It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Marvel's series 'Agatha All Along' gets it right, say modern witches
(RNS) — Marvel Studios’ television series ‘Agatha All Along,’ which has its finale Wednesday (Oct. 30), oozes witchcraft lore, movie references and symbolism. Modern witches are all in.
(RNS) — Marvel Studios’ television series “Agatha All Along,” which has its finale on Disney+ on Wednesday (Oct. 30), oozes witchcraft lore, movie references and symbolism.
And modern witches are there for it.
“They are really doing their research,” said Opal Luna, a witch, author and crafter in Florida, “and I appreciate that.”
A spinoff from Marvel’s “WandaVision” miniseries, which ran in early 2021, “Agatha All Along” picks up from that show’s final episode with Agatha, played by Kathryn Hahn, who was magically enslaved by Wanda, known as the Scarlet Witch. The show follows Agatha and her covenmates — among them Lilia (Patti LuPone) and Rio (Aubrey Plaza) — as they seek to recapture their magical powers.
This is all standard television witchy fare, but “Agatha” is drawing real-life witches with an aesthetic that aligns directly with a long legacy of magical storytelling — a teenage witch’s room is littered with witchcraft movie memorabilia — and with modern witchcraft practice. In one episode, the creators imagine the characters as figures inspired by the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot cards, a classic card set first published in 1909, with Agatha as the Three of Swords, Lilia the Queen of Cups, and Rio Death.
“The people that wrote this have to have a background in paganism, witchcraft or something,” said Luna. The characters are “not all typical Halloween witches.” (Marvel Studios did not respond to a request for comment.)
Inspired by the show, Luna plans to include its theme song, “The Ballad of the Witches Road,” in her rituals celebrating this year’s Samhain, a pagan holiday honoring the dead that is celebrated between Oct. 31 and Nov. 7. Luna believes it will become a pagan staple for years to come.
The song, composed by the Oscar-winning duo Kristin Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who wrote “Let It Go” from Disney’s “Frozen” and the tear-jerker “Remember Me” from Pixar’s “Coco,” speaks of a “a dangerous journey” leading to a reward. Agatha and her coven seek their lost power; Luna’s Samhain ritual is a spiritual walk into the underworld to confront death and discover wisdom.
Marshall WSL, a witch and co-host of the podcast “Southern Bramble,” agreed that the song encapsulates “the journey of the (modern) witch” into their own power, he said.
Fans of the show from the witchcraft community also appreciate the complexity of the characters. Many modern witches, Marshall said, find their way to witchcraft through trauma or grief, turning to the practice as an alternative method “to realize their inner strength and power.
As a “heavily bullied child” and an outcast in a very small town, Marshall sees a parallel between his own story and the character Teen, with his Jewish backstory and queer identity.
“Agatha is complicated,” added Marshall. “None of us as individuals are truly all love and light. … We all have a range of emotions.” Agatha is “every witch.”
Marshall WSL. (Courtesy photo)
Marshall has been moved to create a talisman for himself modeled after a necklace Agatha wears on the show. The necklace, based on an 18th-century Italian brooch, depicts the pagan god Zeus’ daughters, three dancing graces. The show calls the trio “maiden, mother and crone,” another detail that “speaks to modern witches who work with (the triple goddess),” Marshall said.
“Agatha All Along” is not the first show or movie to strike a chord with modern witchcraft practitioners. “Bewitched,” which ran from 1964 to 1972, as well as “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” (1996-2003) and “Charmed” (1998-2006), all inspired modern-day witches.
In the mid- to late 1990s, said David Salisbury, a witch, author and activist in Washington, D.C., witchcraft-related movies and shows were everywhere. “It was very exciting to see all those fantastical witchcraft stories” on screen “and then go online (to the newly growing internet) to research and connect with other witches,” said Salisbury. “It was a perfect storm of inspiration and access.”
Salisbury said “The Craft,” from 1996, is a common movie cited by witches as a source of inspiration. As he studied magic, Salisbury said, he was fearful that his growing knowledge would eventually ruin his love for “The Craft,” but that never happened. “I realized that we actually are calling the elements. We are invoking directional spirits to help us. We are casting spells to improve our lives,” he said, just as the characters in the movie do.
The fidelity of “The Craft” to real practice was no accident. “The Craft” is one of the first films to openly hire a modern witch adviser, Wiccan high priestess Pat Devin. The modern witch community — and young seekers like Salisbury — recognized these details. The film’s cult status remains strong 30 years later and inspired a sequel, “The Craft: Legacy” (2020).
Zoe O’Haillin-Berne dressed as the Wicked Witch. (Courtesy photo)
It is not surprising that “The Craft” movie poster appears in Teen’s bedroom. But “Agatha” goes deeper into Hollywood’s witch trove by featuring MGM’s 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz” in its imagery and themes.
“Every little girl and every queer little boy wanted to be Dorothy, or maybe Glinda because they want to wear the big, beautiful gown,” said Zoe O’Haillin-Berne, a Celtic Christo-pagan and a witch who serves on the board of directors of the International Wizard of Oz club and plays the Wicked Witch of the West at events through her company, the Spirit of Oz.
O’Haillin-Berne was drawn to the Wicked Witch. Some of her magical altar tools are reminiscent of the Oz aesthetic and she wears black robes in ritual. “I’m an old-fashioned witch,” she said. “I love black pointy hat.”
However, her connection to Oz runs deeper than clothing and witchcraft paraphernalia. Her passion is tied directly to her self-empowerment journey. O’Haillin-Berne’s first witchcraft ritual, she explained, was performed the same day she began her gender transition. “Maybe it’s because I was this little trans kid that always felt disenfranchised by the world,” she mused, that she loved the Wicked Witch, “a woman who commands the world around her.”
“Agatha All Along” may never reach the status of “The Craft” or “The Wizard of Oz,” but the show, in its short run, has created a storm of approval from many in the modern witchcraft community. One fan posted on the social media platform Threads, “I hope ‘Agatha All Along’ inspires a whole new generation to explore witchcraft, just like ‘The Craft’ did for mine.”
Marvel has announced an Agatha tarot deck, published by Insight Editions, the publisher of other Disney-related tarot decks.
Marshall said he’s already preordered the deck, but he’ll have to wait until July for its release. In the meantime, he and other Agatha fans in the community will be eagerly waiting for the next season.
“We (witches) are inspired by mythos. I think we are inspired by song. I think we are inspired by characters, deities, spirits that make us feel something,” he said. “And we are really getting that with ‘Agatha All Along.’”
Source: Africa is a Country Activists and relatives of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei march calling for an end to femicide, 2024. Credit Andrew Kasuku / AP Photo
In Kenya, Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegi was brutally murdered—doused in petrol and set on fire by her ex-boyfriend just three weeks after returning from the Paris Olympics. In Switzerland, authorities recently revealed that Kristina Joksimovic, a former Miss Switzerland finalist, was killed by her husband, who confessed to the crime and allegedly dismembered her body and pureed it in a blender. In London, Cher Maximen was fatally stabbed in front of her daughter by a stranger while on her way to the Notting Hill Carnival.
Femicide is broadly understood as the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender—the most extreme form of gender-based violence. The 2012 UN Economic and Social Council’s Vienna Declaration on Femicide was the first to outline and recognize various forms of femicide, including intimate partner violence, targeted killings of women and girls in armed conflict, female infanticide, deaths related to genital mutilation, honor killings, and murders following accusations of witchcraft, among others.
