I was asked recently about hope. Is being hopeful a moral imperative? Is there a ‘language of hope’ that transcends mainstream religious rhetoric? Although the question arrived in the context of my ‘On the Couch’ posts (which are a feature for paid subscribers) I wanted to write a tiny bit about it here in my free-to-all monthly newsletter because it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit over the past couple of tumultuous months, and it’s a timely question for most of us, I suspect.

Outrage alert (trigger warning?): hope has a bad rap. It’s one of those words that alienates a lot of people, and I’ve never really understood why. Maybe because people associate it only with unrealistically la-la optimism? I admit that I’m always a bit irritated when people take issue with particular words based on one small element of their range of possible meanings and start cancelling them. When I first started writing extensively about enchantment, around fifteen years ago now, a couple of people occupying a sort-of-similar space started declaring that enchantment was a Bad Word because it was … I can’t even remember what. Some sniffy-nosed thing, probably just concocted to take me down a peg or two :-) I’m delighted to thumb my sniffy nose back at them today (all pegs present and correct) and point out that enchantment is all the rage now, but really, all of this is just silly. Leave words alone. Let them live and breathe and inspire anyone who chooses to be made or unmade by them.

Still, at least they didn’t say it was demonic, which (as well, rather bizarrely, as enchantment) seems to be an especially de rigeur word right now in right-wing Christian circles. This week, my Substack feed (for some weird reason) once again threw up an article by an Orthodox Christian and self-confessed friend of JD Vance called Rod Dreher. Wide-eyed and rather breathless, and at some considerable length, Dreher explains how naughty Christians who possess tarot cards or read their horoscopes or take ayahuasca or psychedelics (well, not so much that, because Dreher apparently did it himself when he was younger, so that’s all right then, and anyway, I’m sure he didn’t inhale) are ‘sleepwalking into the occult’. Spiritual peril! Demons!!! Demons everywhere!!!! Exorcise them!!!!! WAAAAHHHH!!!!!!

Well, I’ve already written about all this once before, and explained carefully (and also at some length, though I hope with a bit more substance) why tarot and astrology are not, FFS, demonic, but I promise you that won’t stop me writing about it all again, and as many times as it takes. This isn’t just silly, it’s malicious and dangerous and could only possibly ever stoke up division, fear and hatred against anyone who doesn’t share this particularly bonkers way of looking at the world. I know that’s precisely what the MAGA guys are about right now but it isn’t what Christianity was supposed to be about, and I’m sick to death of the witchfinders-general and witchburners in most institutional branches of the Christian church, which never can seem to stop vomiting them up. This is how all that ‘spiritual warfare’ that Dreher is promoting in this article (yes, really – he’s encouraging spiritual warfare! against the card-lovers and horoscope-readers) began once before, a few centuries ago, remember? Have they really actually learned nothing, or are they all just salivating at the chance of getting to do it all again? We need to nip this kind of pernicious nonsense in the bud, and now. Or before we know it, they’ll be back at confiscating the devilish fiddles again, and burning them with the Rider-Waite decks on the pyres alongside us. (Though happily, see the decidedly disturbing footnote to this post, it looks as if our Narnia books might be spared.)1

I should say that I don’t know Rod Dreher, and he might well be a fine, upstanding citizen and all-round life-enhancing delight who doesn’t actually want to burn anyone as a witch at all. But this is very much the kind of thing that has an unfortunate tendency to get people burnt as witches anyway. And has done, for a very very long time. Mostly women. So I do very much wish that he and his ilk would stop being so dangerously irresponsible. The American religious right, as well as the right in general, is getting more and more crackers with every year that goes by. And although there are a lot of fights to fight with everything that’s coming out of America these days – and from all sides, because the progressive left is also more than capable of witchhunts, though they don’t have quite such deep historical resonance – I’m very much afraid that we need to take on this one, too.

Anyway. I wildly, wildly digress. And now I’ll likely get Orthodox-bro hate mail or they’ll send demons to troll me. But in the meantime, onwards …

Hope. According to Oxford Languages, hope is:

1. A feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.

2. (archaic) A feeling of trust.

The combined connotations of desire and trust interest me greatly. But I think of hope as something much more than that, and it’s why I believe hope to be essential in difficult times: the practice of hope engages the creative mind. It makes us wonder what we might do to make that desired thing happen, or how we can become in some way aligned with its happening. At its best, hope is a problem-solving device. And it’s a sacred expression of faith in the wider unfolding of the universe which is hidden from us. It goes hand-in-hand with the practice of intent, and that’s an active process too. (And nothing to do with wishful thinking.)

