When I was Southern Baptist, they called it something else. What was it now? “Division within the church?” “A divided house?” Something like that. Among pagans, it’s known as “witch wars.”
Regardless of the religion, they all seem to come down to one thing: control. Yep, who’s got the power, who wants it, and what they’ll do to get it.
I’ve heard Christians pray for bad things for other Christians to teach them a lesson. The more kind-hearted ones pray for their adversaries’ eyes to be opened so that they’ll be shown the “error” of their ways and know the “truth.” Pagans, on the other hand, work magick (and/or pray) on their adversaries to drive them away (witch bottles and the like) or to do spells to give clarity to people who need to see things their way. Same thing, different posture. I’ve witnessed it from both sides of the religions.
The difficult thing about magick, one of my newer mentors has alleged, is that when a newer group breaks away from an older, more experienced group and a witch war ensues, it’s hard for the newer group to fight back on a magickal level. The elder group knows all their tricks to shield, protect, etc.
A stranger listening to our conversation disagreed,
saying that one couldn’t hurt the other unless one believed it, that people didn’t really do that, that if your faith is strong enough, then you could fight off any witch war magick or block it easily. My new mentor asked if she’d ever been in the situation being discussed. Er, no.
When I relayed this conversation to Shannon, she made an excellent analogy that I’ve found useful for explaining it.
“Of course, it’s harder to block the people who taught you,” she said. She went on to explain that even though she’s quite good at forensics, she can never win a debate against the people who taught her how to compete because they know all the tricks and how she assesses data and uses it in her debates. The only way for her to block them out is to use new information she’s learned from new mentors, skills and techniques that weren’t mastered and taught to her by her original instructors.
It would be nicer if witch wars didn’t happen, but all religions have that same human dynamic. Meanwhile, it’s always good to learn new things and introduce yourself to new teachers.
Southern Gothic, Book One of the Rites of Passage: magick, betrayal, and a reckoning.
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