Science and Witchcraft

Witchcraft is science, too.

No, wait!  Really!  Listen.

The pre-Christian indigenous peoples of Europe were committed to understanding the relationships among the elements of the world:  Plants, animals, stars, and stones, all were the subjects of their inquiry.  Their understanding was good, as it had to be for them to endure the trials of the millennia.  They learned about disease and medicine, nutrition and the body, reproduction, and the health of their ecosystems.  Their knowledge tended to favor qualitative study over quantitative, but many of the understandings they achieved, in harmony with nearly every indigenous culture on every continent, are the same as those only now being understood by modern science:  That everything is connected (quantum theory), that healthy ecosystems require cooperation among species (biodiversity), that forests communicate and adapt together with fungi in the soil (symbiosis), that good design standards are already found in nature (biomimetics), that reality can subsist in seemingly contradictory states (quantum theory), that living systems are spontaneous and unpredictable, within regimes of predictable behavior (chaos theory).  The pagans of Europe developed a sophisticated astronomy that is reflected in the architecture of Stonehenge and myriad other stone circles scattered across the countryside of the United Kingdom.  The science of the time was known as wicce, an Anglo-Saxon word that is cognate with the English words “wit” and “wisdom,” as well as with the Sanskrit “veda.”

It was only after the forced Christianization of Europe, and especially under the bloody reign of the Inquisition, that the word wicce was changed to “witch,” and given dozens of negative associations, including associations of evil intent and service to demonic forces.  The craft of the wicce was painted as grotesque and abominable, and the knowledge and insight of folk women, the craft of wisdom, was largely lost.  This propagandizing was part of a larger project of demonizing indigenous beliefs, and overthrowing the largely (but by no means exclusively) matriarchal society of pagan Europe, and supplanting it with a patriarchal system of dominating empire and religion.

Certainly, the pagan science of nature included teachings that were metaphorical and mythological in character;  But then, so does modern science.  Is not entropy largely a metaphorical concept?  And witchcraft adopts a mystical current in its conceptualization of the world, but so have many of the well-known Western scientists:  Pythagoras the occultist, Gregor Mendel the contemplative monk, Sir Isaac Newton the devoted alchemist.  Indeed, a level of spiritual mysticism is something Western science could use more of.  For the mind without the heart, science without conscience, is the paradigm that brought us the nuclear bomb, drone warfare, runaway climate change, and global ocean death.  Ironically, the science we are counting on to resolve these problems is the same science that created them.  To resolve the problems does not require new science or technology as much as it requires new conscious orientations to the way we use the science and technology that we have now, and that we continually innovate.

It is not a time to look only backward, but neither is it a time to look only forward.  Seeking our roots in our own indigenous culture, from whichever continent it originated for each of us, can offer us the wisdom that we need to guide our application of the knowledge that we always seek.  To live sustainably and responsibly in the post-post-modern world will require a lot of science, and quite a bit of witchcraft.