This Week in Witchcraft (S1 E11)

Welcome to This Week in Witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat, and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan. Can you spot it out in the wild?

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me is Michael Derham. And it's kind of appropriate that we're a duet, since we're going to be handling witchcraft in music today. Michael's brought some that he has found out in the wild for us.

Witchcraft in the Content and Storytelling of Music

Yeah, I just want to talk about how witchcraft manifests in music. And I suppose the low-hanging fruit here is to talk about how music brings with it a message. And we can talk later on, or perhaps in even a different episode, about the aesthetic of music and the message that it brings in and of itself.

But the low-hanging fruit here is to consider the content of the music that we're listening.

To.

What are the claims being made? What kind of new terms are being introduced? How are some terms being redefined through the course of a song? Songs by their nature and history, and even in their current form, songs tell stories.

Songs bring a narrative. They have a start and they have a finish. Where you end up is not where you started. Things have changed in terms of the content that you have consumed. And we can think of the songs of old, which are examples in Scripture.

The songs that were being sung in Scripture from early on were ballads to the glory of God, how He did this, and this is what happened next. And there's story involved. There's narrative involved in songs.

And we can see that as well, and we can hear that as well, in the music of our day. And it may not simply be in terms of story, here's the characters and here's what happened, like a country-western song so obviously often has.

But there is a progression of thought. Very often these songs that are being produced today are very self-focused, very much about the thoughts and the progression of thought within the artist himself or herself.

But there is some kind of story going on. And there are words that are being defined, and there are values that are being established. And so when we listen to music, not just when we read the news or hear the news, not just when we read a book or read an article, but when we listen to music, we should also be aware of what kind of witchcraft may be present in the content that we are consuming.

So we can, again, just go for the low-hanging fruit and think about the songs that everybody knows. Some of the most common songs that are involved in the storytelling, perhaps like Disney movies and so on.

These Disney musicals, these songs that are involved in the story, are in and of themselves teaching things and claiming things. And the question is, what is going on here? Is this witchcraft? Are new words being invented to cover the old words?

Are some words receiving new definitions? Are they being enchanted? Are ideas being brought together which have no business being put together into the same idea construct? Is there sorcery going on? Are things being left confusing intentionally to try to muddle the situation so we do not have clarity?

Is there soothsaying going on? Are ethical values being changed and the origins of ideas being given new origins and so on and so forth? I mean, these are all the different forms of witchcraft that we can see that are forbidden to us in the scriptures, but we see it go on constantly in the music of our day, being the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs of paganism.

And these things are sung everywhere and you can see how popular they are. Someone can just sing a couple of stanzas or even just a couple of musical bars and all of a sudden everybody knows exactly what you're singing.

So I think one good example would be the very, very famous song from Disney's Frozen, Let.

It Go.

No right, no wrong, no rules for me. And a song that ultimately is talking about the character's sexuality where she's just giving everything up in terms of what are the standards, what are the norms.

So Dylan, what are some examples that you can think of in terms of popular music, pop culture music that maybe has been around for a while or maybe some more recently developed music? Where do you see witchcraft coming into play?

Witchcraft in Disney, Pop Music, and the Self

Maybe taking the Disney route again. And I was thinking about this while you were talking, Lion King, which is basically a riff off of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The song I Just Can't Wait to be King that Simba sings as his opening number.

That one I think is an example of Simba using a bit of witchcraft about kingship, but he actually gets smacked down in the story. And you were talking about how maybe it's changed and it's shifted throughout Disney.

And to a certain degree, I'm wondering if their ties to feminism has something to do with their view of kingship as well or male headship in any certain form in the way that he comes to it in the story.

But I would say they're a little more consistent with how the world's created with Lion King than they are some of the more new, like you said, blatant or progressive or just kind of pushed in your face where you obviously see it as, hey, this is talking about Elsa's sexuality obviously coming from Frozen.

And I don't do a great job of keeping up with modern music or popular music, but I do see, as you said, there's a story change. And the story change is usually the story of me now. Any sort of pop music that is venerated or awarded really has to do with me, my money, the way I look, the image that I put off and the way I use my language or the way I use my body.

And that's where we're seeing a lot of it started on a lot of pop music. And now it's coming in Addison commercials on YouTube. So I kind of see it being pushed from that musical realm and being started there and starting to leak into the rest of everything else.

And it was subtle in places like Little Mermaid. I say subtle. It was subtle for me as a kid in places like Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. But their main songs usually have to do with everyone else is a is a moron except for me.

