The Virtues of the Heretic Part 1/2
As I sit to write this, An old man limps to the seat in the library, opposite the desk I am working at. He is waiting for a book from the archives, an old bible dissertation, or a religious text. As the clerk arrives with the book in question he draws a magnifying glass to examine the fine typography. This occurs as I am searching for words to explain the heretic in a relationship to the worlds for a piece I am working on.
He searched this book for no more than one minute. I ponder his research. What led him here to contemplate this text you can gather almost anywhere. I note his issues with walking and movement.
It was not an easy journey, was it faith or fear? A story starts to fill my mind with possibilities. Perhaps he felt terrible guilt and needed to confer with the book to ensure he could alleviate his concept of self from the burden of sin. Or perhaps he was a priest, out in the day making sure the text of his beloved tomes had not faded in the seeming hundreds of years of his dedicated focus to his faith. Or perhaps he was a heretic, a witch scrying for text to use in further examinations later…. or a godd wandering the halls of an establishment that denotes wisdom, to see the humanity they feel unified to and yet in the way of things, perhaps he sort to find hope amongst the rubble of falling structures around him, to seek a way to gesture a path out of the demiurgic past and current affairs.
Consider the wild nature of the storm as it whips about the land. Acknowledge its lack of concern at the disposition you express from the woe of lifes accost. It is here to tend to the foundations of life and its cycles. It’s not seeking to cause you grief (at least not in this instance). Note the fall of the rain as it beats the primal and reddened land, as it stirs the ocean into a flurry of terrifying glory. None of this is to accost the hand that stirs your morning tea, or drenches your pot plant, barely hanging on for life. For centuries we have also contended with religious theology and projection, of the redefining parable in the nuance of semantics surrounding the terms flung at the cunning person, witch, or spirit worker.
Most especially if we see the throbbing sore that is Christian nationalism. But who is a heretic in contrast?
The connection of the vagabond, unruly wild evil perception of such a force, didn’t just form out of the void with the word heretic as if spurred on by an exercise of possession of the most profane. “Heresy” stems from an ancient Greek term meaning to choose, perhaps associated with the sorcerous act of conspiracy with the wyrd threads of fate. You see it is to have the power of will despite the concept of dogmatic and censored rights to power (almost as though these constructs though having real detrimental effects, are made-up standards?). Heresy is not always charged with vehement anger, though yes, it absolutely can be - as is the nature of a beast cornered. Instead, it is the untameable force of truth. It sits beneath the surface, all to rise through the stone-clad iron tower of frail systems that we, over the years, have given power and conformed to. The irony would have it, that these “demonized” acts of reclamation, of love for the true, defenders of the natural wyrd are the very antidote to the hypocrisy that saturates the pathway to agency. It’s also not necessarily even against Christianity that the Heretic stands, or at least the spirits twined and twisted within it. The heretic isn’t marked so because it aims at disparaging views - at least not initially, as it contrasts the deception just by existing. Note the witch that must live on the outskirts of a town to cultivate peace in their own lives, lest the townsfolk grow wary and devise our death. Often blamed for the throws of chaos inherent in nature’s swing. Heresy, by its Christianised definition, as it has become, would also condemn the witch who uses saints in their practice or views, such as but not at all limited to the Madonna as a goddess or Brigid as a saint as well as a goddess or just as the deified persona.
Heresy is a direct, honest, and passionate union of the wise art of relationship to the very real nature of things. It is the Wise Women weaving Christian magick into a healing charm for the ill and the next day a curse for the wicked and it is the mud-painted and sigil-covered herbalist, calling on the cthonic magick of the heliobour for aid in blasting. It is recognition of nature in the human and the divine - bridging them together like the hilt of a mighty sword, a holding of dark and light, as well as the rebel artist creating a public nuisance for the sake of protest and revelation. Heresy is the act of wilful union of self and other, of divine and flesh, of animal and angel. Heresy is an honest relationship in tandem with accountability. Heresy is love unhindered by the corruption of dissociative and ignorant attempts at coercion, cutting free of binds to the ludicrousy and abject horror of empire. Heresy is to choose life, to actively choose into the role of fate and seek clear respective, conscious, animistic attempts at a rounded view of the worlds as they affect, live, and conspire through nature together. By the churches standards, Heresy is to stand up for the people versus the corporate agenda, to allow trans, nonbinary, queer, gay, Lesbian and intersex peoples to live whole and free lives free of prejudice based on the very tome, painted in the hand of man, using the very tactics of spirit work also demonized by the book man sought to write, and in adverse of the heretic become the hypocrisy cloaked in heroism. If you fail to see the hypocrisy in a world hell-bent on your ignorant and quiet submission, you are the sheep they will slaughter for harvest. The heretic - by existing- snaps the fence that funnels the cattle to slaughter and so the heretic is the adversary to coercion and control, the offering of the key to the prison of sin. This does not absolve one of ethics and responsibility, if done true it will instead, gift these to you.
What then is the Heretic choosing?
Catherine Nixey defines extensive research into heresy from an informed personal history and a life as a professional researcher, professor, and historical journalist in her book “Heresy, Jesus Christ and Other Sons of God”. In her work, she calls out the real history of the Romanisation of Greece as the Christian church attempted to take over the mindset of the people, by… Just writing a new history despite the living memory of the people who saw the blood-drinking and flesh-eating rituals of the Christians, and their so-called “beloved” son of god as barbaric (well that’s awkward). All those who would seek to claim their divinity, in the name of sovereignty are by the church’s definition deemed acts of heresy. Using the very language of the people, and lands they sought to colonize and occupy in addition to the genocide and enslavement of indigenous people, proceeded to demonize the stories of the very place they had no real business controlling. Not an uncommon story I’m afraid. This is to say the Christianised form of heresy does not just apply to witches, but all that
is natural, all that is true, all that puts into question the religion and its hypocrisy.
