Some Thoughts on Permission

A recent reflection on a card from Elisabeth Ladwig’s wonderful Elisabeth on Earth deck.

One of my favorite "oracle decks" is the self-reflection deck created by Hudson River Valley photographic artist Elisabethe Ladwig known as Elisabeth on Earth. I put the term "oracle deck" in quotes because Ladwig's approach to these cards isn't anything like what we usually think of as witches familiar with tarot and other systems. Ladwig's cards are basically her artwork assembled into a deck. The evocative images are reflections on states of being and ideas and there is no guidebook to help the user understand what the cards mean. Instead, Ladwig offers a card that accompanies the images that instructs the user to "[u]se these cards wisely -- as a guide, not gospel -- and empower yourself to be the sole creator of your own life." In other words, whatever the image evokes for you is what the card means for you in that moment.

And the images are really good at doing that. The images are of landscapes, with figures in them, usually female, doing various things. There is whimsy. There is lyricism. There is moodiness. I use them as part of a practice that honors the new and the full moons.

And the one that came up for me during this latest full moon has been particularly interesting. The card is called "Permission."

The “Permission” card from the “Elisabeth on Earth” deck by Elisabeth Ladwig. You can purchase the four parts of the deck on Etsy.

The setting of the image is a landscape at the edge of daylight -- dawn or dusk, we don't really know. But the light is moody and the sky is heavily clouded and studded with black birds (crows? ravens?). The landscape in the background appears to be at the edge of a shoreline, a common location in the Elisabeth on Earth deck, but it's still not light enough to really make out much detail. In the foreground is what at first blush appears to be a headless woman wearing a long grayish, yellowish nightgown with shoulder straps, rather traditional looking and demure. But if you look closer and you've ever been a sewer of any stripe, you know that the nightgown is being worn by a dressform, a mannequin, standing in a patch of unruly grass.

So what does a headless mannequin in a field at a liminal time of day have to do with the idea of "permission?"

It prompted some pretty interesting thoughts unpacking the idea of permission. Starting with, when we give permission to someone or something, what are we doing?

At bottom, permission is when someone gives their assent to another person to do something that ordinarily they would not be entitled to do. "I give you permission to come on my property." "I give you permission to wear my diamond necklace." "I give you permission to kiss my wife." Permission is to some extent, a surrender of sovereignty. It is a surrender of possession. When we give permission to someone, we are ceding control to another person of something that is known to be ours in some fashion. Permission is the noun form of the verb, "to permit." Heavily inferred in the idea of a permit is the notion of authority. Permits are things you ask for from officials in order to be allowed to do things like host a event on public property, or have a license to operate a certain type of business or do a certain activity.

In this way permission is slightly different from consent. When you consent to at thing, often it is something that is requiring your active participation in the thing. Consent to a romantic advance like a kiss, for instance, assumes that you will be participating in said kiss. Consent to a medical procedure means that you will be present and participating in the medical procedure in the role of patient. And while that may mean you are under anesthesia while the actual procedure is happening, you do participate insofar as there is going to be both preparatory work to be done, and actions you must take to foster recovery. Being a medical patient is not a passive activity. Consent is something you give to a role that you will play in a relationship with the other person.

Permission, on the other hand, negates your involvement. When you permit someone you have given them license, and they may do whatever they please within the confines of that permission, and what you want or need is immaterial and your participation is not required.

The dress form, the mannequin, which suggests presence and yet not presence, thus fits perfectly here. And the liminality is also appropriate. Liminal spaces are those that are "betwixt and between" or "neither here nor there," thus suggesting the lack of clarity that comes when you start giving out permissions in your life.

But what does it all this mean when you put it on an oracle card?

Are there places where you've given away so much ground that your presence is really no more than symbolic, where you've effectively given someone else a license to use you and yours in ways that negate you as a real person? It's time to ask yourself whether you have premitted things in your life that maybe you haven't intended to, and to examine the places where you have given away things that are yours by right, and whether you're really okay with it. Have the permissions you have granted been observed, or have the persons holding those permissions gradually expanded what you gave them?

