Are we in a battle with the prevailing culture? Who’s hearts and minds do we need to win?
I’ve just finished reading ‘Truth or Dare- Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery’ by the Eco-Feminist Witch Starhawk.
She would maintain that there is a prevailing oppressive culture governed by an outmoded drive to maintain a constant readiness for war. A need to pay homage to a King as: Judge, Censor, Conqueror, Master of Servants, Orderer of the Universe.... “Each aspect carries with it an obsession with its own issues and a view of the self and the world. Each brandishes its own weapons and threats and makes its own particular offer, which presumably we cannot refuse. Each deludes us in its own way and each contains some positive value we must reclaim.”
From this perspective we are seen as subjects to serve the ruling, warring powers who have power-over us. However, our birthright as LGBTQ folk has afforded us a perspective which is able to see this for the nonsense it is. Our own personal drive to become the beings we truly are has enabled us to overcome adverse judgements, has empowered us to speak out when told to shut up. We rock the boat when warned that invaders are afoot. We are prepared to get above our station and we just don’t care when we’re told we just ‘aint natural. We are more comfortable away from structures of Power-over and embrace models respecting our own unique intrinsic power.
Power-over is threatened by Power-with and will oppress, restrict, suffocate, subdue, poison, weaken, threaten, intimidate any attempts to undermine it!
So how do we win out against a war hungry, subjugating culture hell bent on stripping its members of their immanent value? The answer, according to Starhawk, is not to go hearts-and-minds-pleading for it to give a little of its power back. The answer is to team together to reclaim our own personal power as natural creatures of this earth. To invoke the reality of the magick of focussed intention. This is guerrilla warfare with Cunts, Cocks and Guts!
Radial Faerie founding father, Harry Hay famously challenged the early gay civil rights pioneers who were clamoring for assimilation to ‘shed the ugly frog-skin of hetero-conformity’. They were busy pleading for the right to be free from persecution on the basis that they were just like everyone else apart from their sexuality. Ask yourself do you really want to join the queue to join this crazy mixed up society? The fact of our sexuality may be one of the few things we have in common with all those governed by this power-over system.
I don’t need to persuade anyone that I deserve my intrinsic power to be honored. I simply reclaim that power rooted in my own Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Faerie-Spirit. In my determination to be that which (Witch) I am to become.
Come on- let’s make some magick!
