PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Somehow, Bridgerton reminds me of a blown-out Ostara egg.

Pretty on the outside, but that's all you get.

It's no exaggeration to categorize the Netflix period costume-drama Bridgerton, set in an ethnically diverse early 19th century Britain-that-never-was, as a fantasy series. At heart, it's a Mating Game drag show—how many fabulous costumes will our heroine get to swan around in this episode?—but, of course, lacking the poignant self-satire that gives real drag its pungency.

Women in female drag. Now there's a concept.

In Bridgerton, we enter into a world entirely matriarchal, with (basically) an all-female cast. Yes, there are a few nominal male characters, virtually all of them pretty prizes for the scheming central characters, without interior life of their own. (That they're beautiful and occasionally take their clothes off provides only limited consolation.) If this seems due payback for all those decades of hero-centric TV with its pretty-but-empty female trophies, unfortunately, in the end, one is just as boring as the other. Revenge nearly always makes for better fantasy than reality.

At very least, Bridgerton manages to avoid the all-too-predictable Masterpiece Theater trope, in which the lowah closses (= servants) are always good for a loff. (I'll include here Julian Fellowes' current Gilded Age, basically an English costume-drama in American drag.) Here, the dramatis personae are all Persons of Privilege, and working folk—amusing though they be—stay duly in the background, where they belong.

Although I don't doubt that eventually we'll be seeing the more-or-less obligatory Christmas episode, one advantage for the pagan viewer is that this is a thoroughly secular fantasy, in which religion—Christian or otherwise—plays virtually no part at all. As I said, this isn't a period piece, it's 21^st century in drag.

What redeems Bridgerton is its unabashed let's-pretend ethnic romp. What if early 19th-century Britain were as ethnically diverse as contemporary Britain? What would it be like to live in a multiracial society utterly lacking in racism? In that sense, having laid aside even the slightest pretension to historical accuracy, the series offers the viewer a breath of fresh air.

Alas, Bridgerton's ethnic diversity is as far as it goes. Predictably, its lack of non-cardboardy male characters puts any sort of gay interest beyond the pale. (Unlike real matriarchies, there isn't even any lesbianism.) Sorry, Netflix, if you think that your gay audience is going to content itself forever with identifying with female characters while salivating over all those firm young male bodies, I've got some bad news for you.

In the dark days following 9/11, I heard numerous voices of condemnation raised from within the Muslim community: That isn't real Islam.

As a non-Muslim outsider looking in, I have to say that personally, I found (and find, since they continue to be raised after every subsequent atrocity) such responses disingenuous at best, self-serving at worst, but ultimately unsatisfying, and possibly even dishonest. Worst of all, such a response doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Who, after all, gets to decide just what is, and what isn't, real Islam?

As a outsider looking in, it sure looks to me as if the Islams of the world constitute a continuum. Some are inherently violent, some aren't. As a pagan outsider looking in, it seems to me that the most honest statement that, under the circumstances, one can make is: This is not my Islam.

I find that I respond similarly to discussions of racism in contemporary Heathendom. Who decides just what is and what isn't real heathenry?

(As to whether or not I can claim either insider or outsider status here, you'll have to decide for yourself. Of the Tribe of Witches, we're wont to say: We're too witchy for the heathens, too heathen for the witches. Straddling the hedge, of course, is fine old Witch tradition.)

Who owns the past? As pagans, I think that we often feel a sense of entitlement when it comes to the past: that, because of our love for it, the past somehow belongs to us in ways that it doesn't belong to others. In this, of course, we deceive ourselves. The past belongs equally to us all.

When we moved into this neighborhood some 35 years ago, it was dying. The storefronts on Lake Street were mostly boarded up.

Call it the American miracle. Immigration from Mexico, Central and South America, and Somalia turned this neighborhood around. Little ethnic mom-pop shops resurrected Lake Street.

