Missing Witches - MW Simone Weil - Finding Love In The Void

00:00:00.000 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, join the coven, find out how at

00:00:05.240 missingwitches.com, or buy our books, New Moon Magic and Missing Witches, and check out our deck

00:00:13.680 of oracles, the Missing Witches deck of oracles. You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you 1.00

00:00:19.420 must be a witch. You must be a witch. Anarchist, philosopher, mystic, revolutionary, 1.00

00:00:30.000 I've seen many exciting words used to draw the portrait of Simone Veil.

00:00:36.400 But the moment I read her described as the patron saint of all outsiders by Andre Geed,

00:00:43.260 I knew I needed to add Simone Veil to the Missing Witches pantheon of witches, weirdos, mystics, imagineers, and imperfect rebels.

00:00:52.920 I knew I at least needed to read her work.

00:00:54.940 When Risa and I were working on our second book, I was struck down with symptoms of that

00:01:00.120 well-worn syndrome. Imposter. I'm not an expert on the liturgy of occult studies, nor herbalism,

00:01:08.860 nor astrology. I had no right to presume to tell better witches what magic means to me.

00:01:15.240 Then it occurred to me, what I am an expert in is being different. Feeling like an outsider.

00:01:24.940 And isn't that, in a way, what connects all those who identify as witch?

00:01:31.520 More so than cartomancy, spellwork, or even possibly the divine.

00:01:37.560 Feeling different.

00:01:40.780 Seeing the world differently.

00:01:44.380 Simone would certainly not have called herself a witch,

00:01:47.040 but she checks all the boxes for us in our ever-expanding definition.

00:01:52.380 Simone Kotva wrote,

00:01:53.740 Quote,

00:02:23.740 that philosophy is the search for a truth hidden from the eyes of ordinary persons,

00:02:29.960 and accessible only to those who endure the ordeals required to gain access to its mysteries.

00:02:37.300 Vail's occultism was not an isolated phenomenon,

00:02:41.360 but symptomatic of broader trends among intellectuals at the time.

00:02:46.880 End quote.

00:02:47.500 In her quest for justice, Simone found compassion,

00:02:51.140 actionable empathy that was truth.

00:02:53.740 In her quest for God, Simone sought not dogma, but to build her own understanding, and that was her truth.

00:03:02.940 She became a rare philosopher on the front lines, a patron saint of outsiders.

00:03:09.400 In 1915, at six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the sugarless troops in the trenches of World War I.

00:03:17.600 At age 10, Simone spotted striking workers in the street outside her apartment and joined their march

00:03:24.220 Declared herself a socialist in her late teens

00:03:27.260 In 1934, she left her teaching job to go work in factories

00:03:32.560 To understand the struggles of industrial workers first hand

00:03:37.760 She labored under harsh conditions, immersing herself in the lives of laborers

00:03:42.500 and used her experiences to write about exploitation and alienation in modern work environments.

00:03:48.140 She volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War with anarchist militias against fascist forces.

00:03:54.900 She was actively involved in workers' strikes and social movements throughout her short life.

00:04:00.460 During World War II, she advocated for non-violent resistance.

00:04:05.220 She reached adulthood during the Great Depression, and depression of all kinds stuck with her.

00:04:11.760 But Simone didn't just cry or talk or think or ruminate or write, she very literally got her hands dirty to reach into the world and take action, like we do magic.

00:04:27.100 She walked the edge, as we witches do, between the material and the spiritual.

00:04:32.320 And something else we witches have in common with Simone, she refused to be told what to believe, and spent her life in a search for meaning.

00:04:41.760 A faith that felt right, that made sense.

00:04:46.860 She forces me to ask and re-ask myself, what do I believe?

00:04:51.640 And how does what I believe create my reality?

00:04:55.380 And where do beliefs come from?

00:04:57.460 Do I choose them or do they choose me?

00:04:59.900 What is faith?

00:05:01.840 And what do I do with it when it comes?

00:05:04.860 How can I help the world feel kinder?

00:05:09.200 Simone wrote, quote,

00:05:10.820 attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity, end quote.

00:05:16.820 So let's pay attention to Simone today, in this space between our ears,

00:05:21.640 bestow upon her story that rare and pure form of generosity that is the currency of modernity.

00:05:30.240 Today, let's give her our attention.

00:05:33.720 This mystic philosopher lived her life as an offering to the suffering of others,

00:05:38.500 an embodiment of radical compassion.

