Musings on The Witch

 

"Holiness and intelligence of soul are to be recognized from a man's eye, walk, voice, laugh, the way he spends his time and the company he keeps. Everything is transformed and reflects an inner beauty."

Pseudo-Anthony, "On the Character of Men" 

There are SPOILERS for this movie, if you haven't seen it. If you haven't seen the movie, go watch it. What I am saying assumes particular, experiential, knowledge of the movie. I am saying this in bold: I am not holding your hand any further. Watch the movie or don't read this post.

I am, by nature, an idealist. I have a strong natural bent to take whatever inner ideas I have and push them onto reality, with a will that cannot be properly understood in abstraction. On the one hand, this allows me to, once I've locked in on what can and should be done, to get it done. On the other hand, idealism is one of the greatest poisons to mental health to exist, short of being shot in the head. You cannot see the world as it is, only as it's filtered through your artificial abstractions. And this means you miss things. Obvious, obvious obvious things. Because you weren't looking to begin with! Many a situation have I botched due to thinking that the thoughts in my head were more powerful than bad finances or a mean left hook.

One of the things that I truly appreciate about Desert Father (and thus Byzantine) spirituality is the iron resolve to set aside idealism in lieu of measurable and obvious results. They don't mince around with stupid technicalities, they don't ask what you should do, they ask "Does this thing give peace and quiet to your interiority?" If the answer is yes, genuinely yes, then the rest can hang.

You know one of the first things Evagrius of Pontus, the primeval writer of the desert, advises? Don't leave people unless you absolutely must! Negative thoughts and other things have a habit of finding you when you're alone and making you far worse than you would be with people, even if they're not terribly good. The early Christians, for all their talk about the corruption and evil of the pagans, were a pretty cosmopolitan and upper-class group. They didn't mingle, but they certainly were a part of society! All this "Let's go across the ocean and find a new continent to get away with people we disagree with" is a Protestant thing and has absolutely no common ground with anything the early Church did, in any capacity. Even with the differing groups and all the bickering, nobody moved halfway across the world. The benefits of being in the general area of people outweighed the disadvantages of said people being unjust. People are worth loving, even if they can be bad.

So, what's the first thing we see in this movie? Oh, right, a father willingly allowing himself to be exiled, over "the purity of the Gospel".  Upon finding an area clearly cursed and badly off, he doubles down. Lies. Steals. Anything other than go back to the town and apologize. This is the dude who would rather steal from his bereaved wife than go back to town. It's the joke about the guy waiting for God to save him from drowning, when three boats go by offering to pick him up, in film form. 

What would a God Who is so focused on relationship and community that to call Him One is to call Him Three and the other way 'round have in common with someone who would gladly put his family into a cursed land to be rid of a town he finds offensive? What would that God, Who is Community, want to say to such a man, even if He could get that man to hear Him?

Oh, right, nothing.

This isn't a vending machine. You don't put in coins and have your vending machine god do whatever you want. You use the tools given to learn to relate, to be in harmony, not march out of the town and declare everyone else heretics. You love and cherish, and by so doing others correct themselves. So, I don't really have anything terribly nice to say to the father in this movie. 

But it gets worse. Because the father's folly is then visited upon his children. The quote at the top of the post is about what a holy man is actually like and what's important about him. It's not the thoughts in his head that's important, but the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the way the world just... makes sense... to him. And if those things are not given to a child all they have are those most wretched of things: thought without context. It is the context of goodness that is necessary. Thought doesn't mean shit without the warmth that made it. And the father in this story doesn't have it. He passes on the chaff, without the fire that created it.

So, what happens if you fill a child's head with words that don't actually mean anything on their own, and then drop them in a cursed place? You think they're going to be able to take the words and just use them, like some sorcerer? Only the most wretched and vile of sorcerers believe in the pure efficacy of words, and many of those sorcerers walk with a cross around their neck these days! 

