Feature Writer: Queen Lilith

Feature Title: A Grey Witch I Am

Link: Porcelain Pumpkin /  MEME / 10.07.2020 / Reposted by Queen Lilith

 

A Grey Witch I Am

The Grey Witch—One who works with both the powers of light and the dark. The Grey Witch follows her own path, she is not bound by any dogma or doctrine. She follows only her heart.

A grey witch may be less likely to chant “harm to none, nor to me,as I will it, so mote it be”, but that doesn’t mean she is incapable or unwilling to give blessings or perform cleansings. One could argue that there is no such thing as grey magic, only neutral spellwork that neither benefits nor brings harm.

The efficacy of this is debatable. One could say that spellwork which benefits the witch while bringing harm to another is also inherently grey magic. Whether someone uses a blend of black and white magic, or performs black spellcraft and white spellcraft separately is up to the individual.

Grey witchcraft is probably better understood not as a form of magic, but as a mindset or philosophy. The grey witch won’t be the one to scorn another witch for casting a love spell or hexing an enemy. She understands and respects the merits of dark arts and has likely invoked an infernal deity or two in the past. But the grey witch isn’t one to mock or dismiss the craft of the white witch either.

My spellwork involves both white and black magic. It may be different for other witches, and that is okay because everyone’s path and practice is different. Respect is all one can ask for in this world.

More about The Glass Escalator of Witchcraft

A little darkness does wonders for my soul

I go on Reddit a lot. Like pretty much every day. I’ve referenced my Reddit activity on this blog before, particularly because I frequent witchcraft and pagan subreddits. In my completely subjective opinion, Reddit witchcraft and pagan subs are some of the best places on the internet for magical discourse. How surprising is that? I’ve found that websites devoted to witch and pagan communities have all but died or should be dead. It’s so rare that I find an active and thriving witch space or pagan place online that has a pulse and is more than just a goofy meme page.

But I also lurk in a few makeup and skincare subreddits where I noticed something really fucking annoying. Almost every time a man posts in a generally woman-oriented sub, his post title reads “Man here! Hope thats okay!” or “I know I’m a man, but here is my makeup”. And it doesn’t matter how well the dude’s makeup application skills are, he will always receive thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments telling him how amazing and beautiful he is. The main sub fell victim a week ago to a middle-aged man with a humiliation fetish who posted a photo of the shittiest purple winged eyeliner attempt in the sub’s history. It literally looked like he took a Sharpy across his eyelids. In fact, he probably did. The user was called out on the circle-jerk sub after other users dug through his post history, but the damage was already done. His post on the main sub had already received a ton a upvotes and positive comments from unsuspecting makeup users. Probably not the outcome the guy had hoped for, because he underestimated the affirmation ladies will heap onto a man in makeup.

That is just one example of a trend I have noticed that plagues communities commonly identified with women or femininity. Men jump in and, with very little effort, are hailed as brave heroes by women for not conforming with traditional masculine standards. Ever notice how guys on the internet will go viral after they post a video of themselves making their kids school lunch? How they are praised and congratulated as Dad of the Year for doing the absolute bare minimum of parenting? The situation with the dude with the humiliation fetish made me think about the Glass Escalator.

As you may guess, this phenomena also appears rather frequently in the witchcraft community, but not just on Reddit.“I’m a man, but I practice witchcraft? Is that okay?? Am I allowed to be a witch because I am a man? Are only girls allowed to cast spells?? Will goddess Diana forsake me because I have a penis?” reads one too many posts in online communities. All of the subsequent comments assure the dude that no, magic is not girls only! They, of course, offer loads of validation to the dude, tell him everything is fine, and they make sure he feels right at home. But I have to ask, when was witchcraft ever strictly for women?

I am reminded of the time someone took a graphic from my blog and posted it to a local Facebook page where it was criticized for addressing grey witches in the feminine. I don’t remember which image they took from my blog, but I remember it was one that described the Grey Witch in the abstract using female pronouns. The narrative was written as such because this blog is autobiographical, dealing with my journey as a female grey witch. The graphics I make for this blog are specifically about me, so the female grey witch in the image graphic was a representation of myself. If you remove an image from my blog and post it somewhere else, you strip it of all context and criticize it in bad faith.

But I digress. The arguments made on the Facebook page over the stolen image graphic was that addressing witches with female pronouns excludes men from the practice. Their logic was that by calling the witch “she” and “her”, it alienated men from witchcraft, making them uncomfortable to call themselves a “witch”. And boy, oh boy, do I have a bone to pick with this argument.

There has never been a time when men were not recognized as witches. Look at all the names of the influential figures of modern witchcraft and you will see that over half of the names are from male practitioners. Look at the volume of work produced today on the market for books on magic. Hell, look at the names of those that were killed during the Salem Witch Trials! I say again, there has never been a time when men were not recognized as witches.

