The Evil in You

I going to make an assertion: if you grew up with enough spiritual force (what my beloved godfather would call “la fuerza”), at some point someone will have told you that you are evil.

If, like me, you grew up in a Christian community where anything spiritual is demonized, you heard that a lot. Sometimes, that rejection results in violence. In my case, I almost lost my physical eyes over it, which taught me a valuable lesson about telling people what I can see. The label of being evil is no small thing for a child to grapple with, and that stigma stained me until fairly recently.

Spend enough time with people, and you will learn that they use the word ‘evil’ to describe anything that makes them uncomfortable, violates their expectations, or makes them feel inadequate, which is more than enough incentive to rejection, and sometimes violence.

It is what they have to offer. And if you do not seek to fulfill their expectations, you will still fulfill their expectations and wonder, painfully, if they are right.

My godfather comes from an infamous family—many of his relatives make rather extraordinary amounts of money from witchery. They use it to subvert the legal system, bend people to their will, get houses and cars and anything they lay eyes on and want. They objected to him teaching people outside the family and sharing the knowledge with people who are not from his ethnic group.

On Friday, I found myself unexpectedly sitting with Anaisa again, in his body. A question I have had, as I learn magi from my godfather, is whether I have it in me to do some of the things I know he could teach me. I know I have it in me to do things that others would call evil, and have done many things people would call evil, though it’s hard to take a list too seriously when the fact that I exist is a list item.

One of the exercises he gave me could be called evil. I did as asked, then contemplated how I felt about it. I contemplated how the ethics system I once took such pride in, as proof that I was not really evil, viewed what I did, and whether I thought it right. I increasingly think that our ethics systems are… misguided.

Anaisa, with her typical sneer when confronted with human obtuseness, looked me up and down and said “there is no evil in you. You think you are evil, but there is no evil in you.”

The observers, because often others are present for these conversations, understood this to mean that I was weak, because evil is power. I understand that view, but it wasn’t what I understood.

This is what I understand of evil, right now: evil denies the mutual nature of divinity, denies that you and I are parts of divinity together.

That…. that I am happy to know is not in me.

Ayibobo, beloved one. Ayibobo, mambo Anaisa.