Wait, isn't there something in the Bible about sorcery being evil? How it's a vile thing? And how God doesn't stand to be mocked by taking His Name in vain? Oh wait!

Exodus 22:18 is really clear about it:

Sorcerers must not be allowed to live.

The footnote in the Knox Version makes it clear the word is feminine. As in witch. As in using words just for their own merits is, inherently, a receptive act of invoking a spirit. Evagrius of Pontus would sure agree with that, his book about spiritual warfare, Antirhetikous, uses "thought" and demon interchangeably. To invoke a thought with a specific emotional state is to invoke the spirit who holds that combination, to the point to where thought/feeling and spirit are functionally indistinguishable. In fact, the whole Byzantine tradition rests on this central idea: thought with mood/emotion always invokes a spirit.

And we've already covered what it looks like, invoking God. Inner coherence, radiating out in peaceful and a gently healing aura.

The other way is sorcery, spiritual theft. It is a vile, repulsive thing, practiced by Satanists, Calvinists, Traddies and Orthobros, alike. The smell is so obvious, so repulsive, so noetically vile, that only the blindest of fools would miss it.

You shouldn't teach sorcery to your children using the Name of God and expect them to be Christians. You should count your lucky stars if they just become atheists, just to get the taste of sorcery out of their mouths. That's an act of morality from a child who was crippled right at the knees, trying to get away from what's clearly evil.

No, that's not the worse option.

The worst option is if they accept this horrifying idea and then spend the rest of their lives trying to use the Scriptures, commentary, and doctrines of your church as if they were calling on the Lord God. As if these things, taken on their own, with the artificial abyss you passed onto them, are enough to answer the natural abyss within. It's not. The abysses don't care about words or sentiment or (God help us) that disgusting thing called idealism. The abysses just swallow up whatever light and warmth they can find. If your child is unlucky, supremely unlucky, they will think that that double abyss of depression and cold, leading to occasional relapses into debauchery, are the best they're going to get. When that happens, you have damned your child, congratulations. If you're lucky they'll run into something that takes them out of this world before they do something really awful.

Like, I dunno, make a deal with the devil? 

Like, I dunno, float above the corpses of their little siblings and join the ones who ripped their little bodies apart? 

Horrifying, right? But, at the end of the day, humans will always come back to power and results over "morality" and loyalty, always, and if you blinded them to such an extent where they're floating up in the air like that, relieved to finally see results...

Where do you really think you are, right now, even if you're alive?

Heaven and Hell are states of mind, after all. Death is irrelevant to whether or not you're already there.

The Real Point of Crescendo

I close my eyes. And remember. The first time. Didier, dark elf, had finally killed Aliana the Succubus. He filled her with arrows. When her body didn’t vanish back to the Nine Hells like it should have, Didier cut her open. 

A blue flash. A sonic boom way above. The others murmured in concern. What omen was this?

Didier didn’t care. 

You see, Didier’s wife, Ilia, was dead. Aliana had killed her. And now that Ilia was dead Didier had nothing left. He pulled the burning rubble together to make a pyre. He dragged the desecrated corpse atop it. Called his bear companion to him. Stroked it. Leaned into its nuzzles. 

And then cut its throat. 

The bear fell upon the pyre without a sound. Blood poured. Iron steam streamed to the heavens. Sparks followed. 

Didier knelt in his friend’s corpse. He added his howl to the smoke, steam, and sparks. He screamed to the Nameless Raven Queen, in her frozen castle. He demanded the soul of Aliana never rest. That her myriad schemes bear no fruit. Didier thrust his knife to the spark and smoke-choked darkness above, feet driven like stilts into the bloody depths of his bear, and demanded that he be heard. Now!

Silence. 

Everyone looked at me. 

 “Well, Mr. Dungeon Master?” Jedd’s voice was soft. But unyielding. I realized I had to talk. What do you say to such a thing?

“Lightning. It comes down. Engulfs your blade. The pyre is destroyed in a roar. No bodies are ever recovered.”

