“They think that the God and the Goddess assist them in making their magic, as they assist the God and the Goddess in their turn by raising power for them by their dances and by other methods. In fact, they seem to consider the gods as being more like powerful friends than deities to be worshipped.” -Gerald Gardner
If you watched Sesame Street as a kid, then you’re familiar with Mr. Snuffleupagus, the gargantuan anteater/woolly mammoth hybrid who’s Big Bird’s best friend. What you might not know, though, is that when he was introduced to the show way back in 1971, no one but Big Bird was aware he existed.
The running gag was that Snuffy always managed to wander away before any adults showed up. So someone would run into Big Bird and ask what he was doing, and he’d be like, “Oh, I’m just hanging out with Mr. Snuffleupagus,” and then he’d gesture to a now empty space, and the other person would be like, “That’s great! It’s nice to have an imaginary friend.” And Big Bird would be like, “He was here a second ago, goddamnit,” and everyone else would be like, “Aww, Big Bird, you rascal. We’re low-key gaslighting you right now.”
It’s kind of a miracle that Big Bird didn’t shank the lot of them.
As time went on, Sesame Street producers started wondering if maybe reinforcing the idea that grown-ups won’t believe you when you tell the truth was a bad idea. And so, in 1985, Big Bird enlisted Elmo to grab onto Snuffy’s trunk and hold him in place long enough for the adults to see him for the first time. The rest of the cast was like, “Oh shit, he’s real,” and they promised to always believe Big Bird from then on out.
As a child of the late 70s/early 80s, I was extremely frustrated with the whole “imaginary friend” storyline. And my little heart went out to Big Bird, who was going through these substantial occurrences that no one around him would acknowledge. I mean, how could they be so callous towards Big Bird’s pathos? Why did they need absolute proof of his pal’s physicality? Had no one stopped to consider where the giant, steaming Snuffleupa-turds all over the damn place may have come from?
I freely admit that I am over-identifying with Big Bird at the moment, on account of I participated in a big Wiccan ritual a couple of weekends ago — it was a bunch of Witches from different covens working together — and in the midst of it, I received a message from a God. The message wasn’t dire or ominous or anything, but it was clear and direct, as if He’d been sitting across from me, going over the details of a business model and explaining my part in it.
The problem was that nobody heard it but me. After the ritual, I was like, “So… did anyone else happen to catch that thing that was said?” And the other Witches were like, “What thing? Who said what, now?” So I realized pretty quickly that regardless of who might benefit, it was entirely up to me whether or not to share it.
I don’t think anyone would’ve outright disbelieved me if I’d told them what I’d experienced — if anything, they would’ve believed that I believed that something happened. But I also can’t help thinking of the time, many years in the past, when I was loosely involved with an online, non-initiatory Wiccan organization, and this one guy kept emailing out these dreams he claimed to have had, in which the Goddess Herself told him (passive-aggressively, IMO) how She was going to desert Her devotees unless we stopped questioning him and accepted him as our rightful leader.
I don’t want to be that guy. I have no plans nor desires to be a prophet, and I am absolutely not about to grandly announce that I’m the new CEO of Wicca because a deity sent a special memo just to me.
But I still need to figure out what to do with this freaking message.
The best course of action, I think, is to just sort of incorporate it into my life, so that I’m acting in accordance with divine direction, without bringing any attention to that. Which will mean reprioritizing some stuff, and taking on responsibilities in places where I’d really rather just kick back and watch other people do all the work.
And here I was looking forward to leisure time. But the only other option is, “Everyone keep doing what you’re doing, but just know that I’m in charge because God said so.” Which I can’t imagine going over well.
One of the upsides of religious Witchcraft is that we don’t have intermediaries between us and our Gods: They speak to us when They need to, or when They just feel like it, and there’s no one standing between us and Them to put a biased spin on what They’ve said. But there’s a challenge in this as well, since we’re often left trying to process information without any outside perspective. Like, I know what the message meant to me, but it also would’ve been helpful to have the Witches around me all nodding emphatically when it was transmitted.
And you know, there’s every chance that I was just really tranced out in circle and hallucinated the whole thing. Like, “Yes, it may have seemed as if a God reached out to me directly, but frankincense is mildly psychoactive, so I was probably just high.” And in a way, that would be a lot easier to accept. But it would also be like Big Bird telling Snuffy, “It’s more important that people see me as rational than it is to continue my friendship with you.”
Big Bird wouldn’t do that to Mr. Snuffleupagus, so I’m not going to do it to Anyone else. And even if no one believes that one of my invisible, powerful friends came down and spoke plain English to me, that’s fine. The Gods believed it happened, and They were literally here a second ago.
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