Olivia Robertson (1917–2013)

How I will classify this has very much to do with this specific volume. Mostly the Fellowship of Isis strikes me as what I call general magical Goddess religion, not unlike “Dianic Wicca”, but rather more flowery. It doesn’t really have the flavor of an oppositional or protest sort of witchcraft, like the classic 1890s ‘Aradia’ people who spoke Italian to folklorists who had a curious way of talking, or 1960s LA Satanists, you know—they might not have really been from LA, but that’s probably where the popular imagination will put them, distinguished imperfectly if at all in the paranoid imagination (we’re divine from sea to shining sea, except for at least half of them lot) from the Manson murderers and all the rest of them, and all the other radical witches of history who have wanted ‘the government to go to the Devil’, and dancing in the streets (without a police permit), and all the rest of it. It’s not nearly as common in reality as in the paranoid imagination—witches spend a lot of their time hiding who they are—but ultimately it’s not surprising, it’s almost inevitable, for witches to look at a world where women, and almost everyone else, are mistreated and sometimes not safe, and kinda go….

…. (shrugs) I mean, when I was a ‘tolerant Christian’, my idea was that we were all going to love/tolerate each other in a circle of never-ending white light, you know—and Olivia certainly has moods like that, right, but basically I didn’t want to hear about how Christians are masculine or whatever, right…. And yet, it’s true. When you go to church, no matter how many women are there, even if the priest is a woman, (TEC, etc.), you’re not there to be a woman, or to be feminine—in any way, shape, or form, no matter how you interpret that, right. You’re there to be masculine, albeit in a way shorn of personal power, basically…. There are things to be angry about in the world, sometimes, and you can choose to be angry about them, without cursing, hexing, or (merely, lol) shooting or whatever, right. (“Hell, I say you’re looting, I’m shooting, bro…. But I’m not calling up no angry femme down on y’all! This is America!”)

So yeah, it’s not like, as exciting for the news as the Manson murders, or whatever, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or 60s Satanists, or even ‘Aradia’ people—but it is kinda protest (or oppositional) witchcraft, even if it’s more angry pop than heavy metal, right.

(shakes head) I mean, don’t you ever see someone with a corpse disposition selling a bad product, and just kinda get, angry, almost? It’s perfectly natural, really. People have very strange ideas of what human nature consists of…. I’m hoping that when the USA people have to choose between an average Democrat and a criminal this November, it’s not like that scene from the gospel, right…. Human stubborn evil can persist even in much less poetic times, right…. I’m not an anti-capitalist, but I sure hope Joe can rally the base, you know. Reminding the opposition that they’re radical by being moderate tends to just stir them up, you know. I don’t really put the faith in the 49% person that I used to, to be honest….

…. (reads) Wow, it’s amazing how narrow a base that most agile of birds, Christian aversion in a ‘tolerant’ Christian, such as I once was, needs in order to land, and perch, you know. It was based on even less than I thought. I literally just didn’t want to hear anything where general magical Goddess religion and Christianity weren’t held up as perfectly indifferent, you know, where ~anyone~ had ~ever~ preferred something other than what I preferred in my oh so stable, tolerant way, right….

There’s really nothing clever to say about it, you know.

…. But yeah: what was going to say was, there’s this whole discussion about the oppositional as opposed to the sorta classic pro-social, right: because even apart from what Wiccans want, that’s the other thing people don’t like—too much light and wispy clouds and cheeriness and then that’s the new reason why everyone is suspicious, right~ and certainly among Christians, it doesn’t take much non-tribal talk of love and acceptance before we have some traitors to hunt down and destroy, right…. I guess the ‘correct’ answer is that women are meant to argue now and again for love and acceptance, but also to quickly fold and get resigned to failure at the proper time, since is after all, only Their thing, right.

Even when Goddess religion isn’t really oppositional, it strikes people as such, simply because it has a prominent ‘she’, you know.

…. It is a curious book ‘historically’, if there is such a thing, for laying out so clearly both the sense of the new possibilities present in the middle of the 20th century, and—I’m a pessimist, perhaps, but—even more so, simply the sense of overwhelm almost necessitated by starting out in something at such a low level, right.

…. Yeah, before she got into being Isis, she was deep into the whole trad elite thing: practicing class rationalism, bringing trad European scientific domination to the world, right…. Only a few years ago, it was like the century after the Greeks and Romans or whatever; it was like Imperium 2.0 or something, right.

A lot of times you’re a liberal Christian, you want to Tolerate People, you don’t realize how rotten the old tree is. Christianity isn’t the only system with problems—any community has problems—but it’s funny, right. Even churches with liberal leadership will have some people eating cake afterwards making veiled references to smiting people: or else they’re simply asleep, right—you imagine that maybe one or two people have gotten out of line and done Hitler over the years, but it’s nothing a little colonial rationalism can’t solve, if we really let people know that we personally won’t smite them, since we are just contented people, you know!

…. (shrugs) And yet the world is still all either distorted divinity, or Divinity itself—and if the former is by far more common, this world is still no hell, you know.

…. She is very sweet and creative: aliens to Catholicism, and back again, the whole cosmos, only without any guilt….