A silence enveloped the eight people around the table. We ended the session. 

I painted that scene. It still hangs on my wall.

Not too long after, I ran my first campaign of Burning Wheel. The first session revolved a young princess discovering her fairy godmother, a tall and black-haired beauty, had an evil twin sister, who had angered the forest gods. Slighted them. Stolen from them. 

And the gods demanded recompense. 

The evil twin couldn’t be found. The princess  and some of her retinue searched and searched, but they couldn’t find her. She had escaped. The gods would not be mocked. They wanted blood and suffering. So the fairy godmother offered herself in her wicked sister’s stead. 

What followed I can’t adequately describe to you. I will try. But forgive me, I failed before I started. 

The princess begged the gods for more time. She was refused. She pleaded. And pleaded. This was more than her friend. The fairy was closer to her than her own mother! Surely something could be done! The gods said there was no more time. The princess offered herself. The gods told her she wasn’t worthy without a second thought. And so, ever so patiently, the fairy godmother talked the princess into letting her go. The princess’s voice never rose. It never broke. But the confusion. Oh, the confusion! The fairy godmother had done nothing wrong! Why should she pay for her sister’s evil? There was no answer. Eventually the princess gave in. With one last smile and a lingering squeeze of her hand, the fairy godmother walked into the dark forest. And she vanished. Without a sound. She just winked out. 

I can’t tell you what that room felt like. I can tell you eyes were wiped. A few got up hurriedly for a smoke break. Two of the players were Marine infantrymen, whose feet had trod Afghanistan. And they wept louder than the rest of us. They had absolutely no issue with grieving the bravery of the princess as her innocence died. 

A few years later, and I played in a game of Torchbearer. A rarity, to find me playing! I wound up playing… surprise!  A paladin! 

… who was on the lamb for killing his parents. He claimed they drank from some cup, and when they did their eyes… changed. Something uncanny went into them. And when they talked their voices weren’t their own. He slew them on the spot. And then ran. He had killed the king and queen, you see. 

In one of the dungeons he was captured by a band of snakemen. They had never met him before. So, when they declared Sir Charlemagne was to undergo trial by combat for murdering his parents, there was a bit a shock. 

Out Sir Charlemagne strode into the ring, sword in hand. He lunged. And got smacked in the face with the flat of his own sword. The snake man said if the paladin could land even one blow, he would be acquitted. Again Charlemagne lunged. This time he was pricked with the snake man’s sword. I got frustrated. Kyle kept changing the difficulties of the moves! He announced that he was! 

“Why did you kill your parents, paladin?”

“They weren’t themselves! They were evil!”

“Oh? And how did they show you?” The flat of the blade almost broke Charlemagne’s nose with a SLAP. 

“They… they were different!”

“So what?”

And I felt it. This moment where Charlemagne’s confusion and mine fused. I realized Kyle was trying to tell me something. Something important. Vital. This creeping feeling of gravity overcame me. The next few words would be a turning point for me, as a person. I don’t know why they were, but everything funneled into this one moment. 

“Do you think you made a mistake?”

“Wouldn’t that make me evil?”

“Are you not still a paladin? Do the gods not still hold your vows? Are your prayers, even now, answered?”

I laughed. Charlemagne lunged. And this time he cut his target. The snake man gave Charlemagne his own sword as a gift and released him, a justified man. Later, Sir Charlemagne would drink the same draught his parents had. His eyes were opened. And he sacrificed himself to make Ragnorak a beginning, not just an end. 

These are all the kinds of moments that become myths and fairy tales. There’s so much not said here! How Didier and Ilia had helped steal Aliana’s cambion child, and how Aliana had sworn revenge. How the princess and her soldiers found the evil twin and offered her to the gods, who gave back the good fairy godmother. How Sir Charlemagne had danced with the Eve of the new world before he died, unknowingly opening her womb so life could continue. And so much more! 

These were journeys that took years. The weight of unspoken time is so thick and loud that it almost eclipses these words. 