Feminist scholars and activists have highlighted that femicide is not only about women and girls who have been killed, but also those who endure a continuum of gender-based violence, including ongoing violence, harassment, and assault. Academics Maya Dawsone and Saide Vega explain that femicide serves as a social barometer, reflecting the level of violence that women and girls experience, which may not always lead to death but can feel like a “slow death” for many. A contemporary example is the harrowing case of Gisele Pelicot in France, who discovered that her husband, Dominique Pelicot, had been drugging her for nearly a decade, inviting strangers to rape her in their home between 2011 and 2020 while filming the assaults as a form of “public revenge on men.” Pericot’s daughter describes the experience as a “slow descent into hell,” highlighting the horrifying sentiment of new cases of gender-based violence that emerge, challenging our perception of extreme violence.
While feminist movements have made significant strides in naming, recognizing, and advocating against femicide, it often seems as though the rest of the world remains disturbingly indifferent to this “silent pandemic,” carrying on with business as usual. The alarming rise in femicide, coupled with the relentless advocacy of feminists worldwide, makes it more urgent than ever to confront the root causes of this global epidemic of violence against women, and to take action to uproot it.
About 30% of women have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once in their lives. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 2005 recognized that femicide is not “isolated, sporadic or episodic cases of violence; rather they represent a structural situation and a social and cultural phenomenon deeply rooted in customs and mindsets.” One structural cause of femicide lies in how states and governments enable these killings—either through inadequate responses or a complete lack of action. Significant gaps in data collection also hinder the fight against femicide. Most data is drawn from national crime statistics or homicide records, which are often not gender-specific due to inconsistent criminal justice reporting across countries. As a result, the actual global rate of femicide is likely much higher. In many countries the lack of digital records further exacerbates these challenges, creating additional barriers to accurate data collection.
Mainstream approaches to ending femicide have largely focused on legal solutions and the criminal justice system. One example is the push to classify femicide as a distinct crime—in 2022, Cyprus incorporated femicide into its criminal code, making gender-related killings an aggravating factor in sentencing. Although classifying femicide as a distinct crime can aid in advocacy, awareness, and harm reduction, it remains limited by the broader shortcomings of carceral approaches. This classification alone is unlikely to serve as a strong deterrent to future crimes, and in many cases, gender-based violence laws exist but are poorly enforced.
Effective measures seek to address the underlying socioeconomic inequalities and precarious conditions that contribute to violence against women. This includes providing financial support, accessible shelter, and economic empowerment for women reporting violence. For instance, cash transfer programs in low- and middle-income countries have shown a positive correlation between women’s income and lower rates of domestic violence. A successful example is South Africa’s IMAGE Programme (Intervention with Microfinance for AIDS and Gender Equity), which equips women with microfinance to enhance their economic independence. Additionally, governments must increase social spending on health and education to alleviate the burden on households, particularly the unpaid domestic labor that disproportionately falls on women.
Lastly, education and community outreach efforts must not only be inclusive of women but should also actively engage men, boys, and all other victims of patriarchal norms. Such education can dismantle deep-rooted cultural beliefs and harmful misrepresentations, like “boys will be boys” or the myth that a woman’s choice of dress justifies sexual assault. The Swedish government has consistently invested in educational programs aimed at addressing gender violence, including re-socializing boys by integrating gender equality into school curriculums. These efforts have contributed to Sweden’s relatively low levels of intimate partner violence and femicide, fostering a more gender-equal society.
Each day, cases of femicide remind us that ignorance of violence against women is deadly. Legal reforms, while essential, are not enough to end this crisis. To truly combat femicide, we must dismantle the deep-rooted inequalities, patriarchal norms, and systemic failures that sustain it. Femicide is not just a feminist issue, it’s everyone’s problem, and more people should be outraged. The time for action is now.
Naila Aronii is a writer and artist from Nairobi, Kenya.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Why experts say Christian nationalists’ rhetoric may spur violence
Alice Herman Sat, October 19, 2024 A Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Arizona, on 6 June 2024.Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
As the sky darkened on the National Mall in DC last Saturday, evangelical pastor Ché Ahn addressed the thousands of worshippers gathered there and issued a decree.
Trump, Ahn said, was a figure akin to the biblical King Jehu, and “Kamala Harris is a type of Jezebel, and as you know, Jehu cast out Jezebel”.
“I decree in Jesus’s mighty name, and I decree it by faith,” said Ahn, “that Trump will win on November the fifth, he will be our 47th president, and Kamala Harris will be cast out and she will lose in Jesus’s name.”
The Bible story Ahn invoked is extremely violent. In it, Jehu throws the Phoenician princess Jezebel from a window. She is then trampled by horses, her corpse left to be eaten by dogs. Ahn did not get into the particulars of this story at the DC event, but he likely didn’t need to: in his world of charismatic and evangelical preachers, pastors, self-styled prophets and apostles, and their many followers, the story of Jezebel is a key narrative.
The rally on the mall on 12 October, advertised under the name A Million Women, was billed as a gathering for women to wage spiritual warfare against changing gender norms in the US. Drawing tens of thousands, the event showcased the ability of leaders from the New Apostolic Reformation, a growing movement on the Christian right, to mobilize followers – and ply them with militant political rhetoric.
Experts fear their spiritual message has the potential to spur real-world political violence, especially if Trump were to lose the November election.
As Ahn spoke, the crowd that had gathered on the mall to “turn back hearts to God” through prayer and praise, swayed and listened. Some had heard about the rally through Bible studies and church groups and seemed unaware that many of the featured speakers were deeply involved in rightwing politics. Others had participated in the Capitol protest that devolved into a deadly riot on 6 January 2021. All received the messages of a dire, good-versus-evil vision of American politics that the speakers brought that day – and peddle regularly on podcasts, YouTube channels and Christian television and in front of their congregations.
Matthew Taylor, a scholar whose work has focused on the New Apostolic Reformation, said veiled calls for violence cloaked in religious rhetoric are common in the NAR, a loosely-affiliated network on the Christian right that embraces modern-day apostles and prophets.
“Having it be a women’s march, I think they kind of dialed back some of the more violent rhetoric,” said Taylor, who is a senior researcher at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies. But Ahn’s decree, he said, “shocked” him.
“I could very easily picture, if you had the right mix of charismatic identity theology that’s aligned with the NAR, and unhinged, violent tendencies in an individual – yeah, that could very easily be an instigating factor in an assassination attempt,” said Taylor.
Leaders in the movement who spoke with the Guardian emphasized that they meant only to draw their followers into battle of a spiritual nature, and correctly pointed out that the rally on the mall was peaceful.
“We were fasting, all of us on that stage were fasting,” said Folake Kellogg, a pastor who helped organize the event and spoke there. “We had not eaten, we were praying. We knew that the battle is not against any human being. We love our brothers and sisters.”
Ahn disputed the idea that his decree could spur his followers to violence, writing in an email that such language was “all spiritual” and that “[a]nyone who advocates physical violence in Jesus name is not a true follower of Jesus who taught us to turn our cheeks”.
Leaders in the NAR “believe themselves to be what they call kings and priests and [members of] a royal nation”, said Jonathon Sawyer, an academic whose research focuses on religious and political extremism. Such figures “have the sense that when they offer some type of decree such as this, that there is a tangible impact that will happen in the ‘natural sphere’ and in politics”, he added.
