Don't Waste Magic on Polyticks
Skip the spiritual [and psychological] crash and burn
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, combining my religious Paganism [at the time it was closer to Goddess spirituality] with my political beliefs about environmentalism seemed completely reasonable. Unlike in my Christian upbringing, the sacred was not separate from the world but part of it. The earth needed protection from… us.
It didn’t occur to me then the damage that could be done by assuming my entire species was some sort of bane. Certainly, I didn’t think of myself that way. Of course, I was one of the good guys! My Pagan/Wiccan friends all thought the same. Our attitude was in lockstep. So when my attitude about the practices of the environmental movement started to change, I ended up with a spiritual crisis.
That shouldn’t happen.
When I discovered Paganism in the late 70’s, the environmental concern was air pollution and global cooling. Then we had the hole in the ozone that was going to fry us all. That problem was quickly replaced by another. There always seemed to be something to focus on that felt terribly important. Much more important than getting my life together. [Which, trust me, needed a LOT of work.] But why focus on getting my life together when the world was going to end if we didn’t DO SOMETHING? [I’m thinking some younger people might relate to this.]
Then I read Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark, which is about combining magic with political action. She and her coven protested publically while chanting and drumming for the health and well-being of Mother Earth. They were opposing the opening of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in California. Fear of nuclear power was ubiquitous when I was young. We associated it with war and nuclear fallout. [Most people still seem to.]
What she and her coven did felt so noble, so powerful. Magic carried the promise of not feeling helpless in a world I didn’t feel able to deal with.
What Starhawk did felt so… Right.
It wasn’t. Starhawk was wrong. Wrong from a practical standpoint because she didn’t understand the real need for power. Not the spiritual power that she often spoke of, but the power to light and heat her home, and the price of that power when there isn’t enough to go around. But she was also wrong from a moral standpoint.
What Starhawk didn’t see was the price of [potentially] shutting down the biggest power generator in California. That price is paid by the poor. They are the least able to afford high electricity costs. [Not to mention inflation.] Pagans can’t make any claims to compassion if we are more concerned about nature than we are about people. Religion and spirituality are supposed to be bigger than polyticks. Religion shouldn’t be an ideology. The desire to live in harmony with nature is good. But how we get there matters. Being in harmony with nature shouldn’t mean causing harm to other humans.
Humans are not ‘bad for the planet.’ We cannot be separate from nature because we evolved here. [If you think we were dropped here, rather than evolving you may not be my audience.] If we make messes, we’re [mostly] capable of cleaning them up. The messes we can’t fix right now will likely be fixable later when we have more skill, wealth, and knowledge. [I hope someday we can clean and refill the Aral Sea.] But more to the point, Earth - and her other residents - have been here much longer than us. Whatever mess we might make, everything we know could be wiped away in a heartbeat by an asteroid or a super volcano. We shouldn’t overestimate our influence. At the moment, she’s our only home and we should respect existing natural systems and have humility about what we don’t know, but that has to be balanced with human needs.
Do the gods really want us to die out? Or to live in greater poverty? I don’t believe that.
Starhawk was hugely influential among Pagans. She claimed to use magic to stop the opening of Diablo Canyon. She didn’t. Diablo Canyon is the only remaining nuclear plant in California. The plans to shut it down this year were nixed when California Independent System Operator (CAISO) warned that when the plant closes the state will reach a "critical inflection point.” The already unstable California grid would become impossible to maintain.
Diablo Canyon - the largest power plant in the state - will remain open until 2035, because by then, <sarcasm> surely, there will be enough solar panels and wind turbines to power the whole state. [Which might be true if CA keeps losing residents at the same rate.] </sarcasm>
Like me, Starhawk was working from ideology instead of a complete story about our place in the world and what we should be doing here. Humility is warranted. Our world is terribly complex and the answers aren’t nearly as obvious as politicians [or other advocates,] might claim. Polyticks is transient. The trouble is that politicians are very good at framing any issue as a potentially life-threatening problem. It’s a great way to get attention, votes, and funding. But declaring an environmental [or any other] situation an existential crisis doesn’t mean that’s true, even if they believe it [I’m sure some do.]
Substituting transitory political messages for religious values is a mistake. Who we have as elected [or unelected] officials is by no means eternal. If I’d been more focused on fixing myself, more focused on gaining competence in the world, Starhawk and her approach to magic might have seemed less appealing.
There’s a place for magic in our practices. It starts with using it on ourselves. Maybe it should end there.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.