Dear Gretchen: On Witchcraft (Patreon)

 Dear Gretchen, 

What role, if any, do the the occult and magic have in your art, writing, and, if you want to get into that, your personal life?

-Sebastian

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Thanks for your question, Sebastian.

I'd say the occult has a prominent place in my fiction. No End Will Be Found is about the witch trials of Würzburg and a young woman tortured and executed by the city's religious authorities during the run-up to the worst of the violence. There are occult scenes in the book, but they don't connect to the central story and I left it unclear as to whether they're real or just sort of hysterical visions born out of cultural anxiety. That idea of the imagined occult is so interesting to me, this image of enemies of society living in this elaborate alternate culture with profane rules and regulations, and ultimately I think it's a precursor to the paranoia and irrational rage surrounding modern conspiracy theories. 

People are most comfortable believing that there's a reason for everything, that the harvest was bad because their fields were cursed, that they prosper because God loves them; it's a lot less scary than acknowledging the essentially random nature of existence. So I guess that's the foremost way I find the occult interesting, as a filter through which people pass bad experiences to make sense out of them. In terms of modern practice I find pagans pretty anodyne and insufferable. People usually characterize me as some kind of witch because I wear black and own jewelry made of bones and I'm kind of sour, and I don't think there's a right or wrong to that. I care about dream interpretation and augury. I have a black cat. Julia Gfrörer tattooed the snake that bit me the day I came out onto my hand, right where its fangs went in.  In another sense, though, no one has ever really been a witch, because "witch" is a word people made up to excuse their executing undesirables.

My other book, Ego Homini Lupus, is way more directly about the occult as a kind of language born out of repression and drudgery, a way to express things for which the systems we live in have no tolerance. I started writing that book while I was extremely sick and living with an abusive partner and so much of it was about saying things I couldn't find a way to say in my own life. The occult means a lot to me in that context, as this way of speaking and thinking that pushes so far past the acceptable that it becomes monstrous and completely raw. I can't compare, but I feel like I took that sensibility from Barker, whose depictions of magic are so destructive and overwhelming and sordid, and so frequently bound up in transformation and remaking. 

I guess what I'm getting at here is that, to me, magic is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The idea of making rules and observing practices about it is ridiculous to me, but at the same time I would never leave my teeth, nail clippings, or loose hair out unattended. I've cursed a few people by driving thumbtacks covered in my blood into door frames and walls. Is it real? My loathing for them was real. The explosive, exhausting catharsis of doing something solely out of hatred and hurt was real. It's as real as the burning of Sergeant Howie at the end of The Wicker Man, or the desperate love spells cast by Elaine in The Love Witch. Magic is abject. It's the act of begging wordlessly and desperately for something impossible, and like all abjection it has the power and terror of its nakedness.