Oh, My Pop Culture Witchcraft: When is a Witch Not a Wiccan? (Quite Often, It Turns Out)

A few weeks ago, Lady Geek Girl wrote a nice article describing the precarious position of witches in current pop culture media. Witches only finally started to reach some level of acceptance (still a work in progress, that’s for sure) largely thanks to the enormous expansion of the religion of Wicca in the past fifty years or so. This led to a curious occurrence: witches weren’t just in fairytales and fantasy books anymore; they were bookstore clerks and nurses and teachers too. It opened the doors for the possibility for modern people to reclaim and identify with the word “witch”. We can see other seemingly outdated or maligned words being used by contemporary folk, from druid to heathen to shaman (though words like sorceress and wizard seem to be lagging in popularity), but I would argue none to quite the degree of “witch”. So while I believe that Wicca was a large—I would say the primary, in fact—reason for the modern reclaiming of this word, I think it is inappropriate to treat “Wiccan” as a monolithic synonym for “witch”. There are simply too many witches out there who are not Wiccan.

Oh, My Pop Culture Goddess: Transgender Issues in Wicca and Paganism

Before Gail Simone wrote Alysia Yeoh as the first trans character in mainstream DC Comics, Neil Gaiman briefly introduced another trans character in the Sandman story A Game of You. Trans woman Wanda Mann is arguably one of the first trans characters in comic books, and, while I utterly love her character, the way she is portrayed is definitely extremely problematic. However, this is not meant to be a post discussing Wanda’s overall portrayal as a trans character. Instead, what I want to focus on is the exchange between Wanda and the witch Thessaly, and how their interactions relate to the current issues that trans people face within the Wicca and Pagan communities.

Young Avengers, We Barely Knew Ye…

Some of the saddest comics-related news I heard at the end of last year was that Marvel’s most recent Young Avengers run was going to be coming to an end with issue #15. Well, I finally got my hands on the final issue of the run, and, while the story definitely got a satisfying conclusion, it’s still sad to see it go.

I can’t speak to how different Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s take on the Young Avengers was from the original Young Avengers series by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung, as I haven’t read the original. What I did know about this series when it came out was that 1) it was set a few years after the original series, and 2) it was going to be a very diverse group of young adult-age superheroes doing awesome superhero things, and that was really all the hook I needed.

Oh, My Pop Culture Pantheon: Syncretism in Pop Culture

We have talked before about shows like Supernatural blending religions together in a way that usually ends up being incredibly offensive to any religion that isn’t Christianity. In Supernatural, the most notable episode depicting this poor blending of religions is “Hammer of the Gods.” In this episode, all the gods from every other religion are not only shown as being less powerful than the Christian God, but also less powerful than even the Christian angels. At the end of the episode, viewers are treated to Lucifer murdering all the other gods. This blending and combining of often dissimilar beliefs into one belief is called syncretism. When shows like Supernatural attempt to blend religions together, they are attempting syncretism, though the writers don’t often do it well.

Syncretism mainly happens in three different ways. In the case of religion, it can be used to recognize your own beliefs and hold them to be true while still recognizing another person’s beliefs to be true. In the ancient world, this was shown in the way that each city and/or country believed in and worshiped its own god(s), but another country could have their own god(s). The people of each country were devoted to their own gods, but they still believed that other countries’ gods existed. It was often believed that if two countries went to war, their gods would fight each other to prove which country was more powerful. In fact, followers of ancient Judaism did not believe their God was the only god until about five hundred years before Jesus was born. This use of syncretism allowed people to keep believing in their own gods while still accepting that others may be devoted to different, but no less real, gods—though ancient people also often believed their god was better than another person’s. So although different people were allowed to believe in different gods, this was not a harmonious system as the various gods and beliefs were often in conflict with each other for supremacy.

The second form of syncretism is the fusion of religions. This is best shown in the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. Christians combined their own beliefs with the beliefs of pagans in order to make Christianity and paganism more compatible and attractive to converts, but also to eventually erase paganism. Christians put holidays like Christmas and Easter during the same times as holidays like Yule and the Spring Equinox. All Saints Day notably almost replaced All Hallows Eve (Halloween) in Europe for a time. Catholic and Orthodox saints were used to replace many pagan pantheons as well. Obviously, Christians didn’t entirely erase paganism by doing this, but after years of syncretism in certain areas, pagan beliefs began to fade away and were replaced by Christianity.

And finally there is the syncretism that is employed by many Wiccans, Pagans, and Neo-Pagans. While some pagans are devoted to one particular pantheon, some believe that all gods and goddesses are different aspects of the God and Goddess. This is more harmonious than the first form of syncretism that I described, because it does not put all the gods in conflict with each other and allows for an easier blending of beliefs. There are also religious pluralists who believe that all religions have some element of the truth, but not the whole truth. In this way, they believe similarly that all gods reflect something of the true god(s).

So what does this have to do pop culture? Well, like in Supernatural, many TV shows, movies, books, and other forms of pop culture try to write about religion by using syncretism, but they don’t really do it right. But boy, do they try.