Some things are just love

In memory of Gordon White

I feel compelled to write this partly because of Gordon's permission by example to feel out loud for the people we meet through books or online interactions. His last podcast episode, a requiem for chaos magician Peter J. Carroll, addresses the impact Carroll's work had on his life, though he caveats that he did not know him as a friend: they met a few times and corresponded a little bit. "How rare is it," he asks the viewer, "to overlap your incarnation with one of your philosophical heroes?" How rare indeed.

I remember when one of the Rune Soup premium members, Eriol, a writer and prolific asker of questions, left us in the physical. Gordon grieved, and led a memorial service for her within the community. He wrote on the blog: "You see, grief is an odd thing. We respond differently when it happens. When I lose someone I worry that expressing or communicating this loss somehow makes it about me, which it isn’t. I also want to hide away from the world. It’s not what you would call a mature reaction. But I have been informed that our little community was very important to her and her family is honoured that we would publicly acknowledge our sadness at her passing." I missed her presence too. She was smart, and observant, and she loved to talk about weird things with us. I am so grateful that he created a space for her, and me, to do that.

It is because of the brave and caring way he acknowledged others who meant something to him that I think he wanted to be written about. And as I have been reminded by his passing of what is mine to do: writing is part of the work I am here for. Even if I feel this piece of writing is too much about me, and what it is to care about someone who touched your life without knowing it, about grief and the importance of the way we remember, which is to say the way we tell the story. It feels vitally important to me that the story of Gordon White is told well by other occultists. It's early days for that. In the end I expect it will be.

Is there a word for somebody you shared a particular bond with, but did not really know? Gordon and I weren't friends. I could recognize him, but he might not remember meeting me. Calling our connection parasocial feels rudely dismissive of the very real relationships and interactions he facilitated through his community. Acquaintance is at once too familiar and too distant. A student-teacher relationship implies that we did know each other circumstantially, but I confess to lurking in online courses and I rarely attended his Q&As. He was an author and thinker who inspired me, and this is more comfortable social territory, although it still begs the question: why, then, such a flow of unexpected grief for a stranger?

And then, that word "stranger" irks me, hanging in my mind with its question mark. We journeyed to the imaginal together many times, had a conversation in at least one dream and once in person during his life. Our community, our enchanted world within the world, is too small for us to have been true strangers. In a city of millions, in a time when we were free to be anywhere doing anything, we once sat across from each other at a long table with, at most, thirty magically operant people in a Brooklyn beer garden. This was the small group of chaotic spiritual brethren who had found and loved Rune Soup enough to join the private membership and come out to meet the others on a Friday night in 2019. I remember the way he leaned back in his chair, surveying every person closely with those intelligent eyes. A flash of satisfaction. He had done this. People had gathered because he brought them together. I remember thinking in that moment that he did all of this for friendship. Every sorcerer from a small town knows exactly how lonely it can be to walk through the strip mall carrying secret magic in your pockets. Every adult was a child who once wished for something, and that root desire is made plain in the lifelong quest.

No, "stranger" is not at all the right word for the pirate wizard who organizes the global re-enchantment that affects your whole life.

If what I am feeling is a parasocial grief, I still reject the assertion that this relationship is one in which the recipient of the artist's creations does not know the giver. Writers live in the tension between not wanting to be known and wanting desperately to be known. Because of that tension, even when we don't write directly about ourselves, we give ourselves away. Alas for the Scorpio rising, who wishes to control the narrative. I do know Gordon in some ways. I know him through his obsessions as a writer and seeker: with mythology and Lord of the Rings, with pirates, with the science and mysticism of magic, with uncovering the hidden bones of human history and placing them correctly in the context of the more-than-human. I know that he was an often misunderstood prophet. Though unpopular questions are made of fire, and can burn, he let them burn him because he had to know, and what he believed, he had to say. I know his mannerisms, his irritations, and his jokes. I am an astrologer in possession of his birth data. I can read his chart, but he never knew mine. It is I who am the stranger. The imbalance, the terrible awkwardness, in this kind of relationship is the writer who does not know the reader, not the other way around. The word I need for what lay between us would describe neighbors who lived far away from each other. Spiritual kin who shared a sense of hiraeth. Is it not by colonial design that our vocabulary is so thin in the places that matter the most? Gordon might have suggested a word or phrase from another language and culture. But he's not here in the same way anymore. I cannot find what I'm searching for because Gordon defied categories.

Everyone has a role in the mystery play, as Caroline Casey, one of my favorite astrologers, is fond of saying. Gordon had a big role, and a unique one, in the mystery play for many of us. He played it well. I admired him: his prolific work, his wit, his sheer knowledge of magical, academic and philosophical concepts. Here was a man who had patience for Donna Haraway, whose overwrought interdisciplinary books I muddled through in graduate school but never found as enlightening as Gordon could. Here was someone who could make Donna Haraway interesting to me, even enchanted. If nothing else, you have to respect his intellect. He was an irreplaceable artist of the occult, weaving together subjects no other Western author had taken seriously and doing it with style. So much of the language and thinking I am using here comes to me from him. He was an original in that sense, inventing a framework on which to hang our magic. Dredging it up from the ancient undersea ruins.

