Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 35: Mirth and Reverence

These, the last of the four pairs of Wiccan virtues, have strangely given me the most trouble.
I feel the reason for that may be our English-speaking puritanical Cartesian dualist history: I feel that, say, an Italian with a longer Catholic history would find it easier to equate these two. In Britain we are far too used to a solemn joyless religion, ruthlessly segregated from the rest of life. It is not for nothing that a high proportion of witches are ex-Catholic: the ritual and philosophical mindset imbued by authentic Catholic teaching, as opposed to the Jansenist caricature which made its way to a lot of English-speaking countries via Irish emigration, create a much more 'humane' mindset.
It is remarkable that while our modern movement was created in its early days by people with few pretensions to intellectual rigour misusing sources which have largely been discredited, yet when you look around for a philosophical basis for the things we do, you can usually find one in the strangest places.
So many aspects of Wicca and Witchcraft have been born in the cauldron of a deliberate self-differentiation from the surrounding culture, that this in itself may be the explanation for finding underlying philosophy where you least expect it. The people who stirred up the ingredients of modern withcraft were following their own bliss, & may have been unaware that the philosophically-minded had thought this out before.
The strange place to find a philosophy underlying our mirth & reverence is once again St Thomas Aquinas:
'As St. Thomas makes clear in his discussion of the virtue of eutrapalia or "wittiness," laughter can be outright sinful if it occurs in inappropriate circumstances. To laugh at certain moments would be unfitting and even insulting. Such a moment would be one in which the situation or the company demand a serious and meditative atmosphere. To laugh is in some way to "let yourself go," there are certain persons and situations before whom we ought not "let ourselves go." In this way, we avoid, as St. Thomas says, "losing the balance of one's mind altogether."1 So how can we refer, then, to laughter as an "infinite" affirmation? Moreover, why can laughter be seen as a verification of the Thomistic understanding of reality? In order to adequately answer these questions, we must first notice an essential feature of laughter. When a man is overcome with honest laughter, his laughter is always spontaneous. Laughter which is calculated and prejudged is not true laughter, it is especially not that "abandon" which we call hilarity. The reason why laughter is always spontaneous is that it is a consequence of the unexpected. The reason we know laughter is always a reaction to the unexpected is because man, being rational and, therefore, a fashioner of words, reacts to wit without words; he is "taken from himself" before he can perform his normal function of tying concepts to words. The person who immediately tells you "why" something is humorous, did not get it.
'There is something which is exceedingly interesting in this fact that laughter is a wordless response to a concept presented to our minds by wit. In a certain way, laughter is a product of supra-rational insight. It is based upon a reason beyond reason. Laughter speaks not of the plodding intelligence which the Medieval philosophers spoke of as ratio, but rather, of that immediate intuition which grasps the innermost core of a reality with a mere "glance," and which the same Medievals spoke of as intellectus. To laugh is to see and acknowledge the way things are, whether one wants to or not. Laughter often forces one to see what one, often, does not want to see. It is our guarantee that objectivity cannot be completely abandoned.
'What is it about laughter which makes it a guarantor of objectivity? It is, precisely, laughter's suprarational status which makes it such. It is no secret that in our own times, rather than think ideas which have been garnered from the structure of created reality, men, for the purpose of maintaining their autonomy, fabricate ideas and concepts which have no natural referent; "equality," "self-definition," and "gender neutral" are a few of these. These and other such contemporary concepts create a mental screen which sifts out those aspects of reality which contemporary men and women will not accept. With these concepts acting as a screen, we can truthfully state that these people do not "see" reality for what it is; for most of our contemporaries, the real has become "unthinkable."' (Source: http://lifeissues.net/writers/cho/cho_05humor.html)
That said, once again Thomas Aquinas's idea is slightly twisted: if laughter is the guarantor of spontaneity, of something outside us, then for we witches, it pairs up with reverence as the guarantor of the living Goddess amongst us, in everything yet also possible to differentiate from everything. Our mirth is what ensures we know the Goddess is in us: mirth is reverence for us, so they are not contrary or even polar opposites, one invokes the other.
It is interesting that while these two virtues were the ones added to the Charge by, presumably, Valiente during her attempt to rid the Charge of as much Crowleyanity as she could, they speak so much to the religion of Crowley. It may be that they were suggested to Valiente in her reading of Crowley, since she says that she recognised the Crowley origin of much of the Charge because of having spent 'years' studying these things. The analysis of the text which is to follow will make clear how she almost eliminated the Crowley material for the verse version, only to end up putting much of it back in for the final version, & it seems that she wound up inserting a Crowleyanity that wasn't there to start off with! His new religion of the new age where there is no slavery and we are free joyfully to pursue our Will is an idea which runs through Wicca at all points.
Similarly Crowley is the idea that if we have a message of hope for the world is this: religion can be like this. It can be joyful without guilt, with personal responsibility and without blame. While we shy away from Crowley's idea of the law being for all, I do feel that we have put out there the fact that religion can be *fun*. In fact, if you didn't know better, you could think that the whole modern phenomenon of Wicca & witchcraft was some huge joke, fabricated on an almost totally fictional base. This mirth/reverence continuum implies the childlike mind that is necessary to magic: if I make believe hard enough it'll happen, & it'll be fun!
Can you hear two old men chuckling?
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