For instance, maybe you have a "friend" on your social media platform who likes to make snarky remarks in response to your posts. You haven't really tried to push back on the behavior, largely because you have a long history with this person and you don't really want to start an argument that will create real world repercussions. You just ignore the comments for the most part. And while it may seem judicious to live in that kind of low grade standoff, here's the thing. By not pushing back on the behavior, you've basically given this person permission to use your Facebook page as a means of taking digs at you. Perhaps you start to notice that the comments go from being kinda snarky to out and out trolling and teasing, the kind of stuff you wouldn't tolerate from a total stranger, much less from a person you like to think of as a friend. This person is treating you like their punching bag instead of a friend, someone they can work out their frustrations on safely, all the while undermining your sense of well-being. At that point, perhaps it's time to rethink the permission you've afforded them, and either push back or block them from your feed entirely.

Maybe you have a relative who likes to use your apartment as a crash pad when they come to town, and the more often they come to visit, the more comfortable they become in your space. Suddenly you find that they're using your apartment for things that you're uncomfortable with, like inviting their friends over without checking with you first, or helping themselves to items in your refrigerator that maybe you didn't really want to share.

Maybe it's the spouse who, when they run out of toothpaste, simply starts using your tube instead of buying their own. You wake up on the morning after your spouse has left on a business trip and discover that they've packed the tube in their toiletry bag, and so now they are on a plane to London, and you are without any toothpaste. Probably not grounds for divorce. But definitely something that needs to be discussed when they get home.

The thing about permission is that it often sneaks up on you. I tell parents of toddlers that if your child starts doing a behavior, it's important to think proactively about whether you are willing to tolerate that behavior forever, because if you let the kid do it once, because you are amused by it, it's cute or whatever, it will be that much harder to get him to stop on the fourth or fifth time once it has become annoying or problematic. Indeed, I really feel for kids whose parents wait until they get annoyed by something before stepping in to correct them, because if you've let me do a thing five or six times and then NOW you tell me its a problem, my four year old sensibilities are going to be upset, because that feels arbitrary and kind of unfair.

But maybe you're the one seeking permission. Often times we fail to give ourselves permission to do things in our own lives that are in fact, perfectly within our rights. The mannequin then represents the fact that we're not really present in a place or an activity or a relationship that we have every right to be present in, but we've denied ourself for whatever reason. What are the things you're not doing because you think, "I could never...."

Maybe you've decided that you as a mom don't have permission spend a night away from her kid, because what kind of mother does that? Maybe you've decided that you can't ask your romantic partner for a certain type of act in the bedroom because you're scared of what they might think, or you don't want to be "too demanding." Maybe you are staying in a career you don't love because well, you spent all that money on law school, so now you had better be a lawyer or else you've "wasted" your education.

Sometimes the thing that's holding you back from doing soemthing isn't anything more than the fact that you haven't given yourself permission to do it.

This is something that I see with witches all the damn time. We're really good at setting up artificial bullshit reasons why we can't do things. We tell ourselves that we can't use our witchcraft to benefit ourselves unless we have a really urgent need. We tell ourselves that we can't do a certain type of spell becuase we're not "advanced" enough to do it. We tell ourselves that only "bad" people will engage in baneful magic.

The truth of the matter is that the magic you are permitted to do is far less limited than you think it is. Of course you can do magic to benefit yourself, even in small things. So by all means go ahead and do that little chant that will get you the good parking spot. That spell you're claiming is too "advanced" is really just kind of intimidating, and you might find that it's more accessible than you think. And as I've said before, so long as you're willing to accept the consequences, there is not a damn thing wrong with doing baneful magic. The obstacles to these things are not hard and fast rules of witchcraft (there are really very few of those), it's the obstacles you've placed in your own head becuase you're scared.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes fear is your friend. I'm not the one to advocate that as witches we should do whatever magic we want, whenever we want, and fuck the consequences. Magic is not a safe substance, and needs to be handled with thoughtfulness and care. Let me emphasize that "thoughtfulness" aspect again, because in the end that's at the core of permission.

The mannequin is headless -- there is no thought process. Because once the permission is granted, the thinking part is ended. We're now into the doing of the thing.

Before permission is granted, however, there must be a lot of thinking, and not just of the "why" variety, but also of the "why not" variety. Too often we look for reasons to withhold permission, instead of looking for the reasons to grant it. We get sloppy about the permission we've granted, and thus set the stage for the boundaries of said permission to get trampled. Thinking the whole thing through -- what is being permitted, what isn't being permitted, for how long, and why -- is a vital exercise. Otherwise permission can feel exactly like the card -- a disembodied mannequin left alone in an indeterminate and dodgy space.

So what permissions have you given in your life to others? What things are you failing to give yourself permission to do? Where are you showing up to think about these permissions you give and receive, and where have you just let things slide?

It's a worthy thing to ask yourself about.

Blessed be, witches...