This post has some discussion about rape, false accusations, sexual assault, victim-blaming.
Alright, it's a bit of a late notification, but I've been putting it on my blogs as I get to them. Shortly after the last thing I posted on this blog I was in an auto accident that left me with an injured neck. The neck injury resulted in a couple months of varying head-fog that made it very difficult to find motivation to write (or really do much of anything I didn't have to). The head-fog is mostly gone, but I still have neck pain and headaches a few months later. Interestingly, it just occurs to me that I'd considered writing a post about Pagan victim blaming shortly after the accident, because it happened maybe a few days after I'd considered re-charging an auto protection spell. Oops.
The accident was very solidly not my fault. I was stopped at a red light when the person two cars behind me was blinded by the sunlight and slammed into the car behind me. I came out of it alive and able to work the same day (albeit foggily), and my car came out of it alive, too (albeit totaled out). I could easily tell myself that, rather than my auto spell not working, it prevented me from changing lanes a few seconds later than I did, which would have put me in the position of having a car that didn't work and a much more serious injury, like the car behind me. But doing that would result in the conclusion that the woman behind me should have been using magick herself, that she was somehow to blame for having a worse accident than me.
The thing is, this is the sort of thought process that often comes with being a Witch, Warlock, or Magician of any sort. You use trial and error until things work out for you, come up with reasons why things didn't work out the way you intended, and come up with a personal suite of magickal conventions and tactics based on that. Those who learn from other people then adopt that same suite of conventions until it becomes assumed that magick won't work properly without them.
I give that background to talk about this: I'm really kind of sick of how much victim blaming goes on when Pagans discuss magick. A spell goes wrong--sometimes even disastrously wrong--and it's the caster's fault for not immediately seeing every interpretation of the words they used or every meaning within the herbs they burnt. It also brings to mind something I wrote about on Reclaiming Warlock, notably that Witchcraft is a perilous practice that leads to certain doom. That said, I'd like to talk about some of the particularly victim-blamey things I've heard from other Pagans, and why we really need to stop doing them:
1. Stop talking about "karma" or the Threefold Law whenever something goes wrong for someone.
I put "karma" in quotes because when people in the West talk about "karma" they are typically using a really watered-down hippie version of the concept in which good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people and this is observable within this lifetime. The reality is that concepts of karma vary from religion to religion and rarely are that simple. But I'm talking primarily about Western Pagans, so the watered-down hippie version is what I'm talking about. The Threefold Law is similarly simplified and watered down, except with the caveat that every good deed will result in three times that good coming back, every bad deed resulting in three times bad.
I have a tendency to get extremely livid when somebody tries preaching these concepts to me. They aren't--no matter what Silver Ravenwolf told you as a teen--universal to all Witches or Pagans. Hell, they aren't even universal to all Wiccans. And they come out at the most ridiculous times, too. There's one local Witch I now avoid because a friend of mine decided to cast a curse on somebody who was abusing his sister and her response was to preach karma to him and proclaim that the abuser will get his through some mysterious force of the universe someday; the same mysterious force, I guess, that'll take care of the George Zimmermans, Darren Wilsons of the world, right? That mysterious force sure is doing its job punishing Timothy Poole, the convicted child molester who just won a $3,000,000 lottery, right?
The obvious lack of efficacy of "karma" in punishing serious offenders is one of two main problems here. The second is that sticking to "karma" in these circumstances lulls people into believing they don't need to do anything, that everything will just work out fine in the end. When I talked way early on in this blog about how Pagans don't do nearly as much to help the environment as we think we do, this is one of the culprits... we have a misplaced idea that believing in something mystical is inherently active, releasing us from the responsibility of advocating for oppressed people, advocating for the environment, reducing our consumption, and we're even discouraged from using magick that could really help people if it even remotely looks like it could be a curse. So this needs to stop.
2. Stop bickering about stylistic choices in magickal spells as if they mean somebody deserves a negative effect.
There was a girl a while ago on a gURL forum for Pagans who talked about a spell she cast that eventually went wrong. She cast a spell to get some money because she wanted to go to a concert, and voila, pretty much the exact amount of money she needed appeared in the dryer the next day. Unfortunately it wasn't her money, and she was punished for stealing by being grounded the exact day of the concert.
The response? "Well you're supposed to end every spell with 'and doing harm to none!' Everyone knows that!"
Hold that thought.
