Witchcraft for Community Development

What makes this town special, and what do we need to make it an even better place to be? Think in fantastic terms, but justify your answer. Do we need a gigantic disco globe over downtown to throw festive colored light on the streets and buildings because it will make everybody feel good? Do we need a military base to increase the number of dating opportunities for young women here? Should we randomly assign all residents to paintball teams for mandatory games every month as a community building activity? How about a rash of UFO sightings and national news coverage to raise the city’s profile?

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Several years ago I went to a witchcraft convention. It wasn’t the kind of witchcraft one normally thinks of, where you sacrifice animals and say incantations to get back at your enemies. But there was some spellwork done to try and bring about a more egalitarian and just society, which could put a lot of defense contractors and lawyers out of work and therefore make the world seem unfriendly and scary to them, so maybe it was actually the same thing as sticking pins in dolls of people you don’t agree with. But that’s a topic for another day.

Now I need to clarify what my definition of a spell is. A spell is a naming and solidifying of intent. For example, wedding vows are a type of spell, and mission statements are too. They force you to clarify what your goal is and feel how deeply you want to commit to it. In pagan ritual, song, dance, and symbolic gesture are designed to help people internalize the goal all the way down to the level beneath the waking mind – down to that silent mind behind your conscious mind which makes sure to sneak a pack of Marlboros into the grocery cart even though you decided to quit last week. Or dial your old boyfriend’s number when you meant to call your aunt.

Most of the spells and rituals taught and performed at this gathering had to do with personal development. Like helping people deal with their limitations and fears and get past them and move on, or just feel more engaged with their lives, or envision new goals, that kind of thing.

One of the big themes of the gathering had to do with community. Like, making sure you have a social network to support you and where you can offer support, because such a relationship makes the individual and the community stronger and leads to a better quality of life for most of those involved.

Okay – now I’m getting to the point. There were a couple of senior members of the national witching association there and they talked about a spell they did for their town. Pardon me but this was a long time ago and I don’t remember the specifics, but they believed an unwholsome trend was starting in the community and they wanted to bring in more positive influences. They got together with a group of like-minded people and came up with a statement about what they wanted to bring about for their town. Maybe it was a greater sense of local identity or a better relationship between elements of the community.

Anyway they got a group together in a room with a big map and defined the perimeter of the area they wanted to cover with the spell, marking specific places on the map. Then they did a ritual with it. Next, they went out in small groups to do rituals at the locations marked on the map. Naturally these rituals had to be small and inconspicuous so as to avoid getting anybody burned at the stake. Both of these folks believed the ritual had in fact benefitted the town. I would say at the very least the activity forced them all to get clear about what they valued about where they lived and how they could contribute to it. Plus they had a good time doing it and strengthened their social bonds with each other.

I was taken with this idea because at the time, the Greensboro neighborhood where I lived was haunted by a serial rapist. It was amazing how much the feel of the community changed as a result. Stories about what was going on cast a kind of spell on the community, making folks uncomfortable, suspcious, and afraid. When you feel like that in your neighborhood, it changes how you feel about your life and the world in general. It’s poison beacause it disempowers people and makes them hole up in their homes, weakens them with fear. One sociopath can cast a large, dark shadow over a huge area and large number of people.

I got a map of the neighborhood and was in preliminary stages of planning a spell to exorcise the rapist, but I couldn’t come up with a mission statement for it. Should the spell be about safety for all residents? If so, what if that covered the rapist? Safety for him might not be a good idea because it could come at someone else’s expense. Should the spell be about revealing the rapist so that he could be caught? How could we work the healing of the community into that? And so on. I also had trouble getting together a crowd of folks interested enough in this project to want to get together. The people I wanted to involve all belonged to different social groups and it would have been uncomfortable getting them together in both a new social situation and a weird project.

So I never followed through on the community spell, but stories about the rapist stopped appearing in the news anyway. I like to believe just thinking about doing it was enough to banish or deactivate him.

Now I’m thinking about community spells again. I still don’t have a group of folks I could work with on it, and I don’t know what the specific aims of the spell should be outside of making life in this town better. One needs to set such goals responsibly, because getting what you want can have some unintended and sometimes unwanted repercussions.  Do we need better restaurants? More places to shop? Better relationships between racial and socioeconomic groups so that there’s a higher level of social comfort between strangers? Safer communities where neighbors are connected to each other? A pervasive sense that one can express opinions without being labeled a racist, leftist, rightist, or asshole, and an accompanying sense that it’s okay to listen to the opinions of others without feeling threatened?