Identity

More recently, occult thinkers and authors have told us that polarity is a load of crap, that we should throw it away with other oppressive paradigms and not look back.

This is a book that stands at neither of those extremes. In these pages, we’ll explore what it would mean to include polarity magic and also be inclusive. I have this idea that there’s a baby in all that bathwater, and I’d like to save the little darling.

The Magical World

I learned the term p-words from Misha Magdalene, who picked it up from Laura Tempest Zakroff. In her book Outside the Charmed Circle, Magdalene describes p-words as “the various streams of modern magical (or occult) practice and the multiplicity of spiritual traditions falling under the headings of Paganism and polytheism.”1 We’re going to get into some really interesting history later on, but for now let’s just say that all of our Western p-word traditions, be they Neopaganism, Wicca, Thelema, Druidism, the Church of All Worlds, or the Church of I Made It Up Yesterday, all have some common ancestors and some shared energies. (Instead of p-word, I’ll often just say occultism or magical people.)

Whatever label I use, someone won’t like it—because people hate labels. But at a larger level, we can understand that our beliefs, practices, and values can be vastly different yet come from a shared root language, and that allows us to leverage a shared vocabulary. In other words, we can talk. What is said in these pages will strike each reader differently, in part because we all have different occult backgrounds (and in part because we’re different individuals), but we can easily translate this information into our own magical languages. I might “speak” Wicca, but you have enough shared vocabulary with me that you can translate into Druidism or whatever.

My own magical background, which undoubtedly influences my writing both consciously and unconsciously, is primarily in Wicca. Over the

1. Magdalene, Outside the Charmed Circle, 30–31.

course of forty years in the Pagan and occult community, I’ve participated in a wide variety of rituals and experiences, attended classes, broken bread, and partied with just about every kind of magical person you can name, on three continents. My intention here is to write in a way that is welcoming to all of them/you/us.

Who Is This Book For?

Bending the Binary is for anyone who is interested in the subject of polarity in a p-word context. It is for anyone who has encountered the concept of polarity and wonders what that means to them personally, or what it means at all. It is for straight people and queer people, cis people and trans people. I don’t assume who you are and what you know, and I may explain things you already know. You may be queer or trans or nonbinary, or all of the above, and be asking if polarity has any meaning to your magical practice. You may be the most heteronormative cisgender person in the entire world and be 100 percent comfortable with polarity as it was taught to you, and simply want to deepen your understanding of an important occult concept. Whoever you are, you are welcome.

The Queer World

Inevitably, this book must address queerness, the elephant in the room of any conversation about polarity. In these pages, queer identities will be front and center. Whether you identify as LGBTQAI+ or not, whether you know what all those letters stand for (we’ll get to that), this is a book that welcomes you. I’ll use queer here as an umbrella term covering and encompassing LGBTQAI+ identities because that’s a comfortable word for me. I recognize that some people are uncomfortable with the word, which was once a slur,2 but it’s a word I embrace, as it fits me.

I started with the word lesbian, but once I’d married and divorced a man, that seemed like a weird word to continue to hold onto. Understanding that I was definitely not straight nor gay, I also didn’t love bisexual or

2. The word queer was first used by the Marquess of Queensberry in 1894. See Perlman,

“How the Word ‘Queer’ Was Adopted by the LGBTQ Community.”