The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/Luke/page/2)
Luke Babb is a magical Jack of All Trades, a companion of Robin Goodfellow, and a Lokean. Their eclectic polytheist practice centers travel, storytelling, and relationship as potent forms of magic. Luke lives in Chicago, where they spend time exploring new neighborhoods and looking for Hermes in unexpected architectural details.
There are any number of quotes from Terry Pratchett’s books that moved me and shaped the way I thought of the world. But the one I always come back to, the one that shaped my magical practice – that was Granny Weatherwax.
It’s no secret at this point that everyone wants to have sex with the devil. This is such a non-statement that it is, at this point, much harder to find a depiction where the devil is anything less than a caricature of the most erotically charged image available to the imagination of the creator. There’s just one problem: nobody can tell me who the devil is.
I use models for what is “old enough” to consider seriously in my practice based on instinct and a vague understanding of the world “historiography,” picking up and discarding things from 1000, 1300, or 1800 as either “older than anything else I’ve found” or “too new” – all while the modern Witchcraft movement can be meaningfully traced to the 1940s.
We were all, in some way, seeking the capital-T Truth – and if we thought we had found it, it made sense to want to share that with others. I hadn’t been sure of the Truth since I was a child, and, for me, that amorphous uncertainty was the point. Having someone, however well-intentioned, try to save me, or convince me – or even to convince themself that I was already saved – felt like the opposite of helping.
This is the first place that has been entirely mine, where every piece of art or display has been chosen because it represents something important to me, something that makes me happy. Trying to see it with another set of eyes feels distancing, like a particularly unpleasant magic trick. I suppose that’s fitting.