Tag Archives: ethics and morals

Paganism, Religion

Polytheology: Finding a relationship between cosmology and morality

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NOTE: This series is an exploration of my personal theology, which I tend to hold lightly. It is subject to change as I gain new insights. Also, no one should interpret anything I say as the “one true doctrine.”

I think we’re all familiar with stories about cosmic battles between good and evil. They often depict two great forces, one good and the other evil, in conflict, battling for something. Perhaps they battle for control of the universe. Maybe they battle for the souls of humans. No matter what the prize, such stories fill the human imagination, something our entertainment industry has profited from. I’ve lost count of all the movies and television shows that portray such a conflict, occasionally in interesting ways. And while I agree it makes for highly captivating and enjoyable entertainment, I wish there were other stories that portrayed other understandings of morality and cosmology.1

I think it’s important to understand how popular culture not only shapes how we see the real world around us, but helps shape it. So I think it’s important to consider how such a portrayals of cosmology and morality may not be beneficial when applied to real life. For starters, it allows us to think of “evil” as something driven by an external force rather than an entirely human issue. For example, I think the oppression and dehumanization of certain classes of people is unambiguously and morally reprehensible, but I think it’s motivated by entirely human impulses. In many ways, I think framing such injustice as something supernatural can be used to absolve humans of responsibility and avoid accountability. One example of this can be seen in the response of many white Christians who were indifferent to the Civil Rights movement or even opposed it. Even many Christians2 like Billy Graham, who acknowledged racial injustice was a “human heart issue,” suggested it was a problem that would not be resolved until Jesus’s return.3 This often became an excuse to do little or even nothing.

This is not to say that I think an understanding of cosmology — or theology in general — has nothing to say about morality, however. For starters, I think that my understanding of everything and everyone being bound together by shared wyrd underscores the need for morality. That interdependence is what inspires — even forces — us to consider how our actions affect one another. If there were no consequences for our actions, after all, there would be no need for morality. Simply doing whatever we want would be a perfectly acceptable way to live our lives.

Another problem that I see with the way the dominant culture in our society frames morality, theology, and cosmology is that it does so in highly anthropocentric ways. At face value, his makes sense. After all, human religion is a human construct trying to understand humans’ relationships with the numinous — whether we’re talking about the divine, the wider world, or both. As it’s intended to offer humans guidance, it makes sense that humans would be centered there.

However, I think this becomes problematic when we allow ourselves to assume that the rest of the universe shares our anthropocentric viewpoint. This is how we start to see every natural disaster and other hardship as a personal attack on the humans impacted by these events. It’s the point where we start to speculate about which target(s) of God’s wrath the hurricane was thrown at rather than simply accepting that the hurricane was a force of nature and some humans had the misfortune of being in its path.

I think that a more careful reading of many sacred stories could help alleviate that kind of thinking. As I’m most familiar with the Norse myths, I’ll once again use them as an example. Particularly, I find an examination of the Aesir’s relationship with the jotnar (“giants”) instructive. While many individual jotnar were seen as enemies of the Aesir because they posed a particular threat, they were not collectively seen as evil. In fact, a number of the Aesir were paired with jotnar.4 I’ve seen other Heathens suggest that even Thor, famous slayer of jotnar, only killed those who threatened the balance and/or safety of the world. Beyond that, the Aesir and the jotnar seem to leave one another alone, having different interests. I think it would be good for we humans to internalize a similar sense that there are forces (and possibly entities) in this world that do not share our interests. And sometimes, it means that our best response to them is to stay out of their way as much as possible and find ways to cope and mitigate harm when that is not possible.

Post History: I wrote the first draft of this post on November 17, 2024. I proofread, revised, and finalized it later the same day.

Footnotes

  1. It particularly bothers me when stories that draw on Pagan (either modern or ancient) themes fall into this trope. The reality is that if any such cosmic battle existed in certain cultures’ stories, they were often far more complicated and nuanced than “the good guys versus the bad guys.” ↩︎
  2. Lest anyone think I’m solely picking on white Christians for their frequent allegiance to white supremacy, let me acknowledge that modern Pagan and Heathen movements and organizations have their own struggles white supremacy. In fact, I’m currently reading Queering the Runes by Siri Vincent Plouff. In it, they go through a brief explanation of Heathenry’s dark history of white supremacy. Fortunately, they also have a web page with recommended resources for ensuring that your Heathen practice is anti-racist. ↩︎
  3. For an exact quote, check out chapter two of White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler. Then read the entire book. I highly recommend it. ↩︎
  4. Freyr’s marriage to Gerd and Njord’s marriage to Skadi are two famous examples. Also, the interesting thing to note about the marriage between Skadi and Njord is that it was arranged to make peace with Skadi after the Aesir had killed her father, Thiazi. Again, thissuggests a more complicated relationship to me than “good guys versus bad guys.” ↩︎
Movies, Witchcraft

Witchcraft Movie Corner: The School for Good and Evil

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Looking for witchcraft-themed movies that were actually released in the past couple of years,1 I ran across “The School for Good and Evil,” which was released in 2022. So I decided to give it a watch and I have a lot of thoughts about it.

I should warn the readers that this post will be chock full of spoilers. So if you haven’t seen it yet and you dislike spoilers, you might want to run over to Netflix and come back to this post after you’ve watched it.

