Today, I’m thinking about the stories we tell to ourselves, each other, and the world. How true are these stories? What are we exaggerating? What do we leave out? Where do we heap blame or praise? And how much are we central to, or on the edges of these stories?
If we could tell a truer story, would we? And how would we?
I’ve been going through my first published book, Evolutionary Witchcraft, as I prepare to release a twentieth anniversary edition next year.
At first, I thought I might just slap a new intro onto the text and call it a day. That’s what most authors do. But after I got the rights back from the original publisher, I felt called to work through the text itself. One thing I’m finding is astonishing to me, and quite unexpected.
Not even a quarter of the way in, I realized how much of my own material I was naming as coming from the root tradition—Feri— I was writing about. It wasn’t that I was trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes by not disclosing information, it was simply that this is how so many practices and traditions work. All creative process is the same. Here’s how it goes: we work with new material, toss what we have learned and incorporated into the cauldron along with all the other things we have learned or experienced, stir it up with our understanding, and, after time, it emerges in a new form.
I did state at the beginning of the book that the material within was informed by my studies with the whirling dervishes, the Gurdjieff Work, mystical Judaism, Christianity, and lslam, Buddhism, and other sources. But as I began to read through the book, I saw how many exercises were simply… mine. Or how much this one exercise was an adaptation from something I first practiced in the Gurdjieff Work, or how this other practice came from my years of dance training.
In the process of writing this deeply personal book? I had written parts of myself out.
Isn’t that strange?
Also, in the twenty years since the book was published, the work took me on a journey that deepened my study of other magical traditions and esoteric practices. I began to see what others had hinted at: that yes, there are tools and ways of being in Feri Tradition that were unique to Victor and Cora Anderson and their students, but that other things were also core to, or overlapped with, many other Craft and magical traditions.
In other words, the book needs to be revised to reflect this deeper understanding. I’m trying to do that while keeping the bulk of the original material intact.
In twenty years, the cauldron never stopped bubbling and the cook has changed.
In revising this book, I’m having to make decisions about what to make explicit, what to cut out, and what needs to expand.
The expansion will mostly happen in other books—like the Stars of Power book I’m working on now—because this one is long enough already! But making things explicit needs to happen: This, I adapted from that source. This came from my own practice. That other thing came directly from Victor or Cora.
Mostly, I need to write myself back into this book. Not a lot, but enough.
Grappling with this again makes me wonder: how often do any of us write ourselves out of our own stories? What do we attribute to others that really comes from inside? And that can be both “good” things or “bad” things.
How much are we projecting or deflecting?
Where are we taking credit that is not ours?
How often do we claim our truth?
How often are we hiding something from the world?
When is it time to claim something that is not just fragments, but closer to the totality?
How will we write ourselves—truthfully— back into the stories we tell?
1 comment
Can’t wait to see the anniversary edition of Evolutionary Witchcraft! Of all the books in my library it is the one I go back to most often when I need to refresh my practices.