He was also a generous host. For magicians and witches, magic is a current of fresh, clear running water that has been hidden away in favor of Brawndo!, the "life-giving electrolyte drink" that replaces all water in the movie Idiocracy. Everything in our culture tries to convince us that Brawndo! is all there is. But if we are lucky, if we really search for the groundwater we can sense beneath us, we may find an initiator who takes us to the secret spring and bids us to slake our thirst. Gordon was that initiatory being for many. Even those of us who found the craft early may have had the experience of lingering, restless, in a kind of antechamber of beginners' spells until someone opens a door to the deeper realms. Gordon did that for people too. Not only was he willing to share his magic with great generosity, but he dreamed a world where its water once again flows freely through the channels of culture.

As a witch who studied anthropology and writes stories, Gordon was the professor I wished I could have learned from when I was bothering shamans on my semester in Kenya, and the magician I would have chosen to think with when I was wandering through Peru in my twenties. It was too early for me to know of him then--Iike Gordon, I am still only twenty-seven--but I am glad I found his work when I did. He taught me that magic was real enough to be tested, like all real things, and he helped me find the variations that worked best. His discourse on sigils is fundamental at this point. His tarot course influenced my private and professional practice, as did his course on journeying and dreaming. He is responsible for motivating my journey to ancestral healing, and for bringing animism to the fore of occult discussions. He respected astrology and investigated it thoroughly without demanding that its incomplete language fill in every gap of metaphysical theory. He teased that he didn't like poets, but he was surrounded by them.

I regret that I was not more actively participating in the creation and discussion of ideas, in the live journeys and book club and intention groups that Rune Soup offered, through the past few years. I became busy and baby-brained after starting my family in 2020. Since having two kids, I have only had time for very specific magical pursuits that need to be prioritized for efficiency. I also felt called to focus on the analogue, hosting and attending in-person gatherings in my local community after the intense years of online-only interactions. Without exactly meaning to, I gradually phased out my involvement with the Rune Soup community, imagining I would return soon. How much of a shock it was, then, to be confronted with news of Gordon's transition from the physical. Now I am rudely awakened by the passage of time reminding me that while you are looking elsewhere, things change without you, and endings are inevitable.

Grief has layers and grooves. Rune Soup's online membership and physical meetups of the others, for me, will forever be connected in my memory to my years in New York, and to a brief period of freelance existence that allowed me comparatively giant swaths of time to practice and contemplate enchantments. Gordon's sudden passing, then, is tied emotionally to some important touchstones for me--my unrequited love for a city I couldn't afford to keep, my romance and marriage before having kids, my initiation and progression within my coven. Most importantly, my ongoing love affair with magic. In my life right now there are other deep, raw chasms of grief that I am still crossing. None of them have anything to do with Gordon, unless you see all things as part of a web of spiritual truth and universal divine love. Which, you might know, they are.

Grief is rhizomatic: an invisible cord that connects a group of people scattered across time and space will sing with a loss when the community feels it, regardless of one's individual relationship to the dead.

Grief requires ceremony with others: when lighting a candle and saying a prayer alone is all you can do, the grief deepens for lack of someone else who understands what this loss means.

In the days after I learned about Gordon's death, I pulled cards. Why am I grieving so deeply about this? I wished to know, confused. The dishes and the laundry needed my attention, my children clamored for me to play with them, and here I was sitting heart-heavy for a person I could not begin to explain.

The answer came from the deck: Ace of Cups. Compassion and empathy, surely. I asked if what I was feeling was mine. Not all of it, but some. I let go of what belonged elsewhere.

I asked again, days later, the weight still blanketing my mood. Ace of Cups. The chalice of water on my ancestor altar, upon which I had sent up an offering and a prayer for him.

The new grief still lingered, without my full understanding. I asked one last time for clarification on another day. Ace of Cups. Well, after all...he was serving soup. The instruction to abandon sentimentality runs deep through my psyche from my training as a writer. It makes me thick, sometimes, as a reader of signs.

As is fitting, Gordon was the one who finally spelled it out for me, telling me the answer I had been looking for. The word I was "finding for," as my three-year-old says. Another day later, I logged into the membership and clicked on his Time Magic course. Browsing through the syllabus without agenda, I found Gordon had left behind videos that explained exactly what I wanted to know. Death is Time Magic, Gordon titled one. I open another: Grief is Praise. He is sitting on a memorial bench next to a pretty pond on a bright day in Geeveston, Tasmania. He is sporting sunglasses and his beard. He looks well. He seems thoughtful, and patient, and intentional in this short film. It is hard to make myself understand that I am watching a ghost.

"Grief is what living beings experience when what or whom they love dies or disappears," he quotes. He is reading aloud from Martin Prechtel's book The Smell of Rain on Dust.

Well, fuck me, I thought. That names it. I'm grieving because I loved. I loved that weird kid.

It is that simple. Ace of Cups. Some things are just love.

Again I am frustrated that the English language is so bereft of words for forces as enormous and varied as love. Whatever the timbre of that feeling, to call it something else would be untrue. I loved his podcast, his classes, and his books, even when they went over my head or I disagreed with his opinion. I loved his sense of humor and his willingness to explore where others wouldn't dare. It hurts and softens my heart to understand now that he was preparing for his own death. In our care he leaves a profound body of work, through which no doubt there are more seeds of understanding that will sprout over time.

The body of work is tragically incomplete, though. It feels too early for this loss.

But then, I am not in possession of the script to the mystery play. All I can do now is raise a glass and continue with what is mine.

Gordon, I already miss your presence in this time we once shared.

You have made my life better.