Because pastors like Ahn lean so heavily on biblical allegory, they are afforded a degree of plausible deniability if followers interpret their speech as an incitement to violence. And in the world that Ahn occupies, this kind of language has been thick in the air for years. Ahn’s decree itself was likely familiar to some: on 5 January 2021, Ahn issued a nearly identical one at a Stop the Steal rally in Washington DC.
The notion that Harris herself embodies the spirit of Jezebel has also become commonplace among preachers in the NAR.
“Republicans, like Ahab in the Bible, accommodate Jezebel,” said the pro-Trump, self-styled prophet Lance Wallnau on a 13 September episode of his podcast titled Trump vs The Jezebel Spirit: How Trump Can Still Win, which aired after the presidential debate. In the episode, Wallnau alleged collusion between the ABC anchors who aggressively fact-checked Trump’s many falsehoods, and the Harris campaign, saying: “What was accomplished was she looked presidential, and that’s – we’ll go to this later – that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft.”
If you had the right mix of charismatic identity theology, and violent tendencies, that could be an instigating factor in an assassination attempt
Matthew Taylor, Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies
Wallnau, who enjoys a following of 1 million on Facebook and 78,000 on YouTube, where he offers a near-constant stream of discourses on topics ranging from electoral politics and theology to wellness supplements, frequently casts the 2024 election in apocalyptic terms.
“We’re in a place, my brethren, where in 30 days – 30 days or so – the die is cast. I don’t think we come back from this one if Trump cannot secure a victory,” said Wallnau on his 7 October show. “I think that once he’s removed, the anti-Christ forces are going to start to move at a faster rate.”
Jenny Donnelly, the organizer of the 12 October rally, hopes the women she summoned to the National Mall – “Esthers”, she calls them – will be ready to fight such anti-Christ forces. Donnelly frequently cites the Bible story of Esther in her appeals to women and moms. In it, Esther, the Jewish wife of a Persian king, risks her life to save her people from persecution. Donnelly and others in the NAR invoke the story, which forms the basis of the Jewish holiday Purim, to urge their followers to take on spiritual battles of their own.
Many women in attendance at the rally wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words “If I Perish, I Perish”, a statement in the story.
“We had a dream in 2022 that we will collectively come together today and declare a war cry,” said Kellogg, a pastor affiliated with Donnelly, early in the day on 12 October. “On the cross, the last words of Jesus, he said: ‘It is finished.”
Shortly after, a dramatic video played on the large screens broadcasting the event on the mall.
“On this day of atonement, we gather to stand and cry out for America,” said the narrator of the video. “If we perish, we perish. United, we will make way for the Lord. The time is now.” A short clip of a hand casting a ballot flashed on the screen.
“As America goes, so go the nations of the Earth,” said the narrator. “This is the last stand.”
Sunday, September 29, 2024
On Harris, Hawthorne, and Fears of Smart, Strong Women for Political Offices
by Barbara G. Ellis / September 28th, 2024
It was a shock to some of us progressives when Liz Cheney—once a rising, strong Republican star in the U.S. House—recently declared she was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and would campaign and spend millions on it in battleground states.
As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”
But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic leaders) was that father Dick Cheney , president George W. Bush’s powerful, two-term vice president, supported her decision and also endorsed Harris. Trump, he said: “can never be trusted with power again.”
Moreover, the Cheneys’ endorsements say something far, far deeper about human relations in this fractious election crisis. It might lead to millions of men changing their minds about voting for a woman president—or any woman seeking public office. Smart and strong women have existed elsewhere in the world for centuries from Cleopatra and Golda Meir to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Or most men believing a vice presidency doesn’t qualify Harris for the White House, despite predecessors like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. They, like Harris, were U.S. Senators and experienced on how the White House operates in handling foreign and domestic affairs great and small.
At the heart of male prejudice about strong and smart women’s competence for any political office seems to be the ancient cultural fear of being stripped of power by those perceived as inferiors.
Perhaps the only two times fear of such women dissipates and true equality begins is either at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or between proud fathers and those strong, smart daughters. For example, King Henry VIII and daughter Queen Elizabeth I and Pelosi’s father, Baltimore Mayor and House member Tommy D’Alesandro Jr., in wielding public power. A true kinship of respect, political training, and love—and tough decision-making—is the reality. It should overcome bias against women seeking public office.
Interestingly, Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of America’s greatest authors (1804-1864) focused largely on this subject of foolish fears about strong and smart women.
Brought up in penury with two sisters by a young widowed mother, he knew economic and social chauvinism and trivialization of women firsthand, doled out by men of every class. He married an intellectual and emotional peer, and fathered two outspoken daughters. In college, he also appears to have studied the revolutionary ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau about equality at all levels.
Moreover, as the descendant of a harsh judge in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93, he probably would have agreed with author Virginia Woolf. She believed such women were hanged or set ablaze not for religious error, but because they threatened men’s desperate need to control other men, but, most of all, powerful and defiant women. Then, by labeling them witches. Today, it’s “bitches”.
To Hawthorne, such women were equal companions, not threats to men. He never viewed them as unimportant or as threatening Delilahs, but, rather, as men’s vital emotional, intellectual, and spiritual partners. As a writer, his mission seemed to be overcoming most men’s deep-rooted fears of the strong and smart. Yet to carry such a message in the literature of his day was a monumental undertaking.
He laid the fundamental cause at ending men’s monopoly on control and power. His novels and short stories were the first in this country to focus on the rigid second-class roles assigned women for life. Initially, he disguised this view in allegorical short stories. He finally threw that cloak aside with his 1844 masterpiece “Rappaccini’s Daughter” about the usual tragic result of male fears. The allegory was poison.
Rappaccini is a brilliant and famed botanist with an experimental garden of toxic plants tended by daughter Beatrice, now immune to their poisons and up for a university post in that field. She is spotted by Giovanni, an older student, from his boarding house balcony who is struck by her beauty as she feeds and waters the deadly garden. It becomes love at first sight for both. He enters the garden despite her warnings. Soon, however, he becomes frightened of losing domination expected of men over all women, powerful and brilliant though they be. Made immune to all the poisons, he accuses her of killing him. There may be no finer breakup line than Beatrice’s heartbroken: “Was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”
That allegoric lesson applies to most biased and fearful men when it comes to women and seeking public office. Put the case another way:
If they had daughters running for any position in the upcoming elections, wouldn’t they proudly tout them to friends, neighbors, work cohorts, and the cashier and line-mates at the supermarket? Maybe help finance their campaigns? Or put up yard or window signs and paste bumper stickers on their cars? Do phone banking? Canvass the neighborhood? And with any action, wouldn’t they insist their daughters were as capable for office as male opponents?
In other words, if fathers—and mothers,too—don’t fear powerful daughters, why fear smart, strong women candidates on November 5? They’re somebody’s daughters, too, and just as worthy of fair consideration as any male on the ballot.Facebook
Barbara G. Ellis, Ph.D, is the principal of a Portland (OR) writing/pr firm, a long-time writer and journalism professor, a Pulitzer nominee, and now an online free-lancer. Read other articles by Barbara.
Monday, September 16, 2024
As the pioneers of modern paganism die, fears grow that their wisdom will be lost
THANK THE GODS THEY ALL WROTE BOOKS
Today’s young Wiccans and witches tune in to social media for community.
(RNS) — The contemporary pagan community, unlike many traditional religions, has had direct access to its living founders for decades. Now many of those pioneers, born in the 1940s, are “crossing the veil,” a common pagan phrase. And their stories may be going with them as interest in their legacy wanes among younger generations in a changing world.
