Post-apocalyptic Witchcraft

What we do is post-apocalyptic witchcraft.

Pagan practice often has a sort of LARPy vibe - and I think that's no bad thing. Life is short, so we should play. The idea that we should do smart, sleek, contemporary magic that's rational and streamlined is no more appealing to me than getting a job in the city. But this, in turn, means we're wrestling with the existential - a handful of us in old fashioned clothes in a field loudly declaiming about the followers of the old ways coming together to celebrate the harvest, as if with our words we can briefly make it real. It's all the worse when you are alone. Here I am, vaguely imagining a great coming together of the community, something to do with maypoles and cider and here I am, alone on a hillside, wondering what could possibly be the point of a Lammas like this. How does one have a party alone.

Mark Fisher desribes capitalism as an eerie experience, an entity without a face, beyond human control, which imperceptibly impacts the world but cannot be explained or understood. On days like this, it feels that way. We talk about the atomization of neoliberalism - atomization meaning "a splitting apart". And so for example, where I live - we had a mining industry which was closed down, as part of a series of moves to destroy the trade union movement in the 1970s. A union is a coming together of ordinary people. And for all the flaws of work, so is a working community - a coming together. The imaginary harvest festivals require an agricultural community. All the churches round here are shut, and we've lost our libraries. A slow loss of "third spaces" that people can just be in without paying. Most people are retired - there are no jobs, so their children have moved away. I think, what would it take to get all these people out of their houses and down to a picnic with me?

It's a lonely world.

There are things about me which make this harder. I'm not merely unemployed; I was violently removed from the world of work - and that tends to change your perspective on things quite a bit. I don't have my family in my life, and the last group of close friends I had ended in a profound betrayal of trust. I don't know what I do to attract these situations, but I guess they compound into a very deep need for something permanent, something connected. Rather than being awash on this great emptiness. Perhaps I'll paint tomorrow, or stay in bed; neither matter very much. I go offline to free up more time to do other things, but the time feels no less wasted than vanishing onto twitter. A great unmapping. When I daydream about building community, it's not quite a desire for fame or reknown - more basic than that, a wish for some kind of acknowledgement from anything or anyone. The little ways one belongs to a society - being in a family unit, being in a workplace - can be something of a trap or a delusion, but it's the kind of delusion a social species needs to feel whole. A sense of purpose and belonging.

I fast. I meditate. I call the quarters. I stay offline and read. I walk in the mountains and offer secret devotions. It might as well not have happened.  

You know, maybe there's an agricultural fair I could go to? But that would just be paying an entrance fee to be a tourist. A great sorrow of the past few years has been the loss of alternative spaces. I've tried to fill my empty hours with hobbies and communities, only to find them consumed by the logic of capitalism - dominated by people who see them as a financial opportunity. Could this be a place that isn't a workplace, and isn't a shop, where people who have been prevented from working and shopping can be? The answer is always no; and so, one by one, those places are places I no longer go, and I feel them as voids within me. Maybe if the house had more decorations, we could make the harvest real inside (but I can't take on new material costs, and I am wary of consuming too much when the planet can no longer bear it); maybe if I had a better costume, I have fun dressing up (but I haven't done for years now, because it brings on contemplation of the body). And when I look out over the mountains and see the great hollowing out of place and people, I try desperately not to think of the hollowing out of nature too - how the forests I can see are farmed and empty of life, how the council won't stop cutting back the wildflowers, how everything is cars and the noise of cars, and how much I miss the first weeks of lockdown - with their sudden stillness. And the great boredom and hereness that made neighbours want to talk to one another.

The recurrent pagan fantasies of Wicker Man/the Village/Midsommar, of owning land and building community there are - at their heart - fantasies of an end to atomization. Of togetherness. Of course, all those fantasies begin with a great purchase, and even if one could do that - the next step, of finding 40 nice people to stock your fantasy with, is insurmountable; I'd be surprised to find four. And after all that's happened, I do not like people very much. I do not like people in groups, people with privilege, or people individually. I can't really imagine a little community rite, or even a coven, as places that are free from abuse, free from cruelty. Safer, I think, to stay at home with my books.

The apocalypse came to these hills, and it won; first when industry chased away the people of the countryside; and then when the city chased away even that - leaving only a harvest of the imagination.

I spent most of Lammas gripped by existentialist dread. One doesn't stop being the person that one is when stepping into the circle; and so these thoughts consumed me. I meditated, and cast a circle alone (with a process, surely, that was designed for a team); I went up into the mountains and they did not speak to me. I put a hay wreath on my door to tell the world it was a day to party, and the world made no reply. I tried to play music, and it was interrupted by this and that, by my husband going through his ordinary day - two is small for a party anyway. By the time the moon rose on the first night, I was in a depression; I spent the second day trying to shake it, but by the time the moon rose I could not face the effort of baking bread. The nothingness was all-consuming. And anyway, there's no agriculture where I live, it was only ever mines and caves and the darkness under the hills.

This has been the case for a long time, longer than lockdown, and it's very hard to see a way out of it.