Oh, you want a story I got from Crescendo! You noticed! 

There was a young man named Sorin. He was a forester, and he realized the soil was impoverished. There were trees with fruit which gave magic energy when consumed. And they were dying. So was the planet. So Sorin went on a quest to find out how to save the world. 

Along the way Sorin rescued his one and true love, Andrea. She had been captured by satyrs. They couldn’t get Andrea back to her husband, Marius. Sorin knew Andrea loved him still. And he didn’t make a single move on her. They would get her home. He promised. 

And then one day they watched helplessly as Marius was strapped to a rocket and launched at their home city, leveling it. Andrea swore revenge. Sorin comforted her. And didn’t make a move on her. Andrea wanted him to. But Sorin knew she grieved more than she knew. Eventually, Marius came stumbling out of the woods. One of the dark gods had rescued him off the missile. Andrea was beyond relieved! They reunited, finally! Very soon, she was pregnant. 

And Sorin… Sorin tried not to think about it. He was King Sorin now, you see. He had talked a mountain elemental down from destroying the people who had killed his own city, and they made him king! King Sorin tried to bury himself in his work. To help those he could in an increasingly dark and awful world. But then things started happening. A rebellion was beginning to form around Marius, who wanted nothing to do with it! But some force was twisting his every word and gesture. If Marius so much as stubbed his toe, the people took it as a demand for revolution. 

Another mountain elemental and a mysterious meteor-man attacked King Sorin’s city. He went out, axe gifted him by the shield-maiden of war in hand, and this time he slew the mountain. And the meteor man. In succession. Sorin began to return home as a hero. 

Only to find his city burning. See, somehow Andrea had gotten infected. Possessed. It had gestated within her. And she had begun infecting others with her curse.They were taking over. King Sorin begged the creature he still hoped was Andrea to come back to him. To Marius! But the thing laughed at him. Andrea was gone! Marius told Sorin that thing wasn’t his wife, and if he didn’t act then all she had fought for would perish. 

So King Sorin, Mountain-Fighter, slew the Dark Queen, who was piloting the meat-sack that was Andrea. His magical axe, which could make mountains bleeed, was more than sufficient. Those under the Dark Queen's spell were freed. The people rejoiced in their brave king… who stood over the corpse of the only woman he ever loved. 

During the celebratory feast, Sorin saw Marius slip off. When caught up with, Marius admitted he couldn’t do it anymore. His every word was twisted into an act against his best friend. And now Andrea was gone. He wished he had died on the rocket, and he was going to go do what should have been done a while ago. 

Sorin asked Marius if he was really going to destroy yet another surviving part of Andrea. He promised that they would break the curse on Marius. They would rebuild. Andrea’s memory would be honored. And with that, they sat and looked at the quiet sunset. Their rebuilt city sat behind them, celebrating the life they had been given, whether they deserved it or not.

That’s a dramatically condensed version of 38 sessions. But there. That’s King Sorin, Mountain-Fighter. 

There's a Point to All This, Right?

I guess?

I don’t share these stories terribly often. Other RPGers talk about their grand goofiness, and I generally let them talk and laugh with them. Their stories are fun! I like hearing them! But I’m rarely in the mood to talk about how little Celeste, the cambion Didier and the others rescued became a vibrant and loving young woman. She’s wasaaaaay down there in my soul. She still lives. And she’s gotten me through some times! Or how, when Sorin was sitting with Marius, I could almost see the sunset the two of them were looking at. And that I saw it through Marius's eyes, in the moment. These aren't just... shared.

If you like the sound of that, I got good news: there’s a game made specifically to make these kinds of moments! Just show up moderately conscious. And you will get that and so much more. I will teach you how to run it. 

So. 

Um. 

The text isn’t done. 

But the rules are, and together we can make this game, which already means so much to me, mean something to a lot more people! Come on over to the Discord! We got regular games running, a sorta shambly-but-functional text, and a lot of passion! 

Thanks for reading, either way!