Sevenfold Silence

There's a guest post about personal experiences in pagan blogging over at the pagan blog The Wild Hunt that tweaked me. Paganism isn't otherkin, and otherkin isn't paganism, but the two are interwoven for a lot of people, so it caught my eye in the context of Sevenfold Silence.

The heart of the post is:

Don't give me your ideas on Pagan life, my sisters and brothers. I have ideas enough of my own. And don't give me answers, because ours is a religious movement with hundreds of answers, thousands of answers.

Give me your experience. Give me the marrow and the meat of your spiritual life. Because, unless you write it down, no one else ever will. Only from you can I receive this gift: your own lived Pagan journey.

And here, I'm thinking, is a key difference between the pagan community and the otherkin community (other than the obvious): where pagans talk about ideas and play their personal experiences close to the vest, otherkin talk about personal experiences and play their ideas close to the vest. There's much more chatter about the symptoms of being otherkin, the everyday reality of it, how different you feel, than there is about where we come from, what we're here for, how we can function.

Each of these has a place but I think, personally, that the personal side of otherkin is overplayed. Sharing personal experience is great! But drawing commonalities between experience, attempting to create (and break) generalizations--that's more fun, I think, and far more productive.

I think we're scared, as a subculture, to talk ideas and make the necessary generalizations to do that. We are all so rabidly individual, and potentially so very different from each other, that it gets hard to talk ideas. But I think that just chatting experience is part of why the otherkin community's gone so silent. There's only so much you can draw from "sometimes I feel like I have a tail and scales" (for instance), and only slightly more from "sometimes I feel this--does anybody else?"

But even something mild like "I think that sometimes I feel like I have a tail and scales, because of x y and z, and it usually happens to me during a b and c--can anyone relate?"--that has room for discussion. It puts the speaker in the crossfire, potentially, and it creates potential for controversy and disagreement. But without taking a stand you can't have a real conversation going.

I make a fair number of posts of a personal nature here on this blog. I try not to, generally, and I space 'em out when I make 'em, because there isn't much room for discussion with that, and honestly if I used this blog as a place to describe my own, very peculiar personal experience with otherkin I think that would border on the masturbatory.

I'm much, much more interested in stripping away the personal experience and, yes, sometimes the poetry from the otherkin experience, and getting to the heart of the matter--big ideas, theories, and experimentation.

Now, I am pretty much expecting a whole bunch of you to go ‘Wait a minute, goblins can be whatever we want them to be! There is no one way a thing should be! That would be RESTRICTING things and what if someone else wanted to be a goblin who wasn’t small, irritating or ugly???”. Well. Wouldn’t that sort of be like saying a horse can have six legs if you want it to, because saying they only have four legs is, like, restricting our creativity and stuff? I dunno, man, I’m just throwing this out there, you know?

(from a seriously pretty interesting post and line of conversation over at the LJ otherkin community)

That's an interesting point that froudgoblin brings up, although I don't really know how much I agree with it.

Ultimately I guess it's a question of philosophy, one of platonic forms. Or, alternately, "bad birds and better birds", to draw from a slightly different field. (A robin and an ostrich are both birds, but chances are you think the robin's a better example of a bird.)

We already accept, by virtue of living in a real world of imperfect things, that virtually nothing is a perfect example of its form. A horse is a four-legged running mammal. But Sleipnir, the eight-legged mythological horse, is still a horse. A mutant six-legged horse is still a horse. Eight Belles, the Kentucky Derby runner who broke both her legs upon crossing the finish line, couldn't run at the end before she was put down--but she was still a horse. Even though a horse is a mammal that runs.

Ultimately this is the big question of what it means to be otherkin, even bigger than "where did we come from" or "why are we here". Definitions are strange, fuzzy things. Where do they stop? Western dragons are winged scaly mythological creatures, who live in lairs and hoard gold and are secretive. Can a human being, who likes lairs and hoards shiny things and is secretive, realistically describe themselves in any sense as being a dragon? How fuzzy is the definition?

If we accept the constraint that a mutant six-legged horse isn't a horse because its external form is unhorselike, then virtually no one I know of within the otherkin community qualifies as anything special. I'm deceiving myself, because I don't have literal physical wings. The OP is deceiving herself because she's short and swarthy. Both of us are liars. Any doctor would tell us--rightly so--that we are both fully biologically human, and that's the end of that.

