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ON QUEERING GOETIA
Yesterday I posted briefly on my discontents with the democratiziation of magic as it frequently appears in the (mostly American) Anglophonic occult communities in regards to the grimoire revival.
Yesterday I posted briefly on my discontents with the democratiziation of magic as it frequently appears in the (mostly American) Anglophonic occult communities in regards to the grimoire revival.
To be clear, I’m not against the availability of magical texts, however owing to the intersections with the occult and pagan/polytheist communities eventually there is someone who will want to try and make the grimoires work for them while throwing out hundreds of years of…
…Christian baggage because they have issues with their (presumed) religion of origin. Simply put, you don’t get out that easy.
This is not to say you can’t sincerely approach the spirits or engage with the methodology, but substituting cultures and contexts alien to the grimoires isn’t exactly the best way to go about it.
In a discussion group I’m a part of, most of us decidedly non-Christian, one person has been having some difficulty wrapping their heads around the fact that they simply can’t replace the mention of God with Odin in goetic workings.
Although there’s nothing prohibiting them outright from doing that, it would require a major shift in cosmology and one that wouldn’t do justice to the spirits or the gods this person serves.
While we are free to believe in whatever we want, there are rules and there are RULES, and trying to impose one’s beliefs and insert them into a context where they are alien is misinformed at best, and colonialist at worst – the freedom of expression and belief does not apply…
…to cosmologies and beings who really are doing quite fine without you trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
This person and a few others have also had some issues understanding why they can’t just approach the saints but use their own prayers instead of traditional Christian ones.
Well, because chances are those saints probably are saints because they outright refused to believe in the very gods you as a modern pagan/polytheist worship.
Does that mean you have to become Christian to work with the saints – not necessarily – but you’ll need to be on the down low when approaching them in their courts, in short DON’T ASK DON’T TELL.
These examples are not to be proscriptive, however, and in fact provide an opportunity for queering approaches to goetia and grimoire magic precisely because you are given the opportunity to engage in multivalent syncretism and engage multiple cosmologies with equal sincerity.…
…The world is a big place with room enough for many gods and many spirits without trying to make them fit our very limited worldviews in the 20th century.
It’s also an opportunity to engage and subvert tradition without being disrespectful as well in defiance of the post-enlightenment, post-protestant emphasis on single-focused piety.
In doing so you not only queer your own beliefs, but are able to queer the methodologies themselves.
