Scribes

For reasons essentially irrelevant, I recently looked into the roles of those belonging to covens…as in witches. Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about the spiritual workings of covens or the wiccan culture. My interest was drawn to the role of the scribe, which I suspect involves more than being a simple recorder, communicator or archive tender.

The scribe is the coven’s communicator…record keeper. Now as I see it, this makes the scribe perhaps the most important person in the coven. This person selects the language, which determines the coven’s meaning to the outside world. Scribes render the coven and its experiences in language selected by them directed to concentric worlds from nearest to farthest. As one scholar has put it, if we read their texts, we experience their “use of contextual commentary and evaluative adjectives or adverbs which suggest [their] attitudes and values…and reflect the pragmatic context.”

This makes the scribe a very powerful person—a person who determines truth. Think here of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the onerous task they faced as evangelicals of a gospel promising eternal life based on faith in an eternal truth. Their “good news” was as much about them and the way they wanted the truth to be known as it was about the hero of their stories…perhaps more so.

But I don’t really want to discuss the various permutations of Christian or Wicca faith. I’d be happy to do that some other time. Right now, this idea of scribes rendering the truth of spiritual or corporeal experience raises a point I used to emphasize in my creative writing classes. I’d refer to James Joyce’s comment that to create stories, one must first live a deliberate life. Then, armed with the stuff of living, step back, alone, and become the creator-god of whatever story you wish to make. It’s a little like playing the old video games, SimLife and SimCity. You create an environment, arrange life forms in it and have them interact according to a history and a plot, i.e,, conflict, rising action, resolution and denouement.

Some stories are for the entertainment value of the drama. And some are for the purpose of making some general point about human existence and how it can be improved and/or made less painful (e.g., the gospels and the scribe recordings). What I’ve learned in my frustrations at trying to be a creator is that the scribe/evangelical must have a compelling story and a reasonable plot (whether comedy or tragedy). Think of how much the gospellers had to leave out in order to make a compelling story. Think of how the wiccan scribes must focus on the viability and future of the coven to engage the believers.

History is actually merely good and often not so good story telling. A historiography professor I knew began each class by telling the students that all history is fiction; one picks and chooses among the varieties depending on what one wants to believe. We live through daily facts and periodically along the way we create a self-satisfying truth from those facts. The rest disappears through the sieves of our minds.