I
was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy.--Paul Kingsnorth, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine
This is how
it goes in the West nowadays, the eclectic, mix-n-match, make-it-yourself
religion. We see it even in more
conventional circles: ‘I’m a Protestant
who reads Thomas Aquinas’, or ‘I’m a Roman Catholic who tolerates St Gregory
Palamas’.
Those who do
this sort of thing consider themselves very clever and open-minded, but none of
it is about surrendering to the Truth.
Particularly in the case of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, it is
about creating one’s own ‘truth’: In
Roman Catholicism, the Pope does this when he speaks infallibly ex cathedra. In Protestantism, this is accomplished via
the priesthood of the believer and their doctrine that the Holy Scriptures are
plainly understood by any Christian who reads them.
None of this
works out particularly well in history:
The only
place one will find the full, undistorted, catholic (in its proper sense) Truth
is in the Orthodox Church:
https://www.pravmir.com/how-does-god-guide-the-church/
Like Mr
Kingsnorth, it is time the weary West (including Dixie) came home.
And that
homecoming can’t come soon enough. Time
is running out for the South as the decrepit Roman Catholic and Protestant structure
crumbles (which it was fated to do, being sundered from the God-man and His
Grace-filled Body, the Orthodox Church) and new faiths rise to take its place,
even in the ‘Buckle of the Bible Belt’, Alabama:
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a bill to
allow public schools to offer yoga, ending a ban that stood for nearly 30
years. Christian conservatives who back the ban said yoga would open the door
for people to be converted to Hinduism.
--Bill Chappell, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999020140/its-now-legal-to-practice-yoga-in-alabamas-public-schools, via Drudge Report
I think the rise in people identifying as witches
might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you
the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself
a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority
— and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a
shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting
framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for
the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of
identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive,
amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes
even nothing.
. .
.
In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who
confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like
Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a
confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her
arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating
as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today
— at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in
contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least,
they say they do.
--Suzannah Lipscomb, https://unherd.com/2021/05/why-are-women-becoming-witches/, via Drudge Report
(bolding added)
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
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