The problem is, the spotlights inside us have been switched on throughout our lives, and the outside world today is full of noise at an unprecedented level. After spending a day on social media, email, messaging apps, even when we switch off our physical devices (assuming we do so at all), their ghostly presence remains in our mind. The feeling of hardened glass lingers on our fingertips, and the last thing we see in our mind’s eye before falling asleep is not a kindly old teacher of magic, but a white F on a blue background.
The magical insurgents discovered early on that they couldn’t wish reality away: Victorian London, with its smoke and clangour and stink, was there, indisputably real, whether they liked it or not. Changing gear required more than a decision; it required a conscious effort. We are in the same position. To find shadows and silence, so as to let the numinous stir within us, we need to make shadows and silence anew. The technique the insurgents developed to do that is called ritual.
Wicca has no set belief, no promises about the afterlife. Practice matters, whereas faith does not. You can think what you want about the ultimate nature of gods and spirits, or the fate of your soul after death; but when a ritual with your coven is in the calendar, you have to show up. ‘Like a musician keeps time with a metronome,’ Christina said, ‘we do that with rituals. Come hell or high water, whether the timing is convenient or inconvenient, we show up. The aim of a ritual is to put you in a space where your inner door to mysteries can open. What happens in rituals is beautiful, poetic, candlelit, always familiar but always unknown.’
Witches meet in the woods, or in private spaces, and they ‘close up the outside world’. Wherever they are, they make sure they are not going to be interrupted or disturbed. They need to be fully engaged with what they are doing, in body and mind, and the smallest of distractions could break the spell (it’s tricky opening an inner door if you’re worried you are going to bump into someone walking their dog).
Rituals are held in a circle, which is ‘the shape that we form around the campfire’, the oldest way in which humans come together. Without giving me any specifics, Christina said that during a ritual ‘we dance, we sing, we speak words of praise and poetry. We drum, we have moments of ecstasy and moments of stillness, engaging all senses. The exact details of what we do are not very old, but all the important components you find in tribal initiatory traditions from Sumatra to northern Liberia, to the Inuit. Look for the circle, look for the drum, look for the calling of the spirits, look for what in that language is considered the most beautiful poetry, look for the moments of ecstasy, look for the moments of stillness, look for the experts who have gone through a secret initiation.’
Secrecy is important: rituals are like Las Vegas, and what happens there, stays there. ‘Things that happen in the private sphere,’ Christina said as we were leaving, ‘have a lovely intimacy about them. They live in the same place of remembered dreams, things that are not out there to be debated and discussed. They live in the place of our mythic self, where the doors are switched open to the realms of the gods.’ Those are the last words in the interview; we said goodbye, and went our own ways.
Christina’s words made me think of those famous lines of John Milton: ‘the mind is its own place and in itself / can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven’. Wiccans seem to think along similar lines, and though they do not believe in Heaven and Hell as such, they work to make their mind a different place: a mythical wilderness where gods still walk.
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To learn the tricks of their trade, we need to make one more move and realize that mythical does not mean fake. A myth is a different sort of truth, as the ancient Greeks were aware. For them, there were two ways of understanding the world and our place in it. One was called logos, and it was about logic and clear-mindedness – about shedding light, if you like. It was about asking well-defined questions in the search for well-defined answers, and then trying to understand whether the answers were correct. In time, this way of thinking would give birth to modern science.
But there was also a second way, which has been all but forgotten in the West. It was called mythos, and it was about ambiguous feelings and personal meanings that couldn’t be explained, only more or less pointed at – it was about shadows. It was celebrated by priests and aedi, the Greek bards, and was prominent at mystery rituals. It involved tales of gods and heroes and sacred performance, it was about art, poetry and, of course, mystery. Logos formulates theories, mythos tells stories.
If logos is the reassuring, competent parent who has a law degree and helps you to find a good, well-paid job with prospects, mythos is the unreliable uncle who shows you how to break the ice with girls. Logos is there to help you understand objective truths, mythos is there to help you deal with those parts of your life that will always remain profoundly mysterious. Logos is the map you use to find your way in the woods, mythos is the lines of poetry that inspired you to walk in those woods in the first place. Logos is not boring and mythos is not fanciful. For a full life, you need both. Otherwise you’re going to get lost in the woods; or you’re not even going to bother to visit them.
When Christina mentions her mythical life and her mythical self, she is not referring to ‘unreal’ things, but rather, to things that are real in a mythos kind of way. She refuses debate because debating her spiritual life would be both wrong and pointless. Debate, with its coherent arguments and counter-arguments, is how you abandon mythos and slip into logos.
The secret to a healthy inner life is balance. Today we insult mythos by making it synonymous with ‘fake’. Even those who defend positions that are scientifically indefensible – say, that we shouldn’t vaccinate our children – appeal to logos, in a far-fetched way. Religious fundamentalists appeal to a logos-based view of their faith,8 in which stories must be considered literally true – because the only other option would be to consider them utterly fake. No one wants to be tainted with the accusation of being in the thrall of naive, filthy mythos.
Over and over again we are told that logos (for the smart and the well-adjusted) is wholesome and useful, while mythos (for deluded hippies) is pointless at best and more often harmful. But that is like saying that, because you look good in the elegant tailor-made suit you go to work in, you should wear it all the time – when you go to sleep, when you go to the gym, and even when you go for a swim. Sounds uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Applying logos to our whole life is likewise uncomfortable. We need to recreate within ourselves a bridge towards mythos.
We can do that through ritual.
Ritual focuses on words and actions that are meaningful rather than useful. It gives us a context in which what we say and what we do resonates with larger truths about what we wish for and what we fear – truths we cannot fully articulate in a clean, logical way. It gives us a way to think with our body, to think with our friends, to think with our dreams. It nurtures our most creative intuitions.