Month: February 2018

Totalising systems

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 4 Comments

A totalising system is one that seeks to subsume all other paradigms within its paradigm, rather than accepting that other paradigms exist alongside it. It regards itself as a complete and universal system which can explain all experience and needs no supplemental systems.

A non-totalising or pluralist system recognises its particularity to its local culture and sees that different philosophies emerge out of different cultural contexts and local histories. A totalising system ignores local contexts or seeks to explain them through its paradigm.

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Never again

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

I don’t know how to write this in a way that will convince you if you’re an opponent of gun control. But I have to write something.

There have been eighteen mass shootings in the USA this year already, and it’s only February.

Whenever there’s a particularly awful mass shooting, I post about gun control on Facebook, and someone is sure to comment that it’s too soon to talk about gun control, or that I am politicising a tragedy, or I don’t understand because I’m British.

Yes, I do not understand the American obsession with the second amendment. I don’t understand why the right to own a gun is more important than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of victims of gun violence.

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Ritual roles and archetypes

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 2 Comments

Ritual roles are often allocated according to gender, but this doesn’t need to be the case. Allocating roles by gender seems a lazy shorthand for the archetypes you want the ritual role to express. There are so many different archetypes, and not all of them are gender-specific. How about if we allocated ritual roles according to the archetype they are intended to embody, or the skills that are needed for the task at hand?

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Self care for activists

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 3 Comments

This is an excerpt from my new book, The Night Journey: witchcraft as transformation. I am sharing it because I have noticed an awful lot of activists on my Twitter feed expressing pain, rage, and exhaustion. Accordingly, I have revived a hashtag, #activistSelfCare. I didn’t do this to promote the book; I did it because I saw people in pain.

It turns out that the term ‘self care’ originated with Audre Lorde [1], who wrote,

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” 

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Top ten movie and TV wizards

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 3 Comments

Since Hollywood and TV don’t seem to have heard of male witches,  I thought it would be fun to make a list of my top ten wizards. There are quite a lot to choose from, what with the Harry Potter universe, the Discworld, and many more. Not all of them are called wizards, but they embody the archetype of wizard, which seems to be derived ultimately from the image of ancient druids and shamans, but has picked up the symbolism associated with magicians, occultists, astrologers, alchemists, and scientists along the way.

Alchemy. Image by The Fairy Path.

Alchemy. Image by The Fairy Path. [Public Domain, CC0]

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The landscape of gender

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 12 Comments

My preferred metaphor for gender is a scatterplot (not a spectrum). If one’s assigned gender is at point (a,b) but one’s actual gender is at point (q,r) then one needs to change to match one’s actual gender. If one’s actual gender is at point (c,d) it’s quite near one’s assigned gender, so the person is cisgender.

If we model gender as a spectrum, it suggests that male and female are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and supports the gender binary, hence positioning genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender fluid people somewhere on that spectrum, whereas they might be outside it. A line is a one-dimensional model. We have more dimensions available to us than that.

Perhaps we could reimagine gender as a landscape. The mountains of the Fierce Femmes. Little Cisgender on the Wold. The village of Enby. The river of Genderfluid. Much Genderqueer in the Marsh. The valley of the Otters, near Bear Forest.

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Top ten movie and TV witches

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 8 Comments

Celtic Woman by Darksouls1 on Pixabay. [Public Domain, CC0]

Celtic Woman by Darksouls1 on Pixabay. [Public Domain, CC0]

The image of the witch in fiction is ambivalent. The witch defies patriarchal notions of womanhood, asserting her independence, her right to her own sexuality, and her innate power. This is scary for the patriarchy, so witches are often portrayed as coming to a bad end, or being bitter and destructive. But every so often, there’s a movie witch who transcends these ideas and asserts her right to be sassy and feisty and powerful, and gets to live happily ever after.

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My new book – Dark Mirror

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 5 Comments

Dark Mirror: the inner work of witchcraft

By Yvonne Aburrow

Update 1 August 2020: The second, revised and expanded edition of Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft is now available from the Doreen Valiente Foundation shop.

Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft

Inner work is a name commonly given to the inner processes that happen in ritual. It can also mean the transformation of the psyche that comes about through engaging in religious ritual. However, the best kind of inner work also has an effect outside the individual and outside the circle. When rituals are focused only on self-development, they tend to be a bit too introspective. Ritual is about creating and maintaining relationships and connections – between body, mind, and spirit; with the Earth, Nature, the land, the spirit world, the community, and friends. It is about making meaning, weaving a web of symbolism, story, mythology, meaning, community, and love. Creating a community that welcomes and celebrates diversity. Creating strong and authentic identity to resist the pressures of consumerism and commercialism and capitalism. Weaving relationship with other beings: humans, animals, birds, spirits, deities.

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Towards an inclusive Wiccan theology

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 7 Comments

Wiccans can be polytheist, animist, pantheist, monist, duotheist, atheist/archetypalist, or “all of the above depending on the day”. Most Pagans believe that the divine is, or deities are, immanent in the world; and that includes most Wiccans.

This theological diversity works in ritual settings as long as everyone can “translate in their head” and have a certain amount of flexibility as to practice and the wording of rituals.

The goddess Artemis. Photo by Jason Youngman [Public Domain, CC0]

The goddess Artemis.
Photo by Jason Youngman [Public Domain, CC0]

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