Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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Witch's Honor

 

 

“Witches honor,” says my friend, holding up her fingers in a V in front of her face.

She was grinning as she said this. I too laughed, as she'd intended; but I also took her at her word.

One of the sillier aspects of the 60s sit-com Bewitched—which is saying quite a bit—was the “Witch's Honor” sign, here demonstrated by the incomparable Agnes Moorehead, who played Samantha's mother Endora in the series.

(Any Boomer Era witch who tries to tell you that her decision to embrace the Craft was unaffected by watching the jet-setting witches of Bewitched as a child would be lying; but, frankly, I doubt that you could actually find anyone who would even attempt to deny it.)

In the series, paired with its accompanying hand-sign (the terminally eclectic might say mudra here), Witch's Honor in effect constituted an oath of truth-telling, and that's exactly how my friend was using it.

There's no comparable gesture of ritual affirmation in the contemporary real-life Craft. Maybe there should be; this was just one of the things that my friend's use of the TV hand-sign was saying. In a way, she was making fun of us for not having one. The cultural poverty of the Craft is something that every serious modern practitioner has to face up to (and then work her butt off to undo).

Before my friend's laughing allusion, it had never occurred to me to wonder why that particular gesture—which, quite frankly, I hadn't thought about actively in years—would be paired with the act of giving an oath.

But think about it.

V for Vow. (Or Veritas: “truth.) The point of the V frames the mouth with which I speak my vow; its horns point toward the eyes, meaning: I bear witness. One could even read it as calling the viewer to bear witness to my oath. The fact that I make this gesture with my strong hand (right for righties, left for southpaws) means: I strongly affirm.

If we're really pushing it, we could even see the V as an invocation of the Horned God, to bear witness to the fact that what I say is true.

(If ever, for even so much as a nanosecond, you doubted that the ability to Bullshit is one of the foremost Powers of the Witch, dear reader, be here roundly disabused of your foolish misapprehension. Witches put the “Bull” in Bullshit, baby.)

Of course, I am way over-interpreting here. (Though the origin of Witch's Honor is lost in the mists of deepest, darkest California Standard Time, I'm going to hazard a guess that Moorehead herself may have come up with it: it certainly has that quality of archness to it. I presume that it echoes the phrase “Scout's honor,” but—never having been one myself—I don't know if that phrase was ever associated with a gesture. [Readers?]) Part of the fun of my friend's action was the implicit self-satire. Anyone in the so-called 21st century who calls herself a witch had bloody well better be able to see the funny side of it.

In many ways, that amusing interaction between my friend and I embodies the complexity, the layeredness, of that paradoxical animal that we call the modern Craft. We're mutts, mongrels, us Latter-Day Hwicce: we draw our lore from everywhere, even those of us who aim for cultural integrity. We modern witches take ourselves very seriously, we do, but always with that soupçon of self-satire beneath.

Now, I'm not seriously suggesting that modern witches consider adding the Witch's Honor sign to our repertoire. As a general rule, popular culture is a yawning vacuity and best avoided.

Still, witches are nothing if not rule-breakers. As a friend of mine points out to me regularly, by claiming this identity, we automatically take ownership of anything that anyone says about us. All witch-related material, anywhere, belongs to us.

So I wouldn't use Witch's Honor around the cowan masses--to take an oath in court, say.

But for in-house use, now—especially when we start taking ourselves just a little too seriously—well, that's another matter.

Witch's Honor.

 

 

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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