On The Blessedness Of Warmth

A homily for the New Moon on April 27, 2025.

Dearly Beloved,

Blessed New Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and of the Divine on this, the New Moon in Taurus.

Spring has truly sprung in my home of beautiful northern California. We are coming up on Beltane and the spark of life that was reborn on the Winter Solstice has grown into a gentle flame. Every day I see more flowers, more bees (thank the gods, keep it up, everyone!), and more birds. The rushing, meandering, expanding, and contracting life of the natural world—never truly gone or dead but merely asleep and dreaming—has gotten out of bed, finished Her first cup of coffee, and is officially starting the agenda for the year.

As such, I am moved to talk about that luscious delight that draws us into bed each night and out into the light each morning. That sheer hedonistic pleasure that greets us at the end of the long, dark winter. That sudden and leaping joy, that quickening heartbeat, that beams down upon us from our beloved Sun every day.

I am moved to speak of warmth.

Now, before I continue, I wish to make it clear: physical warmth isn’t always a good thing and is not the subject of this homily. Just like anything else in existence, the wrong amount of warmth or warmth in the wrong place can ruin your whole day. As we move forward into a world where it looks like too much warmth is going to be the theme of the next millennia or so, I am the first to acknowledge that warmth is a double-edged sword. But we’re mages…we already know that. Too much of any element is a recipe for trouble, and too much Fire can most definitely cause problems. So I want to talk instead about a different sort of warmth…emotional warmth.

In my last homily, I praised the virtue of thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness can be summed up as simply caring enough to think about the welfare of others and then trying to do something about it. I urged that we should all try to devote some energy to making the lives of the people around us—especially the people about whom we care the most—just a little bit easier each day. That we should try to shoulder each other’s burdens, just a little bit. This is a way of living out our basic duty of care to others.

I also urged that we should think of ourselves as someone of whom we should be thoughtful…that we should think about our own future selves and their needs and desires. I said that we should try to put just a little bit of energy each day into making the life of “future us” just a little bit better. This might seem obvious or like simple self-interest, but you would be surprised how many people need some help caring about themselves in this way. I know I do. Just like with others, we owe ourselves a duty of care, thus we should also be thoughtful of ourselves.

However, warmth is something else. Warmth comes before thoughtfulness. Warmth is the emotional attitude that leads us to care about others or ourselves enough to be thoughtful in the first place. To be “warm” is the opposite of being “cold”, and while we often hear people admonished about being cold—often playfully, as if to say “you scamp, you don’t care about others, how cute and funny!”—we seldom hear anyone urged to be warm. It’s as if the most we believe we can expect from ourselves or each other is a basic neutrality, a sort of casual disregard. True hostility is wrong, of course, almost everyone agrees with that, but to ask people to care enough about others as a rule to actually be warm…that just seems like too much.

Well, I think that we can do a bit better than that.

My whole life, everyone from my grandparents to every news network to my freshman economics professor has been trying to convince me that humans are awful. That we are violent, lazy, stupid, gluttonous, rapacious, bigoted, exploitative monsters who can’t be trusted with our own welfare. That’s why we need all of the various authorities these people are always trying to sell us, from clergy and churches to sovereigns and governments. These people, although ostensibly humans themselves, are special humans, you see, here to save mere normal humans from ourselves, and all for the low, low price of our money, our lives, and, of course, our endless, undying obedience. We can’t just trust ourselves and each other to live in communities of care together—of course not, that would be silly!—but we can definitely trust this tiny minority of special humans with all of the really important decisions and control of the communal resources. What could possibly go wrong?

Now, here is the part where a lot of people would cynically use my last set of statements to conclude that “therefore we shouldn’t trust anyone!”. My snide tone and statements criticizing authority figures are leading there, right? That is where the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that has sold so many books of Continental Philosophy always leads, after all, and who am I to disagree with luminaries like Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault?

Well, I’m nobody special, but I must apologetically disagree anyway. I think that humanity is a lot better than these bad actors who are always trying to get into positions of power and privilege want us to believe. I think that we have it within us to do horrible things, of course…but I also think that most of the time most us don’t actually want to do those horrible things.

