Anarchist, philosopher, mystic, revolutionary. I’ve seen many exciting words used to draw the portrait of Simone Weil.
But the moment I read her described as “the patron saint of all outsiders,” by André Gide, I knew I needed to add Simone Weil to the Missing Witches pantheon of witches, weirdos, mystics, imagineers and imperfect rebels. I knew I needed to read her work.
When Risa and I were working on our second book, I was struck down with symptoms of that well worn syndrome: imposter. I’m not an expert on the liturgy of occult studies, nor herbalism, nor astrology. I had no right to presume to tell better Witches what magic means to me. Then it occurred to me - what I am an expert in is being different. Feeling like an outsider.
And isn’t that in a way what connects all those who identify as Witch? More so than cartomancy, spellwork, or even possibly the Divine: feeling different. Seeing the world differently.
Simone would certainly not have called herself a Witch, but she checks all the boxes for us in our ever-expanding definition.
Simone Kotva wrote:
“Weil's interest in occult and esoteric subjects such as Gnosticism and Egyptian mystery religion was not an eccentric sideline to an otherwise ‘Christian’ mysticism but emerged necessarily out of her philosophical method, which, quite independently of those texts where Weil deals with esoterica, displays that pathos of hiddenness so characteristic of occultism: the notion, expressed especially clearly in her late work, that philosophy is the search for a truth hidden from the eyes of ordinary persons and accessible only to those able to endure the ordeals required to gain access into its mysteries. [...] Weil's ‘occultism’ was not an isolated phenomenon but symptomatic of broader trends among intellectuals at the time.”
In her quest for Justice Simone found compassion, actionable empathy that was Truth. In her quest for God, Simone sought not dogma, but to build her own understanding, and that was her Truth. She became a rare philosopher on the front lines. A patron Saint of Outsiders.
In 1915, at six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the sugarless troops in the trenches in World War 1. At age ten, Simone spotted striking workers in the street outside her apartment and joined their march. Declared herself a socialist in her late teens. In 1934 she left her teaching job to go work in factories, to understand the struggles of industrial workers firsthand. She labored under harsh conditions, immersing herself in the lives of laborers, and used her experiences to write about exploitation and alienation in modern work environments. She volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War with anarchist militias against fascist forces. She was actively involved in workers' strikes and social movements throughout her short life. During World War II, she advocated for nonviolent resistance.
She reached adulthood during the Great Depression, and depression of all kinds stuck with her.
But Simone didn’t just cry or talk or think or ruminate or write, she very literally got her hands dirty to reach into the world, and take action. Like we Do Magic. She walked the edge, as we Witches do, between the material and the spiritual.
And something else we Witches have in common with Simone - she refused to be told what to believe, and spent her life in a search for meaning, a faith that felt right, that made sense.
She forces me to ask and re-ask myself: what do I believe? And how does what I believe create my reality? And where do beliefs come from? Do I choose them or do they choose me? What is Faith, and what do I do with it when it comes? How can I help the world feel kinder?
Simone wrote, ““Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” So let’s pay attention to Simone today, in this space between our ears, bestow upon her story that rare and pure form of generosity that is the currency of modernity. Today, let’s give her our attention.
This mystic philosopher lived her life as an offering to the suffering of others, an embodiment of radical compassion. She didn’t just speak on justice; she, in her way, became it. She entered the factories, breaking her body to feel the pain of the workers. Her hands blistered as she wrote of oppression, each word dripping with the weight of lived experience. Simone saw beyond the illusions of power, piercing the veil of comfort with a fierce devotion to the downtrodden. She fed her soul with hunger, fasting in solidarity with the oppressed, her body a vessel for their grief.
Her altruism was magic woven through action, a spell cast for liberation. She refused the safety of distance, of intellectualism without skin in the game. Simone called out to the divine - her life a chant of solidarity with the most invisible among us.
Her life, like yours and mine, was a magical dance with contradictions—an ascetic who craved the world's pain, a revolutionary who sought God in every breath. Contradictions that belied a supreme, singular focus and singular goal. The Truth. But as we’ve discovered in our own lives, dear Coven, real Truth is never simple. Simplicity is never simple.
David McLellan’s book about Simone and her work, published in 1990, was called Utopian Pessimist. I have possibly never related more to a combination of two contradictory words. I am here. Dreaming of a world where everyone is safe, happy and free, while the shadows of depression, anxiety and news cycles hunt down that dream and try to bury it.
Through her work and life, she attempted to answer the eternal question of how to live ethically in an unjust world - how to find love in the void - and the work took on the weight of sacred duty, instruction from a God whose voice she couldn't quite make out, an obsessive calling to seek Truth with a capital T - a challenge she embraced seemingly from her birth in her parents’ Paris apartment to the very end of her devastatingly short life.
