The illustration to this post has set me thinking about certainty, doubt, authority & questioning, from a Witch point of view. You see, the phrase 'question everything' makes me uncomfortable since nobody ever actually questions everything, everybody actually always has some certainty, or at least theory on which to build. The sarcastic example here, of course, would be to comment that the person who sprayed that graffito obviously didn't question his or her right to deface a public place with an inane comment!
'Question', in this context, I suppose is therefore a criticism of some kind of authority. The implication is 'Don't believe everything you're told', which is different from not believing anything. At its extreme it leads to an excessive dualism where nothing is real - dangerous when taken to where Christian Science takes it, although they merely deny the reality of the 'physical' & accept the reality of the 'spiritual'.
From a Witch point of view we have an embarrassing relationship with evidence for our position, namely that there isn't any. We also end up red-faced in the search for authority for our position: attempts to find an authority - usually founded on an invented or mistaken history - leave us without an authority. My personal opinion is that since Witchcraft as a modern religion has always been created in conscious opposition to virtually everything conventional religion stands for, we might as well continue this & take the position that we do not need an authority for our Witchcraft.
This also draws nicely on another element of the Witch figure, that of the outsider onto whom people project everything that they don't want, making us these anti-authority figures. I mean, these same people are quick enough to turn to us as an authority when they need some magic!
It is, of course, essential to examine our own presuppositions & the basis on which we pin our certainties. This is in a great magical tradition of the necessity of knowing yourself, since it's the magicians who have some unacknowledged interior stuff going on that tend to come unstuck. I do love the story of the chaos magician who did a paradigm shift to that of a fundamentalist Christian & has been one ever since.
Which brings me nicely to the question of 'everything' - it is actually humanly impossible to doubt everything at once, since you really would go off your head. Perhaps a better word would be 'examine', & this is another activity that can bring magical people into trouble, if they neglect it when necessary. My anecdote for that is the famous one of Tanya Luhrmann, who was completely upfront that she was seeking admission to Gerald Gardner's original coven for the purpose of research. She comments in her book on the perceptive shift she found happening in herself, by which she became less questioning & more inclined to interpret things as caused by magical agency.
I personally don't have a problem with this idea, since in magic the principle of 'It is so because I say it is so' is so often the turning point to the free exercise of the Will which causes real change to occur. I'm sure she would hate this idea, but she actually cast her spell on the coven. I have limited sympathy for the coven's feeling of betrayal when she published the inner workings of the coven: she was upfront about what she was doing, but she describes them forgetting this. Their failure to examine what was happening caused the 'betrayal': they should either have refused her admission or come to some other relationship of limited exposure with her.
In true Witch fashion I have come full circle back to where I was at the start, the nature of questioning, the need to do it, & what everything can mean. Also in true Witch fashion I don't feel inhibited from tackling these truly monumental questions in a single blog post!
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