So Mote It Be

You can’t attend too many Pagan circles without hearing someone say “so mote it be!” It’s one of those phrases whose meaning quickly becomes clear from its context: “may it be so” or the stronger “so must it be.” I can’t hear it without thinking of Yul Brynner as Ramses in The Ten Commandments saying “so let it be written, so let it be done!”

I never paid much attention to the phrase until I heard it in a Baptist church. After the shock wore off I remembered I was at the funeral of a Mason. I quickly connected the dots and realized this was yet another rubric Gerald Gardner and company lifted from Freemasonry.

MasonicWorld.com has a reprint of a 1927 article that interprets the phrase as “the will of God be done.” I think that interpretation commits the classical religious error of assuming my will and the will of God are one and the same. A look at the simple meaning of the phrase combined with Wicca and modern witchcraft’s emphasis on empowering those outside the popular circles of power clearly indicates the phrase’s proper meaning is as I’ve seen it used in numerous Wiccan rituals: “as I will, so mote it be!”

Can we end a magical working with “so mote it be” and say it with the confidence of a pharaoh issuing a command? If we have thought through the situation, if we are certain what we’re doing is neither unethical nor trivial, and we’re willing to accept responsibility for what we do, why shouldn’t we?

If we are going to live our lives our way and not as popular culture says we must, at some point we have to stand up and say “this is what I want. This is how I will live. This I value and that I do not.”

So mote it be!