She's a Real Witch

So following from that is so gay post I thought I would address the she's a real Witch issue, OK how many of the people who are opposed to the the term that is so gay have called someone a Witch & not meant a Wiccan, Hedgewitch or other form of Witch in the Pagan sense? A Witch is a term often used to describe someone who is not actually a Witch but someone who malicious, scheming & generally unpleasant, but no one batters an eyelid at that phrase. The term Witch meaning someone is unpleasant gets banded about too readily without public uproar, but soon as someone says that is so gay people are up in arms about it. Isn't that double standards? Witches have feelings too & hey we are not evil, well maybe if I haven't had much sleep & I have to be up at the crack of dawn I can be thoroughly unpleasant , but unless you are one of those freaky people who enjoy the early to rise thing I think most can empathise with that. So what to do, lobby the equal rites commission to get the word Witch not to be used as an insult? Witches have been ingrained into the mass public psyche as being wicked creatures & most of the time people think of Witches as being monsters more than humans. How do we get across calling someone a Witch is offensive to Witches as far as insults go, when we can't even get people to stop calling someone gay as an insult. Unfortunately we can't but if you are one of the people who thinks its wrong to call someone a gay but is OK to call someone a Witch, then you have double standard, go & look in your political correctness handbook & come back with a reasonable explanation as to why it is justifiable. Don't come back with we don't mean a Witch in the Pagan term we mean it in the other term, the other is the Pagan term, it is just that we got demonised by religious fanatics centuries ago & the influence of that is only just starting to wear off. I do not recommend calling anyone a Witch as an insult unless we can use other religious titles as an insult without any comeback on us. So long & short of it don't call someone who is not a Witch a Witch, just as much as don't call someone gay who is not gay. Level playing field here we come.

That's So Gay

OK eytomology time again, the word gay gets used a lot, mainly to refer to homosexual men & occasionally homosexual women, but in recent years it has meant that something is stupid as well. People get uppity about the usage of this term & in the way that it is ever more increasingly used. But haven't we purloined a word that was used as an insult at the time anyway? Lets look at the ways in what it has been used it originally meant happy or cheery, nothing wrong with that, but just as the word grotesque ended up being a word for an ornament that is a gargoyle without a function a gay became the opposite an ornament which was desirable & a nosegay is a term still used as bouquet although less so nowadays, I'm not sure if you classed me as an ornament I that wouldn't end up being more like a grotesque personally. Another meaning of the word gay meant carefree, which by modern standards is considered a good thing meaning happy, peaceful & free if somewhat naive, but not back then it didn't the happy & free bit probably stuck but the lack of morality in general was also meant. With that in mind the term changed to incorporate another meaning & for the first time a purely negative one, as a prostitute, meaning that they were nothing more than a pretty object to take pleasure out of without thinking of the morals of what they are doing, thankfully that meaning of the word disappeared into obscurity. But then another less welcome interpretation came into use, gay started to mean garish & flamboyant, which is the term gay came from that eventually meaning a homosexual male, yes they were calling us garish not happy or jolly, but we have subsequently taken it as a badge of honour ignoring the fact that way before it got used for us it was starting to be quite a negative term, eventually we took it on renouncing the garish connotation & putting the happy gleam on it. OK I'm proud to be gay myself & it is a badge I wear openly. So why does it seem that I'm supporting the negative use of the word, most people when they say it, do not mean that is so like a homosexual, it has become habitual & people use it without thinking, they just mean something is stupid, soon language will change & something else will mean stupid, though what I'm not sure. Please take things in context. So one of the fall outs of such phraseology has become the Queer being used by gay people about themselves, those who are not comfortable with the term gay any more, my problem with this is that queer has never been a none pejorative, it means weird or not quite right. OK heterosexual people use queer as their status too because as they don't like the stereotypical connotations of the word straight & is also used by Bi people as it may cut out some of the flack they receive & I have no problem with such a status existing, in fact I quite support it, just don't call it queer, it never has meant anything pleasant, call it other, unspecified or none heteronormative or something that is not an insult. I would prefer to be called gay than queer because at least gay does have some good connotations to it. OK people should be a little more aware of the situation that they may cause by using the term gay meaning something rubbish, but then we also need to realise that it isn't a direct attack on us.

