Bindings

Sometimes life is a grand panoply of joy and all the world is your friend.  Sometimes life kicks you in the face.  Ah well.  Into every life a little rain must fall and into the lives of witches so must the need to bind. 

Binding, of course, is the magickal act of restraining someone or something against a particular kind of behavior.  It can be used to good effect to bind oneself against bad habits.  However, most of the time binding is used to restrain someone (an enemy) or something (usually a harmful spirit) from messing with you or your loved ones. 

Binding is one of those ethical grey areas that people often fight about.  Some say it's unethical to bind anything against exercising its own free will in any way.  Others blithely cast bindings any time someone annoys them.  I take the middle course.  My guideline is to never bind someone or something in a way in which I would not be willing to be bound.  For example, I have no problem binding someone against maliciously telling lies because I wouldn't mind having that ability taken from me.  Once I've cast a binding I always try to act as if I am also bound, because it gives me a good idea what I've done to the other person.  If it's awful I can remove the binding and my own pain/discomfort would be the price I paid for my error in judgment.  It's not a perfect system, but it's worked for me so far.

When I do a binding I like to physically bind a poppet that represents whatever I'm binding.  If it's a person I like to put a picture of that person in the poppet if I have one, or just load it with representations of that person if I don't have a picture.  Then I'll put in herbs appropriate to the sentiment of the spell.  I typically make the poppet out of felt squares (they're easy to come by in any craft store and are inexpensive). 

I'll usually bind the poppet with yarn, but recently I've discovered marine rope.  Yarn is relatively weak and has a fair amount of give in it, making for a rather flexible binding.  It's great for restraining yourself from bad habits or for when you want the binding to sit lightly.  However, sometimes the situation you're dealing with is particularly heinous and you need a stronger, less flexible binding.  Enter marine rope.  Marine rope (available in any boating/fishing supply store) is incredibly strong and has varying amounts of stretch to it.  I recently found Dyneema STS 12 Single Braid Line. 
This is now my super-binding cord of choice.  It's stronger than steel, thin as para-cord, and has absolutely no give whatsoever.  When you need to binding something and give it no chance of wriggling out of that binding, this is the way to go.  Overkill? For most things yes, but sometimes you just need to go whole hog. 

Dark Arts from the Outside

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of representing the Grey School, along with the ever brilliant Rae du Soleil, at the Vancouver B.C. Pagan Pride Day.  It was held outdoors in a park just outside the city (in the suburb of Surrey).  We lucked out and had decent weather, though the wind got a bit feisty at times.  There were a decent number of attendees and we had some really great discussions.

One of the things that really struck me about this event (I hadn’t attended it before) was the diversity of immediate reactions to my saying that I was the Grey School’s Dean of Dark Arts.  The reactions ranged from “Oh cool” to abject horror.  Now, that in itself isn’t all that surprising (pagans do run the gamut on opinions on DA) but what was really surprising was just how different the bases were for those reactions.

The people who thought being involved in DA was nifty ranged from the ever present Potter fans to people who were obviously fond of the Dark Arts themselves.  By far the most common reaction to my title was to be relatively positive and then ask what the term meant at the school.  These folks took one look at my book (Defense Against the Dark) and generally assumed I was a good person and that DA at the Grey School was probably positive – as, of course, it is.  The ubiquitous Potter fans thought the similarity between my title and the defense against the dark arts title at Hogwarts was just the coolest.  These folks might not look to deeply into what I do, but at least they don’t think I’m evil.  Then, naturally, there were the shadow practitioners that performed the expected “does she actually practice what she preaches” verbal sparring that I quite enjoy. 

Then there were the detractors.  I do expect a fair number of people to hear that I practice the Dark Arts and immediately misinterpret what I do.  The ambiguity of the term makes this unavoidable.  I’ve come to expect that a certain number of the more lily-white/fluffy members of the pagan community to shriek in horror at the mention of “black magick” before they ever bother to find out how the term is being used.  I was pleasantly surprised that just about all of these folks were open minded enough to let me explain how we use the terms “dark arts” and “black magick” (which we use to mean the study of defensive magick, creatures of the night, and low magick).  Once they understood what we actually meant they accepted it as a good thing. 

What actually surprised me were the one or two people who heard what I did and assumed that I was on the far side of the light and went around indiscriminately destroying dark creatures.  That was a new one.  I practice shadow magick.  My practices are about as dark and disquieting as you get while still maintaining ethical standards.  I teach defense because there are bad things out there that would like nothing better than to tear your face off.  There is a huge chasm between blasting everything that scares you and learning how to protect yourself when necessary.  One can respect and even embrace the shadow while still keeping a wary eye. 