Even though Simone wrote extensively about god, and more specifically, Jesus of Nazareth AKA Jesus Christ she refused to be baptized.
Despite her devotion - devotion to Truth, to cultivating a set of morality inside mortality - she was compelled to linger in a state of agnosticism. Maybe we Witches live here too. We’re devoted to our ethics, our philosophies, and for some of us, our deities. But this devotion won’t allow us to close the door on a universe of infinite possibility!!
I think a lot of us have dealt with the kind of belief systems that close the door and lock it behind them, putting their foot down against any kind of questioning or a deeper search for truth. But we Witches can’t do that.
We continue to look for the door into the unknown country.
The first ever episode of the Missing Witches podcast was a bout Pixie Colman Smith and bore the title: Look For The Door Into The Unknown Country, and whatever our faiths, we Witches keep looking, knowing that here is unknown country out there to discover and expand our ideas of what it means to be human, what it means to be divine.
“Albert Camus hailed her as “the only great spirit of our time.” T. S. Eliot credited her with a “genius akin to that of the saints.” But Weil herself might have objected to these consecrations as a form of “idolatry,” which she defined as a misguided thirst for “absolute good.” Nothing is so absolute about her as the difficulty of parsing her contradictions. Her writing radiates a cosmic empathy that coexists, sometimes on the same page, with a strain of intolerance blind to life’s tragicomedy. She resists any system that enslaves the individual to a collective, but her own vision of an enlightened society.” (Judith Thurman Supreme Contradictions New Yorker)
Another contradiction: I was at a retreat for a weekend this summer. A perfect place to connect and bond with like-minded people. And yet, I still felt that familiar pull to be alone. See, I’m a pack animal, and if you’re a member of the Missing Witches Coven, you know this about me - that my love for my friends and for humanity is massive, but I’m also a lone wolf, and solitude is where I feel safest, free-est, the most me. And sometimes I wonder if I’m making a mistake when I seek out my moments of isolation. If I’m missing something. And I’m sitting alone in the sun at a campground picnic table, women frolicking and laughing together just off in the distance, and I silently open my copy of Waiting For God, a collection of Simone’s letters, notes and correspondence. I’m four pages in.
“”I feel” she wrote “that it is necessary for me, prescribed for me, to be alone, an outsider and alienated from every human context whatsoever.” And on another occasion, she jotted in her journal the self-reminder, “Preserve your solitude!” (WFG, x)
And I laughed. Alone in the sun. But not alone, because in that moment, Simone was with me. The contradiction: us outsiders gotta stick together. I read a few more pages before closing the book and rejoining the frolicking gang.
Leslie A Fielder wrote:
“What motivated her was no selfish desire to withdraw from the ordinary concourse of men, but precisely the opposite impulse. She knew that one remains alienated from a particular allegiance, not by vainly attempting to deny all beliefs, but precisely by sharing them all. To have become rooted in the context of a particular religion, Simone Weil felt, would, on the one hand, have exposed her to what she calls “church patriotism” with a consequent blindness to the faults of her own group and the virtues of others, and would, on the other hand, have separated her from the common condition here below, which finds us all ‘outsiders, uprooted in exile.’” (WFG, x)
That was the thinking behind Simone’s refusal to be baptized. To vow acceptance of one thing, she figured, meant the relinquishing of all else. She studied Greek and Egyptian religion, Hinduism and Buddhism with fervor.
Despite this, she also wrote, “A “synthesis” of religion implies a lower quality of attention.” As if to say that if we are not singularly focused on a single idea, rejecting all others, we’re doing it wrong.
I see this as part of her misguided thirst for “absolute good.”
Simone was French so everything I’ve read of her work has been translated into english. But there’s one word she uses again and again: MALHEUR. Malheur is generally translated as ‘affliction’, but as translator Emma Craufurd puts it, “No English word exactly conveys the meaning of the French malheur. Our word unhappiness is a negative term and far too weak. Affliction is the nearest equivalent but not quite satisfactory. Malheur has in it a sense of inevitability and doom”. (WFG, 67)
Simone wrote, “In the realm of suffering, Malheur is something apart, specific and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through.” (WFG, 67)
Are you feeling Malheur these days? An untranslatable weight that is profound sadness, and pain that feels like a mark on your soul? And how do you escape it? With hope? Faith? Action? Philosophy?
Simone wrote, “love is in fact possible, and it is [...] the beauty of the world.” (WFG, 113).
We can turn to her now, when malheur comes, to be reminded. Love is possible.
One more contradiction: the more I learned about Simone Weil, the more I began to see her as both a role model and a cautionary tale. I want to be like her but I do not want to be like her. I respect and admire her but I also want to shake her by the shoulders.