For the Want of a Better Phrase Part 2- Energy

So my second foray into the murky world of eytomology refers to energy, what do we mean when we say energy? Energy in the literal sense is something measurable that emits from an entity e.g. heat, light, sound, radioactivity, kinetics. In that case the last time I felt the energy of a stone it was being hurled at me when I was at school, I felt the force of the kinetic energy by the throw & heard the sound waves as it hit me. But in magical terms this is not what people mean, when I was Stonehenge doing a clean up, I was asked whether I could feel the energy of the stones, no was my response, then they said they could see the energy of the stones as they seemed to have a strange almost shiver to them. At that point I had to turn away & try my hardest not to laugh, I could see what she meant but what she saw was the evaporation of the dew, but being captured by the awe of place the first time she'd been there I suppose it is only natural to get carried away & in a way she did see the energy of the stones just the thermal not the spiritual that she thought.

So now you are getting the gist of the post, spiritual energy, is it energy? In a physical definable way, no. So what is 'energy' in this sense? I propose a notion that instead of the word energy we use a different word. So what to use? We could purloin a word from a different language such as Qi (Chi) from the Chinese, Prana from Vedic or Mana from Hawaiian but these translate as life force and are OK for living entities but not for stones, plus it means life force, again force is measurable so brings us to another dead end if speak to people who wish to be pedantic about what we are talking about, which also means we can't go all Star Wars and just call it The Force, plus I don't think I'm geek enough yet to even contemplate it as an option. The closest word we have to the notions of Qi & the like in our everyday language is vitality which again would not be useful to describe a non living thing. Its not just beings & things that have an 'energy', but places too. Do graveyards creep you out? Why are they so eerie & uncomfortable, it isn't as if we live the world of Buffy or Being Human so we shouldn't expect something to just suddenly rise out of the ground at any minute to eat us. So is it an echo of what goes on there? The only echoes I hear there are what is going on their at the time which is generally birdsong or people visiting graves. So echoes are a bounce back & now I have got the thought of bouncy skeletons out of my head I shall go onto something a little more constructive.

So what words could be a useful alternative? You could say essence, like vanilla essence which usually does not contain vanilla you still get the vanilla taste, they have kept the essence of the vanilla, but does that strike you as it doesn't have the genuine feel about it, I must admit although to me it feels a more correct phrase than energy, it still doesn't quite seem right. So how about spirit? For me this works in the fact that it is something that is not tangible but we can feel even if it we can't measure it, you can get the spirit of a place, you can feel the spirit of someone in a good mood or a bad mood, but then we come back to stones again they don't live & unless they have been extricated by force out of the ground, probably by dangerous means by exploited workers 7 by which point wouldn't the spirit of those stones be almost be rotten to the core? So perhaps we should say spirit for those things that have lived or have been lived in & essence for sticks & stones? Or should we just throw stones out of the window on that one? (just make sure they don't hit anyone in process)

The Want of a Better Phrase - Pagan Chaplain

The term Pagan Chaplain tends confuse people, it does seem very much like an oxymoron at first glance predominantly as people think chapel as church which is a thing Pagans seem to lack not being Christian & all. So here is how I tend to put it, a Pagan chaplain is someone who provides moral support & spiritual advice for people who seek it. In the establishment I work in & because I work in an interfaith environment I don't just see people of my own faith but others as well. In this position we do not seek to convert the person from another faith but we do provide support as best as we can for that person. The work I do requires confidentiality so I will not name any of the people who come to for support nor will I release details that are specific to any given case, sorry if you want juicy gossip but you will not find it here. As stated before I work in an interfaith environment so do not take any musings about anyone vaguely referenced is Pagan or works in the establishment I work in. Chaplains work in secular buildings/organisations such as prisons, universities, hospitals, the military and the police force & often in a space that is set aside specifically for faith activities such as prayer or meditation. In secular buildings they can be devoid of permanent religious decoration of any faith so that people of different denominations can use them, this is the 'chapel' that the chaplaincy part refers to not a church.

So what would you call a chaplain of a faith that doesn't have a church? Its a difficult one, cleric might work but with all the press at the moment they tend to use the word cleric to describe a rogue Imam or a priest who has done something that seems rather beyond his remit, plus some how it seems to sound rather clinical and would make me sound like some kind of High Priest or Arch Druid and don't get me started on the title Witch King. I have run a social group that offers support as much as friendship with many of its members. I have run/co-run for coming up to eight years. I don't have a fancy title as Hedgewitches don't have a hierarchy as such, as we tend to learn off each other and tend respect each other as equals, I just ended up in the driving seat of a group for a while. So other terms Minister either Christian or political. Pastor either a Christian or if spoken a homonym for a staple food. So I think I will stick with the term Chaplain until a more fitting word comes along. And if you are still a little confused I dare say your not the only one.