The Editorial By Scot Rhoads A Witch by Any Other Name In this issue's Letters section, Don Kraig clarifies some questions he brought up in his Stealing of Wicca from last issue. I would like to add my more general perspective on what I saw of the exchange resulting from his article. Witch is a word in chaos. If you consider everyone's definitions (including Hollywood's and fundamentalists'), there is such variety and mutual exclusion that there is no commonality. Even among those that agree that these words represent positive things, there is absurdly little in common. When a definition is this chaotic, it must eventually settle down or the word will end up with unrelated meanings among insular groups and contexts, or the word will disappear. Insular groups in our society are becoming progressively harder to maintain (or justify). Witch has been with us for so long it seems unlikely to disappear. So I expect a more stable definition to come. We ought to work toward the best definition that we can collectively choose. It's going to happen—best that it happens consciously. But we are helpless to make a conscious decision when we attach our emotions so strongly to the word that we cannot separate the word from the meaning (even a personal meaning). There are good reasons for this. Our society and our minds manipulate symbols so much more easily than raw meaning that it becomes difficult (and often socially disastrous) to try to separate the two. We must be secure in what we (as individuals) are. We must be so secure that we can freely translate (in a mathematical and linguistic sense) the grid of language that we use to orient our world without concern that our position will have new coordinates. [I hope people get this metaphor—it's cool.] We have such disparate definitions that if we all try to cling to our favorite, Witch will remain a uselessly chaotic word (outside of insular cliques) until our collective unconscious defines it for us. This reflects other problems our world is facing. Global interaction between different cultures is creating a chaos of meanings. Consider how desperately cautious any leader must be in making any public statement, and how any statement seems to provide fodder for various opponents anyway. More fundamentally, we have a chaos of paradigms. Foundational paradigms are the models we use to structure our world, make sense of it, and make plans and predictions. So we justifiably terrified of any threat to our paradigms. And we cannot even allow ourselves to understand that this is what we fear, because that realization would itself undermine our paradigms. But that is what our world now demands of us. As long as so many different people have to live together, the only way to avoid learning to sort out our various foundational paradigms is some form of war. (I know which I prefer.) As a bonus, if we can work this out, we will have a more robust and flexible set of paradigms (that I like to call a metaparadigm), or something even better that I cannot imagine. But an important step is to recognize (on some level) that we are dealing with a universe larger than our idea of it; thus it can be very unhelpful to cling to our ideas. We must use paradigms and words and other handles for manipulating thoughts of our world, but we need not be attached to them. The first part of communication is a common vocabulary (or words, paradigms, whatever). And if the participants have varying vocabularies, they will have to agree on a single field expedient vocabulary for the purposes of communication. This can be impossible if new definitions are threatening. Then communication quickly devolves into a form of parallel play [where children may seem to be playing together, but are not really interacting], only this is more parallel combat. Nothing results but ill will and a greater barrier to communication. Though it may be challenging to overcome our natural fear of the uprootedness that communication can demand, the rewards for doing so are almost as great as and the rewards for not doing so are unpleasant. Angels We Have Heard On High
Tell Us to Go Out and BUY! For several years I have been spending Christmas with the In-Laws. They have the consumerist spirit to a degree I've never seen before. It's a blast! I understand how people can get caught up in it. I expect I would too, if I could afford it. I thought I knew before, but I'm still amazed at how much fun materialism can be. Much of my surprise comes thanks to the politically correct attitudes against consumerism that have been the accepted ideal throughout my life (despite advertising and other hypocritical messages to the contrary). OK, maybe it is superficial and empty—problem is, I don't know. I haven't had enough of it to find out, and it's too much fun for me to just take someone's word on that. Suppose consumerism is as empty as people say. I can't find any social problem inherent in that. The problem (as with most things) would be if there was nothing else in someone's life to address needs outside of consumerism. But social problems related to consumerism do come up, and not just the obvious ones related to lack of balance in our lives. The biggest will be the question of how we want to incorporate consumerism at a species. Thanks to demands on resources and the problems of pollution, we now have a population some 2 times what the planet can support at U.S. levels of consumption. We could, however, probably support our present population at Indian levels of consumption (not that we could suddenly stop our population at this point). When the politically correct indignantly point out that people can live fulfilling lives at much lower levels of consumption, they are correct. But so what? Population comes at a cost. What do we get for it? A lot of people. Certainly people are inherently valuable (and, at improbably low population levels, vital), but at some point just having a lot of people may not be worth what we have to give up in return. We have to consider quality of life. Everyone admits this, but usually it seems to imply a prejudice against consumerism. I agree that consumerism is not everything. I agree that we need to look to necessities and spirituality and community first. But I fear that if we keep thinking that consumerism is dirty (like sex or elimination) we will try to force upon it a role much smaller than the one it will tend toward. We will not be able to make circumspect plans. Consumerism will always be a problem because we will always want too much of it. If we embrace consumerism, though, if we admit how much we like it and that liking it is not a bad thing, then we can make an informed choice of how much of it we want in our world, and make our other choices to accommodate that. Hail Mercury! Hail Bacchus! Quisling Claus A more annoying observation I've made at my In-Laws' at Christmas is this Santa thing. Yes, I am peeved about a cool Pagan symbol like Santa being co-opted and commercialized; but I've lived with that for so long that I pay more attention to the rare occasions that he rises above that. What annoys me is the Santa Lie (as I perceive it—I gotta admit I don't know these people nearly well enough to say what's really going on). The adults make a huge deal about Santa's Visit when some stooge in a Santa suit comes to deliver gifts. What grates is the frantic phobia that the children might see Santa's VW bug or some other clue that he may not really fly in a sleigh, come from the N. pole, enslave elves, etc., ad nauseam. Why does this bother me when I'm happy to see a guy wearing antlers pretending to be Cernunnos? Because I don't see Cernunnos as dishonest. When I see a man representing Cernunnos, I know he's a symbol of something that is real for me. It doesn't bother me if children think he is really Cernunnos because there is no attempt to deceive. In fact, it is in significant ways more accurate to see him as really being Cernunnos. Symbolically he is Cernunnos, and the thing we name Cernunnos is as real as emotions. The business of tricking children with a Santa stooge seems different to me. The adults evidence no belief in any form of Santa Claus (except to trick the children). He does not seem to symbolize anything for them, in any vital sense. He is a blunt tool for vicariously recapturing the adults' lost innocence and belief in magic—at the children's expense. The importance that children have a symbol of goodness and generosity is lost in a desperate need for them to believe the symbol (not what is symbolized) is real. Tragically, when the symbol dies for the children (as such an absurdity must), the things that it symbolizes may die too. If Santa is not real, what about goodness and generosity? The lesson we should get is that Santa is real, he is a real symbol of real human traits. Then, as they learn, children can expand into broader ways of thinking about the universe rather than contract into an ever more narrowly defined reality. That's why I believe in Santa Claus. Blessed Yule! | 
