on for many years, Mrs. Nice Guy also known as The Blessed Virgin Mary, had begun to pinch a bit around my little toe.  It no longer fit me, because frankly there were things in my life that I wasn't willing to go to my grave with.  It was a difficult thing, this shifting of energies.  How could I do something as huge as leaving a religious conviction, a religious community and a comfortable retirement on streets of gold without replacing it with something else?  Viola', enter the Witch.  A woman under no authority, a woman wise enough to see the tides around her and move with them, a woman who can be eccentric and have no one put the pinch on her because everyone knows witches are highly eccentric.  And I could rage if I wanted to!  Menopause has brought many things up for me, not the least of which is an occasional RAGE.  I have spent my life suppressing, smiling through,making nice-nice, making due, making excuses for, and not honoring my RAGE.  Baba Yaga taught me to live into and through it.  

Being a writer of yarns, this archetypical image of Strega is quite inspiring to me and my Muse.  We are having a field day with it!  And I can see that in my enthusiasm to immerse myself in all the imagery it has begun to singe the superstitions of my suburban counterparts.  They actually believe that I am a witch!  

Back to stories.  If there be only "Love and the Now", then what is all this other stuff that makes up living?  Could it just be the creative ideas of others.  Stories that writers have made up and others have adopted as their own embellishing as they see fit.  Like storybooks, like illusions that we forgot we made up in the first place?  I have not forgotten that I made up I was a christian and now I make up I am a witch.  Only thing is whilst I was in the midst of being a
christian I didn't know that I was riding on some other writers imagination of what makes a christian.  I believed it to the death.  And I believed it to the death of anyone who did not believe it.  For in this thought system it is okay to "kill off" whole, huge groups of people who do not believe.  And sometimes it has been a literal "killing off".  This killing starts with thoughts and beliefs.  The same thoughts and beliefs that send letters with no return address to poor darling little witches and mediums like us.

-Jacqueline DuBois©2002