65 years ago the number of new pagans in the world was negligible. Now we number (possibly) in the (low) tens of millions, in (probably) every country of the world. (Did you know that there are New Pagan movements in virtually all of the Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia? G****e Tengrism.) (Tengri = Blue Father Sky.) In the course of the history of religions, that's really pretty remarkable. How in the world did it happen?
According to Sparky T. Rabbit, it's a spell.
Yes, folks, Gerald Gardner cast a spell and zap! Here we are.
Sparky explained his thinking to me one night. Like so many insights, it seemed obvious once someone (else) had articulated it. I suppose this is the difference between conscious and unconscious knowledge.
“This movement was founded by people like Gardner who got an idea about what a new paganism could look like and work like,” he told me. “They experimented a little and then wrote books about it as if it already existed. Other people read those books, and they thought: Hell, this exists; I could do this too. And they did. And suddenly what didn't exist yesterday, exists and is real today, and all because somebody said so.
“Nobody ever talked about the process, but somehow other people figured out without being told that this is how you do it. That's how this all got started, we've been doing it all along, and we're still doing it today. You talk about it as if it already is and suddenly, zap! It is.
“I dream it, I say it, and suddenly it exists. That sure sounds like spell-casting to me. If that's not magic, I don't know what is.”
They call witching the “crooked path” because it's the way of indirection. Frontal assaults are not how our people tend to do things. We have other ways than through: under, over, around. The whisper, the casting of bones, the spell in the night. These things must be done delicately.
Witchiepoo was right.
Together we can zap the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pgzDoo5HMk