Why Call It 'Traditional' Witchcraft?
I know, it sounds weird to anyone who knows me, right? We don't really come across as 'traditional' people in the normal sense. I've had a lot of questions about why I still use the term 'Traditional Witchcraft' so I thought I'd explain.
Most people associate the term 'traditional' with traditional values. But I keep the term 'traditional' because I believe our link to the past is more complicated than past = conservative, future = liberal. I don't see our world as some kind of straightforward evolution toward perfection as the term 'progressive' would suggest. Many of the values of indigenous cultures, for instance, would appear very 'radical' by comparison to today's mores and yet they existed deep into the past.
I believe there are positives and negatives to the past, just as there are with the present world. Some things we have to learn from the past and some things are better today. The problem is that the past is often high-jacked by people with a conservative agenda.
Conservatives like to think of themselves as 'conserving' the best of the past but most conservatism isn't actually like that. Instead it serves to protect entrenched patterns of privilege that protect elites but do little to support the ancient folk-ways and traditions that could be seen to carry many of the wisdoms of the past.
I believe folk-wisdom from the past to be highly valuable. I see in it a kind of collective wisdom that belongs to no one person but is the accumulated wisdom of many generations. In our highly individualist Western society (once again, individualism has both positive and negative manifestations in our world) we usually come to everything from the past with an unconscious kind of arrogance about us. An assumption that we today represent the pinnacle of knowledge and wisdom that mankind has ever obtained too and everything that came before exists solely to be ransacked for our use before we've taken the time to understand it. I don't believe that traditional magical practices should be encountered on their own terms (at least initially) because I believe that a magic worker from the past was necessarily better at what they did than I am, but because I believe that all the accumulated wisdom behind a practice passed down for generations knows better than I do!
This is why I believe in taking time to study before jumping into a practice. It isn't because I believe that intellect trumps experiential immersion or intuition, it's more because I see this as a way of paying respect to the material I'm working with. Studying the magical practices and beliefs of the past is my form of homage to that collective wisdom. Yes, I have some pretty revolutionary ideas when it comes to current politics and social values, no I don't think that my ability to use the internet and read lots of books makes me a stronger sorcerer than someone born into a culture who had a fully reddened magical practices passed down to them at their parent's knee which carried the accumulated, unbroken wisdom of countless generations! And let's face it, even if it did turn out that we 'knew better' it wouldn't do most of us modern Westerners any bloody harm to have engaged in that exercise in humility.
This of course doesn't mean that I think everything was better in the past. Now is certainly the best time to be a woman, queer, or one of numerous racial groups that are looked on far more positively in the West today. It may occur to some people to ask why we should expect 'wisdom' from people that held all these other unenlightened views, beat their wives with sticks (no bigger than the thumb for the Victorian lady, thanks) executed homosexuals and owned slaves. A good question if you asked it! To which I have two main answers.
One is that power abuses primarily belong, in any era, to the groups in power. The folk magic practices that find their way into my 'Traditional Witchcraft' were seldom developed by the groups actually engaging in creating that world or benefiting from its spoils. They themselves were usually the rural poor and often used magic to try to gain some power in a world where they had little. But! (I hear you say) there is a significant contribution from learned magical traditions in modern Traditional Witchcraft, what about them! Why are they so wise? Well, to be honest, I don't think that the same generalisations I've made about folk magic can be extended to a tradition once it is passed through books. I am primarily interested in the learned material that filtered back into folk magic, the little snippets of grimoire magic that were absorbed into cunning practice. If it didn't filter into folk magic and remained in a grimoire I tend to class it as 'ceremonial magic' rather than witchcraft or cunning craft. This being said, the question still must be addressed.
Although I do believe our views on these matter are better and more humane than those held a couple of hundred years ago, I don't believe that this is due to any fundamental superiority on our behalf. Our forebears led much tougher lives than we do today, most of us can't even imagine what it would be like to live so near the knife's edge as many did and I think it's pretty clear that living a gentler life, not being brutalised yourself, helps in the development of compassion. If ever since childhood you were witnessing hangings and knew that you could starve at any time and there'd be no welfare to help you out, then that would significantly effect how much you felt you had the luxury to care for others. And I do think luxury is the right word. Today we feel secure enough in a lot of places to put thought into how people are doing in other parts of the world. Some of our ancestors had enough to worry about on the home front. They might not have started rallies over in Wales to end slavery in the Americas but they didn't have the TV and internet and they probably did far more to help out their neighbours than most of us do today.
