Toward Ecosophy

One of the entertaining features of living in a magically illiterate society is that very often, when people create symbols, those symbols express far more of the truth than their creators realize -- or want. I had a great example of that yesterday, courtesy of the flag to the left, which was flying over city hall here in East Providence.  

I think most people these days are familiar with the standard Pride Flag, which was invented back in 1978 by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker and has become an iconic presence in the gay and lesbian communities. In what became its standard form, it has six stripes, each of which refers to a principle -- red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for harmony, and purple for spirit. (Those of my readers who know their way around magical symbolism will recognize these attributions -- clearly Baker knew what he was doing.) 

Just recently, however, the six-stripe Pride flag has been deemed inadequate by certain influential groups in our society. The first alternative version to get general acceptance put black and brown stripes above the rainbow, to symbolize people of color. The flag I've posted here is a next-generation revision of that, including blue and pink stripes for transgender persons, as well as a white triangle. This is called the Progress Pride Flag, and it was invented in 2018 by designer Daniel Quasar. It redefines some of the colors in the original six-stripe flag -- in this version, yellow stands for "new ideas;" green, inevitably, for prosperity; and blue for serenity in place of harmony. Yet the most important change, as in the earlier alternative version, is that the black, brown, light blue, and pink stripes stand not for principles but for people -- the brown and black for people of color and the white, blue, and pink for transgender people. 

Now look at it as a symbol. It shows the gay and lesbian communities being split apart by a wedge composed of racial and transgender issues.  It shows the replacement of principles that everyone can embrace, and benefit from, by a system of privilege in which certain categories of people are assigned rights that override the rights and needs of others. The wedge is an emblem of forcible penetration, thrusting its way in against the will of others -- and the lily-whilte triangle at the far left sure looks like the impetus behind it all. 

I doubt that Daniel Quasar had any of this in mind; xer (sic) clumsy redefinition of three of the original stripes suggests that xe has no clue about the magical meanings of colors. As Carl Jung pointed out a long time ago, however, it's the symbols we create in perfect ignorance of their meaning that most precisely reflect what's going on in the deep places of our minds. The new flag is an exact reflection of a particular political and cultural stance of our time, in which the rejection of principle in favor of privilege has become pervasive, in which the natural world (sunlight and nature, the solar and telluric currents of ancient magic) has been dismissed in favor of anthropocentric fixations on "new ideas" and getting rich, and in which harmony between people is supposed to be replaced by an internal state of serenity which can, of course, coexist readily with abusive behavior toward others -- and in which all this is to be forced on everyone against their will. Truth in advertising?  It certainly looks that way to me.