Car Wights, and other animist thoughts
Talking about wights in the modern world can get a bit strange. In some ways it is more believable that certain rocks or trees are beings, but a lot of the modern world is fabricated. How does the modern city-dwelling animist make sense of that?
Can a computer or a printer be a being? How about a car? If there are housewights, what about work wights? Do apartments have one wight for the whole building, or one for each apartment, or both? How do you find landwights when you live in a vast sea of pavement? These are things that I probably spend far too many late nights thinking about.
For the record, printers are definitely beings, and I wish I could figure out how to appease them. They are super temperamental beings. Computers are still a mystery to me as to if they are animate. More thought is required...
Cars have car wights. It has long been the tradition in my family to name cars the same way you might name a boat. If someone gets a new car then after my family hears the make and model, and sees a picture, they want to know its name. My current car is named Chelsea. I usually give cars female names, like you would with a boat, but sometimes car names describe the car’s colour or something about its character. My father once had an old pickup truck named Rusty, for example. If you have ever seen the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it does a great job of bringing to life the animistic nature of cars. I have fond childhood memories of Sunday afternoon drives down dirt roads in our Isuzu Trooper, Green. My brother and I would sit in the back cargo area and sing the song from that movie while my father chuckled and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to avoid potholes.
If cars have wights, how do you approach them? I always jokingly suggest you could offer them oil. Some people would argue the car itself is not what is living, but rather it is the home for the car wight. Maybe that is true, but it is a difficult distinction to make. It reminds me a lot of Claude Lecouteux’s book The Tradition of Household Spirits. In this book he describes how the house itself was seen as a living being, and how certain parts of it were even described as if they were body parts. Of course, he goes on to describe other beings that live within the house or property. It seems reasonable to me that both could be true of cars as well. The car itself could be a being, but it may also have a car wight living in it.
To me a car without a wight is a lot like when you walk into those display rooms in IKEA that aren’t lived in, they are empty shells of possibility, but without any real layers of meaning. A car without a wight is a shell of a car. It is that car that is rusting in the middle of a field, that someone salvaged the engine out of already for some other project, and then abandoned. It doesn’t have purpose or meaning. It is like a corpse. That part of it that made it living has gone. So maybe a car wight would like oil or maybe it wouldn’t. More of a problem is how you would present such an offering. It seems messy. Probably safer to gift something like coffee. I am yet to meet a wight that doesn’t enjoy coffee, and there are probably some handy cupholders where you could leave such an offering! Car wights also expect you to at least make a solid effort of maintaining the car. In my experience, when someone does not care about their car, they run into problems fairly quickly.
I engage with the work wight and the landwights near where I work regularly. My workplace is on the edge of an uncultivated area so there is a lot going on there usually. (Work wights definitely like coffee, by the way.) It makes a lot of sense to engage with your work wight(s) as it makes things go more smoothly for you. Depending where you work, people may even be aware of the wights present. I worked at one restaurant where things would move around on the shelves frequently when there were no vibrations or external causes. My coworkers would say it was the “ghost” as that was the only terminology they knew to describe it. This was always said in a lighthearted way, where the being was recognized as existing, but no one was upset about its presence.
As for apartment wights, I am of the opinion that there are building wights, and individual apartment wights. They seem to be fairly stand-off-ish in my experience, probably due to the transient nature of the inhabitants. (Less so than hotel wights, however.) My apartment complex has a paved courtyard, and there are definitely wights of the courtyard as well. They are landwights of a sort, but not fully wild like the landwights you would find in a forest. I suppose it is the difference of the courtyard being a cultivated area, even if I am not the one doing the cultivation. I am of mixed opinions on land-taking rituals and apartments. The land has already been taken, the most you can really do is promise to be a good steward.
There are many wights you can engage with, even in the concrete jungle of the city, but it is always nice to go out into the wild and engage with the wights there. It is a different experience. Sometimes it isn’t possible to leave the city and find a truly wild space, but you can find spirits of place all around you in the city. On the bank of a slow moving river, or in a certain stand of trees in a park. It is not difficult to build meaningful relationships right where you are, and your life will be fuller for it. The wights are your neighbours, and it is good to be neighbourly.
Further Reading:
“Heathenry in Urban Living Spaces”
https://www.thelongship.net/2019/03/10/heathenry-in-urban-living-spaces/
The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices by Claude Lecouteux
“The Wight Stuff: A Case for Car Wights”
https://www.rationalheathen.com/2017/02/13/the-wight-stuff-a-case-for-car-wights/
Photo Source:
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (cover illustration) by Joe Berger