00:05:41.400 She didn't just speak on justice, she, in her way, became it.

00:05:45.860 She entered the factories, breaking her body to feel the pain of the workers.

00:05:51.340 Her hands blistered as she wrote of oppression, each word dripping with the weight of lived experience.

00:06:01.500 Simone saw beyond the illusions of power, piercing the veil of comfort with a fierce devotion to the downtrodden.

00:06:08.340 She fed her soul with hunger

00:06:11.040 Fasting in solidarity with the oppressed

00:06:14.660 Her body a vessel for their grief

00:06:20.040 Her altruism was a magic woven through action

00:06:24.420 A spell cast for liberation

00:06:27.080 She refused the safety of distance 0.91

00:06:29.720 Of intellectualism without skin in the game

00:06:32.460 Simone called out to the divine

00:06:35.340 Her life was a chant of solidarity

00:06:38.020 with the most invisible among us.

00:06:41.520 She lived with the raw edges exposed.

00:06:45.520 Her life, like yours and mine,

00:06:48.180 was a magical dance with contradictions, 1.00

00:06:50.820 an ascetic who craved the world's pain, 0.74

00:06:54.720 a revolutionary who sought God in every breath,

00:06:58.460 contradictions that belied a supreme singular focus

00:07:02.240 and singular goal, the truth.

00:07:05.620 But as we've discovered in our own lives,

00:07:08.020 Dear Coven, real truth is never simple. Simplicity is never simple. David McClellan's book about

00:07:17.020 Simone and her work published in 1990 was called Utopian Pessimist. I have possibly never related

00:07:23.760 more to a combination of two contradictory words. I'm here, dreaming of a world where everyone is

00:07:32.320 safe, happy, and free, while the shadows of depression, anxiety, and news cycles hunt

00:07:40.920 down that dream and try to bury it.

00:07:45.240 Quote, Simone Vale philosophized on thresholds and across borders. Her persistent desire for 1.00

00:07:51.260 truth and justice led her to both elite academies and factory floors, political praxis, and

00:07:58.240 spiritual solitude. At different times, she was an activist, a pacifist, a militant, a mystic,

00:08:04.740 and an exile. But throughout, in her inquiry into reality and orientation to the good,

00:08:12.280 she remained a philosopher. Her oeuvre features deliberate contradiction, yet demonstrates

00:08:18.200 remarkable clarity. It is value-centered and integrated, but not systematic. It contains

00:08:25.740 scattered notes of her translations and commentaries on several ancient greek texts

00:08:31.560 pythagorean geometry formulae and detailed accounts of her daily tasks within a factory

00:08:37.760 but her oeuvre is also composed of addresses to political industrial and religious leaders as

00:08:44.560 well as pieces intended for university students radical militants industrial workers and farm

00:08:51.680 laborers. In both her life and her thought, itself an unstable distinction with respect to Vale.

00:09:00.920 She is a philosopher of margins and paradoxes. End quote. Through her work in life, she attempted

00:09:10.340 to answer the eternal question of how to live ethically in an unjust world, how to find love

00:09:18.420 in the void. And the work took on the weight of sacred duty, instruction from a God whose voice

00:09:26.200 she couldn't quite make out, an obsessive calling to seek truth with a capital T,

00:09:31.840 a challenge she embraced seemingly from her birth in her parents' apartment to the very end of her

00:09:38.940 devastatingly short life. Even though Simone wrote extensively about God, and more specifically,

00:09:45.160 Jesus of Nazareth, a.k.a. Jesus Christ. She refused to be baptized. Despite her devotion,

00:09:55.000 devotion to truth, to cultivating a set of morality inside mortality,

00:10:01.240 she was compelled to linger in a state of agnosticism. And maybe we witches live here too.

00:10:08.300 We're devoted to our ethics, our philosophies, and for some of us, our deities. But this devotion

00:10:14.340 won't allow us to close the door on a universe of infinite possibility. I think a lot of us have

00:10:22.400 dealt with the kind of belief systems that close the door and lock it behind them, putting their

00:10:28.120 foot down against any kind of questioning or a deeper search for truth. But we witches can't do

00:10:35.140 that. We continue to look for the door into the unknown country. The first ever episode of the

00:10:42.720 Missing Witches podcast was about Pixie Coleman Smith and bore the title, Look for the Door into

00:10:48.780 the Unknown Country. And whatever our faiths, we witches keep looking, knowing that there is

00:10:55.660 unknown country out there to discover, and expand our ideas of what it means to be human,

00:11:02.900 what it means to be divine. Quote, Albert Camus hailed her as the only great spirit of our time.

