The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Enchanted Suffering: Queer Magick as Educated Hope Jasper Jay Bryan BA, MPS, Expressive Arts Therapist Student Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada [email protected] Abstract: Is there magick in suffering? Moreover, how can an enchanted worldview assist care providers in expanding horizons of hope for their clients, patients, congregations, or communities? Using a magickal hermeneutics, case studies of self-identified “queer witches” have much to teach us about hope. Following José Esteban Muñoz's conception of Queer Utopia and Ernst Bloch's docta spes, these individuals demonstrate a hope that is rooted in adversity, tended by enchantedness. As spiritual care providers, we can learn to purposefully integrate magickal principles into our work with marginalized individuals, and all of those who are experiencing suffering. We can hold magickal space---an enchanted, educated utopia---to cultivate our clients’ inner power and expand horizons of hope. Keywords: queer, magick, spiritual care, LGBTQ, queer utopia, hope, suffering Introduction Loki, the Norse trickster god, was known for weaving clever schemes, trapping other gods in precarious situations. He was a shapeshifter. Loki changed his form, gender, and sex in service of these tricks, playfully challenging whatever the Vikings (and their gods) considered “normal.” He was a web spinner. His name, translated, means knot or tangle, and indeed he tied many knots in Norse mythology’s threads, often bringing about a god’s downfall – if not provoking a good laugh with his outlandish antics.1 Other pantheons have similar irreverent figures. Heretics, outcasts, oddballs, queers, witches: radicals have always tied knots in how a society thinks and feels about the way their world is, or the way it should be. One could contend that most, if not all, faith traditions – and cultures – have analogous characters in their mythos. Throughout time and place, archetypal figures have been represented as knot makers: characters, real and imagined, who challenge “straight” stories. It seems that even the straightest and best-woven threads inevitably accumulate knots, which become sites of anarchic collapse and liberatory recreation. Knots remind us that the here and now is but a point on the thread, and sure enough, tangles will 1 Heide Eldar, “More Inroads to Pre-Christian Notions, After All? The Potential of Late Evidence” in Á Austrvega: Saga and East Scandinavia: Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference, ed. Agneta Ney (Sweden: Gävle University Press, 2009), 363. 26 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article emerge then and there.2 Beyond a straight thread lies utopia; hope is raveled in snarls and points of disjuncture, expanding perspectives on our web’s horizons. Soon, we may spot more threads – opportunities for something, somewhere, else. Over the rainbow, and through the looking glass. The Witch is one archetype that shows up in countless cultures. “Witch” has a tangled history: it’s been a title forced upon people to marginalize and persecute them, yet also a heterodox self-identifier worn proudly by practitioners of varying spiritual traditions, most of which are marked by magickal cosmologies.3 Similarly, the word “queer,” originally a slur for gender and sexual non-conforming people, has been reclaimed as an anti-identarian identity, praxis, and worldview.4 Both point to a conception of hope beyond what philosopher Ernst Bloch terms “abstract hope” and towards a theology of “concrete” or “educated” hope (docta spes): a form of utopian being, feeling, and thinking that transcends problematic progress discourses.5 Presenting case studies of self-identified “queer witches” and tracing the history of magick, this paper attempts to expand views on hope, suffering, and utopia to inform an “educated” spiritual care practice. From a queer theoretical optic, Utopia can be a magickal hermeneutics with which to interpret histories and personal narratives. It is a flower that grows from the mud of suffering, but only when fertilized by enchantedness. It is the willful expansion of horizons beyond the “quagmire of the present”6 towards new worlds, and new modes of being. Lastly, Utopia is tangible, available to us at all moments in the form of “wishful images”7 – the arts, popular culture, fairy tales, mythology, and spiritual longings. Magick is accessible to everybody. As therapists and spiritual care providers, we can learn to purposefully integrate magickal principles into our work with LGBTQ2SIA+ individuals on the margins, and all people who experience suffering. We can hold magickal space to cultivate our clients’ inner power and expand horizons of hope. 2 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 3 Tomás Prower, Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World, Kindle Edition (Woodbury MN: Llewellyn Publications), 2018. 4 Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer,” in Keywords for American Culture Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 5 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, ed. N Plaice, S Plaice, and P Knight (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), 1. 6 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 7 Ernst Bloch, Jack Zipes, and Frank Mecklenburg, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 27 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Figure 1: "Jay" by Jay Bryan An illustration of a merman jumping from a tower that is on fire, being struck by lightning, and rooted in the crashing waves below. A version of the Tower tarot card. 28 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Utopia is a Magickal Hermeneutics What is a PROVOCATEUR? A provocateur is someone who provokes reaction in others through unconventional behaviour/performance and fantastic expression. Willing to say what others would be shot for saying, they are Picaros, confidence men, satirists, entartistes, double agents, imposters, charlatans, jokers, ringmasters, jesters, fools, actors, tricksters, and players. How does one PLAY the PROVOCATEUR? When PLAYING the PROVOCATEUR, you can play any role at any time, including yourself in masquerade… By making others aware that we are only PLAYING, we must trust that they will believe us. We become vulnerable to them, and hope that they will PLAY the provoked, and challenge their own perceptions instead of trying to dismiss us. Who can PLAY? Anyone can PLAY.8 What does it mean for something to be “magickal”? Derived from the ancient Greek magike, the word referred to priests’ craft, but in the early Christian era it became associated with deviance, sorcery, and witchcraft. While condemned in the Torah, Judaism and Christianity’s relationship with magickal practices fluctuated from context to context, divided into benevolent (mystery and “high” ceremony) versus malevolent (witchcraft and works of the devil), sanctioned or condemned based on its contextual spiritual tradition.9 Unlike stage magic, magick is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”10 It exists in the liminal space between free will and fate. Magick is, by all accounts, queer. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes that: Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.11 I argue that magick is a queer striving, a desire for then and there manifested as free will. Magick, in the form of ritual, arts, play, and creation, is the ability to imagine beyond the here and now, materializing emergent visions into action. 8 Magixnartz, “Welcome to Optative Theatrical Laboratories!” Magixnartz, accessed April 11, 2020, http://www.angelfire.com/folk/magixnartz/otlzplayidea.html. 9 Dale Wallace, “Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial Conundrum,” Journal for the Study of Religion 28, no. 1 (2015): 25. 10 Aleister Crowley and Leila Waddell, Magick: Liber Aba: Book 4, Second Edition (Newburyport: Weiser, 2013), 127. 11 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 29 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Magick is also play: tricks that frolic with “reality” (or our conceptions of it). The treatise at the beginning of this paragraph demonstrates magick’s playful, radical qualities. Operative Theatrical Laboratories is a performance art collective that incited spectators to act on a then and there. Their and other artists’ spirits of play have been adapted by the Radical Faerie tradition. The Radical Faeries are a group of gay magick practitioners who find spiritual meaning in sexuality, sharing values that include environmentalism, feminism, and dismantling hierarchies. Many identify as witches, and practice Pagan, Christian, Islamic, and/or other faith traditions. Members of the sect reclaim “faerie,” a common homophobic slur, playing with its double meaning – gayness and folklore – in collective spiritual practices. Faeries are tricksters from European folklore: enchanted, mischievous creatures, benevolent or malevolent, who shapeshift, appear, disappear and