Sources for Witchcraft: Walking & Kierkegaard

Needless Alley, Birmingham, 1953

I think I prefer sources 'for' to sources 'of', as better representing the act of using sources to create a witchcraft; 'of' seems to hijack those sources & apply a usually unsuitable witchcraft title to them. At some point I shall go through the blog applying this tag where I think it fits. It's been ages since I've debunked anything, so let's debunk the idea of the Peripatetic School of Greek philosophy first. Needless to say, this entry from Wikipedia is unreferenced, but all the sources I've been able to see clearly describe Aristotle teaching in the Lyceum, not walking about:

'The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece. Its teachings derived from its founder, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and Peripatetic is a name given to his followers. The school originally derived its name Peripatos from the peripatoi (περίπατοι "colonnades") of the Lyceum in Athens where the members met. A similar Greek word peripatetikos (Greek: περιπατητικός) refers to the act of walking, and as an adjective, "peripatetic" is often used to mean itinerant, wandering, meandering, or walking about. After Aristotle's death, a legend arose that he was a "peripatetic" lecturer – that he walked about as he taught – and the designation Peripatetikos came to replace the original Peripatos.' (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripatetic_school).

I begin with this because I want to draw parallels between the walking praxis of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who was deeply schooled in the ancient Greek philosphers, & is sometimes referred to as a peripatetic philosopher, & the philosophy of the hedge among modern witches. For us the hedge is a location of learning, encounter, magic, & transformation, & it appears our approach is not that different from that of Kierkegaard to Copenhagen in the nineteenth century:

'Kierkegaard's walking was a many-sided affair and had from the very first a communicational intention. The walks were both Socratic and Romantic-Ironic. They were the walks both of a philosopher prepared to engage any passer-by on some topic of mutual interest and of the free-floating, unengaged spirit as described by Friedrich Schlegel, unattached, passionless, committed to no cause, achieving no aim, and serenely indifferent to whatever might befall.' (Roger Poole: Kierkegaard - The Indirect Communication. University of Virginia Press, 1993, p.15)

I remember Kirkegaard from my theology student days as a rather dour, pietistic Christian philosopher, & so I am delighted to find much that is witch-like in him. I am of course aware that I am essentially hijacking someone who is absolutely not a witch for my purposes. Hey, that's what finding yourself in the hedge is all about: the inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. Perhaps the most witch-like thing about him is his desire not to set himself up as the great philosopher. He needed the daily contact with many different people that he got in what he called his 'people bath', that he got while walking the streets of Copenhagen, the streets that formed his 'hedge' in which he did his thinking before going home to write it all down. For one of his biographers the image of the streets become an (extremely witchy) metaphor for the thinking he did in them:

'The city is a metaphor for Kierkegaard's work as an author - changeable & disquieting - & it could take almost no time to move from the light-filled, elegantly neo-classical plazas to the cacophony of the dark alleys. So when Kierkegaard moved about the streets of Copenhagen, his strutting was connected with his writing, he was everywhere & nowhere, walking this way & that, conversing intimately with everyone, but at the same time distant & alien.' (Joakim Garff (translated by Bruce H Kirmmse): Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, pp. 316-7)

So for Kierkegaard his daily walk was both the source of & forum for his philosophy, exactly the role the hedge plays for hedge witchcraft. A further reason he walked was not to set himself up as a 'celebrity' - ironically his concept of aristocracy in this next quote is also incredibly witchy:

'Yes, of course I am an aristocrat (& so is everyone who is truly conscious of willing the Good, because they are always few in number), but I want to stand right on the street, in the midst of the people, where there is danger & opposition. I do not want [...] to live in cowardly & prissy fashion at an aristocratic remove, in select circles protected by an illusion (that the masses seldom see them [other philosophers he has named] & therefore imagine them to be Somebody).' (Cited in Garff, op cit, pp. 317-8)

Kierkegaard comes incredibly close to a magical notion of movement in the famous letter written to his niece in 1847:

'Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Even if one were to walk for ones health & it were always one station ahead - I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it - but by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health & salvation can be found only in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. And out in the country you have all the advantages; you do not risk being stopped before you are safe & happy outside your gate, nor do you run the risk of being intercepted on your way home. I remember exactly what happened to me a while ago & what has happened frequently since then. I had been walking for an hour & a half & had done a great deal of thinking,& with the help of motion I had really become a very agreeable person to myself. What bliss, &, as you may imagine, what care did I not take to bring my bliss home as safely as possible. Thus I hurry along, with downcast eyes I steal through the streets, so to speak; confident that I am entitled to the sidewalk, I do not consider it necessary to look about at all (for thereby one is so easily intercepted, just as one is looking about - in order to avoid) & thus hasten along the sidewalk with my bliss (for the ordinance forbidding one to carry anything on the sidewalk does not extend to bliss, which makes a person lighter)  - directly into a man who is always suffering from illness & who therefore with downcast eyes, defiant because of his illness, does not even think that he must look about when he is not entitled to the sidewalk. I was stopped. It was a quite exalted gentleman who now honoured me with conversation. Thus all was lost. After the conversation ended, there was only one thing left for me to do: instead of going home, to go walking again.' (Cited in Poole, op cit, pp 172-3)

In this letter Kierkegaard manages to cover so many matters of concern to witches: the place, high & low, single-mindedness. In fact Kierkegaard's notion of the nature of walking is not that far separated from the French idea of the flaneur, more recently also utilised in psychogeography:

'While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a "gentleman stroller of city streets",[8] he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.[9]

'In the period after the 1848 Revolution in France, during which the Empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of "order" and "morals", Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, "a botanist of the sidewalk".[8] David Harvey asserts that "Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of flâneur and dandy, a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other" (Paris: Capital of Modernity 14).

'The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through self-consciously outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur's active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.

'The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists such as Georg Simmel began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life", Simmel theorized that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a "blasé attitude", and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being... (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur)

Once again this draws on so many of the modern witch figure's roles. Just in case there is a source I haven't plundered yet in this post, walking has a more profound meaning in the world of magic, which again can be drawn upon to nourish a philosophy of hedgewitch walking, that of circumambulation. One of the things I love about witchcraft is the way it has a habit of leading you back to where you begin, & so the themes I find myself returning to continually in this blog are found here: the hedge, the circle, going round, embodiment, and so on. The witch's wanderings through the hedge interact with the hedge so that both the witch & the hedge are altered by the act of walking. I'm going to give the last word, on circumambulation, to Uncle Al:

'In Part II of this Book 4 it was assumed that the Magician went barefoot. This would imply his intention to make intimate contact with his Circle. But he may wear sandals, for the Ankh is a sandal-strap; it is born by the Egyptian Gods to signify their power of Going, that is their eternal energy. By shape the Ankh (or Crux Ansata) suggests the formula by which this going is effected in actual practice.

'This has a very definite result, but one which is very difficult to describe. An analogy is the dynamo. 'Circumambulation properly performed in combination with the Sign of Horus (or "The Enterer") on passing the East is one of the best methods of arousing the macrocosmic force in the Circle. It should never be omitted unless there be some special reason against it.

'A particular tread seems appropriate to it. This tread should be light and stealthy, almost furtive, and yet very purposeful. It is the pace of the tiger who stalks the deer. The number of circumambulations should of course correspond to the nature of the ceremony.' (Magick in Theory & Practice, Book 4, Chapter 10. http://hermetic.com/crowley/book-4/chap10.html)

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