I actually cast a really nasty curse once. It did exactly what I wanted it to do, but the way it worked involved me being falsely accused of sexually abusing a child. I didn't suffer any long-term repercussions from it (falsely accused white men rarely do, which unfortunately can also be said for legitimately accused white men), and consider it my greatest and most effective spell to date. When I told a group of people about it, though, people insisted that the vehicle the spell took was a result of poor wording of the spell on my part, despite the fact that I hadn't actually published the spell to begin with.
Hold that thought, too.
"Don't cast love spells or you'll get raped." You ever hear that one? Holy shit. Love spells are entirely wrapped up in rape-related rhetoric: Either casting them makes you a literal rapist, or casting them will cause somebody to become so obsessed with you that you'll literally get raped. For the record, I actually agree with the assertion that casting coercive love spells is based in entitled rape culture (although that's a subject for another time). But seeing somebody get blamed for her own rape because she had at one point cast a love spell on a man was just fucking ridiculous.
These are all victim-blaming based on, again, stylistic choices. People who try mitigating unseen effects of their spells by adding "and harming none" are using a personal stylistic choice. They're putting up a safety net in case they didn't think of something. That's fine, but it's still a stylistic choice. Many of us would rather focus on the meaning behind the words, and if I were to recite a spell--and really fucking mean it--all the "if it harms none" disclaimers won't make a difference. In my own case, that spell was instrumental in how I think about spells. It was a success that other people are defining as a failure because it resulted in temporary psychological harm to myself. The victim blaming for rape is the worst, though... men become obsessed with women all the time, magickally-influenced or not, and it never excuses raping somebody. Ever.
3. Don't confuse appropriation with solidarity.
Personally, I tend to think of myself as trying to forge personal appropriation-awareness. With over 18 years as a Pagan and Witch under my belt, it's hard to remember where I even got a lot of the things I do in my practice, and it's important to try to discover and recognize where these things come from, and gaining that awareness is important in recognizing what aspects of my practice are irredeemably offensive and which are not.
One thing I've noticed lately is how many white Hoodoo practitioners have been entirely silent about the recent (and historic) abuses of black people by law enforcement (a few have changed their tune now, but they should have been on this from the start). These are people who are gaining spiritual insight and often money from a practice developed by black Americans who are giving nothing back.
Although it's not specifically Pagan, the recent fuck-up by Greenpeace at the Nazca lines is another instance where it's likely appropriation was confused with solidarity. Environmentalists are extremely prone to picking and choosing indigenous beliefs and quotes when it suits their agendas, but aren't always keen on following through to either help those communities when it's people who need help. In this case, it's telling that of the many activists who went out there it seems not one pointed out that a damaging an important indigenous monument was a bad idea.
The reason I lump this in with victim-blaming is because appropriation epitomizes one-way exchange. It victimizes oppressed people by taking and often profiting from their culture while assuming that oppression is their problem, not ours. This is practically always wrapped up in a victim-blaming mentality.
4. Don't confuse effective magick with being Elect.
Calvinist ideals permeate the United States (and probably several other countries by extension, but hey, write what you know). This has leaked into the Pagan consciousness as well, with people having a hard time recognizing that effective magick is not the same as deserving the effects of that magick.
The factors that go into effective magick are will, experience, and just flat-out luck. I like to use a lottery ticket example to explain this. Lottery spells abound... to the point where even hardcore non-Pagans have been known to use magickal thinking to try winning the lottery. Kissing tickets, praying, lighting candles, having super-special numbers, and so forth are extremely common.
How much do you realistically believe a lottery spell affects your odds of winning? Does it double it? Triple it? QUINTUPLE it? That may very well be the case. It's also the case that you can double your odds of winning the lottery by simply buying another ticket. The odds of winning are so minisculely low, though, that even if you got fifty experienced Witches all casting the most powerful spell ever over a single lottery ticket, your chances of winning are still ridiculously low.
That doesn't mean you can't do it (I use gambling magick myself, although with an understanding that it probably won't make me a millionaire). I'm merely using it to explain that in most cases our magickal domain isn't necessarily expansive and it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not we're good Witches or deserving of what we get. A lot of it is just luck.
5. Finally, even if you really, sincerely believe that this stuff is preventable, shut the fuck up.
Listen, when somebody is homeless or has been raped or their friend has been murdered or some other horrible thing happens to them, the last thing they need is for you to preach why their faithways caused it. If this is a useful way for you to develop a path for yourself, that's great. But opportunistic preaching over oppressed and suffering people is victim-blaming bullshit.