Consider the following anecdote, remarkable only because it is so darned typical: I went to the grocery store today, like I do every couple of days. I walked to the store, picked out groceries, paid for them, and took them home. I interacted with a few people. I didn’t see any cops. I almost never see any cops, and when I do they are almost never actually enforcing laws or making people behave themselves. But the business of the grocery store—the buying and selling of goods, the storage of goods and currency, and thousands of interactions between humans—all mostly happened without any problems whatsoever. People mostly said “please” and “thank you”, they mostly said “excuse me” and “go ahead, you first”, and they mostly did not harm each other or steal from the store or each other. All without anyone to force them to behave themselves and without any realistic threats of violence or imprisonment. Humans, monsters that we are, mostly behaved ourselves without anyone forcing us to do so, just like we do almost every single minute of almost every single day, all over most of the world.

There are, of course, regions where wars and atrocities are currently occurring, and there are also the systemic injustices and cruelties that plague almost all of our civilizations, in which we often participate and of which we are often also victims. And of course there is actual crime, both organized and improvisational. These horrors, both obvious and subtle, are very real and I do not wish to minimize them. But I do want to point out the fact that most of our world isn’t like that. I don’t wish to debate the fact that some people are bad actors, what I wish to point out is that the pessimistic view of humanity that is so persistent in our world simply can’t account for how many people are actually good (or at least not bad). If humanity were truly the monsters that some people want us to believe we are, every ruler would have been a tyrant. Every government would have been totalitarian. Chattel slavery would still be the norm. Brutal violence would be the way every conflict of interests was ever resolved. We would still be fighting the first world war that was ever declared or we would have rendered ourselves extinct fighting it. The people who think humanity is intrinsically evil simply don’t have enough imagination—or perhaps they just don’t have the hearts—to imagine what evil truly is. If they did, then they would know exactly how lucky humanity has been.

There are some people out there—a vanishingly tiny proportion overall, but still there and disproportionately powerful and privileged—that are actual bad people. Sadly, this is true. And often those bad people find themselves in positions of power and privilege precisely because they are willing to do unethical things to gain power and privilege that the rest of us aren’t. Those people often then do things like wage wars, engage in colonialism, commit genocides, and generally act like…well, bad people is my nice way of saying it. I can think of several worse terms. People like this are why we shouldn’t have positions of power and privilege at all. Authoritarian systems of power assume that someone, somewhere exists that can be trusted with power over others and we just need to find that person or people and put them in charge, and they are wrong. Every one of them. I think most of us can be trusted with power over ourselves, more or less, but that no one, not one single person, including (and especially) myself, can be trusted with coercive power over others. Even parents should not possess that sort of power over their children. We all need checks on our power, limits on our behavior, and accountability when we transgress.

But most of us don’t actually need too much of any of those things. Most of us don’t rob our neighbors even when we know we could get away with it. Most of us don’t murder the person ahead of us in line for that big promotion or kidnap the kids we were supposed to drive to the football game and sell them into slavery. In fact, almost none of us do. Most of us are…well, not good, exactly, but we are mostly not bad, either. Definitely not bad enough to justify the coercive power of the authoritarians among us and the consequences of their inevitable abuses of power. We are…okay. Both saints and monsters exist, it’s true, but we are mostly just okay.

And okay is actually pretty good. Good enough, at least. Maybe not good enough to love; I know not all of us are called to that as I am (and trust me, I have to work at it sometimes). But definitely good enough to care about. Good enough to give a few moments of consideration. Good enough to give a bit of warmth.

So let us look to each other and ourselves to make the world just a little bit better, just a little bit more loving, just a little bit kinder, each and every day. Let us look around and recognize that each of us is worthy of care. Let us try to think well of each other, even when we are tired or angry or hungry or sad.

Let us be warm.

Blessed New Moon, dear ones.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Edvard Munch, “The Sun”, (1910-1911)