Happy secular New Year from The Wild Hunt! We hope that 2023 will bring many blessings to all of our readers.
January 1 is a complicated day. On a personal level, many of us aim for resolutions, laying plans, goals, and even stating oaths to be fulfilled in the coming solar year. I, on the other hand, avoid resolutions, as I am highly skilled at breaking them.
On this day in history in 1937, I learned – and others may regret learning – that Kenneth Daigneau, an actor and brother of a Hormel vice-president, squeed as he won $100 for creating a new portmanteau for a product, “Spam.” Hormel sources disagree with both the legend and squeeing.
Winter solstice dawn over Llanrug as the sun rises between Crib Goch and Carnedd y Ddisgl – Image credit: Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12337334
It has become our tradition at The Wild Hunt on New Year’s Day to start a dialogue regarding themes in the news and in society that may be important to the collective Pagan, Witchcraft, Heathen, and polytheist community. Fortunately, Dr. Karl Seigfried shared an excellent Pagan wish list yesterday to propel us as a community into 2023.
So once again, I will check in with Pythia in the hopes of guidance while donning my hat as Cassandra about concerns in the year to come. But before I do, I want to caution our readers that these are my concerns only; as they say, your mileage may vary.
As we enter 2023, in many ways 2022 will still be with us, a recurring theme of this decade so far. The unforeseen war by Russia on Ukraine was not only obscene, but it heralded a new era where a rules-based order is optional. I fear the international system is currently unable to correct itself. That will bleed into many spaces, with public and private shocks.
Let me offer a list of concerns related to our community that seem to have surfaced more for 2023. But before the list, I would be remiss if I did not mention our seemingly eternal struggle with exclusionary practices and discrimination. Racism pervades everything in the modern “first-world” Anglosphere, and our community is no exception.
We are equally polluted with transphobia and heterosexism. We try to bury these prejudices, but then they resurface with alarming regularity.
To our benefit as a Pagan community, however, many of us have entered a dialogue on these issues. In that sense, we have moved away from the authoritarian deafness that pervades other religious movements.
We may have started to look at the truth part of truth and reconciliation, but we still have a way to go. Nevertheless, that start is miles ahead of others.
Now, on to the 2023 list with issues closer to home.
First, the inflationary burn is true for everyone. It seems to be subsiding – at least recent evidence suggests so for the United States – but inflation remains an economic wildfire. Retailers feel it most, and Pagan retailers fill a special place in our community while also living on very thin margins. Large retailers are hunting for our money. I recently found palo santo at Five Below, and Amazon is well, a growing jungle of Pagan gifts sourced from who-knows-where.
Pagan retailers do more for our communities than just act as a metaphysical sutler. They are often havens in a landscape that is hostile to Pagans of any stripe. They are link pins about the vibrancy of the local Pagan community and a beacon about our welcome in a given place. When a retailer closes or must realign to a new market, a local point of contact evaporates.
I expect more conversations with Pagan retailers and establishments about their struggles this coming year.
We have awesome creators in our community, and their work is regularly stolen, usually by someone in a region with little protection of intellectual property. That’s often China, but not always. Our market is also so small and the internet so vast that creators can’t monitor all the places where their work might be copied and presented.
Moreover, there is a new threat from artificial intelligence services like Midjourney, Lensa AI, and ChatGPT – amazing tools in themselves, and creations worthy of coverage on issues of consciousness. But there is no substitute for the creativity and insight our creators offer our community. I also doubt that AI services and intellectual property theft will be abating.
The stories may not make the mainstream news (outside the advances of AI), but they will be making our pages.
Equally serious is the rate at which the elders of our community are passing. Our elders are passing, and far too often their journey with us and their crossing goes unremarked. We started the “Crossing the Veil” to share information about their lives. Unlike the “Big Name Pagans” who are often memorialized in many places, including here on The Wild Hunt, the stories of elders who are doing the groundwork of the Pagan movement do not get told as often as they should.
We at TWH will do better telling these stories. Their passing will be news, but their successes have often been news that we and others have failed to report. We want to celebrate those with them while they are around to share them in their own words.
Winter Solstice Sunrise (2010) – Image credit: By Winter Solstice Sunrise 2010 by Sian Lindsey, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106942447
Finally, there is a new wave that has me and many in the Pagan community concerned. It reminds me in some ways of the Satanic Panic, though that term does not fully describe it; it’s not a panic, but more of a dismay and a display of Evangelical mania.
One aspect of it is a rise in misogyny. We can see it in the subculture of “Tradwives.” This subculture has built a romantic view of the 1950s housewife. It started about 5 years ago, and it is growing. There is even TikTok content to define femininity in this way. It is a pushback on the culture of an independent woman with the supposed caveat that being a Tradwife is a choice and place of power and freedom.
Perhaps, but it is also an almost exclusively white movement that embraces fundamentalist religious messages. The movement and its followers (and even web resources) use phrases like “Darling,” “the natural order,” and “spiritual cost” to describe its tenets. Here is one such comment, from the website Darling Academy: “A TradWife embraces the natural order, and believes that though she is just as important as the male of her species, she is created differently, and embraces it. In a modern world that wants to coerce us into gender neutrality, she knows this goes against the laws of nature, and so rejects it.”
A year or so ago, Target was mocked for displaying clothes that seemed at home in “Little House on the Prairie.” The dresses were back this year. Target doesn’t guess on merchandise, it reads the data. That data says that there is a thirst for this “tradition.” The line is now referred to as “Folkloric.”
As a reminder, unlike today, in the 1950s and 1960s, women could not have a bank account or a credit card, practice law, serve on jury duty, attend an Ivy League university, run the Boston Marathon, take birth control or have easy access to reproductive health care including abortion… oops, let me edit that sentence given 2022 events … take birth control.
The other aspect of the new Evangelical mania is a boldness that had been quieted for some time. Let me share an aspect of my daily life. I receive, as the managing editor of The Wild Hunt, about 40 messages daily about suggested topics and tips on news. Two-thirds of them are now like these examples:
When we published our news editor, Star Bustamonte’s Tarot review of 2023, I received this message hourly from fake emails:
Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the LORD your God. Levíticus 19:31
At the time of writing, I received 28 of them.
When we published our commentary on the Mayan Calendar:
The obscenity you post on your website must end and be forever destroyed. When it comes to the possibility of God’s existence, the Bible says that there are people who have seen sufficient evidence, but they have suppressed the truth about God. (Romans 1:19-21).
This is just part of an email that is 3,500 words long. There were 3 of them, and they described science as a false view of creation, over and over.
When we published on Yule, I received scolding emails that we have no moral authority to discuss Pagan topics during Christmas:
“Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”
There were six such “tips,” including two more today.
That’s just from the last few days. They have also moved from sending tips through the website to direct emails once the author figures out the editor’s email is available in many of our posts.
What the emails show is that the writers do not care about the emotional and intellectual burden or violence of their messages. They only care about silencing us.
There is a ridiculousness to these messages as well. I suppose I’m expected to respond, “Thank you for your message! Being educated in Western Culture for all of my life, I had never heard of Jesus until this email. How did I miss that? Let me get to – what did you call it? – a ‘church’ right away!”
I am confident more will be coming.
Nonetheless, I and my colleagues remain hopeful for the new year. We hope you do as well. Be safe and thrive in 2023 – nothing irritates your enemies more.
Happy secular New Year!
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