Keep pure your highest ideal…

Being a reflection upon the condition wherein modern witchcraft remains plagued by the limits of vision in some quarters…

Why must we seek to restrict and bind ourself by definition, beneath such auspices delineated by the immutable truth of mere opinion, thus restrained by bias, the unmoving principle of self-proclaimed rightness utterly unassuaged by the proclamation of a preparedness to discourse which so thinly veils the finality of our mind.“We are the Witchcraft,” announced young ‘handsome Jack’ Parsons, “and although one may not know another, yet we are united by an indissoluble bond. And when the high wild cry of the eagle sounds in your mind, know that you are not alone in your desire for freedom… And when the ways of your fellows about you seem the ways of idiocy and madness, know that there are also others who have seen and judged – and acted.” Through the amnion of the atavistic sabbatic vision of Austin Osman Spare, plunged ever forward from his Witchcraft Initiation, we have been the neither-neither, inured to the inane quibbling over opinions. Surely we aspire to greater experience than this glamour.

What is this desire hoped to manifest, what purpose has been served here, what Gods of Self satiated by righteous appraisal summoned with the self-serving spell cried aloud: “Opinion”.

And what of those evoked, who, like Cochrane, decried the labelling, denouncer of the name ‘witch’, itself cast by others on the outside looking in, like aspersions, half-baked theorem dedicated and duly sacrificed at the altar of Self.

Is this to be the latest cry of the Witchcraft, the destination of a grand visionary path once entered with footsteps of those whose dedication consumed their life complete, a road now paved not with a hopeful prescience of Truth but the sludge of myriad opinion, unheeding, uninterested, crying in self-aggrandising glory of competing abasement, a bone ladder not of ancestral virtue but ascending the mass of ridiculed and degraded sacrifice for the elevation of the almighty ‘I’, ‘My’, and ‘Mine’.

What has become of us if this is the great legacy we bequeath our progeny, uninviting and incapable, no Socratic method, no high ideal to which we hold ourselves, no stringent philosophy of thought and debate, nor willingness for such as might challenge. We only improve by pitting ourselves against superior opponents unless, content in our chamber of echoes, we are as a Demiurge and our self delusion allows no room for our betterment within a world of our own making, bounded on all sides by imprisoning ignorance. Ossified must we be then, as a curiosity long since gone and largely forgotten, buried beneath layers of time and trod underfoot by those neither knowing or caring, our spiritual heirs.

Charged are the Wica with simple edict, “Keep pure your highest ideal; strive ever toward it; let naught stop you, nor turn you aside.” Must we rest upon the laurels, then, of such a cheaply won and held ideal, wielded clumsily as ‘opinion’, mistakenly identified, or face the difficult path less trod, embrace the challenge we are set and, by reckoning our strongly held opinions against a test of Truth, keep pure our highest ideal. If it is never tested, how may the purity of mettle be ever known?