In memoriam

This weekend I hung up the pointy hat temporarily in Warwick. This inscription on the church has always intrigued me. My impression of this has always been that Louisa Ryland was both very keen to make permanent her munificence in making up the funds lacking to restore the church tower, and also very keen to exclude hoi polloi by making sure the inscription was in Latin.
It turns out that Louisa Anne Ryland (1814 - 1889) was a philanthropist and major donor to the town of Birmingham, using her wealth inherited from her father, who made his millions in industry. She gave the land that became Cannon Hill Park, the land that became Victoria Park, Small Heath, contributed to the building of the School of Art and obviously to the restoration of St Mary's Church, Warwick. Birmingham's Ryland Street is named after her, and the headquarters of Birmingham Social Services is named after her. She bequeathed her estate, valued around two million pounds, to Charles Alston Smith, the son of the man she had wanted to marry. Her father opposed the match, wanting her to marry the Earl of Warwick. She didn't marry either of them.
What is this touching tale of Victorian philanthropy and frustrated romance doing here? This was going to be a blog entry about showy Victorian charity, commenting on cyclical time and how magically the driving force behind an effect is usually hidden, so let's start there. The whacking great carved inscription in stone has been enough to make me find out who Louisa Ryland was 123 years after her death, so it has obviously served its purpose. Whether or not she wanted that inscription, she has been immortalised for performing that one action.
Attempting to work out what makes me so uncomfortable about this, I have come up with a question: how do I want my achievements remembered? The answer is, not like that. I would like to think that my impact on people is much more subtle and based on individuals. I suppose this comes back to the Hedge, that creating a reality is like weaving a hedge, there is a warp and weft to the tapestry of reality. There is usually some sort of idea among witches that things repeat themselves. This is usually seen in the common belief in karma (this comes to us via theosophy, since we usually think of it as theosophists understand karma rather than as it is understood in Eastern philosophy). This has the effect of both making our every action more and less important than they are as understood in a linear understanding of time.
Ryland's one action has been immortalised, but imagine the inscription if she had given again for it to be restored again in another 300 years! The one action would become overshadowed by subsequent inscriptions. On the other hand it would make her more inclined to make sure that the architect and masons got the restoration right to last a good long time so that she would not have to give again. If our actions are seen in the perspective of lives rather than this one life, this is the effect it has on our sense of proportion.
As magical people our impact on the world around us has often of necessity to be hidden, not least because people often simply will not believe that we are witches. And of course it is in silence that magic is accomplished, so that many traditions enjoin not even thinking about a spell after you have cast it. I personally find this very difficult and tend to pick at things and worry at them (if I was a real dog I would be a Jack Russell!), so I tend to make sure I cast spells where I can come back to them and prod them a bit.
This silent action behind the scenes is of course never commemorated by tablets of stone ('The Hound cast a spell for...'), but sometimes part of being a witch is being the one who will stand up and speak. I love this aspect of the witch figure: being the person who is the one to go against the grain, and in so many ways our tradition has consciously developed being different from everyone else into an art form. It is not even necessary to say 'I am doing this because I am a witch': there is just something so witchy about being a spoke in the wheel of progress around us.
As for Ryland's romantic involvement, it has totally softened my heart to her. I am envisaging a stern mutton-chopped Victorian father telling her that she would be cut off without a penny if she married the man she wanted to. He obviously married someone else, but the irony of leaving her father's inherited millions to his son! That is the action of a witch if ever there was one.