00:11:09.440 T.S. Eliot credited her with a genius akin to that of the saints.

00:11:13.320 But Vale herself might have objected to these consecrations as a form of idolatry,

00:11:18.600 which she defined as a misguided thirst for absolute good.

00:11:22.940 Nothing is so absolute about her as the difficulty of parsing her contradictions.

00:11:28.660 Her writing radiates a cosmic empathy that co-exists,

00:11:33.140 Sometimes on the same page, with a strain of intolerance blind to life's tragicomedy,

00:11:40.120 she resists any system that enslaves the individual to a collective,

00:11:44.320 but her own vision of an enlightened society.

00:11:47.640 End quote.

00:11:48.600 Another contradiction.

00:11:49.940 I was at a retreat for a weekend this summer,

00:11:52.500 a perfect place to connect and bond with like-minded people,

00:11:56.220 and yet I still felt that familiar pull to be alone.

00:12:01.460 See, I'm a pack animal, and if you're a member of the Missing Witch's Coven, you know this about me.

00:12:06.320 That my love for my friends, and for humanity, is massive.

00:12:10.780 But I'm also a lone wolf.

00:12:13.920 And solitude is where I feel safest, freest, the most me.

00:12:20.620 And sometimes I wonder if I'm making a mistake when I seek out my moments of isolation.

00:12:26.420 If I'm missing something.

00:12:28.560 And I'm sitting alone in the sun at a campground picnic table,

00:12:32.180 women frolicking and laughing together just off in the distance.

00:12:35.680 And I silently open my copy of Waiting for God,

00:12:39.520 a collection of Simone's letters, notes, and correspondence.

00:12:44.600 I'm four pages in.

00:12:46.860 I feel, she wrote, quote, that it is necessary for me, prescribed for me,

00:12:52.080 to be alone, an outsider, and alienated from every human context whatsoever.

00:12:57.980 And on another occasion, she jotted in her journal the self-reminder,

00:13:03.040 And I laughed, alone in the sun.

00:13:09.960 But not alone, because in that moment, Simone was with me.

00:13:15.360 The contradiction? Us outsiders gotta stick together.

00:13:20.380 I read a few more pages before closing the book and rejoining the frolicking gang.

00:13:25.440 Leslie A. Fielder wrote, 0.94

00:13:27.980 what motivated her was no selfish desire to withdraw from the ordinary concourse of men,

00:13:33.480 but precisely the opposite impulse. She knew that one remains alienated from a particular

00:13:39.220 allegiance, not by vainly attempting to deny all beliefs, but precisely by sharing them all.

00:13:47.040 To have become rooted in the context of a particular religion, Simone Vale felt, would,

00:13:52.560 on the one hand, have exposed her to what she calls

00:13:56.100 church patriotism, with a consequent blindness

00:13:59.460 to the faults of her own group and the virtues of others,

00:14:03.040 and would, on the other hand, have separated her

00:14:06.300 from the common condition here below, which finds us all

00:14:10.180 outsiders, uprooted in exile.

00:14:14.900 End quote.

00:14:15.520 That was the thinking behind Simone's refusal to be baptized.

00:14:19.820 To vow acceptance of one thing, she figured,

00:14:22.560 meant the relinquishing of all else.

00:14:24.800 As we heard, she studied Greek and Egyptian religion,

00:14:27.700 Hinduism, and Buddhism with fervor.

00:14:31.120 Despite this, she also wrote,

00:14:33.560 A synthesis of religion implies a lower quality of attention.

00:14:39.340 As if to say that if we are not singularly focused on a single idea,

00:14:44.500 rejecting all others, we're doing it wrong.

00:14:47.960 I see this as part of her misguided thirst for absolute good.

00:14:52.560 Simone was French, so everything I've read of her work has been translated into English.

00:14:58.460 But there's one word she uses again and again.

00:15:02.920 Malheur.

00:15:04.080 Malheur is generally translated as affliction.

00:15:07.560 But as translator Emma Crawford puts it,

00:15:10.100 No English word exactly conveys the meaning of the French malheur.

00:15:15.340 Our word unhappiness is a negative term and far too weak.