“Each death of old friends and contemporaries feels like another bit of my soul is being ripped away,” said Oberon Zell in an email interview with Religion News Service.
Zell, who now resides in North Carolina, co-founded the pagan Church of All Worlds in 1962. He is a well-known author and a long-respected figure in the pagan movement since its inception.
“We felt like pioneers, venturing into unknown territory of our imaginations,” Zell said. “We’d grown up as bright kids, often bullied.”
He believes that this “peer disdain” bred their creativity and courage to be “fearless.”
Zell’s group eventually mingled with the emerging Wiccan community, occultists and other magical practitioners. Their mission, he said, was “to make the world safe for people like us, and I believe we succeeded.”
Oberon Zell. (Courtesy photo)
Today, those young pioneers are now elders in their 70s and 80s, and every year sees the loss of a few more.
Wiccan priestess Mary Elizabeth Witt, known as Lady Pythia, died in June near the summer solstice, a widely celebrated pagan seasonal holiday honoring the longest day. “Trust her to wait for the brightest light to see her off on her journey,” her sister said.
While not as nationally known as Zell, Pythia was a key player in a largely decentralized, growing religious movement. She was co-founder of the Ohio-based Coven of the Floating Spring and became a trusted voice and leader within the Covenant of the Goddess, a national organization for Wiccans and witches.
This year also saw the loss of author and Wiccan high priest Ed Fitch, who became a national figure in those early years. Among his many achievements, Fitch spoke publicly in support of witchcraft and was editor of one of the first U.S. witchcraft magazines.
Derrick Land had the “rare opportunity” to meet Fitch near the end of the author’s life. “It is different to have a (live) conversation with such a person” than just reading their books or seeing them on television.
Derrick Land. (Courtesy photo)
Land is the high priest of Shadow Wolf Coven, a Wiccan group in Austin, Texas. He is also the co-founder of Austin Witchfest, a popular pagan event held every April.
Being able to “tap the shoulder of an elder is priceless,” Land said.
Those trailblazers, as he calls them, were not only birthing a new religion, but were also activists, and Land urges his own students to never “lose sight” of that legacy.
“We are able to practice safely because of them,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago.”
Land, who considers himself a xennial — a person born at the cusp between Generation X and millennials — acknowledged that today’s young pagans are far less impressed with those trailblazers than he, and he is not alone in that observation.
Paganism has evolved since Land began his pagan journey in the 1990s. There is a greater diversity of practice and less dependency on in-person training. More pagans are solitary, or practicing entirely by themselves. A decentralized movement has become even more so.
One main factor, according to our interviewees: social media.
Beckie-Ann Galentine, a millennial in Virginia who first found a witchcraft community through Tumblr, grew up in a rural community in Pennsylvania with no access to in-person groups. She read “anything she could find,” with no guidance on what was authentic.
When she discovered Tumblr’s magical community, she was hooked, describing its members as “breathing their authentic self.”
But there were pitfalls, Galentine said.
Beckie-Ann Galentine. (Courtesy photo)
“I had no conception of misinformation,” she explained, and the digital community eventually proved to be largely “driven by vanity.” The witch aesthetic was more important than spiritual practice. That was 2006.
“It was a crash course,” Galentine said, “on getting exposed to people, rather than having a deliberate goal.”
She believes that her early learning experience, from books to Tumblr, is a “perfect example” of what happens when you don’t have guidance from elders.
“Social media influencers are not a substitute for an elder or mentor,” Galentine said, recognizing the irony. Galentine has since become a popular social media influencer, known as My Bloody Galentine.
In the 2000s, she didn’t know the early pioneers existed. Very few elders were active online and, if they were, their voices were often drowned out by the “loudest social media voices.”
When you “only look at the beacons” on social media, Galentine warned, you miss the deeply personal connections that form from in-person connections.
“I don’t want to say it’s not possible,” she added, but without having guidance or a personal community connection, “it makes (learning) way messier than it needs to be.” She points to her own experience.
Galentine, however, stressed the need for discernment in choosing whom to follow. Some teachings are “deeply problematic,” she said, while others are simply no longer current in a changing pagan world.
Galentine, now a leader herself, typically directs young pagans to relatively new authors who connect well to the younger generation, but she still recommends the classic “Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft” — first published in 1986 and often referred to as “Buckland’s Big Blue” — as “a point of perspective,” she said.
“It may not make sense. But start there,” Galentine advises.
The author, Raymond Buckland, originally from London, is one of the most well-known pagan trailblazers and was instrumental in bringing Wicca to American shores. He died in 2017.
Discernment, as Galentine described, has since become central to the social media engagement of paganism’s youngest representatives, according to Luma Notti, a digital media professional and Gen Z witch in Minnesota.
She believes that this critical skill is fueling, in part, the waning interest in the pioneers. “Many Gen Z folks look critically into witchcraft, New Age beliefs, politics and consumerism,” Notti said.
They are having “real conversations about spiritual psychosis and toxic spirituality,” she explained. “More than half of them are cautious about brand authenticity.” Just being a famous pagan doesn’t impress them much.
For Gen Z, she added, “consumerism, colonization and appropriation are intertwined.” And many of these concerns, along with others, are absent from early pagan teachings.
The digital media experience of Gen Z pagans, overall, is vastly different from that of millennials like Galentine. Gen Z members understand the concept of misinformation and other pitfalls because they grew up with it, Notti said.
“There is a lot of research on the loss of identity and subcultures of Gen Z because of being raised in the digital era and experiencing coming of age during lockdown,” she added. “Many Gen Zers are just trying to survive.”
Pushing back against stereotypes, Notti said: “Millennial and Gen X witches have asserted their presence (online) and already have a particular perception of Gen Z witches and spiritual practitioners.”
It isn’t all aesthetics, she insisted. Notti used the phrase “low key” to describe the trend in Gen Z pagan practices.
“We don’t want to make our practice our entire personality,” she explained. They are unconcerned with labeling how they practice, Notti added. But they still do seek community and often online.
But not always. Land said he has never had a problem finding new students for his Wiccan group and always sees young people enjoying Austin Witchfest.
Buckland’s “Big Blue” decades later still remains an educational staple.
So what does Zell think of all of this, decades after the movement began?
He sees no problem with any of it. “The diffusion at the periphery (of the pagan community) is the main indication” of the pioneers’ success, he said, proudly.
“It’s exactly as I envisioned and hoped it would be,” he said. “We have gone from a scary, paranoid, isolated and persecuted minority to an interesting mainstream phenomenon.”
All these decades later, Zell is still invited to speak at festivals, conferences and other events.
“It’s like having Grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “I’m delighted to see new generations of pagans coming in to take the place of those who are passing away.”
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Child abuse scandals hang over pope’s East Timor visit
By AFP September 7, 2024 Pope Francis will visit East Timor, Asia's youngest nation, for three days - Copyright AFP/File Valentino Dariell DE SOUSA Jack Moore with Clement Melki in Port Moresby
When Pope Francis becomes the first pontiff to visit an independent East Timor, he will confront a clergy beset by child abuse scandals that have been largely ignored by the deeply Catholic country’s freedom heroes.
Cases include Nobel-winning Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, who helped Asia’s youngest nation free itself from Indonesian occupation, but who the Vatican secretly punished over claims he had sexually abused young children for decades.
There are calls for the 87-year-old pontiff to speak out on child abuse when he lands in the former Portuguese colony Monday as part of his Asia-Pacific tour.
