Don’t Let Others Name You
Recently on Twitter, a guy told another guy he couldn’t call himself a witch because witch is a word for females. Instead ALL male witches should take up the word warlock. I doubt it’s worth calling out the actual tweet as you get the idea. The disgruntled “warlock” with 130 followers was trying quite hard to get the attention of a witch who was publishing a book on witchcraft and it worked.
There is always the debate of whether to engage these sorts of things. Should we just ignore the tweet because it’s silly, or should we engage and start a conversation. I lean towards start a conversation. Not because I think we can change the warlock’s mind… but because it may help others that bump up against such arguments.
You might think I would start off focusing on all the famous male witches like Gerald Gardener (the father of Wicca) or maybe I would bring up the entomology of the word. But I think all of those things are inconsequential.
Words exist on a timeline. What they were before, what they are now, and what we will them to be. As witches it is our power to choose our future. We look to magic and ritual to change our destinies and enchant our timeline. We feel disenfranchised. We look at the normal world and decided we wanted more from it.
Other religions and belief systems are served on a platter. There is an enforced line of thought. Witchcraft forges its own path. And in forging the path we forge ourselves. We take up the mantle of naming who we are. Whether you choose witch, warlock, occultist, mage, practitioner or any other word that makes you feel powerful, you get to make that choice. You can be initiated into a long line of magicians and earn degrees of power, or you can squirrel away in a cabin reading books and divining your future from the sounds of birds. You have agency. You get to decide.
The lesson of agency is not learned once. It isn’t that we name ourselves and then we are forever free of the bounds of others, but it is a conscious and sustained practice. The lesson is a fractal that keeps repeating and spinning off of itself. The words we call ourselves, the life we choose to live, the things we decide to participate in. That we have say in these things is both powerful and humbling. When we recognize our agency we also must admit our chains are often self-inflicted.
It is also a lesson that quickly moves outside of the sphere of witchcraft. One that we should paint on banners and go to battle for. We all deserve to name ourselves, to choose our lives, and to decide how we present. As you move through the world pay attention to the ways we put people in boxes and allow others to do it to us in turn. Stand up for someone’s right to choose a different life and different ways of being. Agency is one of the few True things.