I’m getting incredibly frustrated that female witches will bend over backwards to make sure the men are comfy cozy in the craft. Male witches are never pressured into evaluating their concepts of gender. They are never told “hey, if you have some reservations about calling yourself a witch because you have a penis, maybe you need to do some introspection and really question your relationship with your gender”. Instead, male witches are always comforted by righteous female practitioners who tell them “oh no, it’s okay sweety! It’s not your fault toxic masculinity has made you self-conscious for being a male witch. It’s our fault we didn’t go out of our way enough for you so that you never had to worry about it in the first place! On behalf of all female witches, I humbly apologize!”

It reeks of insecurity when a man paws at the sleeve of women for validation. The onus always seemingly falls upon women’s shoulders to make sure cis men are comfortable in a primarily female-dominated space due to the toxic notion that men are lesser for participating in “feminine” activities. Magic has always been all gender-inclusive and witch has always been a gender-neutral term.

There are TERF branches of Wicca that excludes trans women, and there are the nationalistic neopagans that believe men are to play the role of conquering viking while the women perform the role of 1950’s housewife. But the larger witchcraft and pagan communities are very progressive and accepting of the genders, even if it’s not perfect. Only in fringe groups are you going to meet with gendered hostility. This is why I am so confused when the topic of male witches hits the main community for the hundredth time. Its not even tokenism, it’s a false controversy perpetuated by people that want to make a public and moral stand for something that was never an issue in the first place.

To be honest, I find myself continually disappointed in men and women within the craft. One of the main reasons I had to scrap Wicca in the first year of my journey into witchcraft and paganism was because it was way too binary and projected heterosexuality onto everything. I talked about it in this post back in 2017. I’m a sex-repulsed aromantic asexual, and lately I’ve been questioning my own relationship with gender thanks to some of the very issues I outlined in today’s post. I’ve found myself gravitating toward the term agender as a way to describe myself because I am so detached from the concept of womanhood. More and more I am beginning to view gender as a confining and oppressive institute, which is why it plays less a role in my life, and my path as a pagan grey witch, now than ever before.

The thing that gets me the most, I guess, is that defending a cis man’s right to call himself a witch is such an easy hill to die on. It’s a social statement that poses no social threat but still looks like you are making a profound stand for social justice. Literally nobody is going to argue with you. No one is seriously going to say “you are WRONG!!! Men CAN’T EVER be witches! It’s IMPOSSIBLE!” unless they are a relatively new practitioner who still thinks male magic practitioners are called warlocks. This mindset is usually discarded around the same time that newby witches realize that Wicca is not the oldest religion in the world.

The idea of witchcraft being a woman’s art stems from a little thing called sexism. By holding cis men’s hands as they dip their toes into witchcraft, female witches expend their own energy in a wasteful and counterproductive way. They pretend, or maybe even truly believe, that “men can be witches too!” is some enlightened critique of modern witchcraft. They’ve either been lead to think that it is a worthwhile mission to crusade for, or are looking for approval from other witches, as though taking a strong stance on this non-issue will establish them as a noble and prominent voice in the community. I can’t help but see the women that do this as the pick-me’s of witchcraft.

Let’s talk for a moment about the men that produce magical material for the witchcraft and pagan communities, be it books, blogs, videos, etc. Their word is almost always taken more seriously than women creators of the community. The flaws of men’s work are almost always interpreted as a difference in practice, whereas flaws in women’s work are called out as such, flaws. The names of women creators are almost always accompanied by the mistakes they made along the way; we are always reminded of their inconsistencies or their inaccuracies. How many times, when we come across the name of a female author on witchcraft, are we warned, “keep in mind that this author wrote some iffy material, and so take her words with a grain of salt.” But male authors, no matter their roots or experiences, are firstly touted as masters of their own craft, their mistakes being an afterthought or rationalized away as products of their time.

Crusading for men in witchcraft as if they were being actively oppressed and persecuted by the female folk is absurd. The fact that this is the type of activism witches leap at is astonishing and it highlights the privilege they live with. It’s a cheap attempt at moral posturing without actually having your moral ground tested. Many simply lack the perspective and worldly experience to see how unproductive their crusade is or where that attention is better tuned into. For the past two years, I’ve been pretty outspokenly anti-crystal within witchcraft due to some serious ethical concerns behind crystal mining and global labor rights. So excuse me if I don’t don’t get up in arms for men feeling emasculated by invisible forces for practicing witchcraft.

We can’t pretend witchcraft fights the patriarchy when, in many ways, in upholds it. The Glass Escalator of witchcraft will see that male practitioners are eased into the practice with a helping hand, elevated in such a way that they carry more weight in the community, and occupy places of immunity within our very own social hierarchy. We need to stop treating men like delicate flowers when they decide to plunge into witchcraft just because they aren’t completely comfortable calling themselves witches. That is an issue they need to work out among themselves, and they need to stop expecting others to rationalize for them why they are allowed to use the word “witch” to describe who they are.

There are a lot of pressing issues in the world today, and one of them absolutely is not whether or not men can be witches. Of all the people to stand up for in our community, the ones that need it the least are grown ass men who can work out their own issues of their own volition.