When Power Learns to Move

One of the teachings I have encountered repeatedly within the Temple of Witchcraft tradition is the idea that the Aquarian Age calls us away from hierarchical structures and toward something more like a round table. The image is simple. Rather than arranging ourselves vertically, with one person above another, we sit together. Different voices are heard. Different gifts are valued. Responsibility is distributed. Diversity becomes a strength rather than something that must be flattened into conformity.

I have always appreciated this idea. But lately I have been wondering whether the round table is only the beginning. What might happen if we developed the image further?

Perhaps what we are actually building is a mandala.

Taking Away the Height

When we hear the word hierarchy, it is easy to imagine a pyramid. Someone occupies the top while others are arranged beneath them. Authority, knowledge, status, and often value appear to increase as we move upward.

The obvious Aquarian response is to flatten the pyramid. But flattening the pyramid shouldn’t require us to abandon structure. This distinction is important because structure itself is not the problem.

Teachers still need to teach. Leaders still need to lead. Responsibilities still need to be assigned. Knowledge and experience still matter. Different people possess different abilities, qualifications, aptitudes, and responsibilities. Pretending otherwise does not create equality. It creates confusion. What I am interested in exploring is de-verticalization rather than decentralization. We do not necessarily need to remove the centre. Instead, I think what we need to do is to remove the height.

A centre can organize without becoming superior. A teacher can teach without becoming more valuable than the student. A priest can lead ritual without becoming more intrinsically worthy than the people participating in it. An experienced practitioner can possess knowledge that a beginner does not yet possess without making the beginner somehow lesser.

The question, then, is not whether differences exist. Of course they do. The question is whether difference must automatically become a measurement of human worth.

From Round Table to Mandala

A round table gives us a horizontal plane, but a mandala gives us something more. A mandala can contain a centre and circumference, directions and regions, boundaries and relationships, specialized functions and movement between them, all without requiring us to stack those differences vertically.

This image speaks naturally to several streams of my own training. Witchcraft gives me the circle. Yoga and Tantra give me the mandala. And Energy medicine teaches me to think in terms of systems, relationships, centres, pathways, and flows.

These traditions are not interchangeable, nor am I suggesting that they historically teach the same thing. They are some of the languages through which I have learned to perceive and explore the world. What I am developing from them here is a Windtalker model. The mandala offers a way to imagine structure without automatically imagining supremacy.

But with this comes an immediate danger.

We could very easily draw a beautiful mandala and then decide that the centre is more important than the circumference. The closer someone stands to the centre, the more important we might imagine them to be. If we do that, we have accomplished very little. We have simply taken the pyramid, squashed it flat, and congratulated ourselves for becoming Aquarian (insert sarcastic air quotes here).

Changing the geometry does not automatically change the power.

The Brain, the Fingers, and the Toes

The human body offers an interesting way of thinking about this. The brain and central nervous system occupy a particular organizing role. My fingers and toes do not perform the same functions as my brain.

That does not make my fingers failed brains.

Different parts of the body possess different capacities and responsibilities, yet the health of the organism depends upon the relationship between them. The nervous system does not simply issue commands to a passive body. Sensory information travels inward. Responses travel outward. The organism continuously receives, communicates, adapts, and responds.

The centre depends upon the circumference. The circumference depends upon the centre. And this gives us an important principle:

You cannot assess the health of the centre without examining the condition of the circumference.

A flourishing centre surrounded by a suffering circumference is not a healthy mandala. Likewise, a circumference that can flourish only because the centre continually exhausts itself maintaining everything around it is not particularly healthy either.

A living system depends upon healthy relationships between its differentiated parts.

Perhaps human structures do too.

Equal Worth Does Not Mean Equal Qualification

Imagine a ritual setting.

Bob is lighting the candles because Bob studied light-bearing. TJ is taking photographs because TJ went to school for photography. John, the High Priest, has written the ritual and will be leading it because his years of study, practice, initiation, teaching, and lived experience have prepared him for that responsibility.

And Brittney is doing the dishes.

Poor Brittney. Our Aquarian instincts might immediately become suspicious. Why is Brittney doing the dishes while everyone else gets the interesting jobs?

But that question alone is insufficient.