It is also noteworthy that today we do a good job at tolerating inhumanity in return for comforts (just as our forebears did) as long as it's kept out of our line of sight and perpetrated in the Third World. So, in a nutshell, our ancestors weren't perfect and neither are we, but I believe the very harshness of their reality by comparison to today is precisely why they knew their shit when it came to magic. There are also plenty of things about the way magic was practiced traditionally that have their own radicalism about them when compared to today's culture. Let me explain...
History, as we know, is written but he victor. Groups that have power use narratives of history to hold onto that power. Conservative viewpoints will choose a highly selective vision of the past to cling to when they push their 'traditional values'. My vision of what classes as 'traditional' in witchcraft is just as selective. The only difference is that I'm not exactly part of a dominant power elite and I am also entirely self conscious and honest about what I'm doing. Yes, I select aspects of the past I wish to honour as 'traditional', such as the magical culture, and reject others, such as the persecution of homosexuality. No problem getting that out there at all.
It is acknowledged that history is written by the victor, but we seldom acknowledge how every group, ideology or religion does its own myth making. We all need myth. Myth is part of what gives life meaning. It's only bad if we pass it off as history and thus deny alternate stories.
I've often heard Traditional Craft be accused of a kind of 'mythic history', because some people claim that 'witchcraft' was always a negative and that even Cunning Folk would reject the association with this pejorative word. So, therefore, any association with the word is by nature modern rather than traditional.
I have a couple of problems with that argument. One is that, yes, witchcraft was a word that described a capital crime in the past. So it's almost a no-brainer to say that people weren't all lining up to have that word associated with them. To give so much priority to whether or not they owned a particular word is to ignore the richness of the myth that goes with the word. I would be more interested in who was sending the fetch, going to weird spirit meetings with animal and part-animal others, meeting spirits at crossroads stiles and wells, casting spells, collecting bones and brewing potions and consciousness altering ointments and prophesying events, and entering the Hollow Hills to commune with the faeries, rather than who was brave (or stupid) enough to slap the word 'witch' on what they were doing.
My second problem is I think this argument can potentially ignore the fact that all history is to some extent mythic and creative. The history that is accepted by the establishment is always a partial picture, as is the history accepted by the fringe-dwellers like myself. This is inevitable because we only ever have partial records and the vast majority of actual truth is lost to time. What aspects we choose to emphasis will always make a big difference to picture that emerges. As witches, however, we are often more self-aware when it comes to the Stories that define our lives. We need myth as much as we need history, but we cannot afford to let someone else pass myth off as history without our awareness.
In summation, I use the term 'traditional' because I believe that we have things to learn from the magical practices of our forebears. I believe this to be the case because these people lived close to the land, they lived generally in one land all their lives and were born into connection with place and people, the practices and even just the beliefs about the spirit-world they were passed is not just the wisdom of one or two people but of potentially thousands and these people often had to rely on magic for life and death matters. I don't believe that people who were living so close to subsistence would have wasted time on practices that didn't get them immediate practical results. This stuff was tried and tested in the fire of immediate human need.
This even goes for the use of Christian or heretical Christian motifs and symbols. I believe they used them because they worked for them in some way, or that those ideas were close enough to something older that it made an appropriate gloss. Before I reject something outright from a knee-jerk response I'd rather respect it enough to try it and see why it was used. I don't believe they were stupid and impressionable or didn't know what they were doing when semi-Christian folk magic developed in Europe. I think they were instead a pragmatic and omnivorous magical people/s who absorbed useful things but at a much slower and steadier rate than modern cultural appropriation and eclecticism.
I use the word 'witchcraft' in there with 'traditional' because I believe it's the best word in English to convey what we do. I believe it conveys the sense of the ecstatic, night-flying, spirit-walking, animal-turning, hedge-crossing, spell-casting, spirit-talking, dead-seeing, curse-throwing, root-working, herbal healing, magical practitioner. Whether or not people wanted to avoid getting killed and might not have used it in the past doesn't erase the whole picture of the history of the word and what it's come to mean today, and I think that whole picture is important.
