Whose Witchcraft?

Surely it will come as no surprise that I love the films directed by Pete Walker which star the wonderful Sheila Keith, an incredibly versatile old lady who had no qualms about playing a cannibalistic tarot reader in Frightmare. I have been watching House of Whipcord, with rather mixed effects. Speaking as a raging homosexual, a film set in a women's prison is never going to be sexy for me personally. However I suspect that House of Whipcord is intended to be sexy in the same way Hostel starts off sexy before the film deliberately makes it all wrong by having people's faces being blowtorched. This is a totally deliberate thing to make you feel all wrong, uncomfortable and slightly guilty.

But in the case of House of Whipcord, frankly seeing the girls getting whipped - I'm very aware that this is somebody else's sexual fantasy I am watching.

I am also following a man on Instagram who is hot stuff, and a witch, and definitely gay.

So why is he celebrating a very heterosexual God and Goddess, fertility, Wicca type witchcraft which is almost completely gleaned from other people, both books and I think he has had some direct teachers? It's like watching someone watching someone else's sexual fantasy which you know is not his. It's absolutely bizarre, in my eyes at least totally inauthentic and if he didn't have an intriguing patch of hair in a certain place I would be unfollowing post haste.

And yet despite this he still manages to keep an authentic sense of place. I think he is from the Black Country and I think lives in the Staffordshire country to the north of here, and local life and folklore totally gets an input into his witching.

Now you may very reasonably say, Hound, you arrogant bastard, who are you to say what is authentic to anyone else? And of course that's the point. It strikes me that he is using a different combination of the ingredients common to all modern witchcrafts from my own combination.

There are two different poles for how you get witchcraft. One is you are given it by someone else. This is obviously the initiatory traditions like Gardnerians, and their source for it is previous initiatory magical orders and Freemasonry. This tradition is also represented by the tradition Leland mentions that you have to give the magic to someone else before you can die. He tells the story of a witch who gave the power to a priest just for the craic.

The other tradition is the one where you go off into the woods (or into an underpass in my case - never underestimate the magical powers of a 1960s underpass) and teach yourself, make it up, or learn it from the entities you meet on the journey. There is much interchange between these two poles of course.

'There is no room for homosexuals in the Craft,' Gardner used to say. Of course this was because he liked nude young women and 'the great rite' and he can kiss my arse. My humble opinion is that if you ape someone else's witchcraft it will never truly be authentic. The way I keep comparing witchcraft to sex is totally deliberate - not just because it pretty much is sex - but the illustration holds perfectly. If you try to live someone else's sex life you're at best on a hiding to nothing - it must be yours and that is why Know Yourself is such a major magical thing.

Besides, the Goddess doesn't want sheep, that's a different thing completely.

I suppose the point I'm really getting at is you can't do somebody else's sexual fantasy or witchcraft and as you can see I have expressed my mystification but haven't actually gone so far as to act when someone else's witchcraft is in clear opposition to their expressed sexual interests!