So my interview with pagan centered podcast just came out. This interview was...well it wasn't an interview. It was a bunch of people grilling me about pop culture magic. I did my best to answer them civilly, though I lost a bit of my temper when several of them were downright insulting. I'm used to people being resistant to the concept of integrating pop culture to magic. I've certainly heard my share of critiques about it, but this interview reminded me of the pagan bunny hunter club...people who would "hunt" pagans who didn't share similar beliefs that they had. In the pagan bunny hunter club, and also in the case of the majority of the people on this podcast, what I'm struck by is the fundamentalism and close-mindedness that informs the attitudes of the people. As you'll probably hear, if you listen to this episode, the majority of the interviewers weren't really familiar with my work and didn't think it was worth their time or effort to become familiar. How that then makes them experts in critiquing said work is beyond me.
I don't expect everyone to agree with how I do magic or think it's the best way to do it. But I really dislike what I consider to be an attempt to tell someone that his or her approach is invalid, because it doesn't fit within the paradigm of someone else. You can tell me it doesn't work for you, but don't try and tell me it won't work for others or that its blasphemous. I actually ended up tailoring some of my responses to fit the perspectives these people were coming from in order to actually communicate how pop culture magic can work. That was an interesting exercise in itself, because I mainly ended up using a psychological model of magic to discuss the concepts with them. That's not necessarily the model I would always use to discuss how magic works, but it was useful in this case and it seemed to at least cause us to arrive toward an uneasy consensus.
Not the best interview I've ever had and quite honestly in some ways very discouraging to see that there is such a prevalent attitude of fundamentalism, though not too surprising either. It's fair to say that in some ways this interview is representative of some of the disillusionment I've felt in regards to the pagan/occult communities.