On Stories & Spells (Part VI): Revenge

In response to my series on stories and spells, I received this thoughtful note,

This is a beautiful series, Tad – thank you. About power… I watched a lecture by Keith Wrightson about witchcraft and magic in early modern England. He used a phrase that stuck with me: “spells were the weapons of the weak”. He was referring to the role of spells in disputes between neighbours. People who’d been unfairly treated and didn’t have the physical or social power to fight back (often older, women, solitary) sometimes looked to spells as a way of evening the playing field. I think we still see that kind of justification for spell casting when things are unequal or unjust (“This is just what I need to do to even things up…”).

Amen to this all.

What are the poor and oppressed to do in the face of power?

Are spells to be removed from the panoply of options and diversity of tactics afforded to them? What do those with less power do in the face of those with more power?

This is an age old crisis that has come to all of our ancestors at one time or another and that we live out in every moment and to which there seem to be no easy answers.

Revenge is, of course, the understandable and frequent answer.

William Blake spoke to the frequent consequence of revenge in his poem The Grey Monk

‘I DIE, 1 I die!’ the Mother said,

‘My children die for lack of bread.

What more has the merciless tyrant said?’

The Monk sat down on the stony bed.

The blood red ran from the Grey Monk’s side,

His hands and feet were wounded wide,

His body bent, his arms and knees

Like to the roots of ancient trees.

His eye was dry; no tear could flow:

A hollow groan first spoke his woe.

He trembled and shudder’d upon the bed;

At length with a feeble cry he said:

‘When God commanded this hand to write

In the studious hours of deep midnight,

He told me the writing I wrote should prove

The bane of all that on Earth I love.

‘My brother starv’d between two walls,

His children’s cry my soul appalls;

I mock’d at the wrack and grinding chain,

My bent body mocks their torturing pain.

‘Thy father drew his sword in the North,

With his thousands strong he marchèd forth,

Thy brother has arm’d himself in steel,

To avenge the wrongs thy children feel.

‘But vain the sword and vain the bow,

They never can work War’s overthrow.

The hermit’s prayer and the widow’s tear

Alone can free the world from fear.

‘For a tear is an intellectual thing,

And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the martyr’s woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.

‘The hand of Vengeance found the bed

To which the purple tyrant fled;

The iron hand crush’d the tyrant’s head,

And became a tyrant in his stead.’

Those last four lines are as faithful an articulation of the troubles facing us in contending with power as I’ve ever read.

A few years ago, I spoke with a friend of mine, a leader in the Cree community in Alberta and he confessed his concern about the growing use of the word ‘revolution’.

I sensed what he was aiming at and made the guess, “Because it symbolizes a 180 degree turn and now those who are oppressed are in the seat of power but the seat of power remains untouched?”

He nodded.

If our response to power is to simply become more powerful well… now there’s more power in the world. If our response to pain is to inflict more pain, what sort of world are we making? If our response to the punishing behaviour of others is to punish them, what does it do to the fabric of living, holy culture that sustains us all?

“Never wish them pain. That’s not who you are. If they caused you pain, they must have pain inside. Wish them healing. That’s what they need.” Najwa Zebian

Caroline Casey speaks beautifully about spell casting when she says, “Never cast a spell you wouldn’t be the happy recipient of.”

And then I wonder - is it a spell or a prayer? And how might we distinguish between them? Another wondering for another time.

But using your framing, we could see a different kind of spell, and a different kind of weakness in those early modern cases. Many revolved around loss or misfortune following an argument – your horse died; your crop failed. Painful, costly, often difficult to determine a cause, but with a grievance all lined up. So, if grief or mystery couldn’t be borne (weakness), you could accuse your least powerful neighbour of something they could never disprove. That seems like the perfect spell to simplify the unknowable into causality and blame. And it still seems a popular form, even if the details have changed.

Scapegoating might be one of the oldest human spells.

The traveller people of Scotland have had plenty of experience with this as have the Roma and the travellers of Ireland and all around the world. If there was a problem, someone’s chicken went missing, it was them who got the blame for it. The flower of grief never gets her chance to bloom into the beautiful flowering of love for life that she wants to be when her seed is crushed under the rock of grievance.

I think many of the women and men accused of being witches during the burning times would be familiar with this as would many people of colour, black and indigenous people.

These spells of how those ones are not really human and therefore their lives are less valuable… well, there’s the beginning of every genocide humans have known.

As Martin Prechtel writes, “For the lack of grief, we go to war.”

And, all too often, in the modern era, spell casting has become the chief weapon. It is used against us and we use it against others.

But when we fight their spells with our spells, the world falls deeper into the slumber of being spellbound.

And what then?

I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m saying it’s understandable and more consequential than we could possibly imagine.

We would do well to proceed with care.

The darkness around us is deep.