Weird Sisters

I feel like I have blogged about this before. But as it is a recurring theme in my head, it might as well recur here.

I was meditating peacefully in one of the holiest places on earth when it occurred to me again (because my brain has to be trained and slowly stroked into peacefulness, and it doesn't always work just before a new semester) that if I had managed to have a similar life back then, I would absolutely 100% have been burned as a witch in the middle ages.

Frankly, it didn't take much. Unprotected women were the easiest targets (though as far as I can tell, men were also targeted). That meant poor widows, older single adults, the literate, and basically anyone who could inspire suspicion, fear, jealousy, or dislike. That's me all over the place. I'm not procreating, and therefore serve no useful purpose in the community. It's not that I'm grumpy, necessarily. Even married women get grumpy. It's that I don't have a gift for allaying suspicion. It is a challenge for me to lay out the workings of my brain in a way that other people can understand. My priorities and motivations are self-determined, and I rely heavily on instinct. Can you imagine a better recipe for accusations of witchcraft? I mean BESIDES sleeping with everybody's husbands, which isn't really my ouvre. Really, though, they'd just have to suspect it. It doesn't have to be real.

I'm less frightened of being a witch in Terry Pratchett's head. Unlike the Harry Potter universe, witchcraft on the Discworld wasn't necessarily an inborn skill (like sourcery is), but a vocation that requires training. They perform a lot of mundane chores that can include everything from birthing babies, tending to the ill and elderly, and simply being willing to stare down Death. A lot of witching in that world is just being willing to do what others won't when the stakes are high. There, I'm not sure I qualify.

Granny Weatherwax uses what she calls "headology" which is somewhere between manipulation, psychology, and telepathy.

The Discworld witchcraft is based on two skills: first sight, and second thoughts. First Sight is the ability to see what's actually there. It can include communicating with things people can't usually communicate with (like ghosts, inanimate objects, etc.), and it also includes the ability to see people as they really are, not just as what they want you to see. You can see how a skill like that might get you burned. To survive, a witch would also have to be able to selectively allow people their illusions. That's not a skill I have.

Second thoughts are simply thoughts functioning on a meta-level. Thoughts about thinking. Once you've arrived at that third dimension of thought, you can think about thinking through several different levels, or allow the levels to communicate with each-other. You have become aware of the product of thoughts, you can self-criticize, and you can begin manipulating your own and others perception. You can think laterally and divergently. It offers a degree of independence, because you no longer need someone else to show you how you are thinking wrong.

I admire Discworld witches. I think they have a lot in common with the real women I admire here, too: women who work hard in the service of others, who have broadened their values to include the marginalized, and who think about how they are thinking to try and work to control it. These women might not be beautiful, or fully integrated socially, but they are powerful.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High and Low Horses

 I have not blogged in a LONG TIME and I'm so rusty.  Politics these days, amirite? My little brother pissed me off a few weeks ago in the throes of a political kerfuffle (not reasoned enough to be an argument by either definition). He accused me of posing - I don't remember exactly what he called it, but it was something like "virtue signaling." And very, very rapidly, I was trapped. I could not even attempt to do the right thing without knowing that I was doing exactly what he had just sneered at. I suppose I could go back and carefully analyze the rhetoric of the conversation and delicately unravel exactly what was happening. I am capable of that kind of analysis, but this is a blog, not a school paper, and I'm more interested in the abstractions at play. I'm always more interested in the abstractions. Let's imagine that you have a stick figure in a two-dimensional world. I'd draw it and upload it for you, but somebody stole my reMarkable. Stick fig...
Read more

The Species of my Faith Tree

Image
 Last week I wrote about the space that faith fills in the epistemology of the gospel: specifically that it extends beyond the known, but can be felt and experienced as a sensation as if something is growing inside us. I reiterated and complicated Alma's description of how to tell when a seed is good, and when we should keep watering it. As a metaphor, planting "the word" as a seed is extremely helpful for those who are new to the idea of faith, and those of us who have begun taking it for granted. And yet I find that there is more to say. What exactly is this thing whose tentacles/branches/nerve cells want to invade every part of me? Must I let it grow before I know? What is the nature of the growth? Is it a cancer? A parasite? A symbiote? How much of it is me, and how much of it is not me? Will I birth it like a child, or absorb it into my cells like a protein nutrient? Maybe. . . Maybe a better metaphor is gut biome - it's a thing that biologists haven't quite ...
Read more

The Love-Doctrine Tightrope

Image
 LDS news is abuzz with Elder Holland's address to BYU faculty last week. His comments about gay students was particularly concerning, especially when he lamented how few people were willing to wield a "musket" in defense of eternal marriage doctrine (which doctrine is exclusively heterosexual when it is not a polygynous variation thereof). Perhaps a blunderbuss might have been a more apt weapon. War imagery has always been problematic in religious discussion specifically because humans are the WORST at correctly identifying an enemy. We can't do it. A religious person wielding any kind of projectile weaponry is guaranteed to injure someone they should be protecting. If I may generalize dangerously for a moment, I think that our problem is that in defense of "doctrine" we end up fighting people, and people are never the enemy, no matter what ideas they espouse, and no matter how militant we feel they are.  Some "people are enemies" confusion even c...
Read more