Suffer a Witch to Live
Irene's message was a gift, and it changed me.
It popped the lid off my most precious, hidden magick and forced me to share it with the world... despite being shit-scared.
I didn't realize how deep and all encompassing was my fear of sharing spiritual gifts. It's made me question the reasons for that fear, and I’ve discovered most of it is Christian colonization.
Why I gotta dig into it
First, before I begin - I know some of y'all are like "who cares?". Just dismiss Christianity and be done with it. I get it and I wish I could, but I can't ignore the weeds that want to choke the light out of my life - especially when those weeds claim to speak about spirituality and my relationship with divinity.
Whether I like it or not, I have unconsciously absorbed massive levels of Christian beliefs and judgements into my concept of Self and the world and my relationship to the world and to divinity. My parents and extended family, media, literature, bosses... have all been the authorities in my life shilling Christianity to some degree. Even my father's outright rejection of religion couldn't mask his ongoing conflict to reconcile his conditioning with his personal freedom.
Two formerly close friends (now acquaintances), have recently put on the robe of "Christian", including ideologies of the conservative anti-abortion and anti-vaxxer.
It low-key freaks me out.
People who I once loved and trusted and (thought that we) shared a world view and belief system, now embrace ideology I consider fragmenting and harmful.
Christianity is not Christ.
Christianity is a distorted version of Christ that's been used to hoard power and control.
The Mool Mantar
The Sikh religion embraces the call to interfaith respect and protection. All of Creation is an unbreakable whole, so we are asked to listen and learn from all the ways that people worship and believe.
This feels good and right to me.
I want to learn from all perspectives of what "God" is believed to be by peoples from all over the world. This means that I take what feels good, loving, inclusive and peaceful and reject all the rest.
I reject the premise that Judeo-Christian ideology has ever truly understood or embraced the reality of wholeness in Creation.
I used to believe the Judeo-Christian tradition was talking about the ultimate source of Creation. I believed that the messages and beliefs in the Judeo-Christian bible were stories about the wholiness of existence.
They're not.
Yaweh (Jehovah) was only one of many local tribal gods worshipped in the ancient Levant. He was not known then as the source of the world. Yaweh was likely a “divine warrior”, which seems like a bad choice on which to build a peaceful, joy-filled existence. His worship has been and continues to be characterized by misogyny, patriarchy, violence, control and exclusion. Worst of all is the repeated separation and distancing of spirit from the physical world. The Judeo-Christian concept of “God” is wholly and completely separate and different from it’s Creation. However, the Abrahamic traditions are exceptional at judgement and fragmenting the world into good/bad, holy/unholy.
This is spiritual fuckery.
It's not real or true or based in any experiential understanding of being a spiritual being in a physical experience. Judeo-Christian traditions look and feel like the trauma stories of abused children.
Judeo-Christian beliefs and ideology of the world are part of what I am required to heal in myself in order to remember my wholeness and share it with the world.
We create the gods of this place.
We create the world and it's gods from our current understanding of the wholiness of existence. Our rules and laws are currently based on incomplete beliefs of existence and hold the power to determine what we allow to be true and real.
WE DO THIS.
The world is not as it is because “GOD” decreed it to be. It’s the way it is because WE believe incompletely.
We never need an intermediary to communicate with spirit.
(And then I immediately offer my services as an intermediary to communicate with Spirit. LOL!)
We don't need anyone or anything outside ourselves to tell us what "god" wants or what is right or good. Christianity has long been an authoritarian, hierarchical and oppressive institute at odds with personal freedom. It's a one-way dialogue from "god" to Church leaders on down the hierarchy, all in service to maintaining power and control of church beliefs over the populace.
I'm able to say now that Christianity and the Judeo-Christian bible are not, and have never been, a reliable or legitimate source of education about true spiritual freedom.
The King James version of the Bible is filled with the most misogynistic translations. King James was a misogynist himself and a likely homosexual. The early Catholic church was a haven for homosexuals and a fertile ground to build belief systems of male superiority embedded right into the Creation beliefs of our existence.
This is not an indictment of homosexuality.
This is an indictment of the misogyny that can flourish when femininity is despised.
There are no roles for women in Christianity, except as a mother... and a virgin mother at that. Not even divine mothers are allowed to enjoy the sexy times.