“We ask Your Holiness to encourage the leaders and the people of Timor-Leste to take more effective measures to prevent sexual abuse,” the Timor-Leste NGO Forum, a civil society coalition, wrote in a letter Wednesday to Francis.
BishopAccountability.org, a documentation centre on Catholic Church abuse, also called on the Vatican’s sexual abuse commission chief, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, to “urge” Francis to “be the victims’ champion” on his visit.
Catholic-majority East Timor is one of many countries that has suffered the global scourge of child abuse by members of the clergy long veiled in secrecy.
In 2002 Pope John Paul II accepted the abrupt resignation of Bishop Belo, then the head of East Timor’s church, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.
The Vatican said it was for health reasons but did not explain further.
It then permitted him to be sent to Mozambique as a missionary where he worked with children, before he moved to Portugal.
The Vatican secretly sanctioned the bishop in 2020 after claims he sexually abused underage boys over a 20-year period up to 2002.
It banned Belo from any contact with children or with East Timor, conditions it said he formally accepted.
Only when Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer reported the restrictions in 2022, including testimony from a victim who said they were raped by Belo, did the Vatican go public.
The Dutch magazine report’s author says allegations about Belo were known in 2002.
Francis later suggested the decision to let Belo retire instead of face consequences was made when attitudes were different.
– Widespread support –
The bishop had won the Nobel Prize for his defence of human rights during the Indonesian occupation, which lasted more than two decades.
He is revered at home for sheltering young demonstrators and saving their lives.
It has helped him retain strong support among the country’s 1.3 million people, of which 98 percent are Catholic.
“We feel we have lost him. We miss him,” Maria Dadi, East Timor national youth council president, told AFP.
“Because after all he really contributed to the struggle of Timor-Leste.”
In another case, defrocked American priest Richard Daschbach was found guilty in 2021 of abusing orphaned, disadvantaged girls.
He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but has also found support at the highest levels of Timorese society.
Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao courted controversy last year when he visited Daschbach to celebrate his birthday and shared cake with the convicted paedophile. He also attended his trial.
For many in the country, they favour Belo returning for the pope’s visit.
“We are very sad without the presence of Bishop Belo,” said 58-year-old academic Francisco Amaral da Silva.
“The government and the Catholic Church should invite him.”
East Timor’s presidential office did not respond to a request for comment. President Jose Ramos-Horta has said punishments for Belo should be handled by the Vatican. – ‘Limited value’ –
The pontiff will meet with the Catholic faithful, children, Jesuits and preside over a huge mass during his stay in the capital Dili.
But it remains unclear if he will raise cases that have shocked observers of one of the world’s poorest countries.
The pope’s schedule does not include a meeting with victims, and the Vatican did not comment before he departed Rome.
Yet he could ad-lib the subject in one of his speeches, which would be a strong gesture.
Francis could also meet victims privately as he has done before, the latest on a 2023 Portugal trip.
But survivor advocates said the pope must acknowledge the sexual violence by Church officials on East Timorese children, including by Belo.
“Those abused by Bishop Belo and other clergy will expect a public statement by Pope Francis on the Church’s continued failure to deal with its wayward clergy,” said Tony Gribben, founder of the Northern Ireland-based Dromore survivors group.
Gribben said a meeting would “have limited value”, citing apologies given by Francis to abuse victims on an Ireland trip in 2018.
“The event was a well-crafted PR exercise,” he added.
“But since then, it’s business as usual.”
Sporting a feathered headdress, Pope Francis finds 'Eden' in Papua New Guinea
Pope Francis traveled to the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea on Sunday to celebrate the Catholic Church of the peripheries. While 90 percent of Papua New Guinea's 12 million residents call themselves Christian, religion sits longside a panoply of local beliefs, customs and rites – some of which spark bloody zeal.
Issued on: 08/09/2024 -
Pope Francis takes part in a meeting with Catholic faithful of the diocese of Vanimo in front of Holy Cross Cathedral in Vanimo, Papua New Guinea, on September 8, 2024.
Pope Francis visited a remote jungle-flanked community in Papua New Guinea Sunday, where he urged an end to violence, and "superstition and magic" that tarnishes a place he likened to Eden.
The 87-year-old pontiff touched down in Vanimo, a coastal town a few degrees south of the equator, as he marked the halfway point of a gruelling 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific.
Donning a traditional Bird of Paradise feathered headdress despite the stiffing tropical heat, the pope drove home his pledge to embrace people and places on "the periphery".
He described Vanimo as a "grandiose spectacle of nature bursting forth with life, all evoking the image of Eden".
He was greeted as a guest of honour by bare-chested Walsa tribesmen with body paint, ornate headdresses and bands made of feathers, shells and grass, who performed a ceremonial dance.
The pope thanked the assembled thousands, some of whom had walked or sailed for days to come and see him, and praised the "contagious smiles and your exuberant joy" of local children.
But he also painted this as a troubled paradise.
He urged the faithful and a handful of local missionaries to help "overcome divisions -- personal, family and tribal" and "to drive out fear, superstition and magic from people's hearts". Religion alongside local beliefs
These and other evils, he said, "imprison and take away the happiness of so many of our brothers and sisters, even in this country".
Australian researchers have estimated about 3,000 deaths in over the last 20 years.
The pope urged his flock to tackle such social ills head on, and to remake the image of their nation.
"Make Papua New Guinea famous not only for its variety of plant and animal life, its enchanting beaches and clear sea, but famous above all for the good people you meet here," he said.
It is a message that has resonated with Papua New Guineans, many of whom hope the pope's visit can transform their nation.
Earlier Sunday, the pope held a mass for 35,000 people in the capital, Port Moresby.
Margaret Clive, an elderly street vendor in the capital, said that many people had complained about the pope's visit, asking what it would bring them.
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"I am happy Pope is here" she said. "He is a world religious leader bringing the message of peace."
"There is a lot of violence against women and children, here in the city, the youth are snatching bags from mothers who market."
"Christian principles are hidden while our sinful ways are transparent, we need change."
There he will encounter a resolutely Catholic nation, but one in which the clergy has been beset by child abuse scandals.
(AFP)
In Papua New Guinea, Pope holds mass ‘at the edge of the world’
By AFP September 7, 2024 The 87-year-old pontiff led an estimated 35,000 people in prayer from Port Moresby's main stadium - Copyright AFP Tiziana FABI
Pope Francis held an open-air mass for tens of thousands of Papua New Guinea’s faithful on Sunday, imploring this nation “at the edge of the world” to embrace the Catholic faith.
The 87-year-old pontiff led an estimated 35,000 people in prayer from Port Moresby’s main stadium, the latest stop on this gruelling 12-day trip across the Asia-Pacific.
He appeared before a startling mix of green-robed clergy, worshippers in starched Sunday whites and tribesmen and women in feathered headdresses and reed skirts, who tapped out songs of worship on hour-glass shaped kundu drums.
His homily carried a familiar theme of his papacy — bringing those on the “periphery” closer to faith, and the vast Catholic Church he leads.
“Brothers and sisters, you who live on this large island in the Pacific Ocean may sometimes have thought of yourselves as a far away and distant land, situated at the edge of the world,” he said.
“Today the Lord wants to draw near to you, to break down distances”.
More than 90 percent of Papua New Guinea’s 12 million residents consider themselves Christian, but the religion sits alongside a panoply of local beliefs, customs and rites.
About a quarter of Papua New Guineans are Catholic.