Images from: http://www.templeilluminatus.com/group/the_witches_kitchen?groupUrl=the_witches_kitchen&xg_source=activity&id=6363372%3AGroup%3A1747624&page=3
Most people associate the term 'traditional' with traditional values. But I keep the term 'traditional' because I believe our link to the past is more complicated than past = conservative, future = liberal. I don't see our world as some kind of straightforward evolution toward perfection as the term 'progressive' would suggest. Many of the values of indigenous cultures, for instance, would appear very 'radical' by comparison to today's mores and yet they existed deep into the past.
I believe there are positives and negatives to the past, just as there are with the present world. Some things we have to learn from the past and some things are better today. The problem is that the past is often high-jacked by people with a conservative agenda.
Conservatives like to think of themselves as 'conserving' the best of the past but most conservatism isn't actually like that. Instead it serves to protect entrenched patterns of privilege that protect elites but do little to support the ancient folk-ways and traditions that could be seen to carry many of the wisdoms of the past.
I believe folk-wisdom from the past to be highly valuable. I see in it a kind of collective wisdom that belongs to no one person but is the accumulated wisdom of many generations. In our highly individualist Western society (once again, individualism has both positive and negative manifestations in our world) we usually come to everything from the past with an unconscious kind of arrogance about us. An assumption that we today represent the pinnacle of knowledge and wisdom that mankind has ever obtained too and everything that came before exists solely to be ransacked for our use before we've taken the time to understand it. I don't believe that traditional magical practices should be encountered on their own terms (at least initially) because I believe that a magic worker from the past was necessarily better at what they did than I am, but because I believe that all the accumulated wisdom behind a practice passed down for generations knows better than I do!
This is why I believe in taking time to study before jumping into a practice. It isn't because I believe that intellect trumps experiential immersion or intuition, it's more because I see this as a way of paying respect to the material I'm working with. Studying the magical practices and beliefs of the past is my form of homage to that collective wisdom. Yes, I have some pretty revolutionary ideas when it comes to current politics and social values, no I don't think that my ability to use the internet and read lots of books makes me a stronger sorcerer than someone born into a culture who had a fully reddened magical practices passed down to them at their parent's knee which carried the accumulated, unbroken wisdom of countless generations! And let's face it, even if it did turn out that we 'knew better' it wouldn't do most of us modern Westerners any bloody harm to have engaged in that exercise in humility.
This of course doesn't mean that I think everything was better in the past. Now is certainly the best time to be a woman, queer, or one of numerous racial groups that are looked on far more positively in the West today. It may occur to some people to ask why we should expect 'wisdom' from people that held all these other unenlightened views, beat their wives with sticks (no bigger than the thumb for the Victorian lady, thanks) executed homosexuals and owned slaves. A good question if you asked it! To which I have two main answers.
One is that power abuses primarily belong, in any era, to the groups in power. The folk magic practices that find their way into my 'Traditional Witchcraft' were seldom developed by the groups actually engaging in creating that world or benefiting from its spoils. They themselves were usually the rural poor and often used magic to try to gain some power in a world where they had little. But! (I hear you say) there is a significant contribution from learned magical traditions in modern Traditional Witchcraft, what about them! Why are they so wise? Well, to be honest, I don't think that the same generalisations I've made about folk magic can be extended to a tradition once it is passed through books. I am primarily interested in the learned material that filtered back into folk magic, the little snippets of grimoire magic that were absorbed into cunning practice. If it didn't filter into folk magic and remained in a grimoire I tend to class it as 'ceremonial magic' rather than witchcraft or cunning craft. This being said, the question still must be addressed.
Although I do believe our views on these matter are better and more humane than those held a couple of hundred years ago, I don't believe that this is due to any fundamental superiority on our behalf. Our forebears led much tougher lives than we do today, most of us can't even imagine what it would be like to live so near the knife's edge as many did and I think it's pretty clear that living a gentler life, not being brutalised yourself, helps in the development of compassion. If ever since childhood you were witnessing hangings and knew that you could starve at any time and there'd be no welfare to help you out, then that would significantly effect how much you felt you had the luxury to care for others. And I do think luxury is the right word. Today we feel secure enough in a lot of places to put thought into how people are doing in other parts of the world. Some of our ancestors had enough to worry about on the home front. They might not have started rallies over in Wales to end slavery in the Americas but they didn't have the TV and internet and they probably did far more to help out their neighbours than most of us do today.
