this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2021
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Witchcraft

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Their Dreamwidth states "My gender identity is coward", so I'm gonna use they/them for the author here.

There's a lot here. I love, love, love efforts to sever an elemental way of thinking from its gendered history, and the Sun/Moon/Star page gives a lot of that.

There's one aspect that tangled up my brain. From the Key Ideas page:

Landcrafting is: [...]

  • A mystery tradition - we draw our myths from publically available texts, but find our power in meditation, speaking with the spirits, dreaming, and other private practices. We maintain our tradition by Staying Silent about key aspects of our work.
  • Open-source, decentralised, and anti-authoritarian. We don't have leaders, hierarchies, or holy books; everyone is welcome to participate, and develop their own thing from what is written on this website.

I think this gets at what I find unsatisfying about Internet witchcraft/occultism writ broad. I don't think it is possible to be both a mystery tradition and open-source. (What they're saying here is probably valid rephrased to "A tradition of mysticism") There is something in mystery traditions that is inextricably bound to the social relations along which knowledge is passed. These social relations have historically been thicker than the relation of publisher and audience.

I suppose heavily coded/symbolic means of expression create an alternative to social relations as the functional limits of information distribution that define a mystery tradition. The alchemist who renders her notes unreadable except to the studied adept is not in discourse with the adept, not necessarily socially relating with him; she relies on prerequisite knowledge to suss out who should be given her insights. (Something something and that's why critical theory is unreadable something something.)

All the way over on the other hand, I'm very curious to think what an open-source witchcraft tradition on the internet could look like. The sacred text shall be a wiki... and the edit wars as fierce as any Nicene skirmish.

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