Think of the average fairy-tale heroine. Everything seems lost at the beginning of her story, but she puts one foot in front of another and sets out on the journey to a new story anyway. That’s hope in perfect practice. Cinderella doesn’t just sit mindlessly among the ashes, pining for a nice prince to happen along and sort it all out. (Best of luck with that, anyone. Oh, the nice prince happened along and sorted everything out said no proper fairy-tale heroine, ever.) In ‘Aschenputtel’, the Grimms’ version of the story, she sorts out the seemingly hopeless situation herself – and very successfully, thank you very much. She asks her unpleasant father for the gift of a hazel branch, plants it on her mother’s grave, tends it faithfully and loyally, and waits for the time when it can provide her with what she most needs. She loves a diverse collection of birds she’s befriended into doing the impossible sorting task that her wicked stepmother has set her to, asks the tree for a pretty gown, takes herself off to the ball she’s been forbidden to attend, and entrances the prince by the simple fact of being herself. She gets what she ‘desires to happen’ by doing her best to actually make it happen, and into the bargain, by the end of the story, everyone who’s worked against her, including that particularly pernicious father, has received their comeuppance.

Hope, then, at its best, is in service to possibility, and it’s also about resilience. It’s about a love for life and the enchantment of existence, in spite of all the brown stuff that sometimes gets thrown our way. The opposite of hopeful is hopeless, and that’s about as passive and resigned as it gets. So in all those senses and in absolute opposition to passive and resigned, yes – hope is certainly a moral imperative for me. And it’s not at all Pollyanna la-la wishful thinking. It’s certainly nothing to do with wafting about prettily, trying to manifest nice outcomes and world peace and crumbly cupcakes and blah. It’s about getting off your backside and making good shit happen. Like every single one of those fairy-tale heroines who’s thrown out of the house with no money, no friends, with a wicked stepmother and a fucked-up father and nothing but a cloak made of all kinds of fur and a great big bucketful of hope.

Well, all that kind of thing is the subject of this next book that I’ve been working on, and parts of which sprang out of some of the fine conversations paid subscribers and I had last year about The Fairy-tale Heroine’s Journey. (Another antidote to that tediously swashbuckling, all-for-glory Hero’s Journey I’ve been deconstructing for a good two decades now.) Talk of which leads me inevitably and inexorably to complain to you all that I am fairly gibbering these days – and the rapidly growing excess of spring daylight (which always enervates me) certainly isn’t helping – because I’m in the last final, obsessive, hair-pulling couple of months of finishing said book. I both love and loathe it right now, as always happens at this point in the process. It’s not helped by the fact that I have a ridiculously dysfunctional approach to book-writing – though I suppose I could say it’s worked for me so far – which is to give myself plenty of time to write it (and the proposal for this one was finished around a year ago), spend far too much time thinking and researching and making notes and procrastinating and daydreaming about it, panic for a while, and then find myself forced to write like a maniac for six months to meet the contracted deadline. Yes, I was always one of those kids who left all revision for exams till the last minute too. That also worked, but I still have those repetitious nightmares about turning up to the geography exam and I haven’t been to lessons for a year and have no idea what the questions even mean, let alone half a clue about how to answer them. Whatever; I guess it’s baked-in and at 63 years old I’m probably not changing those particular leopard-spots now.

There isn’t a whole lot of other news this month, but do check out a couple of upcoming events and a new reading recommendation below. So I’ll close, as always, by wishing you all the blessings of whichever season you’re in. Multiply those blessings by fighting the witchburners with everything you have – whether that’s growing a flower, writing a book, knitting a shawl or taking to the sun-shattered streets. Enchantment is resistance, and always was.

Sunday May 4, 12 noon. Talk in the Main Hall, Wigtown Book Festival, Spring Weekend. (Wigtown, Dumfries & Galloway.) I’ll be drawing on If Women Rose Rooted, and also on Hagitude and Wise Women, to illustrate how the myths and fairy tales of Britain and Ireland offer a range of wise and powerful female characters who can serve as inspirations and role models for women in these challenging times. Book here.

Saturday May 10, 10.30–12.00 Central time. Online lecture: Minnesota Jung Association. ‘Hagitude: an archetypal analysis of older women in European myth and folklore’. Book here.

Talking about hope, the luminous announced her second book this week, Letters from Wonderland, and it looks as if it’s going to be a stunner. It’s out June 5 in the UK, August 12 in the US, and I’d wholeheartedly encourage you all to run off and preorder it right now!

She describes it as ‘a book of letters, from me, leading you deep into the beauty and truth of the world around you’, and you can read more about it, in Josie’s own words, here.