Daddy doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah. All the townspeople don't know what they're talking about. And if I could just get to this this point or like with the Little Mermaid, if I could just transition, you know, out of the water and onto land, I'd have what I want.

Or if I could just ditch this town, these dumb townspeople, I'd be where I need to be. I'd have fulfillment. And that's one thing about all this is they are searching for some sort of fulfillment and they're using loads of witchcraft to do it.

Whether subtle or overt, it's becoming pretty clear when you stack all that work on top of themselves with Disney especially. Are you seeing it in other places outside of Disney?

Genesis 3, Genesis 11, and the Autonomy of Pagan Music

Yeah. So when you hear any of the more popular music, what it comes down to is some variation on what the devil told Eve in Genesis 3, right, about not letting others, namely God, limit you. Right. Don't let God limit you and keep you less than what you can be.

In fact, you know, don't let there be any restraints. Go ahead and grab whatever you want. Nothing's forbidden for me or nothing should be forbidden for you. Right. So go ahead and grab that and enjoy that.

And then you have this sense of evolution, of an evolving, of a coming out of a former state to a to the next state. Is it chaotic? Yes. But that's supposed to happen. Is there all kinds of pain and disaster?

Yes. But that's supposed to happen. And so even in the natural curse and punishment for sin, this is redefined as just the the mess of evolution. We've got to experience that to move forward in our lives to self-exaltation, self-gratification, self-realization.

Right. And so all kinds of songs are about just grabbing anything that you want. Nothing should be forbidden to you. And that ultimately glorying in one's own being, whether that be my thoughts, my lusts, my body, whatever, I'm going to please myself.

This is these are the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs of paganism. And this is what people sing. And they I mean, these are all variations on a theme. I mean, it hasn't really changed. The famous song by John Lennon, Imagine, which is the like the amazing grace of paganism in which, again, it's the removal of limitations, the removal of limits so that the evolution and progress of humanity and humans and myself can be realized.

And so this just goes back to Genesis 3, goes back to Genesis 11 with, you know, the Tower of Babel and man trying to make for himself a name and so on. So this is where I mean, paganism is not overly, truly overly imaginative.

You know, they you know, they talk about the the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of gods in Hinduism, but they're all just variations on a theme. I mean, it's not exactly very creative. Right.

So the same thing happens in pagan music is they're all just variations on a theme. It's really hard to really come up with anything new. The only thing that they really can do is to become less imaginative and more blunt in the things that they say.

So we've gone from a time in which there was more censorship of music and what you're allowed to say in music, what they allow on the airwaves and so on and so forth. And so artists had to be somewhat creative and use euphemisms and talk askance about things that were immoral and unjust and so on.

And now now with those restrictions, not so much, you know, being important to the cultural watchdogs. And now artists put that in, you know, quotations, artists are just being super blunt about everything.

I mean, they're not even being creative about what they say. All they can use. There's like fewer and fewer words that they're employing to talk about what they want to talk about. And so you can see that there's a degrading in art, in paganism.

And so you can see that in the essence of the music that is being that is popular and being enjoyed by so many, there is the basic idea of witchcraft, whereas you're trying to you're advocating for and you are claiming a demonic alternative to authority, to God's authority, claiming an entirely different type of morality and a value structure than what God has declared.

And that's basically an autonomous value structure. And that autonomy doesn't sit and stay with the lyrics. It moves across into form. Right. And that's why we see a degradation not only in the bluntness of the creativity that they have with lyric, but they're also seeing a really big degradation in form as well.

And you talked about form earlier as like censorship. Well, if you go back in history for Christendom, form or censorship was self-imposed. Right. Like so I am, according to the standard given to me, I'm I'm censoring myself and my and my creativity or my my work through the word of God.

That's self-governance, self-governance, fear of the Lord versus self-indulgence.

Correct. And so I think that when that happens consistently and you're doing it with lyrics or you're doing it with language, it's going to bring itself over into form. And that's why you have not only the great poets or the great musicians coming up with new lyrics or coming up with new instruments.

You also see them coming up with new forms, new constraints to him themselves into because you're really only going to be creative when you have boundaries. I think about the game of baseball. We have foul lines.

We have fences on all sides. But yet men can be extremely creative within those bounds. Now make the game formless and see how difficult it is to be creative. You have to have those rules set up in order to actually constrain you and make you work.

Whereas if you throw off the forms, if you throw off the constraints, there's no work involved anymore. And that's why that's what it looks like. They call they call it hustling. That's another little form of witchcraft that they have.

