I have often said that I was born weird (or wyrd) and weird I remain. That is essentially the truth of how I came upon this odd path I walk. I have an inborn inclination toward things macabre, unusual, mysterious, and frightening. My personal bent is opposite to so-called normal people who find happiness in the day-to-day. My soul yearns to know the secrets of the universe, and I am compelled to seek them out.
I believe that my readers will affirm a similar predisposition. Those of us who walk the winding path of secret wisdom are most naturally drawn to it, usually from a young age. We find ourselves steeped in books of strange tales and fantastic occurrences. We most easily identify with the sorcerers and seekers of these tales, rather than the hidden princess or the shining knight. In the West, many of us have a shared culture in these stories, and also through the numerous films made from them. This popular culture is a booming industry that inundates us with merch for any book or film that has a modicum of a chance of becoming a phenomenon. And the bleed over into the occult community is higher than it ever has been.
This leads some people to roll their eyes or turn up their noses when anyone makes reference to some story or program that partakes of popular culture. The attitude is that no one who is into “that” can really be considered a serious practitioner, or student of the occult. But I beg pardon, for a mo, and suggest that if you hold this view yourself, that you light the incense, clear your thoughts, and wander back down memory lane.
As I said, I was drawn to the strange and unusual from a very young age. If you recognize “strange and unusual” as a line from the movie Beetlejuice, then we are in the same popular cultural headspace. Secondarily, I have just magically communicated to you a massive amount of information, because the images that this conjures up in your memory invariably lead you to thoughts of ghosts, seances, the afterlife, evil spirits, and things that go bump in the night.
If, say, you had a bent for the odd, but lived in a fairly isolated location at a time in the past when things like magic and the occult were not as easily accessible as they are at present, how did you satisfy that itch? You sought out the odd in what you could access. For me this was the scribblings of a somewhat morbid little fellow from Baltimore and his poem about a rather obstinate corvid. Through him I made the acquaintance of some of his contemporaries, who introduced me to Schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, and another gentleman who had the habit of drinking too much and sleeping far far too late.
Alongside these tales, my grandmother had read to me from a very much abridged Brothers Grimm. And about this time, the wonders of television provided me with all the Technicolor® splendor of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West. Before my early teens, I had moved on to things like Tolkien, T.H. White, and Tennyson. In high school and college I branched out into Heinlein and Herbert, Michael Moorcock’s many faced Eternal Champion sagas, and the sometimes bizarre fantasies of Roger Zelazny.
My studies of, and interest in, the occult and magic grew alongside my experience of the popular media fictions. They were very often informed by it. I found in many of these works a spiritual perspective, and alternate views of the nature of reality that were instrumental in my expanding my own viewpoint and personal power. And the study of the occult, I believe, actually added to my appreciation of some of the more subtle ideas in the literature. While I don’t maintain that any of these authors is practicing magic, I will say that some of them have at least done good research. Or are guided by an unseen hand.
My own children, though born just before the turn of the century, are classified as Millennials. Their gateway tale concerns a certain orphan from Privet Lane and a scholarship to a rather unusual boarding school somewhere in Scotland. They get their TV fix from Supernatural and Sabrina, programs which I am compelled by generational dynamics to sometimes cringe at.
Well,…it’s just that I know those demons. They aren’t like that in real life. For one thing, they’re usually taller.
In my house you will find at least three volumes of the works of Charles Addams, which do not all include the more popularly known family members, but share the same kind of gallows humor and oddness that I cherish.
And yes, you’ll also find a toy guillotine, which I don’t think is the least bit strange.
In fairness, my children were probably exposed to weird at an early age. While we don’t have quite as broad a collection as the Addamses, there’s certainly a museum quality to the house. There are also books everywhere, on all sorts of subjects, and reading was encouraged. But that doesn’t perhaps account for my child’s teacher being concerned when she checked out the book “On Death and Dying” in second grade.
“Don’t worry. We’ve told Wednesday; College first.”
You can tell that I am a fan of the kind of dark humor and irreverent sarcasm that marked Charles Addams’s famous cartoons. If you haven’t, I highly recommend looking to the original source, rather than solely depending on the various television and film versions. They are unique and wonderful homages in their own way, a testament to the power these characters and their “ookiness” has on even the so-called normal folks.
I would dearly love to have that dreary rambling Victorian manse beside the cemetery and swamp. I miss my old cemetery and swamp. I spent many a joyful afternoon wandering through them, and the wooded hillsides behind our house, talking with the trees and rocks.
I would be that neighbor that sharpens the spikes on the wrought iron fence. Why have spikes on the fence if they aren’t capable of impalement? I mean, what’s the point?
I don’t necessarily emulate the Addams family. My family has it’s own unique weirdness, but oftentimes it’s much easier to just use this broadly understood popular image instead of explaining to new people what they should expect when invited over for dinner – um…I mean – to dinner, of course.
My own rooms have the majority of the really strange things, but you may expect to find one or two life-size skeletons sitting in chairs in the living room at any time of the year. While my wife does not always express herself at my personal level of strange, she’s never felt the need to explain the skeletons to visitors. That’s why we’re already into our fourth decade together. I don’t recall any visitor ever asking about them, though, so I guess that says something about the kind of people we invite.
I didn’t get this way because I watched the Addams Family on TV. I was already this way, and the Addams Family was something I could identify with and be comfortable. They were my people. This was very important growing up in a small rural community where conformity was expected, and enforced by all institutions. So in this I could find a means of being myself, that at least some of the rest of the crowd enjoyed. And if they chose to believe that I was “just kidding around ” in my similarity to the characters on the show, well, who was I to tell them otherwise.
Full grown adults even today usually assume I am joking when I make some bizarre comment. It’s easier than admitting that there are strange and unusual people in the world, who inexplicably like what other people fear. We laugh at the ironies of misfortune, and seize every breath with lustful vigor because we know the ultimate jest awaits us all. Gomez and Morticia are so passionate, because they know that we are all eventually food for the worms. And even in that they share in their devotion.
In the present time, when anyone interested in the dark arts can jump onto the ubiquitous Interweb and obtain a googleplex of opinions on the finer points of raising the cone of power, or what should go into a love philter; it’s hard to imagine having to glean bits and pieces of forbidden lore from folktale and bedtime story. But that was the reality for much of the world through into the 60s, because these things were considered either fraudulent, or evil, and suppressed and reviled by the public. The only “safe space” for magic, witchcraft, and the occult was the province of fiction, with a moderate easing into anthropology or history.
So when my articles seem too pedantic and reliant upon such things as antique books and scholarly treatises, it’s because that’s what I could get hold of in the latter half of the 20th century. I have, in recent times, looked into some of the seminal books that I hear being referenced by those young people who came upon the craft (and The Craft) in the 90s. I am trying not to have the “Sabrina reaction” to it, because I know it is so very important to so many people.
And that is something we should remember when we are frustrated or annoyed or amused by things on Witchtok and the other venues where the present occult movement is evolving, trying to find itself, and doing all those other things we did when we were growing into our own place in the cosmos.
Whether we agree or not, we must recognize that it is important to those who are using it. Whether we know, from both education and experience, that some assertion is wrong-headed and doomed to failure, we are obliged to bite our tongue, and at least couch our response in context of that person believing that it is so absolutely right.
Because somewhere along the line, someone did that for us, and that made all the difference.
See you next week. Same bat time. Same bat channel.