00:15:19.160 Affliction is the nearest equivalent, but not quite satisfactory

00:15:23.880 Malheur has in it a sense of inevitability and doom

00:15:29.680 Simone wrote, quote, in the realm of suffering

00:15:33.580 Malheur is something apart, specific and irreducible

00:15:38.160 It is quite a different thing from simple suffering

00:15:41.940 It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through

00:15:47.940 Are you feeling malheur these days?

00:15:54.440 An untranslatable weight that is profound sadness and pain that feels like a mark on your soul?

00:16:02.900 And how do you escape it?

00:16:05.160 With hope?

00:16:06.800 Faith?

00:16:08.040 Action?

00:16:09.100 Philanthropy?

00:16:09.980 Philosophy?

00:16:10.820 Simone wrote, quote, love is in fact possible, and it is the beauty of the world.

00:16:17.940 So we can turn to her now, when Malheur comes, to be reminded, love is possible.

00:16:30.780 One more contradiction.

00:16:32.420 The more I learned about Simone Veil, the more I began to see her as both a role model and a cautionary tale.

00:16:40.200 I want to be like her, but I do not want to be like her.

00:16:44.000 I respect and admire her, but I also want to shake her by the shoulders.

00:16:51.180 A fervent advocate for the oppressed, Simone's empathy was so profound it led her to physically endure the labor of factory workers,

00:16:59.260 even though her family's affluence meant she didn't have to, embodying her belief in radical compassion.

00:17:06.260 She put her body on the line but never lost focus on spirit.

00:17:09.620 She constantly, throughout all her early activism, contended with the building of a philosophy of the divine.

00:17:17.960 Her writings on suffering, attention, and the void, like all witches, explored the sacred contained within the mundane.

00:17:28.060 However, she constantly referred to herself as wretched and deliberately denied herself human pleasure and human affection.

00:17:39.620 Even as a lone wolf myself, the idea of denying one's self-affection feels misguided.

00:17:46.940 Part of her misguided thirst for absolute good.

00:17:50.680 According to her friend and biographer Simone Petriman,

00:17:55.220 Vail decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities

00:17:59.320 and sacrifice opportunities to have love affairs

00:18:03.600 in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged, end quote.

00:18:12.420 She wrote, quote,

00:18:13.940 The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation,

00:18:19.180 through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation, end quote.

00:18:27.520 One essayist said, quote,

00:18:29.340 Veil is so full of self-loathing and guilt that her joy only comes through in self-pitying laments.

00:18:38.580 End quote.

00:18:39.580 She believed that denying earthly pleasures allowed her to strip away distractions and achieve spiritual clarity.

00:18:46.980 For her, pleasure could become a barrier to higher truths.

00:18:51.680 Simone talks about envying the crucifixion, as if suffering is the only way to save the world.

00:18:59.340 What I think Simone missed, as she searched for love in the void, searched for God's love,

00:19:06.400 was the other side of the coin of human existence.

00:19:10.280 We suffer, it's true, some more than others.

00:19:14.240 But what makes the suffering worthwhile?

00:19:18.800 It's those moments of joy, that laughter through tears.

00:19:24.380 A friend of mine, after the death of her sister, told me she felt guilty every time she smiled.

00:19:30.980 It was a heartbreaking revelation, but one that I think a lot of us can relate to.

00:19:37.360 As we look around the world, any joy or pleasure we feel is followed by a sense of guilt for being momentarily happy when so many are suffering under violent regimes, sickness, famine, and malheur.

00:19:51.720 I told my friend that I'm certain her sister would not want her to stop smiling.

00:19:57.860 And I think God might feel the same.

00:20:01.300 When I think of the idea of God, what God might be, might mean,

00:20:07.420 I think of the things that Simone rejected.

00:20:12.180 Hugs, laughter, music, good food, and sensory experiences that are the gifts of creation.

00:20:20.280 I think that if God exists in some way, that love, self-love, romantic love, are all expressions of God's love.

00:20:33.860 And I wish that Simone could have found a way to include these reasons for living in her quest for the sacred.

00:20:40.300 Even Jesus Christ turned water into wine.

00:20:44.180 Simone's death at the tender age of 34,

00:20:47.440 partly due to self-imposed starvation during World War II,

00:20:51.340 was as layered as her life.

00:20:54.360 A culmination of her unyielding quest for purity and justice

00:20:58.700 in an impure and unjust world.

00:21:02.620 In her final months, Simone, already weakened by tuberculosis,

00:21:07.440 imposed on herself a severe diet,

00:21:10.160 mirroring the rations of those suffering in Nazi-occupied France.

