Review of Aburrow's The Night Journey

Review of Yvonne Aburrow's The Night Journey

Yvonne Aburrow refers to the phrase “it’s political correctness gone mad” and, following Neil Gaiman, suggests that the expression ‘political correctness’ could be replaced with ‘treating other people with respect’. The first thing that comes to my mind is to wonder if ‘cancelling’ a speaker because that speaker has controversial ideas is ‘treating that person with respect’. What does not come across to the reader of Aburrow’s two fine books on witchcraft/paganism is that Aburrow themself identifies as non-binary, but in my reviews of these two works I have been asked to change the pronouns I had originally employed. As an English major and lover of the English language who is over 35, my initial reaction is one of resistance. Traditionally, the generic ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’ are grammatically correct as gender-neutral pronouns, and ‘their’ is considered by many to be only correct when referring to a plural subject. Euphony is identified as the first rule of language, and the expression ‘they is’ so far just does not sound right. The singular they/them, however, is increasingly being now used to ‘transcend the gender binary’, and while I have an ingrained resistance to ‘transcendence’, I do not have the same with ‘inclusiveness’. Bill Walsh, copy editor for the Washington Post, explained in 2015 that employing he appears sexist; she patronising; “alternating he and she is silly” – and likewise he/she and (s)he. Personally, I have enjoyed the grammatical gender nuance of language and find it is something that allows us to access an organic and aboriginal matrix of pagan origins and insights. What I find is particularly fascinating is that ‘grammatical gender’ does not always match the ‘natural gender’ of the thing or person to which it refers. Dutch – the closest language apart from Frisian to English, originally had male, female and neuter gender categories as German still does but, has reduced these now to only the ‘common’ and ‘neuter’. Consequently, the word for ‘girl’ in Dutch is meisje, and the definite article for it is het ‘it’ since all diminutives in Dutch are neutral. 

In Amsterdam, I had the great privilege to know the esotericist and astrologer Magdalena Schors who I remember commenting, when the phrase ‘people holes’ was to replace ‘manholes’, that "women are not going to advance that way.” Nevertheless, while the words zie and tey have been suggested, the singular they, them, their, themselves and even the more weirdly sounding themself are now being used by individuals who identify as transgender, non-binary, agender, intersex and even cisgender. Aburrow counters to me that  the word ‘you’ functions as both a singular and plural pronoun. ‘You’, however, is the second person grammatical category and is only used when one directly addresses an other – the addressee. The objective, third-person narrative is distinct from the one who is speaking or writing (first-person) and also distinct from the speaker or writer’s audience (second-person).  It is employed for the non-personal or impersonal perspective that is outside or exterior to the first and second persons. Nevertheless, in conforming to Aburrow’s wish, if my reviews sound stilted it is because,  in keeping with my own more slowly expanding comfort zone, I have replaced where I can the pronouns with Abuurow’s name itself.

Following the Pantheacon conflict in 2011 concerning Rabbit’s sky-clad Amazon Dianic ritual and the more recent acrimony on the Pagans page in Facebook in connection to CIS identity, TERF accusation, woke and cancel cultures, in The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation (Doreen Valiente Foundation, 2nd edition 2020), Yvonne Aburrow makes clear Aburrow’s support for ‘consent culture’.  Aburrow finds the inherent aspect of the witch especially in Queer Witchcraft. The more transgressive aspects of the Craft as well as folklore and legends (the night journey, the pact with spirits, the archetype of the Devil) embrace, accordingly, the witchery of genderbending. Aburrow openly wants “the Pagan movement to be diverse and inclusive, [that is] stronger, more interesting, and more viable.” To this end, witchcraft ‘should be’ countercultural and transgressive. The traditional role of the witch is one that undermines the structures of oppression in developing both human nature and our place in the world. In particular, it is resistant to authoritarian versions of reality. Being open to the queer, the wild and the exuberant is put forth as dangerous to the status quo. In its resistance to imposed norms and structures of oppression, witchcraft embodies the forest and wilderness at the edge of civilisation, and one of its important weapons to be used against authoritarianism is humour.

For Aburrow, “gender is not a binary, not even a spectrum, it is a vast glittering field of possibility,” and witches themselves are “the holy ones, the liminal ones.” The author deplores the “diminished, fearful, restrictive, and destructive vision of womanhood, that excludes the childless as much as the transgender and the non-binary.”

