Self-Description by IanC

I’m all for personal power and the ability to shape and guide one’s own life. After all, that’s why I’m a mage and not the sort of mystic who simply ‘lets go and lets God’. However I rather think that my generation, and the children they have taught have made fetish of it in a way that is in danger of becoming an obstacle to sense and understanding.

When my first marriage was ending I once told my wife that I would do this or that. “But that will affect me thus-and-so,” she complained, and asserted that she should have the right to veto my action so that she would not have the consequent ill feelings. Being past caring at that time, I refused her. Sez she “So, I don’t have a right to control my life?” After a moment’s thought I answered “Not the part of it that is me…”

The point here is that she thought she should have the right to control her life - even the parts of it caused by other people. Here we reach that fetish I was pointing out. Boomers and post-boomers have come to believe that individuals have a ‘right’ to ‘control’ almost everything about our lives. We expect social convention to give way, rules to be bent, and even for authority to come down to support us if we insist that things should be our way. Many Pagans seem to view the right of absolute self-determination as a kind of cosmic principle, often expressed as an imperative - “No one can tell you what is right for you, but you,” etc.