00:21:15.620 An egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup.

00:21:21.280 This self-imposed starvation was her final act of solidarity with the oppressed,

00:21:26.780 a physical manifestation of her spiritual beliefs.

00:21:30.100 But her body, which had always been more fragile than her mind, succumbed.

00:21:37.820 Was it a conscious martyrdom?

00:21:40.160 Or the inevitable end of a soul too sensitive for this world?

00:21:45.560 A misguided thirst for absolute good?

00:21:49.300 She is a lighthouse for our seeking souls, our hunger for justice and truth.

00:21:54.320 A hunger that, no matter how many books, or podcasts, or conversations we eat up greedily, can never really be sated.

00:22:03.320 Every bite seems to just make us hungrier.

00:22:06.740 Seeking.

00:22:09.040 Seeking.

00:22:10.160 Anarchist, philosopher, mystic, revolutionary

00:22:14.660 An egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup

00:22:20.580 In her refusal to eat more than what was available to soldiers during World War II, Simone embodied, I think, too brutal an empathy

00:22:29.460 A misguided physical manifestation of the suffering of war inside her tiny, broken body

00:22:38.560 Simone's death, much like her life, blurs the lines between sacrifice and self-destruction,

00:22:44.660 between mysticism and madness.

00:22:47.980 She was a relentless seeker of truth who tried to be a saint, living in a world torn by war.

00:22:55.220 Her soul was possessed by malheur and her body, too.

00:22:58.960 Her passing wasn't just the end of a life, it was a metaphysical statement,

00:23:03.520 A haunting parable and cautionary tale of both the power and peril of living belief to the fullest

00:23:13.880 And something else to haunt us

00:23:18.080 The question

00:23:19.880 What could have been?

00:23:24.780 She was only thirty-four

00:23:26.200 An egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup

00:23:29.180 And as I sit here in my late forties

00:23:32.620 Thinking back on age 34 like it was a part of my childhood, I dream of what truth Simone might have found if she had kept going, kept fighting, kept seeking, saved some of her immeasurable empathy for herself, conceived of pleasure as a gift from God,

00:23:57.620 allowed herself to experience more of the beauty of the world that she wrote about.

00:24:04.080 Our world may have gained a saint,

00:24:07.160 but it lost a human being who had so much more to teach us about living inside a paradox,

00:24:14.040 about being human and being divine,

00:24:18.940 about finding love in the void.

00:24:23.840 Almost all of her writing has been published posthumously,

00:24:27.620 Would she have made different choices if she had known that more than 20 volumes of her work have been poured over, curated, and published since her death?

00:24:39.560 Would you make different choices if you knew you'd be famous after you're gone?

00:24:45.340 Hailed as a saint? Honored as a great mind of your time?

00:24:50.100 Would you see yourself differently today?

00:24:53.820 I've spent so much of my life thinking I wasn't good enough.

00:24:57.620 And I feel certain that Simone felt the same.

00:25:02.780 I want to tell you, and to tell Simone Vale, honey, you are good enough.

00:25:10.360 Or maybe, no, babe, we'll never be good enough, but maybe that's okay.

00:25:14.840 Maybe we're still worthy of love.

00:25:19.560 Simone wrote, quote,

00:25:21.000 The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say,

00:25:26.480 what are you going through, end quote.

00:25:30.720 So I want to know, what are you going through?

00:25:38.500 Never forget, dear Coven, love is possible.

00:25:43.540 Keep fighting, keep seeking, and keep some empathy for yourself.

00:25:49.880 There is malheur in the world, in us, but we must not let it consume us.

00:25:56.680 None of us are strong enough to shoulder the burden of the whole world's suffering alone.

00:26:03.520 Not even Simone Vale.

00:26:06.620 There is beauty in the world, too.

00:26:09.720 A billion ways to love.

00:26:13.100 Let's find them together.

00:26:18.140 We have the assurance, she wrote,

00:26:20.560 That come what may, the universe is full 1.00

00:26:26.000 You must be a witch 1.00

00:26:31.900 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, join the coven 0.81

00:26:37.760 Find out how at missingwitches.com

00:26:40.580 Or buy our books, New Moon Magic and Missing Witches

00:26:45.700 And check out our deck of oracles

00:26:49.400 than witches. 1.00

Missing Witches - October 21, 2024

MW Simone Weil - Finding Love In The Void

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