‘Do not do what you desire, do what is necessary.’ -Robert Cochrane
For anyone who has first engaged with my red mysteries of the Rose Queen this quote from Cochrane, deriving from his tradition, might seem like a contradiction.
And quite frankly, it is one.
This is a contradiction that I believe to be central to understanding the relationship between the black and red serpents. Both of them exist in our bodies, both must be honoured. They will fight it out inside our bodies and our spirits for life. Whilst it is all very desirable for Desire to win, the importance of upholding community, duty and decency to others often requires that we do not do what we desire, but what is necessary. This ongoing battle between the red and the black forces in our lives is part of the business of being alive. Reaching for Wholeness means sitting with both of these realities as ‘both also true’, rather than trying to push one over the top of the other on all occasions. This kind of thinking, that isn’t either/or is a great place to start with training the mind for sorcery.
The presence of Necessity in our lives in the English-speaking world is fraught. We are held by it on all sides, but we try to imagine a world where we aren’t subjected to it. Most of our dreams about life involve having enough money where we could imagine a life where we were no longer subject to it. In this way we have linked income to Desire in a way that will eventually show us the ugliest face of Necessity.
Death is the ultimate necessity. The one reality that cannot be helped.
It happens to all of us eventually. The over-culture doesn’t have a great relationship with Necessity in any of Her forms. We like to try and bargain and delay. We imagine we can use various forms of technology to dig our way out of what we owe to the Underworld. Our over-culture (a term created by Clarissa Pinkola Estés and bell hooks) acts as if there is a world of infinite growth, in a world where in truth every birth requires death and decay to feed that growing bud. The over-culture assumes that youth is better than age, the time when we begin to answer to Necessity, so we seek to look young, we seek to delay death with treatments, even if the person no longer wishes to live and has very little quality of life.
This battle with reality is perhaps why when we are told it is necessary to greatly curtail our consumption lest we incur a debt to reality our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay, it appears that so far we lack the political will to make those changes. It may seem strange to associate a push against the conditions of reality with mainstream humanity, when it is often what sorcerers are accused of, but when you think of it from the perspective of the shadow as framed by the psychoanalytic perspective it makes a lot of sense. We have traditionally accused ‘witches’ (who might in fact have been any scapegoat) with the Jungian shadow of the village, town or nation state exists inside the hedge.
Witches, we are told, are disobedient over-reachers who seek for more power and self- assertion than is right. Witches make the land barren, they steal resources, they eat children and harvest their fat for ointments. It’s not difficult to see how the actions of the humans who have power in our world fit this bill, how humanity’s shadow-self is indeed consuming its own young in a metaphorical sense, taking away their chance for a future, eating up, if not their bodies all their future resources. The disobedience and irreverence has not been towards some male god in the sky, but towards honour, towards the immutable laws of give and take that are intrinsic to how the earth works. It is Nature to whom humanity has said: non servium. Sadly for us we will discover we too are ‘Nature’.
The diabolism witches are suspected of is largely a projection, an attempt to burn up all we are most uncomfortable with about ourselves. To send it, Other it, punish it, and turn it over a cliff like a scapegoat, after which we imagine ourselves clean. Witches with a strong black serpent are comfortable with embracing being the Other. Yet in the gut of the earthworm we all resolve into something where mortal enemies are no longer quite so indistinguishable from each other.
Walking into the world of folk necromancy doesn’t just involve learning folk techniques for talking to the dead, it also involves learning to think more like people did before the modern world. We have to look at the world as speaking to us all the time, full of portends and communions and omens. There isn’t simply ritual time and non-ritual time. The world of the dead bleeds over into that of the living, the two worlds, really one, breath each other in and out.
When we seek to walk down this path we have to leave behind our modern comfort. A large part of what makes us witches is the choice to do this now, even in an era where we may not need to. The willingness to die before we die, this surrender to greater knowledge that is so central to the heart of initiation.
What is most important is that initiation is inevitable for all of us eventually. Even if it doesn’t happen until the day of physical death. For this reason some witches find it easier to get on with their dead family than their living.
The thing is with Necessity is that She only ever walks after us, she doesn’t run. Even though she can only move on the darkest of nights, or in a heavy mist, she still has all the time in the world to catch us up. A whole human life-time, in fact. We may even feel like we got away with our unpaid debts. But the thing with The Old Woman is she doesn’t need to run, because when we are sleeping, she is still walking... Perhaps she has taken to her dark wings for short sprints, and her gains on us are slow but inevitable. I invite you to some story-telling about this Old Woman:
The wise choose to turn and face Her in her ugliness, for such ugliness is part of the bog, part of the rotting place and the fate of us all. We speak to her by her nature: Necessity. She doesn’t care whether we want to do the thing that has to be done, whether we want to experience the thing that cannot be helped. As the witch law reported by Robert Cochrane’s tradition put it: do not do what you desire, do what is necessary.
The English-speaking world is faced a seemingly slow-burn return of the repressed moment we are faced with an ordeal of some magnitude, made greater by degrees for each year that initiation has been ignored, deferred or actively shunned, both by individuals and the culture at large. Initiation means different things to different people depending on their frame, it may be a simply entrance into adulthood, but in general it is about becoming part of something bigger via breaking your current form. No matter what the framework initiation is about Death, about crossing over and coming back. A lot of people talk a big game about ‘dying before they die’ but when faced with the reality of physical Death they realise they, (or perhaps their fetch and all their ancestors!) aren’t as prepared for it as they thought. There is no shame in this, this is as it should be. Death has power because at the very least the idea of it can still give us a good shake down and remind us of the preciousness of everything in our life.
It’s inevitable almost that the bulk of us will have work to do here, because whatever cultures or subcultures we’ve been born into the wider world around us is run by an ideology that attempts to cheat the Underworld, it takes out the minerals and buries non-biodegradable garbage there in return. At a metaphysical level it does the same thing. It hopes to stop ageing, to forestall Death and avoid stillness, silence and lack of productivity at all costs. To be seen sitting alone, without a phone, just staring into space, especially if you are outdoors, in the condition once know as reverie or reflection, is seen by most as a sign of being at best a bit eccentric. Sitting out was also a bit of a taboo in the past, though less because of phones and other forms of modern distraction, more because it associated you with witchcraft and spirit communion. The darkest most uncomfortable aspect of witchcraft has always linked us with the dead, and with places of decay.
So, to begin our journey we will begin with a good momento mori - or a ‘remember that you will die.’