A fervent advocate for the oppressed, Simone's empathy was so profound it led her to physically endure the labor of factory workers, even though her family’s affluence meant she didn’t have to - embodying her belief in radical compassion. She put her body on the line, but never lost her focus on Spirit - she constantly, throughout all of her earthly activism, contended with the building of a philosophy of the divine. Her writings on suffering, attention, and the void, like all Witches, explored the sacred contained within the mundane.
HOWEVER, she constantly referred to herself as wretched, and deliberately denied herself human pleasure and human affection. Even as a lone wolf myself, the idea of denying oneself affection feels misguided. misguided thirst for “absolute good.”
“According to her friend and biographer, Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities to have love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. “
She wrote “The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.”
One essayist said:
She believed that denying earthly pleasures allowed her to strip away distractions and achieve spiritual clarity. For her, pleasure could become a barrier to higher truths. Simone talks about envying the crucifixion, as if suffering is the only way to save the world! What I think Simone missed as she searched for love in the void, searched for God’s love, was the other side of the coin of human existence. We suffer, it’s true, some more than others, but what makes the suffering worthwhile? It’s those moments of joy, that laughter through tears.
A friend of mine, after the death of her sister, told me she felt guilty every time she smiled. It was a heartbreaking revelation, but one that I think a lot of us can relate to. As we look around the world, any joy or pleasure we feel is followed by a sense of guilt for being momentarily happy when so many are suffering under violent regimes, sickness, famine and malheur. I told my friend that I’m certain her sister would not want her to stop smiling.
And I think God might feel the same.
When I think of the idea of God, what God might be, might mean, I think of things that Simone rejected: hugs, laughter, music, good food and sensory experiences that are the gifts of creation. I think that if God exists in some way, that love, self-love, romantic love, are all expressions of God’s love, and I wish that Simone could have found a way to include these reasons for living in her quest for the sacred.
Even Jesus Christ turned water into wine.
Simone’s death at the tender age of 34, partly due to self-imposed starvation during World War II, was as layered as her life, a culmination of her unyielding quest for purity and justice in an impure and unjust world. In her final months, Simone, already weakened by tuberculosis, imposed on herself a severe diet, mirroring the rations of those suffering in Nazi-occupied France - an egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup…
This self-imposed starvation was her final act of solidarity with the oppressed, a physical manifestation of her spiritual beliefs. But her body, which had always been more fragile than her mind, succumbed. Was it a conscious martyrdom? Or the inevitable end of a soul too sensitive for this world? misguided thirst for “absolute good.”
She is a lighthouse for our seeking souls, our hunger for justice and truth. A hunger that, no matter how many books or podcasts or conversations we eat up greedily, can never really be sated. Every bite seems to just make us hungrier. Seeking…seeking…
Anarchist, philosopher, mystic, revolutionary…
An egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup…
In her refusal to eat more than what was available to soldiers during World War II, Simone embodied I think too brutal an empathy, a misguided physical manifestation of the suffering of war inside her tiny, broken body.
Simone’s death, much like her life, blurs the lines between sacrifice and self-destruction, between mysticism and madness. She was a relentless seeker of truth who tried to be a saint living in a world torn by war. Her soul was possessed by malheur, and her body too. Her passing wasn’t just the end of a life; it was a metaphysical statement, a haunting parable and cautionary tale of both the power and peril of living belief to the fullest.
And something else to haunt us: the question - What could have been?
She was only 34. An egg yolk, a peach, a spoonful of soup. And as I sit here in my late 40s, thinking back on age 34 like it was a part of my childhood, I dream of what Truth Simone might have found if she had kept going. Kept fighting. Kept seeking. Saved some of her immeasurable empathy for herself. Conceived of pleasure as a gift from God. Allowed herself to experience more of the beauty of the world that she wrote about.
Our world may have gained a Saint, but it lost a human being who had so much more to teach us about living inside a paradox, about being human, and being divine. About finding love in the void.
Almost all of her writing has been published posthumously - would she have made different choices if she had known that more than twenty volumes of her work have been poured over, curated and published since her death?
Would you make different choices if you knew you’d be famous after you’re gone? Hailed as a saint? Honored as a great mind of your time? Would you see yourself differently today? I’ve spent so much of my life thinking I wasn’t good enough, and I feel certain that Simone felt the same. I want to tell you and to tell Simone Weil, honey, you are good enough. Or maybe, no, babe, we’ll never be good enough, but maybe that’s ok. Maybe we’re still worthy of love.
Simone wrote, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?” So I want to know: what are you going through?
Never forget, dear Coven: Love is possible. Keep fighting, keep seeking, and keep some empathy for yourself. There is malheur in the world, in us, but we must not let it consume us. None of us are strong enough to shoulder the burden of the whole world’s suffering alone.
There is beauty in the world too. A billion ways to love. Let’s find them together.
“We have the assurance, “she wrote, “that come what may, the universe is full.” (LitV, 84)