It is also noteworthy that today we do a good job at tolerating inhumanity in return for comforts (just as our forebears did) as long as it's kept out of our line of sight and perpetrated in the Third World. So, in a nutshell, our ancestors weren't perfect and neither are we, but I believe the very harshness of their reality by comparison to today is precisely why they knew their shit when it came to magic. There are also plenty of things about the way magic was practiced traditionally that have their own radicalism about them when compared to today's culture. Let me explain...
History, as we know, is written but he victor. Groups that have power use narratives of history to hold onto that power. Conservative viewpoints will choose a highly selective vision of the past to cling to when they push their 'traditional values'. My vision of what classes as 'traditional' in witchcraft is just as selective. The only difference is that I'm not exactly part of a dominant power elite and I am also entirely self conscious and honest about what I'm doing. Yes, I select aspects of the past I wish to honour as 'traditional', such as the magical culture, and reject others, such as the persecution of homosexuality. No problem getting that out there at all.
It is acknowledged that history is written by the victor, but we seldom acknowledge how every group, ideology or religion does its own myth making. We all need myth. Myth is part of what gives life meaning. It's only bad if we pass it off as history and thus deny alternate stories.
I've often heard Traditional Craft be accused of a kind of 'mythic history', because some people claim that 'witchcraft' was always a negative and that even Cunning Folk would reject the association with this pejorative word. So, therefore, any association with the word is by nature modern rather than traditional.
I have a couple of problems with that argument. One is that, yes, witchcraft was a word that described a capital crime in the past. So it's almost a no-brainer to say that people weren't all lining up to have that word associated with them. To give so much priority to whether or not they owned a particular word is to ignore the richness of the myth that goes with the word. I would be more interested in who was sending the fetch, going to weird spirit meetings with animal and part-animal others, meeting spirits at crossroads stiles and wells, casting spells, collecting bones and brewing potions and consciousness altering ointments and prophesying events, and entering the Hollow Hills to commune with the faeries, rather than who was brave (or stupid) enough to slap the word 'witch' on what they were doing.
My second problem is I think this argument can potentially ignore the fact that all history is to some extent mythic and creative. The history that is accepted by the establishment is always a partial picture, as is the history accepted by the fringe-dwellers like myself. This is inevitable because we only ever have partial records and the vast majority of actual truth is lost to time. What aspects we choose to emphasis will always make a big difference to picture that emerges. As witches, however, we are often more self-aware when it comes to the Stories that define our lives. We need myth as much as we need history, but we cannot afford to let someone else pass myth off as history without our awareness.
In summation, I use the term 'traditional' because I believe that we have things to learn from the magical practices of our forebears. I believe this to be the case because these people lived close to the land, they lived generally in one land all their lives and were born into connection with place and people, the practices and even just the beliefs about the spirit-world they were passed is not just the wisdom of one or two people but of potentially thousands and these people often had to rely on magic for life and death matters. I don't believe that people who were living so close to subsistence would have wasted time on practices that didn't get them immediate practical results. This stuff was tried and tested in the fire of immediate human need.
This even goes for the use of Christian or heretical Christian motifs and symbols. I believe they used them because they worked for them in some way, or that those ideas were close enough to something older that it made an appropriate gloss. Before I reject something outright from a knee-jerk response I'd rather respect it enough to try it and see why it was used. I don't believe they were stupid and impressionable or didn't know what they were doing when semi-Christian folk magic developed in Europe. I think they were instead a pragmatic and omnivorous magical people/s who absorbed useful things but at a much slower and steadier rate than modern cultural appropriation and eclecticism.
I use the word 'witchcraft' in there with 'traditional' because I believe it's the best word in English to convey what we do. I believe it conveys the sense of the ecstatic, night-flying, spirit-walking, animal-turning, hedge-crossing, spell-casting, spirit-talking, dead-seeing, curse-throwing, root-working, herbal healing, magical practitioner. Whether or not people wanted to avoid getting killed and might not have used it in the past doesn't erase the whole picture of the history of the word and what it's come to mean today, and I think that whole picture is important.
Images from: http://www.templeilluminatus.com/group/the_witches_kitchen?groupUrl=the_witches_kitchen&xg_source=activity&id=6363372%3AGroup%3A1747624&page=3
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