A neophyte cannot simply perform the work of an adept because we have decided hierarchy is unfashionable. Knowledge, training, experience, aptitude, and initiation matter.

There is also dignity in necessary work. Chop wood. Carry water.

The ritual requires candles. It requires skilled leadership. It may require photography, music, cooking, administration, setup, teaching, cleaning, and a dozen other things that nobody notices until they are not done. And when everyone has eaten, drunk, celebrated, and gone home, somebody still has to wash the dishes.

The dishes are not spiritually inferior to the invocation. Nor does performing one task make someone less valuable than the person performing another. What does matter, however, is why each person occupies the role they do.

Perhaps Bob lights the candles because he has developed that skill. TJ takes photographs because he possesses that expertise. The High Priest writes the ritual because that is part of their training and responsibility. Brittney may wash the dishes because, on this particular evening, that is one of the ways she is presently able to contribute.

But Brittney is not a “dishwasher”.

If she studies circle casting and develops the necessary skill, she may then become the ritual circle caster. If she studies herbalism, perhaps she brews the potion. If she develops skill in blending oils, perhaps that becomes part of her contribution. And perhaps she eventually develops an expertise that none of the others possess.

Development within the mandala does not necessarily mean moving upward. It may mean expanding our capacity to participate.

The Centre Cannot Do Everything

A functional centre can provide orientation, continuity, vision, or coordination without becoming the location through which every action must pass. In fact, if every decision, responsibility, question, and task continually returns to the centre, flattening the geometry has accomplished very little. We may have drawn a mandala while continuing to operate as a pyramid.

This is where delegation becomes more than distributing chores. Delegation also involves distributing functional authority. If someone is entrusted with responsibility for a task but denied the authority necessary to fulfil it, responsibility can become powerlessness. Likewise, authority without corresponding responsibility and accountability allows power to become detached from consequence.

Responsibility should be accompanied by appropriate authority. Authority should be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.

A healthy structure therefore does not necessarily ask the centre to disappear. It asks the centre to allow power, responsibility, knowledge, and action to circulate appropriately. Leadership remains possible. Expertise remains valuable. Teachers can teach. Priests can lead. Artists can create. Administrators can organize. Students can learn. Specialists can exercise authority within the areas for which they possess competence.

No single person needs to become the functional centre of every activity simply because they occupy an originating, teaching, or organizing role. In this sense, delegation is not the abandonment of leadership. Instead, it may be one of its clearest and most powerful expressions.

A strong centre does not need to do everything. A strong centre helps create the conditions through which the whole can function.

Following the Flow of Power

This is where the idea has to stop being merely poetic.

We can sit in circles. We can call leaders facilitators. A boss can call employees associates. A spiritual teacher can insist that everyone is equal. An organization can draw itself as a beautiful mandala.

None of that tells us how power actually works.

If we want to know whether a relationship has genuinely moved away from exploitation, perhaps we need to become less interested in what the structure calls itself and more interested in what actually flows through it, and how.

Who makes decisions? Who controls resources? Who carries responsibility?

Who possesses specialized knowledge?

Who performs invisible labour?

Who gets heard? Who gets interrupted?

Who can disagree? Who can say no? Who can leave?

Who benefits? Who continually sacrifices?

Who is accountable when something goes wrong?

And… who does the dishes?

That last question will remain funny until we realize how much it can reveal. The dishes themselves are not the problem. The pattern surrounding them might be. If Brittney does the dishes because that is her contribution tonight, there may be no problem at all.

If Brittney always does the dishes because everyone quietly assumes her labour is less valuable, we should probably look closer.

If Bob has responsibility for the candles but no freedom to exercise the skill he was trained to use, we should look closer.

If TJ is supposedly responsible for photography but someone else micromanages every photograph, we should look closer.

And if the High Priest is writing the ritual, teaching the class, casting the circle, lighting the candles, taking the photographs, answering every question, cleaning the temple, and washing the dishes, we obviously need to look closer there too.

The purpose of examining power is not to eliminate difference. It is to understand the relationship between power, responsibility, competence, freedom, and consequence.

Power, Love, and Wisdom

Another teaching that informs my thinking comes from the Three Rays of Witchcraft as I learned them through the Temple tradition.

The Red Ray is Will and Power, expressed through the archetype of the Sovereign.

