Strabismus and perception

Today I want to tell the story of how I came to terms with my strabismus. I feel the story has some witchy and philosophical relevance and so, I'd like to share it with you.

I grew up with a mother who was a college graduate artist in painting, sculpture and engraving, Thanks to her watching art history documentaries was a big family time in our house. Also, thanks to her I learned at a very early age that in classical paintings saints or Goddesses were depicted with a divergent squint (when the eyes have an open-angle). In fact, the expression Strabismus of Venus comes from the famous painting made by Botticelli.

Having strabismus was interpreted as having an eye place in reality and another in other realms, like this condition, was a physical mark that evidences the person's multiple perceptions.

But in every case, I saw paintings of exalted characters I noticed the squint was divergent and later I learned it was because at the time it was considered that God or the Devine was outside and in contrast, convergent strabismus (the one that I have) was thought worth distrust since it implied being in touch with evil.

I kind of put that ancient interpretation of my condition aside for a long time, always in the back of my mind but never forgotten and it wasn't until I initiated my Wicca path that I started finding that I had new tools to address that part of myself again.

Wicca has helped me recover a female perspective of reality not from a male narrative of what the Divine Feminine is but also from an inherently female narrative. With time I realize (and maybe it was easier for me to realize this because I come from a christian family) that every connotation we give to hell is about demonizing the female. Dualities are unavoidable in this world, I seriously doubt that anyone can have a unified perception of the grand scheme of things without acknowledging the duality that exists in everything.

But there is a duality we've made antagonistic and that is the inside and the outside. At the risk of sounding too literal, I don't think there is a coincidence that the female and male genitalia are such evident representations of that duality. I even had a dentist once who told me that my teeth were feminine because my lateral incisors cover the central incisors and when that happens it's a sign of having a strong female energy present because it creates the visual illusions of a cave or something going inside, and when the predominant teeth are the central incisors it's a sign of masculine energy present like the teeth having a focal point outside (I don't know where how I find such free-spirited dentists but I thought it was a colourful remark that helped furthermore solidify these correspondences of duality in my mind).

In medieval times there was also another representation of that duality: the supra and sublunar areas of study, where everything supra lunar (outside the lunar orbit) was considered eternal en Divine and everything sublunar (inside the lunar orbit) was considered perishable and therefore mundane. God was above, the angels were in the heavens, but demons came from the centre of the earth where there is a dark hell.

The demonic interpretation of the female aspect of reality has been appropriating the collective narrative for too long, but Wicca doesn't teach you about the Devine Feminine from a male perspective (I don't even think Gerard Gardner is that relevant in Wicca for anyone anymore but Doreen Valiente is) It helps you find divinity in the little aspects of life, in the perishable, showing you that even death is part of life and it belongs to the female energy of transformation, that is not as a punishment and not a disconnection from anything but a necessary path in the cycles of nature (after all, even celestial bodies die).

I really don't know what having strabismus means, but at least Wicca helped me resignify an old story and unfair story that I carried with me and there is something profoundly liberating about that.