For one of the acquaintances that I mentioned earlier, I think the "all-in" identity with motherhood was a major draw to Christianity. The support for, reverence and identity as a mother in Christianity is likely a comfort and a satisfaction and mirrors her own personal fulfillment in the mother identity.
This may also be the foundation of her draw towards anti-abortion allegiance. Motherhood depends on birth, so personal freedom to abort should be controlled. This is all speculation - I just don't understand how anyone can justify the oppression of another's freedom based on their own identity.
The early church was concerned, not with sexuality, but with gender roles and enshrining by divine direction, an ascribed hierarchy of place, worth and value for all things in the world. This continues today in the moral hierarchy of the right.
Restrict Learning and Control the World
Restricting knowing and learning is the best way to prevent people (women in particular) from causing "problems" to the established Christian and societal hierarchies of worth. Prohibiting education and preventing the growth of our perspective cuts off our ability to access our full power and sovereignty. Without personal power and sovereignty, we lack the ground to demand the equity and freedom needed to pursue our lives as we see fit.
In ancient times, as today, the Judeo-Christian prohibition on accessing knowledge is not 'godly'. Restricting access to knowledge is a tactic to control what people know and believe. If we can control what people believe, we can make it easy to control and curb their movement and desire to change and grow.
Controlling ways of knowing so your community does not leave is an indictment of the inadequacy of your values, beliefs and freedoms.
The Judeo-Christian culty-shit that goes on in the world is a case in point. The Plymouth Brethren CC, the Duggars and the Happy Shiny People documentary, One of Us, Jesus Camp, Waco, Jonestown, Unorthodox... Google "religious trauma" and you'll find all kinds of sources to illustrate the harmful fall-out as a result of religious control of information and belief.
Christianity is based on the incarnation of god, so it's perfectly set up for a charismatic (narcissistic) leader to 'step in' to the Christ role and lead a community into bondage. These leaders rise by encouraging their own connection to “God” and denying the Christ source in all of their followers.
WE NEVER NEED AN INTERMEDIARY TO 'GOD'
Christ consciousness/god consciousness/wholiness/essence/ is in you, BECAUSE YOU EXIST.
Existence alone is all that is required to connect to, and communicate with, and be in communion with ALL OF CREATION.
Existence automatically makes you an authority on your spiritual self.
You just have to practice, learn, re-member and do the work to live from the source of your automatically sovereign essence.
Earth-based spiritual worship and direct spiritual knowing systems are reviled and denied because they are a threat to the continued lies about the universality of Judeo-Christian perceptions of Yahweh as the one and only god.
Call Earth-based knowing systems 'unholy' and 'demonic' so that none of your followers will believe them, or be tempted to investigate. Call direct spiritual knowing systems 'unholy' so that you can inoculate your community with fear, so that they will never, ever try to communicate directly with divinity themselves.
This was my experience.
My mom was and is scared of any talk about communicating with the "dead" or with Spirit or anything about the afterlife. My dad dismissed it all as "bullshit" with rancorous anger. My old Christadelphian bosses mocked me with derision that I was just 'hearing voices in my head' (suggesting that I was ‘defective’ and mentally ill). The Christadelphians in my life made it very clear that if they weren't good enough to communicate directly with 'god', than I certainly wasn't.
Presence prevails.
Spirit is the quiet guide that never fails. No amount of fear, doubt and rejection could keep me from coming back to learn directly from the feet of Beloved Presence in the world.
The Gnostics in early AD were Jewish and Christian believers in our ability to know truth directly and not be beholden to teachings, traditions and authority of religious institutions.
The Surprising Truth
Seers, calling on ancestors, oracles, wizards, witches, magi and soothsayers - are all forms of truth telling and wisdom - according to the actual Hebrew words used in the Bible. These gifts and ways of knowing, were maligned and demonized because they offer an avenue of truth that exposes the shortcomings and falsehoods of Yahweh. These gifts and ways of knowing were prohibited because it allows individual people to communicate directly with spirit / source / creation / god - on their own terms, in their own way, in acceptance of their spiritual selves.
Wizards and observers of time, oracles and witches are people who practice ways of knowing that cannot be controlled by the church or state. Earth-based worship and ways of knowing value you and your way and your magick as part of the wholiness of creation. No authority can control your direct communion with Spirit in physical form except through waging war on your sense of value, worth and belief in your quiet voice.