You even get to have crappy pop media things, right! 🥹

…. I do kinda view the Fellowship of Isis as religion, because although it’s psych-heavy and not sectarian—the divergent people in Ireland with its history of the Troubles, then still going on, had probably had enough of the idea of “religion”, even if they did like spiritual voluntary organizations…. Although of course the general feeling is intelligible in the West generally, right—it doesn’t quite seem non-religious like a psychoanalysis book, or a history book, (although those do end up going in religion, lol, even when they’re don’t belong there!), or a personal, non-deity new age book/person, right…. Although her roots (to the extent that they are not in ordinariness entire, as far as the Very Early Years go, right) are in that kinda energy therapy/changing consciousness/non-organized stuff, you know, just her and her friends, without a sense that their spiritual experiences were planned rituals or anything, right, and actually the whole span of an ordinary person’s working life passed for her, almost, before she decided to rebrand it as a group that—unlike in the “Call of Isis” days, when “Isis” obviously was just a metaphor—that you could join and which could theoretically be a semi-organized group with a plan of how to change people’s consciousness, and not just an ad hoc circle of people who happened to be friends with a preference for changing their consciousness, right…. But certainly, when you look at it, you get a sense at why it makes people uneasy, even the people organizing the group, right…. It’s just, I don’t know. One doesn’t want to encourage loyalty, as it hinders people and makes the whole thing an entity or whatever that then is the ruler. (shrugs) But I do think that sometimes people can organize groups to help people manage their states of consciousness, with the help of deity and human community and not only teaching, and that basically is religion. People just aren’t in the ~habit~ of doing it in a positive way, right.

…. I wonder if she underestimates the masc-y side of knowledge, right. I’m pretty sure certainly not as much misunderstanding is there as in the stereotype of her (very much as a type, lol) would say. Of course, how does one decide that sort of thing, right?

I wonder if the bodhisattvas who stay in the world until the all-clear signal, have actually learned to like the world as it appears, you know, the life of the world. Sometimes Buddhism is patriarchal; other times, in spite of the age, perhaps….

All I really know is I hate Mercury retrograde, lol. Had my whole morning planned out until I lost this book—for a while, such an open-ended struggle, you know: no guarantees…..

And I can imagine gentle Wordsworth out in the hills, finding some scary thing and being psychically out of commission for days, lol…. That’s the part I understand. Ha.

…. It is kinda funny, we all have this stereotype— women = sex = Not Religious, right—and even apart from problem of how they’re both human and indeed, non-Chomsky/computer/Boston Liberal/journalist stuff, right…. I mean, it’s amazing how religious women can be, right. I actually feel she’s straddling the fence of rather too religious, really: The Rational Mind Doesn’t Know; The Stars Know/We Can Do It Together: For The Children!/It Is A Kinder, More Pompous Thing I Do Now, Than Any Thing I Ever Have Done Before, right…. Which kinda brings you back to the problem of, what the fuck is wrong with people, right, that the consensus for thousands of years, at least in the now-dominant religions, was, women can’t do this; they’re not up to it—and now the unpopular reform position is like, Well, we can invite them over our house and inject them with man-needles and if they don’t move the furniture, how could they mess us up, right?…. Like, aside from the rigidity of gender schema being a problem, there’s the whole aspect of, usually they are constructed mostly with an eye to whether or not the job is ‘important’, and then, ‘if it’s Important Enough, it’s for men’, basically: cooking is feminine…. Ah, but this is a restaurant: rather too important for you, little girl…. Non-rational/intuitive thought is feminine…. Someone get these women out of this church! This is a men’s meeting! We’re to be discussing dogma! The mother’s meeting is Tuesday night, not today!

~ Right?

…. But yeah: from the title, it sounds like a sort of memoir, but actually I feel like the appropriate (specific) tag for me would be, general magical Goddess religion theory, basically.

Although there is minimal ritual wording, some of which I might or might not adopt myself, right….

I don’t know. I do feel like Olivia was quite idealistic. “And everybody knows: that everybody’s starry-eyed….” (Ellie Goulding). It’s not quite that I object, or necessarily that I consider it bad—it could be unskillful, or it could be skillful—but I find it amusing, I guess, (though I know that makes me sound like a Victorian rationalist smirking at someone reading one of their novels, although it is true that Olivia was a sort of old-fashioned radical, you know; her roots are back in Yesterday, when it was long ago; (Frank Capra) “Nobody needs to kill himself, George, if he has friends!” (the wife) “Someone should say that to his wife!”…. I know; I’m weird; I’m mean), I find it amusing that nothing I ever did would ever come out in quite the same way—or even ~almost~ the same way, right. Nothing I did would ever have quite this style, you know.

…. After-note: I was scanning this book looking for a quote—eventually I decided that I didn’t agree with it, that I don’t look at the chakras like that, with her system—but eventually reading through it in this improper way, just scanning paragraphs without reading, just for the topic, and kinda ignoring the actual words/arguments/truth or whatever of the words…. And yeah, I have to say, she is quite a dualistic thinker, and dualists complain, you know. It’s just that she’s not wrong—women shouldn’t have to be ‘spiritual’ all by themselves and in ways that glorify men, so that men can swagger and slay, and get the women to sway, you know. In that sense, she’s not wrong.

I guess I’ll re-discard (lol) this book, although I’ll re-read (properly, lol) the poetry/rituals to see if I want to copy any of them into my notebooks. It’s an odd book, in that her strength is basically poetry/ritual/non-literal thinking, but this book—it certainly isn’t a narrative like the subtitle would have you think: but it’s (or especially as it’s) basically argument, you know, theory: which probably isn’t what is her strength, right.

Still, it’s easy to go:

Isis of Fellowship: too bitchy
Fellowship of Isis ritual books: too many names/details
The Call of Isis: too…. Feminine!

(Which is exactly what I did when I was a historical-tolerant Christian, lol.)

~And not that you have to care about any particular author—especially if you’re not likely to ever hear of them, lol!—but that game we all play with someone like her is not a kind game to play with anyone, right: any girl.… (altro)