The otherkin movement, though, by its very nature, is based on the fact that superficiality and stereotypes and 'common wisdom' aren't the be-all end-all. If that mutant six-legged horse runs around neighing, then damn it, it's a horse. If I feel wings and a strange yearning for quiet green places and peculiar elegance, then I'm fey. If the OP feels "small, irritating, and ugly" (her wonderful, wonderful words), and connects that with a goblin-current, then the OP's a goblin. If someone else doesn't feel that, but can reasonably make a case for having a goblin-nature, then hie's a goblin, too--just a different kind.

This doesn't mean that all claims should go perfectly unquestioned. If there really isn't anything remotely goblin-like about our hypothetical wannabe, then maybe hie should step back and reconsider mightily what's up. But to risk shutting somebody out of one's phenotype, merely because they don't match the stereotype or your perceptions of it, smacks of weird hypocrisy. (Not that the OP is hypocritical.)

Hidebound checklists don't suit a subculture like ours. We don't think outside of the box; we burst violently out of the box, trample it, and bury it. Definitions are good, but they're only useful inasmuch as they're fuzzy--and denying a definition's fuzziness is, for us, a recipe for trouble.

Perusing the nonfluffypagans community on LJ, I found this in the comments, written by user misslynx:

"One interesting pattern that my partner wrote a paper about in grad school is that the depiction of fairy beings has varied considerably over time. In mediaeval accounts, they tend to be predominantly depicted as powerful, dangerous and usually malevolent - sometimes the same beings are referred to alternately as both fairies and demons. There's also a lot of emphasis on their tendency to mislead travellers, tempt them off their paths, and lead them into, at best, being lost in the wilderness, and at worst, any of a variety of horrible deaths. But as the legends move into early modern times, that image is toned down considerable, and they seem to be more trivialized than demonized. That's when you start getting accounts of "the little people", shown more as mischievous tricksters than deadly deceivers. And as the Romantic movement developed, you have more emphasis on them as beautiful but fragile remnants of a lost world of magic and wonder that had been crushed by modernization and the industrial revolution."

Two points:

First: writing as someone who identifies as otherkin and "something fey", my immediate question was "and which one's the real/best version of the fairy story?" (Oh God, shame on me for even thinking that.) To which the answer is, in my opinion, "they're all good". Personally, I detest the cute light happy Disneyfied version of fairies, and I'd be enormously suspicious of anyone who came to me insisting that was their true form, and I'd likely banish the shit out of any external spiritual entity that came my way insisting that, on the grounds that It Must Be My Mind. But I understand its cultural merit. As for the other definitions of a fairy--they're all valid. They're all slightly different, and maybe one clicks 'better' than the others for any given person, but none of them are really wrong. They all contribute in a meaningful way to the full composite image of Fairy.

I probably don't have to tell my target audience "hey! Vaguely-defined magical beings can manifest in a plethora of culturally-specific ways!" but somehow it hit me, hard. I've been thinking a lot about the nature of Fairy lately--perhaps that's why.

Second: the final definition given of what a fairy is, the Romantic-era one about beautiful fragile things from a by-gone age? Divorcing the comment entirely from fairies, that's one of the best damned definitions of otherkin I've seen. (Only, though, when you abandon all issues of identity, which you shouldn't; they're rather intrinsic to the definition of otherkin.) Still--uncanny, I think.

Mind, the people on NFP might (understandably) go apeshit when they see that I've appropriated a comment on one of their posts to add to a conversation about otherkin...

...in that it's a stray survey, not in that it's for stray otherkin...

Dunno how long it'll be up for, or what the data are being collected for, but it asks some good questions, and it's a brief survey so I don't mind taking it. You can find it here.

Most of my answers are pretty generic, but I do like this one that I wrote for it, in response to the question of "What is your opinion on the reason there are more of certain types of otherkin and few of other types?"

Otherkin is a self-identification that arises from certain characteristics (be they personality traits, ways of thinking, physical characteristics, et cetera) that can't be explained away readily by the human condition. Someone who resonates strongly with a non-majestic creature like, say, a bullfrog might explain these characteristics as being those of a quirky human.

Alternately, members of human society tend to think more about majestic, impressive creatures like elves and dragons than poor little bullfrogs, and therefore may be more likely to identify their otherworldly current, if they have one, as being of such a variety.

Of course, if you ask me on a skeptical day, I may just tell you that it's because we're full of it :P