The tao of the Witch

The late Doreen Valiente thought that Taoism was the Eastern equivalent of witchcraft.  I happen to agree with her.  It casts witchcraft in an interesting light, though; so many people see it as “not quite a religion”, and as a vaguely occult path which is obsessed with herbs, spells and divination.

Taoism, via the I Ching, offers a very powerful divinatory system, of course, but it’s much wider than that.  If I were to venture an opinion on how Taoism differs from its offspring, Zen Buddhism, it would be to say that Taoism is more implicitly accepting of the duality inherent in life and the resulting cycles in nature.

Zen focuses on meditation and enlightenment, and nothing else.  It is about emptiness.  Taoism, I think, embraces that emptiness (and I mean emptiness in the Buddhist sense of no-self, of inner void and tranquillity), but is far more accepting of the processes of life.  The universe brings particles into being in pairs; a proton and an anti-proton, for example, and they annihilate in pairs and form other particles, and so matter and energy come into being and play.  And eventually worlds form, and so do birds, trees, people, in a vast array of patterns, colours, shapes and varieties. 

The Hindus call this Lila, the play of the gods.  William Blake, the poet who was also reportedly a Druid Grand Master,  said “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” The infinite plays by making finite patterns, of which we are only one.

Understanding that may give us a view of witchcraft as a spiritual path, one which is in harmony with Nature, which understands the ultimate non-duality of things and yet embraces the Universe as divine and feminine, and experiences the unity underlying things.  (And this is what this site is going to try to portray.)

This may give us an antidote to a society which, after a few years of vibrant feminist activism, seems to be sinking into an increasingly ugly misogyny and tolerance of patriarchy, as well as a narcissistic and poisonous focus on the individual which, I’m sorry to say, seems to be aided and abetted by New Age spirituality, which is becoming increasingly vapid and irrelevant; a form of Spirituality Lite for a generation which has abandoned compassion and community in favour of instant gratification, and technology instead of real communication (I plead guilty here; I do love my gadgets!) 

It’s an antidote which is badly needed in a world which seems determined to rush to its own destruction.

Mystical traditions in almost all religions have emphasised the need to let go of ego.  In Christianity this has often been misinterpreted as some sort of grovelling humility; in other religions as what the catholics would call the sin of excessive self-mortification; but it is perhaps best expressed as simply letting go of self-importance and a grim clutching to personal identity, destiny and individuality.

If we experience little glimpses of the inner space that comes with non-ego, we realise that ego is a burden and that putting it down is a relief.  Questions of afterlife and reincarnation then seem ridiculous; who would want an afterlife as themselves when they could just dissolve into everything?  It’s like staying in a stuffy woollen suit on a hot day when you could just strip off and dive into a cool pond of water.

And so perhaps the tao of the Witch is to learn to dance on the cusp of the void, on the crystalline pinpoint, to play with the edge of enlightenment without dissolving fully.  And to love Nature.