But Yvonne Aburrow’s exploration of the night journey as one of the key themes of medieval witchcraft legends and the translation of one from everyday reality into a liminal zone between the worlds is much more than a challenge to the cruel tyranny of racism, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, sexism and misogyny. The broader endeavour is to explore the structure and purpose of ritual, the stages of the spiritual journey, and how folkloric witchcraft connects to the land. The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Between the worlds,” is designed for those witches who are interested in furthering Craft engagement beyond the basics of ritual practice. To enable leadership of a coven and Craft teaching, Aburrow offers a deeper understanding between witchcraft, on the one hand, and the land, ancestors, legend, folklore and the spiritual journey through the psyche, on the other. This involves the proper use of sound and silence in ritual, relational polytheism, madness and shamanism and avoiding such perils and pitfalls as spiritual bypassing, ego inflation, wobbling, dry seasons and spiritual burnout. The reader is informed that witches do not serve the gods but seek themselves to become divine. This constitutes the traditions of the left-hand path (becoming a deity/apotheosis) and not those right-hand paths that stress self-negation or self-emptying (kenosis) – the gnostic theosis of freeing spirit from matter. In other words, “Witchcraft … is the practice of reconnecting our alienated selves back to all that is: the trees, the animals, the birds, the land, the waters.”

Part 2 is titled “Bringing it all back home.” This is to be a focus on witchcraft insights for everyday life, but I will criticise that the first chapters are actually concerned with the modes and types of ritual, group dynamics, coven leadership, teaching & learning, and a fascinating presentation of egregore (the group mind or collective thought-form created as a distinct identity rather than entity when a band of people come together for a common purpose), current (the magical energy that is passed from one initiate to another & consisting of the cumulative energy of all the witches in one’s upline), lineage (not having a current but instead an egregore), upline (one’s personal line of descent from the founding witch of the tradition or lineage) and downline (everyone one initiates and whom they subsequently initiate).

For Aburrow, that which is ‘brought home’ is really the political. In the later chapters of Part 2, Aburrow maintains that the relationship with a deity is in fact political, and Aburrow understands politics to involve any situation in which a conflict of interest or a difference of power is resolved through negotiation rather than war. Deity is explained as “a powerful entity or identity who has emerged from the complexity of the universe and is shaped by social structures (with humans, animals, their environment, other deities, and other spirit entities).” In other words, the deities of nature are emergent consciousnesses of such complex phenomena as sacred places, mountains, trees, storms, forests, etc. as well as “possibly anthropomorphic interfaces of vast cosmic forces.” Capitalism is among what worsens the hierarchical and commodified view of value, and profit-driven capitalism, industry, consumerism, pandemics and viruses are all themselves results from our failure to cooperate with nature. To be condemned are such eco-fascist ideas like removing indigenous peoples from wildlife areas, the Doctrine of Discovery (Terra Nullius), missionary work, Residential Schools/Indian Boarding Schools, the concept that land can be owned, and the famines and wars that are probably most likely caused by the unsustainable way of life of the richest 10% of people rather than by overpopulation.  To counter global warming, pollution, systemic racism, colonialism, cultural appropriation and the like, “Let us choose social justice, climate justice, learning from Indigenous Peoples, and caring for Mother Earth,” Aburrow pleads. “Resist increased surveillance and authoritarianism; promote science that emphasizes interconnectedness and a sense of wonder; keep building community.”

The twists, turns and insights that Aburrow provides in The Night Journey ought more than intrigue any and all readers. Aburrow understands Unitarianism as the precursor of Transcendentalism which has become one of the strands of the ‘Pagan revival’. Mention is made of many contributors such as Charles Godfrey Leland (Lucifer), Edward Carpenter (Nature), Margaret Murray (the Horned God), Gerald Gardner & Doreen Valiente (Cernunnos), Rhyd Wildermuth (“wordling the gods”) and Starhawk (the different kinds of power). Among some other salient points, Aburrow addresses the mistake of confusing authority-on-a-topic with authority-over-others, explains that pre-Gardner witchcraft traditions usually do not and should not call themselves ‘Wicca’, and discusses Satanism as not “just an inversion of Christianity” but also the philosophical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin and the worship of the Egyptian god Set. “If I acknowledge the existence of Lilith and Loki and Set and Yahweh and Asherah, then I am prepared to accept that Lucifer, Samael, Baphomet, and Asmodeus also exist.” Since the deities of the witches are subversives and liminal figures – on the margins, in the wildwood and rebelling against authority, they include the devil, Aradia, Pan, Herne the Hunter, Hecate and Diana.

As Aburrow insists, “We are all creating the future of the Pagan movement now.” Wicca for Aburrow is “the religio-magical framework in which I engage with the gods and Nature.” While Aburrow questions ‘political correctness’ and seeks to challenge oppression, Aburrow’s presentation of paganisms and witchcraft as countercultural might be considered more imaginative rather than obsessive. For developing compassion, social justice and making the world better, rather than worrying excessively about the self and accepting non-scrutinised  self-help advice from would-be “spiritualler-than-thou” types (including Aburrow), Yvonne  Aburrow advises a walk in the woods, a ritual, joining a social justice demonstration and/or a nice evening with friends.