The Sorcerous Power of Romantic Friendship
Meeting with other witches…what a feral network of connections arises! Some of them mark you forever, others seem to, but in the end do not. The seemingly platonic bonds are equally intense, sometimes they last even longer. In grimoire magic there is often a prerequisite before the work for a celibate period in the lead up. These times of restraint build power in the body, and also in story-sorcery, a form of magic that deeply fascinates me. People became obsessed by characters in a story who love each other but can never quite consummate the relationship. Reading through my mother’s book collection as a child, which had a lot of classics in it, I discovered that in the nineteenth century there was a term for this: romantic friendship. Later down the track I began to link this term, full of studied restraint, with story-sorcery, a form of magic that is carried by narrative.
Holding up a poppet doll of myself, I can show you the exact spot where romantic friendship first touched me. It was just here, just south of where I’m about six years, or maybe seven. My heart was jarred by a scene I thought, upon looking back, might have been in Anne of Green Gables. As I recalled it, Anne had to be separated from her bosom friend. Crying with the anticipated grief of this parting, she asked her friend for a lock of her black tresses. In my memory, her friend flips her hair over and offers all of it to Anne, thinking this is what she requested and willing to lose it all. Realising the request is only for one lock, she gives this instead.
Only recently was I able to work out that the scene was indeed in Anne of Green Gables, and find the right episode on YouTube. The reality of the scene and how I remembered it in particular were two very different animals! Yet my young imagination had chemically mingled it with another romantic friendship soaked scene with hair flipping from Jane Eyre, where Jane offers to have all her own hair shorn off in a solidarity act with her friend. There is also the added confusion that in the book version of Jane Eyre, it is two different characters altogether who perform that scene.
The Anne scene, looking back now, is a movie aimed at children, sodden with sentiment, yet for me it haunts my memory. As if from when you were a very small child, unable to notice excessive emotional heft, drifting back into your more knowing adult awareness. Anne makes the dark haired Diana promise to remain her bosom friend faithfully for life, and Diana must swear the same in turn, which they both do in tears. At the end they exchange promises of loyalty and remembrance before parting, kissing on the face, and watching the other go. The other turning back regularly to see their friend one more time.
I think somewhere, in that spot around the heart of my poppet doll, you can see where the storyline in The Rag and Bone Man entered my timeline. Everything becomes a little phantasmagoric, mixed, cross-infected when you bring it forward into your present day mind. Perhaps this is why things like toys and clowns are so often used in horror scenes? Then again, what does me at six years old look like? You might say that if you took the TV show V, mixed with ET, and The Last Unicorn, you would get me at that age. A psyche put together through story figures, looking to understand the world through other story figures. I don’t remember what it felt like before I knew what romantic friendship was, but in that moment the embryos of the characters Henry and Arthur, in The Rag and Bone Man, were conceived.
My mind at the time didn’t consciously gouge out a space for them. That happened later when I was old enough to consider why I’d never seen such an adaptation of romantic friendship between boys. Later I would discover that even though this connection existed healthily in the Victorian and Romantic Age, and in their literature, it had been pushed down since then. No longer were boys allowed that sense of sexually restrained or innocent romance with friends, everything same-sexed since the word ‘homosexual’ was born had come to hint at the sex act.
Scenes with boys, like the one between Anne and Diana were not filtering down to me through mainstream media. It wasn’t until I started reading books from the era itself that I found they did indeed exist. Whilst there wasn’t really an age of innocence, there certainly was an age less obsessed with exposing possible sex inside romantic friendship. Even if a hint of sexual power should exist there, was not the very purpose of a temporary denial of sex what gives many a magical working its power? Does this not also work inside literature and in movies? Do people not obsess over such platonic connections in stories, to the extent that allowing the characters to be sexual might drain the power and indeed destroy the allure of the match? As I re-find this scene I ask myself what it was that entered my awareness with such force in this moment. What was the imaginative value for me in romantic friendship if it wasn’t something hinting at the mysterious world of magic?
It isn’t even same sex friendships alone that commanded this fascination for me. It was any friendship that became so strong it was a romance, which is not about having sex. It is rare to see this storyline granted between men and women, maybe even more rare than between men. Later I would think of things like the bond that might arise between a medium and a mesmerist, for instance, with less of a focus on gender. Or the type that might arise between the mesmerist and copyist. Love between sorcerers is generally based on forms of romantic friendship, even before it has the chance to metamorphous into anything else. The mutual commitment between two people on the path to Wholeness is not about reproduction, it has its own kinds of many-loves, untold stories, many angles, and many possibilities.