In reality, the Dark Arts is a practice that requires practitioners to balance personal ethics and protection with a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.  A practitioner that actually understands dark creatures can determine when they should be respected and allowed to go about their business and when they need to be acted against.  A practitioner that is an expert in defense can apply the minimum amount of force necessary to correct a problem without going overboard or disrespecting others.  A practitioner that truly understands low magick can apply their magick at the critical fulcrum point that will slide things their way without disrupting the waft of the universe.  Yes, rash and ignorant practitioners can wreak havoc – but that is true regardless of the flavour of magick they practice.  Any expert worthy of the title can balance keeping themselves safe, sane, and healthy, with working magick in the world.

Ethics of Banishing

I was doing a radio interview this weekend and the host asked me an interesting question: what is something that movies and television get wrong about paranormal entities.  The question threw me for a moment because the list is so long.  What do they get wrong?  Nearly everything.  It would be much easier to list what they get right, like occasional bits of folklore.  I decided to pick something that bothered me about the way media portrays the paranormal and that is ethics.  In a lot of media everything that is paranormal is automatically treated as evil and frightening and that’s just not the case.  Sure, there are plenty of very bad things out there but they’re absurdly rare.  Most of the paranormal creatures people are likely to run into are benign or nothing more than annoying – hardly the picture of terrifying menace that sells so very well.  There are plenty of practitioners that will banish any entity that even startles them – I know I did back before I got comfortable with them – but that’s hardly ideal.

As someone who deals with the paranormal rather more often than the average bear, I think it’s incredibly important to have a clear set of ethics when it comes to banishing paranormal entities.  Sentient beings think and feel; they may not think or feel in a way that is understandable to people, but they do.  Their thoughts and wills should not be simply disregarded because they’re inconvenient for us.

Does this mean we cannot protect ourselves against them?  Of course not.  It just means that we have to think before we act against them.  I try consider three grounds to be necessary before conducting a banishing on a sentient being: standing, failure of more polite methods, and self-defense or the defense of others.

Standing is a legal term meaning that someone has grounds upon which to be heard before a court.  In terms of banishing, to have standing means you have a personal reason to want or need the banishing.  For example, someone whose home was inhabited by an imp has a very immediate and personal reason to want the imp banished – it’s bugging them!  On the contrary, someone who had heard that the house down the street is haunted but doesn’t actually know the people that live there and hasn’t been asked for help does not have a personal or immediate reason to need or want the banishing.

Banishing is serious magick and should not be done lightly.  All acts of magick carry consequences and magick that potentially goes against the will of another can carry very serious consequences.  If you try to banish an entity and fail, the entity can become angry or even dangerous: it might come after you or, if it can’t get to you because of your protections, it might go after those around you.  Also, banishing can be harmful to the entity being banished.  Some banishings can feel very much like an energetic brawl, with the practitioner and the entity battering each other with energy until one of them gives in – hopefully the entity.  Imagine you’d been beat up and thrown out of your house; how would you feel?

The clearest form of standing is to own the property from which the entity would be banished.  You always have standing to eject unwanted entities from your property, particularly your home.  Standing can also be given to a practitioner by the owner of the property in questions asking the practitioner for help.  If your friend asks you for magickal help, then you’ve every right to give it if you so choose.  Such scenarios give very clear standing, less clear are situations where the practitioner does not own the property or when the practitioner chooses to intervene on the behalf of others without their asking.  A practitioner may have standing to banish in places such as their school or place of work if they have been personally affected by the entity or if a friend asking for their help has been affected.  A practitioner may also have standing to intervene when they see someone being physically or mentally harmed by an entity.  These are the grey areas for which each practitioner really needs to make their own choice.

Before doing a banishing it is always best to try more polite methods for getting an entity to move on.  Most entities that you will encounter are not malevolent – but that does not mean that they won’t be intrusive or difficult to live with.  Many entities don’t understand that their behavior is disruptive or unwelcome, or perhaps they are merely mischievous and don’t really mean us any harm.  Like intelligent children, many entities will stop negative behavior once it is pointed out to them. 

The number one justification for evicting an entity from any location is defense against harm.  If you feel that something is an imminent threat to your personal safety, you have the right to act to defend yourself.  That means that if you know an entity is present and you are afraid that if you do not banish it right away, it will harm you physically, emotionally, or spiritually.  You will have to use your judgment to discern whether something that does not currently pose a real danger but might do so in the near future needs to be banished.  If you feel that someone is being physically threatened or severely emotionally/spiritually threatened, then banishing is always appropriate.  In all other cases, you will have to use your judgment to determine if the entity poses a great enough threat to warrant banishing.

We have the right to reject an entity in cases of self-defense and the defense of others, where the person wanting the entity banished has ownership of the area and a genuine need to have the entity removed.  In the end you have to use your judgment and decide whether banishing is appropriate and necessary.  Remember, you never HAVE to banish an entity.  You always have a choice.