Deborah Lipp

Jason has a fab post about “overweight Druid priestesses.”

Twenty-five years ago, when I first became a part of the Pagan community, we Pagans were objects of fear and ignorance. We were Satanists, we were evil, we were dangerously crazy. Now, we are mostly the objects of snark and derision.

This is progress. Some Pagans (especially teens) would rather be feared than mocked, but mockery is never going to destroy your life, or deprive you of a job, a home, or the custody of your child. Only fear does that. The fear still exists, especially in the rabid Right, at least when they have a moment between being afraid of gays and being afraid of women who have sex, but it is receding in most of the culture.

Even the far Right often resorts more to mockery than to fear-mongering, in regard to Pagans. Those silly Pagans, they say, with their silly little cutie-pie rituals; only we have a real religion. Wasn’t that the whole point of that Wife Swap episode—silly misguided Pagans learning from the real thing? It’s probably also why the “religious” right is so eager to tie us to Harry Potter. I doubt they think we really have unicorns and centaurs and such on our side; they just want to make us appear more involved in fantasy than reality.

And really, I’m okay with that as an interim step. I’m even okay with that as the whole package. I never got into Witchcraft to look cool to my peers. In fact, when I first got into it, I never expected to tell my peers, although that changed muchly.

Pagans I know used to get furious every time Laurie Cabot appeared on TV. ‘We don’t want people to think we look like that!’ they’d say, all aghast at the big hair and the scary makeup and the black polyester robes. My response was always that all they’d remember is that they saw a Witch on TV and she was a person not a monster. Maybe they laughed at her, and maybe that reinforced their understanding that there was nothing scary there. A year later, they wouldn’t remember what she wore, only the general impression that it was all no big deal.

I was right, I think. Oddballs on TV make people smile, and now we are mocked more, and persecuted less. So if the world wants to think I’m a silly flaky dingbat, that’s a small price to pay if we can all keep our kids and jobs and homes.