Later on Sunday, the pope will travel even further into the “periphery”, to the remote jungle town of Vanimo, in Papua New Guinea’s northwest.
Pope to meet Papua New Guinea Catholics who embrace both Christianity and Indigenous beliefs
Pope Francis’s visit to Papua New Guinea will take him to a remote part of the South Pacific island nation where Christianity is a recent addition to traditional spiritual beliefs developed over millenia that remain deeply ingrained
By ROD MCGUIRK
Associated Press September 5, 2024
MELBOURNE, Australia -- MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Pope Francis’s visit to Papua New Guinea will take him to a remote part of the South Pacific island nation where Christianity is a recent addition to traditional spiritual beliefs developed over millennia.
Francis will visit the diocese of Vanimo on the main island of New Guinea, one of the most remote and disadvantaged in a poor and diverse nation, according to local Bishop Francis Meli.
Trappings of modernity are scarce. There is no running water for the more than 120,000 people who live in the diocese, according to a church website. Electricity is a luxury for the few who can afford solar panels or portable generators.
The visit is an extraordinary religious highlight in an area where Christian missionaries did not arrive until 1961, and where the religion coexists with traditional ancestor worship, animism and sorcery.
The pope will meet around a dozen missionary nuns and priests from his native Argentina during his visit scheduled for Sept. 8. He will also inspect a church-built high school and crisis center for abused women and girls.
Argentinian missionary Tomas Ravailoli, a priest of the Institute of the Incarnate Word, said he came to the Vanimo Diocese 14 years ago after his superiors told him there was “a big need for priests.”
While Christian churches are full, Indigenous “customs and traditions are very much rooted,” Ravailoli said.
“Sometimes for people, it’s not easy to live Christianity 100% because they have traditions that are pagan,” Ravailoli said.
“But honestly, I think Christianity here in Papua New Guinea is very, very strong,” he added.
Papua New Guinea is an overwhelmingly Christian country — a 2000 census showed 96% of the population identified with the religion — but the spiritual beliefs that developed during 50,000 years of human habitation remain part of the fabric of the nation’s culture.
Michael Mel is a 65-year-old academic who was baptized as a baby by one of the first missionaries to reach his village in the remote highlands. An Indigenous man, he said he also “aligns” with traditional spirituality and cautions against abandoning Indigenous culture.
“Western civilization is great. The West has brought us reading and writing and technology and all of the rest of it, but there are some things where I think our sensibilities were much, much better,” Mel said, giving Indigenous forest care as an example.
Mining has widened the country’s economic divide and pitted the haves against the have-nots.
“We need to balance ourselves. We cannot just gung ho throw our knowledge away and accept Western civilization completely,” Mel said.
But traditional beliefs can also contribute to the deadly tribal violence that is creating an unprecedented internal security threat across the country, especially allegations of witchcraft, known in local languages as sanguma.
Sorcery allegations typically arise in reaction to unexpected deaths or illness. But some suspect they also reflect jealousies and rivalries arising from major societal changes in recent decades that have more to do with rapid modernization and uneven development than religion.
As traditional bows and arrows are being replaced by more lethal assault rifles, the toll of fighting is getting deadlier, and police fear that they are outgunned. Mercenaries are also now a feature of what were once conflicts limited to tribal rivals.
“Even though they believe in God and they believe in Jesus Christ, ... they fear witchcraft,” said Bishop Meli, who was born east of Vanimo on an island off New Britain.
Authorities don’t condone the persecution of supposed witches. Parliament in 2013 repealed the Sorcery Act which had made an accusation of sorcery a partial defense against a murder charge. But a study has found that prosecutions for violence against accused sorcerers remain rare compared to how commonplace witch hunts are.
Another enduring source of conflict is land ownership. Almost all the land in Papua New Guinea is customarily owned, which means it belongs to a distinct tribe or group instead of individuals. With no clear borders between customary lands, territorial disputes regularly lead to violence.
Both were among the complex combination of causes blamed for a massacre in East Sepik province, east of Vanimo, on July 17 when 30 men armed with guns, axes, spears, knives and sling shots launching sharpened steel rods killed at least 26 villagers.
Four weeks later, police reported a single suspect had been arrested. They remained hopeful that the rest of the culprits would be found. The U.N. children agency UNICEF said 395 survivors of the attack, including 220 children, remained homeless more than a month later because their houses were torched.
Meli said tribal violence was not a problem in his diocese, where he described the population as “friendly and peaceful.”
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape relished the attention the papal visit would bring his country, noting that 80 members of the international media had registered to travel there for the event.
Marape said South Pacific leaders he met at the Pacific Islands Forum on Tonga in late August had proposed sending delegations to meet the pontiff.
He also noted that Catholics were the largest Christian denomination in Papua New Guinea. Catholics accounted for 26% of the population, according to a 2011 census.
"We look forward to the visit,” Marape told The Associated Press at the Tongan capital, Nuku’alofa.
The Vatican is highlighting Papua New Guinea on the international stage at a time the United States and China struggle over the former World War II battleground for strategic influence.
The United States and close ally Australia, concerned by China’s growing influence in the South Pacific, have struck new security agreements with Papua New Guinea. Australia’s latest pact addresses Port Moresby’s concerns about deteriorating internal security problems. China is also reportedly pursuing a bilateral policing pact with Papua New Guinea.
The Vatican. meanwhile, has been working for years to try to improve relations with China that were officially severed over seven decades ago when the Communists came to power. A renewed agreement between China and the Vatican on the appointment of Chinese bishops is expected to be signed in October.
Bishop Meli said the faithful in his diocese were amazed that they would be included in the itinerary of the first visit by a pontiff to Papua New Guinea since Pope John Paul II in 1995.
“They are so excited and people are full of jubilation and joy because this is historic,” Meli said.
“They don’t think any pope in history will be able to come again to Vanimo,” he said.
___
Associated Press writer Charlotte Graham-McLay in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, contributed to this report.
Tuesday, September 03, 2024
Anarchist Author Margaret Killjoy Crafts Trans Worlds in the Woods
Dressed in all black down to her ankles, dark hair in two braids, Margaret Killjoy let me into her house in the forested mountains, where she lives a hermit-like life with her companion, her dog Rintrah. A transfeminine musician, podcaster, and author of multiple fantasy books, Killjoy lives in the mountains of Appalachia in a home filled with instruments, books, art, and medieval weaponry. For an author who wrote an upcoming novel described as “an own-voices story of trans witchcraft,” her home met my expectations and then some.
Killjoy’s first young adult crossover fantasy book, The Sapling Cage, comes out on September 24 and is described as a novel that hearkens back to gender-bending fantasy and speculative fiction works by women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Tamora Pierce.
I snuck in the interview just before the east coast book tour for The Sapling Cage. Killjoy tells me there has never been so much pre-publication buzz for one of her books before. But given the evil deeds in the book center around resource extraction and power hoarding, and the trans girl protagonist who is not only exploring her identity but training to be a witch, and the collective Millennial and Gen X longing for something like the fantasy stories of our youth, it’s easy to see why the moment is right for this book’s release.
