My Pagan Path, Part 4: Questions and Answers

My Pagan Path, Part 1: Becoming a Green Witch
My Pagan Path, Part 2: My Green Witch Practice (What I do and Why I do it)
My Pagan Path, Part 3: Challenges and What Lies Ahead

 

Here are the questions I was asked about Parts 1, 2, and 3:

I was asked if my views on animism extended to “inventions” or “man-made” objects, such as cars or computers.

Yes and no. Here’s how I see it: All things in the natural world have their own, natural energy or spirit. Things that are man-made have the creative energy that was invested in them as they were made. So, for instance, all works of art have a great deal of energy, imparted to them by the artist as part of the creative process. Similarly, something made by “by hand” a craftsperson (be it a knitted sweater or a hand-made violin, or a piece of furniture made by a woodworker) have the energy that the craftsperson invested in it as they made it. Things that were made by a factory assembly-line, such as a computer or a car do not have any energy. But they can acquire energy if someone owns, and loves, and invests energy in them. So a car that has been lovingly washed and upgraded and named and talked to by its owner does develop a ‘spirit’.

I was asked to expand on my experiences of gender in paganism (mine and other people’s).

From what I’ve read, I’m fairly unique in pretty much ignoring gender in my practice as a pagan. It might be because gender is not terribly important to me in any part of my life, or because I had to seriously work through my gender identity when I was a teenager, and so gender seems to be more of a continuum than a dichotomy to me. Also, as I mentioned in Part 2, the vast majority of plants have both testes and ovaries, and so don’t have gender. When I’m cooking, I’ll taste a dish and think “I want to make it more spicy,” not “I want to make it more male”. Perhaps gender will come into my practice more when we’re raising animals for food (the baby chicks arrive on May 3rd).

I think there’s a few reasons why sex and gender is so important in a lot of pagan practice:

– Dualities (male/female, light/dark, moon/sun, full moon/dark (new) moon, yin/yang) are a way of organizing information, ideas, practices. There is a lot of energy in the tension between opposites. Personally I don’t see male/female (or moon/sun) as opposites, but many people do.

– Celebrations of gender and sexuality in paganism are in part a reaction against the religions that vilify sexuality and stipulate gender roles. People who feel strongly about celebrating their sexuality are often drawn to paganism. Paganism at its best is a quest for honest self-knowledge and a lot of people have hangups about sex that they need to work out (e.g. accepting themselves as sexual being after years of having been told that sex was dirty), so that comes out in their pagan practices.

– A lot of current pagan ideology comes out of 1970s American feminism, when many women really needed to find ways of expressing female power in a patriarchal society. Hence the emphasis on the Goddess to the exclusion of the God, the feminization of the earth, the celebration of female fertility as symbolised by menstrual blood, and imagery that includes “connecting to the Earth Goddess through your womb.” As someone who has chosen not to have children (and there is a great example of the way I tend to ignore gender: I said “As someone who”, rather than “As a woman who”), my womb isn’t central to who I am as a person and therefore not central to my spirituality.

– Sexuality is a way to raise a lot of very powerful energy, so if you have a problem that you want to throw a lot of energy at, sexual energy is an option. I don’t use it because I have a strong connection to the earth, so if I ever need a lot of energy for something, I use the earth’s energy, because I find that an easy way to do it – other people don’t, and may find accessing sexual energy to be a lot easier for them.

I was asked to talk a bit about why Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky is one of the books I found most inspiring to my green witch practice.

This is difficult to do without giving a lengthy summary of the book, but I’ll try. Terry is an astute observer of human nature who really ‘gets’ the difference between a traditional, practical, earth-based magical practice and the brand of ‘wtichcraft’ that we most often see in the media. For example, this bit where Tiffany (the 11-year old witch-in-training) and Miss Level (her teacher) have been to visit an old widower in his cottage:

“Well, couldn’t you help him by magic?”
“I make sure that he’s in no pain, yes” said Miss Level.
“But that’s just herbs.”
“It’s still magic. Knowing things is magical, if other people don’t know them.”
“Yes, but you know what I mean,” said Tiffany who felt that she was losing this argument.
“Oh, you mean make him young again?” said Miss Level. “Fill his house with gold? That’s not what witches do.”
“We see to it that lonely old men get a cooked dinner and cut their toenails?” said Tiffany, just a little sarcastically.
“Well, yes,” said Miss Level. “We do what can be done. Mistress Weatherwax said you’ve got to learn that witchcraft is mostly about doing quite ordinary things.”

He also, in his inimitable way, pokes gentle (or not-so-gentle) fun at those for whom ‘looking the part of a witch’ is more important than the actual witchcraft:

“Oh, I can see the problem…Your amulet with the little owls on it is tangled up with your necklace of silver bats and they’ve both caught around a button. Just hold still…”

Petulia couldn’t resist occult jewellery. Most of the stuff was to magically protect her from things, but she hadn’t found anything to protect her from looking a bit silly.

But what it really comes down to is that in this book, Terry captures what it is for a witch to have a connection to the land, and describes it beautifully:

“She tells the land what it is, and it tells her who she is.”