Like you're hustling. Well, not really. You're you're really not. You're just using that as a as a way to express the fact that you have made an exchange of this formless work that you have for a lot of money that really has no meaning behind the work or the money.

And when you're throwing off the moral content, you're throwing off God's law and the fear of God. You're also going to throw off form as well. And that's where I'm seeing a lot of like where a lot of our culture sort of go downhill.

You still had tunes that you could hum to. And now we're starting to lose that. And that's just a downstream issue of this autonomy that we're trying to grasp for as a.

Culture. Yeah. And I know it's a kind of a silly thing, but the day one of our church members here who was in his 80s asked me if I'd ever heard a particular song. And I said no. And he quoted this ballad for like five minutes of a story that somebody had written.

And these names were important for him in his past. I have no idea who he's talking about. But he tells this ballad, which is very creative, goes through this entire story. It's humorous and so on. And it just goes on and on and on.

I'm like, man, like somebody spent a long time and created this really fun story and they put it to music and so on and so forth. And he just quoted this whole thing compared to music today where, you know, there's about three or four words put together over and over and over and over and over again.

And that's, you know, that's what makes it hit.

Christendom, Creativity, and the Limits of Pagan Art

Yeah. The zero sum thinking of autonomous beings usually comes through in the way that they sing, too. Whereas like I believe that the music of Christendom, the art of Christendom is not that way. It's going to be continuously added to.

It's not going to just have a certain amount of creativity and that's it. But that's actually what you're seeing with a lot of pagan music or pagan work out there is they have only so far to go in their creativity before they're cut off.

Yeah. And I think you see this widespread in art right now that there's the difference between like when you look back in history and you look in Christendom where one artist is inspired by another to try out this, you know, new development versus what happens today where there is basically a copy paste remix of everything over and over again.

Nobody. People aren't coming out with new intellectual properties. It's always the same movies rehashed over and over and over again. It's always the same shows rehashed again and again and again. It's the same song rehashed again and again and again.

And, you know, why is this? Well, again, when you when you think about the tendency of paganism, it's oneness and it's despair. When you think of it, it's all I'm going to grab a little bit from over here, a little bit from over here.

We're going to mesh them together. I want to take some of this song and some of that song. I'm going to mash them together, do a little bit of sorcery, put them together and here's something new. And we're just going to keep on doing this over and over again.

Well, when you do that, you ultimately have less and less and less new things to work with. And then it becomes more and more great, big, you know, colorless, hewless, uninteresting blob.

That's usually what happens when you worship yourself or man, there's there's a limit to worshiping finite things. Right. And you lose it all when you do that. Yeah, I agree. Well, we're going to make our suggestions for content this week.

Michael, my recommendation is a book, a little book. It's very short. It's called The Pundits Folly. The Pundits Folly. The subtitle is Chronicles of an Empty Life by Sinclair Ferguson. And it's published by Banner of Truth Trust.

And it's just four little chapters on the the wisdom that is expressed in Ecclesiastes. And it's full of the worship of God and dealing with the bold, clear claims of Ecclesiastes. So it's a very enjoyable read.

All right. Well, since we're talking a lot about pagans and paganism, I thought I'd just suggest Laughing Shall I Die? Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings by Tom Shippey. It is a study of the stories of the sagas that the Nordics and Vikings recorded.

And the lives of what they considered the great Vikings and the attitudes are interesting, to say the least. They literally laughed as they died. And they would take situations where they might have to surrender an entire group of fighters.

And they're all about to be beheaded by an opposing group. And then one guy cracks off a joke that the leader of the opposing side liked and he saved and the rest aren't. And they have they have this really weird enjoyment of, we were talking about poetry earlier, we were talking about art, a really weird enjoyment for exact poetry.

In fact, their poetry was so predictable because of its form that if you said two or three words of a line, some other Viking ought to be able to finish it because it was the logical conclusion of that line.

Yeah, so it's a it's a really it's a really neat read historically, and a lot of it cannot be corroborated by other sources. So these primary sources are basically the only thing we have. They didn't write a lot of things down unless it was on stones in eastern Oklahoma.

But that's beside the point. They they definitely had a rich storytelling culture, just never written down. So when it's written down, it's definitely an interesting read. And I'm going to suggest that this week.

Closing Remarks

And that wraps it up for today. We're always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week and for supporting us by rating, reviewing and sharing the show. And we hope you can join us again for another week of uncovering and rebuking witchcraft in the modern world.