***
We can look to Tamora Pierce as an expert world-builder and fantasy writer, but we also must acknowledge the shortcomings of her multiple series, especially when it comes to gender. Her book The Song of the Lioness Quartet was innovative for its protagonist, Alanna, a girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to train as a knight in a system and world where girls were not allowed to do so. In a subsequent series in the same world, Kel follows in Alanna’s footsteps. This time, she’s legally able to train as a knight openly as a girl, but she faces unrelenting sexism while doing so. The series exchanges the stresses of secrecy for the barbs of resentment Kel faces and overcomes. While Kel is notably burly, tall, and level-headed, much quieter and less romantically inclined girl protagonist in contrast to the petite, red-headed and violet-eyed, love-triangle-having protagonist of the first series, these two series of Pierce’s works still keep to gendered expectations in a lot of ways, rarely venturing into discussions of queerness or anyone who isn’t cis. In recent years, it can seem like we’ve seen fewer stereotypical and cliche ideas around femininity permeating the young adult fantasy and speculative fiction genres, but a lot of tropes still persist, and despite a genre that contains infinite room for expansive thinking and reimagining of cultures, roles, and genders, we often still see cishet normativity win out in young adult books. Still, I know that Pierce’s works, which many queer adults read as kids, left us wanting when it came to representation that felt more direct, where we wouldn’t have to stretch to see reflections of who we were growing up to be in the text.
In The Sapling Cage, Killjoy presents us with a 16-year-old protagonist, Lorel, who is smart but still learning, pretty but not ridiculously so, strong but not the strongest, good at fighting but not the best. She is frequently conflicted, but often keeps these complexities to herself. She can be brave, but she can also be afraid or unable to stomach violence. Lorel struggles throughout the book to connect with her emotions. She’s spent so much time suppressing parts of her identity, that she cannot always easily define what she wants. Sometimes she has a sense of exactly what she feels is the right course of action, but often, she’s taking the thoughts, feelings, and advice of others into account, too. She exists on the demisexual spectrum, and her romantic feelings bloom sweetly and slowly.
Importantly, to both the plot, and as Killjoy hopes, the reader, Lorel is also trans. And so, in this new addition to the genre, Lorel swaps places with her cis girl best friend who was promised to the witches from birth, but who wants to be a knight. While boys and girls in this world can join various brotherhoods of knights, only girls can join the witches, so Lorel puts on a dress, and begins her journey from thinking of herself as being in disguise, afraid of discovery, to owning her identity as a girl who will grow up to be a woman — and a witch.
When I read the early scene where Lorel and her childhood best friend agree to switch places, it harkened back so beautifully to the first time I’d read Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness. And it harmonized, too, because this was different. This time, we were going to follow the people learning magic, not knighthood. We weren’t going to a castle, but into the woods, and as someone who has often felt locked out of certain circles of girlhood or cis womanhood, the idea of following a character’s journey into a sacred women’s space, and, I hoped, into acceptance in said space, held some serious appeal.
Still, Killjoy had to wait some years to find a publisher for the book after she completed the manuscript in 2017. The book played with emotionality in ways that were atypical of the genre. “I was a fairly emotionally withdrawn teenager,” says Killjoy, “and so I wrote a book about myself as a teenager in terms of a lot of the emotional landscape that Lorel is facing.” However, as Killjoy puts it, that’s “not the way you’re supposed to write YA. You’re supposed to write these almost hyperbolically emotional characters.”
Killjoy takes great care with her handling of the “kids versus adults” dynamics pervasive in YA, resulting in a more complex book with crossover appeal. “I actually wanted her to have a realistic relationship with the power structures that she’s part of, as compared to in traditional YA,” Killjoy says. “I understand why it’s so important to give protagonists agency in the story, and I don’t think Lorel lacks agency in the story, but I think that it’s important for her to coordinate with the adults in her life as she’s attempting to save the world, you know? And I think that’s a more realistic way to solve a problem.”
In a recent post on her Substack offering writing advice, Killjoy notes in the section “Writing the Other” that “constant bombardment with negative portrayals of trans women kept me from coming out even to myself for decades.” When I ask about writing a trans girl in a YA novel, of course Tamora Pierce comes up.
Killjoy tells me about discovering the Song of the Lioness books around 5th grade. “I used to say it set me up to be a cross-dressing knight because, for a very long time, I was just a boy named Margaret who dressed like this, and then eventually came out as trans,” she says. “Then, I was like, no, I’m going to be a girl who pretends to be a boy, and then learns to be a knight.”
The Sapling Cage, she says, is in some ways a conscious inversion of the premise. “I was like okay, well I want a boy who wants to be a witch,” she says. “The most important gender part that I’m trying to convey is this idea that Lorel doesn’t know she is a girl trapped in a boy’s body. That’s not the only way to conceive of transness.”
“I think that we have this problem, although we got to it from an understandable point of view, in how we talk about transness right now,” Killjoy adds. In her childhood, she vacillated between wanting to do girly things, then wanting to change her name, then backing off a name change for a time. She describes a back-and-forth gender journey that is not necessarily neat and tidy. “I don’t want to convey to young kids who are questioning their gender that you have to be sure.”
***
Margaret Killjoy is a master world-builder. She has built a large part of her writing career on speculative fiction and is the world-builder for the recently released tabletop role-playing game Penumbra City.
“I really like the idea of exploring gender in contexts that are not and don’t need to look like the modern world,” she says. And indeed, she does not and says she never will use the words “cis” or “trans” in the Daughters of the Empty Throne series (of which The Sapling Cage is book one). “Not because those are bad words,” she explains, “but because they’re not appropriate to the gender of this high fantasy Medieval setting, you know?”
Killjoy wrote 50,000 words of world-building for Penumbra City, a game where the players use reputation as currency instead of gold, wealthy God-Kings play with the world like it’s a chess game — and yet people find ways to carve out an existence even amongst trash piles and zombies, all while resistance and revolution brews amongst different factions. When it comes to her approach, though, while she does outline her novels, Killjoy thinks that having all the answers at the start is a bore. She prefers to begin by planting seeds, uncovering and discovering throughout her writing process, surprising herself and her readers with the way the world emerges as the story unfolds.
Her first encounter with fantasy world-building came through Dungeons and Dragons. She started playing with some friends, but when they moved away, Killjoy just kept reading the books. “It was what I spent my allowance on,” she says.
World-building is also political. “It bores the hell out of me with world-building when people basically recreate our world,” says says, “and they’re like ‘oh I mapped out everything about every single town,’ but they haven’t bothered to imagine that a town could use a different economic system.”
“I do see my writing craft as sort of a magical process,” says Killjoy, “and that is an attempt to influence culture and thought.” We discussed the influence of Anarchist writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who frequently explored gender in her work in ways that are meaningfully alien to the conceptions of gender we typically hold in the real world, which asks us to interrogate just why we believe what we do, and what, if anything, is a hard and fast rule that must be followed. In speaking to the importance of imagining new worlds, Le Guin said in her speech acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
In The Sapling Cage, for example, witches don’t eat meat from domesticated animals because to do so impedes their access to magic. Killjoy, who’s vegan, says, “I don’t believe that in a literal sense…But I can have characters in the magical world have that experience, and then I think that that’s more likely to make people think about what’s involved energetically in an animal raised in captivity versus a hunted animal versus eating plants.”
Collective and radical politics can be seen throughout the world-building of The Sapling Cage: the witches practice making decisions by consensus; there are varying levels of acceptance and understanding when it comes to gender identity and asexual and nonbinary characters; and while there are serious hierarchies, there are also sometimes collectivized farms. There are different magical systems, even, and no one, right way of doing anything, no single correct way to perceive of or even see magic — the witches in the book, The Order of the Vine, represent only one view and make that much clear.