The Blue Ray is Love and Trust, expressed through the Seer.

The Yellow Ray is Wisdom and Cunning, expressed through the Sorcerer.

Within that teaching, these Rays are understood as manifesting emanations of Great Spirit.

I am interested in what happens when that teaching enters into conversation with this developing Windtalker model.

Power asks whether we possess the capacity to act. Love asks how we enter into relationship. And Wisdom asks whether we understand what is actually happening.

Cunning becomes particularly useful here because spiritual communities, families, workplaces, lovers, and even entire societies can become remarkably talented at telling themselves beautiful stories about deeply unhealthy arrangements.

And here’s my honest-to-goodness confession: I am highly allergic to BS.

So, if we claim to value sovereignty, belonging, diversity, and relationship, then those values should be visible in the way our structures actually function. It is not enough to describe a structure as equal, horizontal, or Aquarian. We have to examine what actually happens between the people within it. How is authority exercised? How is responsibility distributed? Whose knowledge is recognized? Who is able to participate, disagree, develop, contribute, and say no?

Many Centres

Perhaps one of the most interesting possibilities within this model is that a mandala does not necessarily have only one meaningful centre.

I am necessarily the centre of my own perspective.

You are necessarily the centre of yours.

The person standing on the circumference of my mandala may simultaneously be standing at the centre of their own.

I can be the centre of my perspective without needing to become the centre of yours.

This does not erase difference. It actually makes healthy relationship possible.

I do not need you to become me in order for us to belong together. I do not need to surrender myself in order to love you. We do not need to agree about everything in order to share sacred ground. And more to the point, unity does not require us to become identical.

This continues a question I have explored elsewhere in my writing: how do we remain sovereign and distinct while still belonging to one another?

The mandala offers another way of asking it: How can difference exist without becoming domination?

A Windtalker Mandala

I am not ready to declare this a finished system. I think it still requires further contemplation and refinement. But for now, I offer it as a proposition:

What happens if we place this mandala over different scales of human relationship and see what it reveals?

The individual. Family. Friendship. Romance. Work. Community.

Teacher and student. Priest and congregation. Disciple and spiritual teacher. Human and Divine.

What happens when we zoom inward? What happens when we zoom outward?

Where is the centre? Where is the circumference?

Where does authority reside? Where does responsibility reside?

What is moving between them? Where are the boundaries? Can those boundaries breathe?

Who possesses knowledge? Who possesses power? Who bears the consequences of its use?

And perhaps most importantly, can the people within the structure remain sovereign while still meaningfully participating in the whole?

The usefulness of an Aquarian mandala may ultimately depend upon whether it can resolve apparent paradoxes by revealing the relationships between them.

Leadership without supremacy.

Sovereignty without isolation.

Expertise without superiority.

Belonging without sameness.

Power without domination.

Love without possession.

Wisdom without dogma.

Unity without uniformity.

It must also survive difficult relationships rather than merely ideal ones. A philosophy that works only when everyone is kind, self-aware, well-resourced, emotionally regulated, and behaving beautifully is not particularly useful.

The real test comes when power, knowledge, and responsibility are not evenly distributed.

When one person needs or knows more than another.

When someone must lead, must learn, or must say no.

When somebody has to make the final decision.

And yes, when somebody has to wash the dishes.

Perhaps the Aquarian ideal does not ask us to eliminate difference, but to stop confusing difference in function, knowledge, or responsibility with difference in human worth.

A pyramid teaches us to look upward.

A round table teaches us to look across.

But a mandala may ask us to look between.

At relationship. At movement. At responsibility. At boundaries. At Power, Love, and Wisdom.  At the centre and the circumference. At ourselves and the Other. Not separately, but relationally.

Not a world without centres. Not a world without teachers, leaders, elders, specialists, initiates, beginners, responsibilities, boundaries, or structure. But a world in which those differences no longer automatically need to be stacked on top of one another.

Perhaps that is the beginning of the Windtalker Aquarian Mandala. Not the final answer, but a proposition. A structure to examine, a pattern to test, and a question to ask:

How might power flow between us so that both the centre and the circumference can flourish?

And, because eventually philosophy also has to survive contact with the kitchen:

Who will be doing the dishes tonight?

Blessed Be,

Mur Windtalker