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge and point out the antisemitism in the movie. Toward then end, when the character Sophie begins to embrace her role as an evil witch, she begins to turn ugly. Both unsurprisingly and unfortunately, the movie-makers decided to portray her transformation as her becoming ugly in the stereotypical manner. And the stereotype of the ugly witch is firmly rooted in antisemitic caricatures of Jews. Similarly, as another reviewer pointed out, both Sophie and Rafal are shown as being the most evil because of their use of blood magic, which is another antisemitic trope often used. (For those not familiar, it’s rooted in blood libel against Jews. While some might be willing to overlook these things — as the movie is drawing primarily from fairy tales and these antisemitic tropes are pretty baked into those tales — I still find it disappointing. It would have been entirely possible to demonstrate Sophie becoming “ugly” without drawing on such stereotypes. And the use of blood magic played no major role in the movie and could have been written out altogether.

At the very least the movie could have interrogated those stereotypes. After all, it challenged many of the other fairy tale ideas, such as when Rafael points out that some of the fairy tale villains are sent to truly cruel fates and proudly declares them a “corruption of the good in the stories.” So before I move on with the many wonderful thoughts and themes I saw (or at least read into) the movie, I wanted to acknowledge these problems and sit with the discomfort that those in charge could and should have done better.

There’s not a lot to say about this movie’s portrayal of witches and witchcraft. There is no sense of witchcraft as a modern day witch like myself sees it in the movie. Instead, this is about fairy tale witches, who are almost always portrayed as evil. And that is how they are treated in this movie. Witches are common villain in the stories the students will participate in and therefore must either be trained to stop them or trained to be one of them.

At this point, a reader might rightfully wonder why I’m covering this movie at all then. I’d say that the main reasons are two-fold:

  1. I think fairy tales and story telling in general are important to witchcraft, or at least the witchcraft I practice.
  2. I have a lot of opinions on good, evil, and the whole idea of “good vs. evil.” As a lot of my opinions are bound up in my witchcraft practice and this movie explores those themes a lot, I feel it’s a good choice to use the movie to explore those topics.

I think it’s important to understand that historically, fairy tales and similar stories are meant to express and communicate values.2 They are used to communicate what is good, why it is good, and why it is important to embrace good. Many of these tales, as suggested in the movie, tend to express these ideas in the form of an outright battle between good and evil.

The problem with these stories is that it seems like many in today’s society try to see our world as a battle between good and evil. They want to draw lines and declare people good or evil. Unfortunately, the real world is often much messier than that.

Perhaps I read this into the movie (we tend to do that as humans), but it seemed to me that the movie was exploring that reality by moving the complexities and nuances of reality into the realm of fairy tales itself. This was most aptly displayed when Agatha is challenged with the accusation that she doesn’t actually believe Sophie is good after all by responding that it’s true, but only because she doesn’t believe that anyone is totally good or totally evil. It shows this in more subtle ways by taking a critical look at the “School for Good” in particular and in how it handles things like expelling students who fail out.3

Of course, this gets explicitly shown when Sophie manages to get the Good students to attack the Evil students unprovoked, suddenly reversing the roles of everyone. Suddenly, the Evil students all become beautiful and lovely while the Good students become ugly. And of course, the Evil (now “Good”) students turn around and defend themselves — though I will note that they do so without any sense of proportionality. As a viewer, it just seemed like everyone (except Aggie) in that scene had proven themselves to be terribly immoral.

I felt the movie could have done a bit better defining “good” and evil.” They gave a few hints when they suggested that the most powerful emotion for magic on the Good side was empathy. Also the rule that good always defends, but never attacks first was pretty good. And of course, you had the original fight against Rafal and his brother at the beginning when Rafal says that Evil will never cooperate or share. Rafal never really explains the difference between “fairy tale evil” and “real evil,” though he notes that it’s the latter he wants to usher in. I might speculate that fairy tale evil seems to be more about selfishness and pettiness whereas “real evil” seems to be about utter destruction and annihilation, but that’s based on very little actual exposition or explanation.

One of the things I will note is the commentary the movie makes on the desire for power. Many of the characters seem to desire it, including the good ones. It seems to be mostly Aggie who has no interest in it. In fact, she seems to almost entirely motivated by her twin desires to return home to her mother and help/protect Sophie.

I also liked that it at least questioned — though not always well — some common tropes, like the linking of beauty to good and ugliness to evil with the beautiful carnivorous flowers. Of course, this makes the fact that they fall into the “evil witch as an ugly hag” trope toward the end all the more disappointing.

Of course the movie still fails to answer questions I always have about the idea of balancing good an evil. What is the purpose of such a balance? What does such a balance really look like? I personally think the idea of evil and good in balance is in itself a trope that needs to be challenged and would have liked to see the movie go that far. But overall, I think it did a pretty good job of exploring some of the moral questions about good vs. evil in an entertaining and thoughtful manner.

1Seriously. I loved both The Craft and Practical Magic. But I’d like to cover some movies that aren’t more than twenty years old in this blog series.

2In some ways, I think they do a better job at this than many myths, and think that many of us who are looking to find connections would be well served by exploring these old tales at least as much as the myths we have, if not more.

3It’s not clear whether the School for Evil handles its expelled students in the same way, though I feel there’s a strong hint that it does. But then, such cruelty would be expected of a school that promotes evil, yes?