A Wiccan Valentine

Epiphany at the House of Consciousness

            NORFOLK, VA, USA—At The House of Consciousness on Valentine’s Eve I experienced an epiphany.

            I’m talking about the community center at the corner of 35th Street and Newport Avenue, a half-block down from The Venue. It’s been there “forever,” I’m told, but I’d never gone in until that night.

Untitled, by Jala Magik

            I could smell the incense, sweet and exotic, from the street. As I opened the front door, I felt as if I were stepping into a shop in the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. A library of African-American culture and history lines three walls, with unexpected titles like The Origin of Species catching my eye. Paintings and weavings of African-American design on display stand out in vivid colors. Parlor chairs are set about where patrons can read or have conversation. At a snack bar off to one side refreshments are sold.

            I’d been invited to perform a few poems for Poetic Consciousness, an open mic held bi-weekly at the back of the store. There, about fifteen or twenty people, including a few children, leisurely arrived to take their seats in three rows of folding chairs set up before a modest performance space in front of the book shelves.

            Proceedings got underway late, and my epiphany came on slowly, not fully registering on me until the next day.

            It began with a poet who proceeded me. He was an evangelist who dynamically recited three long poems bristling with fire and brimstone. In the course of this tsunami of abuse leveled at sin and sinners, including vivid descriptions of eternal torment, something occurred to me that I’d never thought of before.

            In the theology this preacher-poet presented, Satan’s no rebel against God. God and Satan are working together on the same side. God makes the rules, woe-man breaks them, God hands the sinner over to Satan, Satan gleefully punishes woe-man for eternity, thus carrying out God’s order. They’re like brothers running the same business. If Satan were really a rebel against God, wouldn’t he reward woe-man for defying the heavenly tyrant?

            It struck me as never before that basic, orthodox Christianity is a good-cop/bad-cop cosmology. Problem is, as in human society, they’re both cops.

            That was my epiphany. But an epiphany is only a starting thought. What does it mean to my understanding of Christian teaching to realize that God and Satan are two sides of the same coin? Does that coin still have currency?

            Religious dogma is confusing to me because it gets in the way of the original revelation common to all spiritual paths. That enlightened moment of self-realization, which is open to everybody, sooner or later begins to fade. To keep the revelation current, leaders create and enforce dogma. The God-Satan dichotomy is one of those dogmas. It must have been invented to control the behavior of believers within their social groups.

            If there is an afterlife—and I suspect there is—I don’t think there’s any reward/punishment system in place there. But I think there’s a simple rule to live by in this life which cuts through all the dogmas in the world and satisfies all the original revelations. I like it because it’s so easy to remember.

            It’s the simple Wiccan injunction: Do No Harm. 
          Meditating on the full meaning of that pithy mantra will...well, expand awareness, since no one can live in this world without doing harm to something or somebody—sometime, somewhere.

            What better content to take away from an evening spent at the House of Consciousness?