In the case of ancient Greece and its slow Christianisation, the heretic was choosing tradition over oppression, decency over submission and relationship over religious coercion. The arguments between the people and the nationalism of their Roman colonisers would lead to the burning of ancient temples and centuries upon centuries of scriptures and histories, or re-writing them altogether. Rebellion against oppression would be so natural to the Greek people that it would become an integrated part of their culture. Even today, with the saintified versions of their Godds and idols and the clear domination of orthodox Christian faith, the resilience of the people towards corrupt government and policies echoes in the thralls of their protest. Perhaps in this case the first heretic was the Devil in the original definition and the second was the Christians that demonised them, in the Christian definition.
Taken in Delphi beneath the temple of Apollo in 2022
As history has shown, the Heretic does not rise from nothing. They are not formed out of some peaceful slumber for the sake of causing rifts in the open world. They arrive naturally in the effort of balance. They arrive as natural disruptions to systems abusing natural order and liberate sometimes by direct intervention, other times by simply existing in contrast to the whims and restrictions of oppression, like a beacon in the dark. The natural “heretic,” meaning defiler, is only so because these structures of identity, as forced into the public psyche by the oligarch church and their corporate pawns, would have it so. To their system of oppression, the wild is to stand as directly adverse, as it is everything they cannot control. We see this admittance in the very psalms they mark as holy, with the distinction of goodness being in the walls of empire and that which is the Devil and his spawn of the wilds.
The trick they use is to fool the insightful by blinding them with deflection and manipulation. To seed an idea that the “devil” is in the people and waits to seed evil discordance amongst you, as well as when rooted in the human, the heretical. One aspect of this is true: The Devil is with the people, but these cohorts of “evil” exist not in the Devil but rather in the brittle-liver-spotted hands of a minor percentage of humanity. The church would have you believe that sanctity is only found in their order. The Devil is portrayed by such people as evil, all, because they do not submit to these illusionary ideals of safety in a world, made deadlier despite the tellings and controls by corrupted systems in power. The heretic is, however, nature itself. They are the weed that forms a flower as it reaches through the cracks in the pavement of economic status, they are the swarming vine that wreaths the building not out of any malice even though it actively dismantles it by doing so, but because it is built on the land it inherently occupies and the structure of status and financial domination offers to the forest floor only shadow. These structures then by effect, dare the vine to search higher for the sun it needs, that these manmade structures often hoard for but a few. We as the vine, also dwell in the shadows, and here too we gather from the wiser earth because the heretic is also adaptive.
Like the vine, the Heretic is the central adversary to the demiurge by nature, by virtue and by extension of what it is. It will always be like the weed and vine - find a way. When the Heretic is aware of the vitriol of empire, like an anti-virus, it works diligently to extinguish it or rather to resolve it to mulch and nutrient-rich resolve. Sometimes, like the root system of a nearby willow to a bank on the edge of the lake, it will hold the form in place and reap and sew active blessing. This can be central to the community or secluded to its garden of interest. When hunted or its predator seeks to extinguish life or manipulate it to hunger, it will tear it all down to make way for a grand flood, or it will simply climb over it altogether. It is conscious relativity and natural connection that makes the Heretic the greatest adversary and easiest scapegoat for the systems who seek to supersede the wild, or damn it to division and frame it as the perpetrator.
And so perhaps the “Devil” is so portrayed as evil, because they are the first Heretic. The first vine, the first to seed wild beast into the sweetness of the fruit and spur dreams to inspire the masses, the first sunbeam-clad healer and god of rebellion, master of poisons and medicines to the ailed by such systems, the first to offer song and art amongst the sharply shaped form of domination and oppression to which man followed until they sort control of these gifts by way of hoarding and dividing the fruit they fear to water. The Demiurge attempts to apply consequence by way of making the tree of wisdom forbidden and its fruit untouched. For when knowledge is forbidden, when choice is enslaved to consequence, wisdom withers like a rose without sunlight. Or so they thought they could enforce. But as we have found no amount of fear can hinder the smooth hide of truth in its pursuit of love and wisdom. Instead, we drink the light and move in the shadows they thought would kill us.
To be the Heretic means to willingly choose the truth, even if it means you must unravel. It is also to wield one’s fate, given by fate itself. To risk holy fire within thee. To reclaim one’s truth and power - but also to take accountability for one’s totality, both in the looming shadows and in the bright searing blaze of the sun. In this, to be the Heretic is to marry life and death. To walk this path, you will find ways of crooked forks in the road, you will see down become up and up become down. You risk madness, the twisting nick of a thorn, the blood to the earth, the same blood birthed in a falling star, a star that falls in the name of love, a willful fall to be like the vine, like the Devil.
The Devil, the first heretic, gave fire that witches would seed and fruit. The demiurge sort to corrode the wise ones for a world of controlled allocation of such things in a division of power for the subservient authority and those deemed as unworthy, and poor. What is virtue but as the the dictionary defines, “for the good of humanity” but who then are we affording the power of judgment? Will we dare to take a seat at midnight’s table, and reclaim our power, our nature?
As always:
Ever in the name of love for the wild-hearted.
For we are the lunar flock, the secret children of twilight and in-between places, the sunlight and the vine.
Where there is corruption from Empire, a Witch is brought to ensure its crumbling. Where there is heart and beauty - the Witch is born to cultivate it to its blossoming.
Ardwen Briarheart.
Part one of two…
Félix Bracquemond, Un Paysage, 1856 (Etching on old green laid paper).