The 'powers that try and rule' can only pervert our power and connection to truth and spirit by trying to convince us it's bad and wrong and we're bad and wrong as a result. Shame has been used for thousands of years to maintain spiritual control.
The “Meonenims” are people of the plain of the great tree.
They are astrologers, soothsayers and they are 'observers of time'; astrologers and soothsayers and are warned against by the followers of Yahweh.
They sound like Indigenous people. Earth-based worship peoples. People like the Draoi, my own Celtic people, who worshipped trees as knowledge keepers and communed directly with Spirit. People who welcomed and lived their lives with Spirit right here, with us in all things, all the time.
Calling on and communicating with the unseen, the ancestors, and all of Creation is powerful and creates sovereignty. It is prohibited by Judeo-Christian traditions to keep us powerless and weak and disconnected from our ancient spiritual inheritance. It is intended to keep us outside of our own ground of existence as ancient spiritual beings expressing the soul of the Universe in the physical world.
That is literally what you are and you need no intermediary to commune with your ancient source.
The prohibition to speaking with Spirit and communing with ancestors is to establish fear of our own power and presence. It is intended to instill self-doubt in our own ability to communicate directly with Creation and doubt belief in the powerful and beautiful magick that They continuously offer.
Magick has always been direct knowledge and ways of knowing from Existence itself. It is a path of knowing that can never be controlled or taken away unless we believe that somehow we were separated from the wholiness in ourselves and separated from the wholiness in each other.
You will suffer the witches to live until you deal with the pain of your own buried jar of joy and magick.
Illustration by Maruti-Bitamin. Click image for website.
The most joyous, magickal part of my life, I kept sealed in a jar on a shelf in a closet in the basement.
The part of my life that knew and lived and experienced the world in ways of direct knowing and talking with the "dead" and the animals and the trees and the world. The part of me that knew and experienced the world as happening for me and for everyone else at the same time... I hid that away. I shut it down and locked it up because of the fear, ridicule, scorn, derision and danger that I received in response from people who had already hidden away their magick and were triggered by the expression of mine.
I never stopped connecting with the jar of joy and magick.
I never stopped opening it in the closet, in the dark. I never stopped sharing it with a very small handful of loving, safe people.
That's not enough.
It's not what you need or what the world needs.
What we keep secret stays unreal.
Our knowing and beliefs become real, and live and breath, and take form in the world when we share them with others and live them "out loud" in our own lives.
I am shocked and amazed that this little tiny jar of joy and shiny magick is now open and can be my whole life, if I’m willing. The jar is open now and the fear has been felt and and now the sharing can spread out as far as I want to share it.
Your jar of magick is the same.
Very few of us are living with our jars of joy and magic cracked open. Hiding them is what we think we need to keep safe and protect the most precious part of ourselves - the part that still knows how to live in wholiness and direct connection with spiritual expression of source on earth.
Our lack of trust in the world, and lack of trust in ourselves to share our experience of wholiness and be okay, and be safe, makes us lock it up and hide it from others... and from ourselves.
Assholes like Gary… lol.
You are safe.
I am safe.
We are safe.
People WILL disagree. There will always be assholes. People will critique and scorn and be derisive and dismissive and cruel... but the experience of living in wholiness is the most precious and eternal and only expands when it is shared.
As we dissolve the blocks to trusting in our essence and source and learn to connect and communicate directly with Creation, we learn that attacks against our spirit and wholiness... nothing really happens. When we stand in the centre of our wholiness nothing can really happen to us.
Nothing happens.
Outside reactions, responses and attacks don't mean anything, so we can turn our attention to the interesting question of why do you need to destroy or shut up or shut down the present experience of wholiness?
What hurts so much that you need to destroy the magick from being shared?
You want to kill the witch because she makes you remember your own magick.
You want to kill the witch because she reminds you your magick is locked up in a jar in the basement.
Your magick isn't ever subject to any outside authority.
Your magick is your birthright.
Your magick is your inheritance as a descendant of Creation and you can open your jar anytime you're willing.
Or would you rather do it yourself?
Christ consciousness is here and has never left. The “Return of Christ” story is a ruse by the Christian institution to keep us focused on the after life as a reward instead of doing the work to become closer to the Anam Mór on Earth. It is heaven here, we just keep not seeing it. Wake up. Let’s wake the fuck up.