The Witch Faith in Catage

In Catage, the epithet of Witch is no longer used as a term for spellcasters of a certain disposition and expertise, but rather to adherents of a certain set of spiritual practices that formed among the counterculture of the city’s poor. The Witch-Faith was subject to much persecution by the royals due to its refusal to see them as part of the divine, and their opposition to the city itself. After the royals were ousted, the Merchant-Industrialists took the official stance that the Witch-Faith was acceptable so long as its adherents were, but in practice their adjacency to both anarchist and transcendentalist causes has meant they remain policed, scrutinized, and treated with derision.

The first tenet of the Witch-Faith is that we are all merely visitors to the divine. The natural world itself is the divine, and to walk in it is a gift granted. The proper response to a gift is to give in return, and to borrow rather than steal when possible, otherwise these gifts will be taken from those in the future who deserve them as well. They fear that the great work of the city is a blemish worthy of retribution, and cultivate what wild spaces they can within it, spreading seeds in cracks in the roads and tending to the stray animals. The Park-Estates are a particular blemish in their perspectives, frightening facsimiles of nature wrought by the hand of humanity.

The second tenet of the Witch-Faith is that permanence is a trap set to catch humans in hubris and greed. There is no shame in an emotional attachment to something or one, but when it has run its course, there is a necessity in passing it along. Meetings between witches often involve swapping of unneeded tools, clothing, and art. This extends as far as names: a newly faithful witch is instructed to take a new name, ideally one remembered without context around it, and use it in life, but on death they hold it no longer and will be buried again nameless, so that they do not take the name with them and deny it to others.

The third tenet of the Witch-Faith is that to teach is an act of love. This is a love that spans a wide variety of interpretations. Most broadly, it means that witches find the passing of skills to others to be a holy act, increasing the ability of another to freely traverse the natural world and live more freely within it without reliance on taking from others. Newer witches are often taken in by a teacher-figure. Sometimes, but not always, this love extends to both the romantic and sexual connotations: the faith prescribes neither heterosexuality nor monogamy, so networks of teachers and learners are often also networks of variously entangled partners, and teacher-student cohabitation serves as a way for some couples to euphemize a queer relationship that could come under scrutiny from the more conservative elements of Catage’s society.

The fourth tenet of the Witch-Faith is that retaliation for trespass has already begun. Magic itself, and related phenomena from other worlds such as nightmares, dwellers in the deep, and the intrusion of faerie realms are all understood as the natural-as-divine bringing in weapons to be wielded against the intrusions of humanity. Few witches are spellcasters, but those who are tend to think of themselves as temporary vessels being used for some unknown purpose in service of this retaliation rather than as masters of a craft. In this way there is a fatalistic tinge to the faith: an end is an inevitability, and the efforts of humankind within it are small unless they serve it.

Witches struggle to fit in with other factions in the city and wilds. Royalists see them as traitors. Merchant-Industrialists hold near opposite values to their conception of the divine. Occult-Futurists see them as depraved and anti-social. The fire cults see them as a rival and an oddity. There is some common ground with the Anarchists and Transcendentalists, but an isolationism and trust in divine inevitability puts them the former’s dedication to collectivist struggle via specific and violent action ill at ease, and the latter’s scientific naturalism strikes the witches as wrongheaded and hubristic.