Now every single one of those businesses is gone. Over the course of the past four nights, I have watched my neighborhood be systematically dismantled around me.

Last night it was the white kids' turn.

Hundreds of angry white kids—let me be nasty and say trust-fund anarchists from the suburbs—defied the governor's curfew orders and marched through a largely ethnic and immigrant neighborhood already traumatized by three nights of fires and looting.

I live just a few hundred feet from the epicenter of last night's destruction. More buildings and businesses—virtually all of them Latino-owned—were pillaged and torched. Four of them are still burning as I write this.

Truly, a mob is an organism with many legs and no brain.

“Why don't these kids all go back to the suburbs and leave us alone?” my next-door neighbor said to me as we stood on the sidewalk and watched the noisy march. Penny, who's African-American, is the block matriarch; she's lived here longer than anyone else.

If it weren't for the violence that accompanied it, it all would have been kind of funny. The whole thing had a defiance-for-the-sake-of-defiance “I'm not going to bed and Mommy/Daddy can't make me” feel to it.

Eventually, of course, the trust-fund anarchists went back to their apartments in other (quiet) neighborhoods, leaving behind them more burning buildings and more mayhem in a neighborhood already traumatized by its own destruction.

I have not the slightest doubt that the vast majority of those folks last night honestly want justice for George Floyd (1974-2002), an African-American man brutally murdered on Memorial Day by a white policeman only blocks from here. Believe me, so does everybody in this neighborhood.

Resources for the disambiguation of Heathen symbols vs. hate symbols. TW: discussion of racism

This is a resources and links page for how to tell the difference between a religious symbol being used by heathens and a hate symbol being used by neonazis or white supremacists. There are several different symbol guides linked from this page. Using the various symbol guides requires more than looking up a suspect symbol; it also requires taking context into account. For example, once while screening applications I ran across the version of Othala with wolves attached to the lower legs of the symbol. The first time I saw this symbol, I wondered: is it the footed Othala used by Nazis or is it just the regular Othala but with wolves? I used a reverse image search (the Chrome extension) to find the origin of the symbol, and found the page of the artist who designed it. The page had many pagan and heathen artworks, none of which looked like neonazi or white supremacist symbols. The artist's statement on his website was an unobjectionable, pretty standard pagan statement. I concluded the Othala-with-wolves symbol's resemblance to the footed Othala was just a coincidence. The context provided by the artist's other artworks and artist statement helped me interpret that image.

Alas, ill news in Pagandom.

To judge from his social media presence, it would seem that Holden Matthews—the domestic terrorist who recently torched three predominantly-black churches in Louisiana—is pagan, apparently of some folkish heathen variety.

If that doesn't make you angry, it should.

If that doesn't make you feel ashamed, it should.

Here are some entirely inadequate responses:

He's not a pagan/heathen.

That's not real paganism/heathenism.

[It doesn't involve me because] I'm pagan, not heathen.

[It doesn't involve me because] I'm heathen, but not folkish.

[It doesn't involve me because] I'm folkish, but not racist.

Who Matthews is in his own heart, we do not know. But we can be certain that refusal to take ownership of problems in our own community achieves nothing.

Some better responses:

Well, well. The mills of the gods may grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.

The political future of Governor Blackface of Virginia now lies in the hands (O happy irony) of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus.

Of course, I don't get a vote here. But if I did, here's what I would be tempted to say.

Dear Governor Blackface:

Your callous actions in the 1980s were despicable in their casual racism, and you are right to be ashamed of them.

We take you at your word that you regret your actions. For this reason we will continue to work with you as governor, to make the best decisions that we can for the people of Virginia.

Please be aware, however, that as we do so, we will be watching you closely.

Extremely closely.

Yours most sincerely, etc.

Then, of course, he'll owe them bigtime.

This is the final in my series on racism in Paganism. It is devoted to resources we can use to educate and challenge ourselves with the long-term results of having a multiracial Pagan movement where all feel welcome.

---