For her work on her history podcast — Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a look at people who were legitimately awesome, good, or otherwise on the right side of history — Killjoy researches and writes a 5,000-10,000 word script every week. This, too, reflects her thinking around world-building, history, and perception. “Learning of this history has really, really informed my writing,” she says, “because the thing I love about history is learning about different ways that people have fought and felt and lived in essentially different realities and needs of the world in different ways, because humans haven’t changed, but our conceptions of everything have changed.” She talks to me about a recent search for mini-periods in time of increased LGBTQ acceptance and tolerance because history is not a linear march toward progress, but a twisting, turning thing full of backs and forths.
***
One thing I noticed when reading The Sapling Cage was that the characters sure did wander, walk, and generally find themselves traveling. I ask Killjoy if her personal past had any influence on that part of the story. “I just wanted a weird, interesting life,” she says.
She grew up with a family who surrounded her with books, then went to art school, and then dropped out in 2002 after attending an anti-globalization protest. “There was a culture of traveling anarchists at that time, where we would go to different demonstrations, and then in between the big demonstrations, we would open squats and cook with Food, Not Bombs, and ride bikes around and you know, guerilla gardens everywhere,” she says.“It was the first thing in my life that gave my life a sense of adventure and meaning.”
She explored, traveled to new places, exposed herself to new people, and wrote her first short story in a squat in the South Bronx. “The window was broken, and it was winter, and I had this roll top desk that had just been in that room for probably the 60 years since anyone lived there before, and it was almost an aesthetic choice. I didn’t have a computer or anything. I just hand-wrote a story.”
From there, Killjoy wrote zines that fictionalized her life but presented them as authentic perzines while writing under various names, causing some confusion later when she began to publish the work of others, readers still assuming everyone was still Killjoy. This led to her consolidating under one name, Margaret Killjoy, and no longer publishing under pseudonyms. She continued to write and submit short stories, and started Steampunk magazine, which she describes as “a critique of Victoriana.” In 2009, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction, the first book Killjoy edited, was published.
In 2014, Killjoy published fantasy novel A Country of Ghostsandsold her first short story. She used the money from the story’s sale to attend the intensive speculative writing workshop at Clarion West in 2015. Following the workshop, Killjoy continued to write and sell short stories.
She recalls one of her instructors telling her he thought she’d be the most likely to make it because she lived in a van. She laughs, “I was waiting for him to be like ‘because you’re the best.'”
We talk about the realities of writing and publishing and money, about keeping expenses down and about writers who live in tents, on boats, or, well, in vans. Killjoy credits zine culture for breaking her into writing. She continued to publish books before she found an agent, including The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, the first in her ongoing Danielle Cain series, which follows anarcho-punk demon fighters and begins when a man-eating demon deer appears in a squatter town.
Traveling constantly, losing friends to violence, and seeing other people in the movement she was in go to prison culminated in increasing panic attacks. Killjoy knew she needed to seek some more stability — and also, her van wasn’t long for this world. She built a black A-Frame cabin on an anarchist land project, where she lived without electricity through the start of the pandemic before moving into the house where she lives now with her rescue dog.
Her house is filled with instruments, mostly a variety of harps she put together from kits that require some woodworking. She gleefully takes an instrument off a high shelf and tells me it’s a “goblin harp.” Killjoy strums it, and each string plays the same note. It’s a goblin-esque troll of an instrument. She pulls out a dulcimer and skillfully plucks away at the strings while it rests on her lap.
Sound, too, is an important part of Killjoy’s life and work. She’s a musician and founder of the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl. She’s involved in additional musical projects ranging from neofolk to electronica, and of course, also just plays for fun.
She also is part of publishing collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Penumbra City is published through Strangers, and I ask Killjoy, if, as a publisher, there was anything she wished writers knew or understood better. “I wish people knew that rejection is not the end of the world by any stretch, and that a rejection of a book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, it just means it’s not what that the press can publish right now,” she says.
“I wish people knew it was a peer relationship,” she adds. She emphasizes that just as it takes a great deal of work from a writer to complete a book, it also takes the publisher an enormous amount of effort to get the book out into the world and to set the work up for success.
Killjoy takes me through her weekly writing routine, which is equal parts inspiring and intimidating. She writes 5,000-10,000 word scripts each week for Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, as well as a 2,000-4,000 word Substack post, and also, about 1,000 words each day on one of her fiction projects. The last one is looser, since Killjoy notes that actually completing 1,000 words of fiction each day would mean completing four books per year instead of the “two books a year or so I seem to be on right now.”
She holds a somewhat anti-precious stance when it comes to her work that keeps her producing. Even though she’s technically living in just one place now, Killjoy is constantly moving — and that’s how she likes it. “I love that my job is learning, and I’m not an academic,” she says. “Yeah, like that makes me so happy. You know, every now and then I’m like, oh, something’s hard in my life and then I’m like this is the sunset I get everyday, and it is paid for by me reading history books. And talking into a microphone. And I am one of the luckiest people who’s ever been born, and I worked really fucking hard to get here, yeah, you know, but like I am very aware of and grateful that I like my life.”
“So, it’s funny, cause then I realize that most people I know don’t actually want to live like I do at the end of the day, most people don’t actually want to basically be a hermit,” she adds. “My dad made fun of me when I told him I was a hermit, and he was like, you have the internet.” This is true, she concedes. But in an average week, she probably only has one in-person conversation with a cashier, or with her dog Rintrah. “But he doesn’t talk back,” Killjoy says.
In a typical day, she’ll spend time walking with her dog, and then most of her day is dedicated to reading and writing. She talks to friends, and of course, podcasts, and stays connected to the world via the internet.
“I don’t know if this is true,” Killjoy starts, “but a million years ago, I heard Enya just sort of got rich, bought a castle, and lives alone with cats in the castle and makes music.”
“And bothers no one,” I add.
“She’s not on Twitter saying turkey shit.”
Living in a place that allows her this life of solitude informs her work.. “Because it’s the mountains where no one goes, it has an attitude of ‘we let people be weird.’ We mostly just wanna let people leave people alone,” she says.It’s the kind of writing life some people dream about, and the kind that is definitely best with a silly dog who will keep trying to lick your face or bark at planes.
Despite wearing all black living in the woods, Margaret does not describe herself as a witch. “I don’t fuck with [magic] much cause I do believe in it.” Magic, real or not, is a metaphor in Killjoy’s writing. The villains in the book are resource extractors, people seeking to accrue and consolidate power. The Sapling Cage begins with a concerning, magical blight that leaves trees drained of all life. Margaret and I walk out of her house so she can show me around her land. Some of the oak trees are dying of some kind of blight here, too.
She talks about how, even here, at her hermetic outpost, she can see the effects of climate change, the ways in which the power hungry are sacrificing the commons of nature for their own personal gain. Still, the sun is setting over the rolling mountains, I am taking some very witchy photos of Killjoy, and her book fills me with a ton of hope. I’m rooting for The Sapling Cage to find its audience and its way into the hands of the kids, and especially trans kids, who will love it.
When it comes to what’s next, Margaret is, as you might predict from her writing routine, chugging ahead on future books. She tells me she’s just completed the next book in the Danielle Cain series, and then, of course, she’ll be moving onto the next book in the Daughter of the Empty Throne trilogy.
No need to wonder if she’s writing. She is definitely writing.
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killyjoy is available for preorder.
Faithful of the Diocese of Vanimo wait for the arrival of Pope Francis at the Esplanade in front of Holy Cross Cathedral in Vanimo, Papua New Guinea on September 8, 2024. © Tiziana Fabi, AFP
