uh-huh, so I believe this time a question like this deserves a bit of a longer answer even though my immediate reaction is just a deep desire to sigh and dissolve into some kind of void goop-slime.
but! let’s divide this into three things:
1. a pagan witch can honestly say anything because the rules of craft and faith are often personal. some believe certain concepts and abide by certain sets of rules while others don’t – and neither the fact that someone is a witch or a pagan forces them to believe one unchangeable thing. unless the concepts rule each other out (like perhaps, I don’t know, saying you’re a polytheist but you believe in only one god, or you’re a witch who doesn’t believe in magic/power of intent and will) things are generally up to you.
2. following tradition and an ancient path, or being a part of a reconstructist religion does not mean you HAVE TO – or you’re even allowed to – follow all the customs and rules they followed centuries ago. tradition is also something that evolves constantly, a group of things that changed throughout generations, bits retracted and bits added, changing moods and affiliations. tradition is not the opposite of progress and change, but a profound respect for your past and the ways of people whose lives allowed you to come into existence.
you’re not gonna catch me living in a hut with no electricity making butter all day, sacrificing lambs, sitting with my bare arse on the field to make it fertile, shitting in the woods, and jumping on the funeral pyre of my deceased husband with a horse or two.
3. imagine you live all those centuries ago. you’re rather poor, your house is made of wood and clay. you’re not really that entertained by the concept of dying this winter, really, so you hope with your whole heart that your fields will be fertile and your crops will be good. if you want to have someone to take care of you when you’re over 40 and very tired by your farming life, you hope with your whole heart your wife is fertile too. two of your children died before they turned five. if the neighbour tribe attacks and you do not have enough sons to protect your household, you die. you pray your wife is fertile. you believe in goddesses whose main thing is Fertility™ – womb and field alike. you believe in goddesses whose main thing is Please Don’t Let My Wife Die in Childbirth.
the world you live in is harsh. you spend your entire day in the field, hard work. your sons are somewhere fighting a war and might die – by sword or because their buddy sneezed on them. it is only logical that you have to be strong. you have to be The Man while your wife has to bake bread out of what’s left from when you got mice in the barn and birth children – she has to be The Woman.
but look, times change. we do not live in huts of clay – we live in polluted and overpopulated cities. we have too many kids. we do not actually need more kids to survive the winter and to protect us from when Bogdan and Bożydar get bored and decide to attact our village. we have education, science, medicine, women do not have to stay at home and just be a mother. you buy butter in Tesco. do you work in the field? do you live only by what the earth yields?
change is crucial and necessary and our lives will always be different than those of our great great grandmothers. we need to adapt – ourselves and our concepts. this also applies to adapting to very modern concepts that science gave us – medicine, electricity, psychology, sociology, so many other studies. we evolve. we change as a species.
we do not need the same idea of masculinity and femininity that our ancestors simply HAD TO HAVE. we do not need to worship Fertility out of the fear we will die. it’s no longer the most important thing.
gender is made up, gender roles are no longer necessary, a witch can say whatever a witch wants.
one of my forever favourite rants to the two anons who are apparently really new to my blog.
how does it work that a pagan witch can say that gender in made up? isn’t witchcraft and paganism based on the balance of male and female? fertility and femininity and the masculine
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