âWe are removed from the web of interaction with the natural world; the rhythms of our daily movements do not relate us to earth and sky, weather, seasonal changes, sources of our food. Our language does not structure the natural world into sacred space, either in vocabulary or in categories of thought.â
Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler, Penguin Books: 1986, 433 quoting Brandy Williams.
I finally finished reading Drawing Down the MoonâI know, only 30 years late to the party. There were several parts of the book that struck a chord within me, and this is one of them.
I love languages and often mourn the decline of Celtic languages as community languages. Each language encapsulates a cultureâs unique way of thinking. When languages disappear from a communityâand become solely academicâwe lose a cultural context of the human experience, an understanding of what is important, what is historic, and what is novel.
The quote above brought this thought to a unique place for me: Language in a living culture also implicitly references what is holy. This seems apparent enough. I studied Religious Studies in college and am well aware of different vocabulary tropes used in various religious and spiritual systems to indicate something mythic or Mysterious. However, Iâve never really thought about how language informsâand is informed byâmy own religious experiences with Witchcraft.
There are the obvious buzz words that fuel my life as a Witch, words like: magic, ritual, spell, element, etc. What about more âmundaneâ terms? What about: water, flame, joy, love, and the like? I use all of these to connect with the Sacred and to manifest it, but do I connect my âmundaneâ interaction with these concepts to my âsacredâ use of them? No. Itâs not something I always do or realize. So the question arises, can language be a medium for this? Can paying attention to the concepts I invoke via my words bring more connectedness to my life? I donât know, but if I had to hazard a guess, Iâd say itâs likely.
Some religious philosophies, such as those of many Buddhist traditions, see language as dualistic: it separates things into categories, because something can only be âthisâ if itâs not âthat.â I often fall into that camp, myself. But can language be used as a spiritually unifying tool? Can it bring a holistic sacredness to the world, such that I realize the water I use in my Circle and the water I pour from the tap are inherently the same being with the same properties, both mundane and sacred? Perhaps. Perhaps there is something to this semantic gematria, and perhaps I can create my world sacred simply by verbally recognizing it was always so.
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