I mean that’s the caveat, though, right?
What God is subservient unto another? AND now I know hierarchies exist in any explanation of the universe, but there is a difference in worship and collaboration.
Every teacher (should) be looking for a student that surpasses them. I work in a place where training of new employees is commonplace, and one of the things I highlight is whether or not the trainee was able to eventually outdo the teacher.
‘Gatekeeping’ for me is kind of an odd topic. I come from a traditionalist family of practitioners, in a rural area of the country where many of our neighbors are distant relatives, and these members of our extended clan (several of these families have lived in the same geographic area since we came over on the boat) are nominally Christian: until they need an abortion, or their sons get in trouble with the Law, or someone is going through a divorce. I was raised in a place where nonprofessional deferment to magical expertise was pro forma et quid pro quo. You require something from a magician you see the magician and defer to their expertise, just like if you needed a wall built, you’d consult a mason, and just like a mason, you pay for it. Members of my family have lived on this business model since we arrived in the United States (then colonies).
I, as an obviously queer child, was taught women’s work (the keeping of a house, gardening, herbalism, the making of medicines, and ‘witchcraft, nominally love spells and glamour’). I was taught the basics of a man’s work (hunting and trapping, husbandry, shooting, geometry and accounting, surveying the land, local politics, how to maintain cash crops, orchardry, and men’s magics- how to ensure the precision of boundaries, the creation/maintenance of wards, the luring of species for hunting or trapping, species maintenance in a given area; transmutation (namely distillation) but also spiritually, grave digging, the maintenance of the dead).
Who knows how long these gender barriers existed among these simple folk. My mother (to this day) makes a majority of her income from legal spell work and women’s care (including abortive services). We’re a hard folk and habits persist.
I left that place when I went to college and discovered magic at large, post-internet, and a million different sources and ingredients and spirits…
I would never pass my personal esoteric specifics outside my bloodline. Magic is what we did, males and females alike, in service of the community. Two of my siblings love in that area and have had numerous children, male and female, to which I’m able to pass whatever I’ve learned outside of our upbringing and help them better there lives: but I also exist in a world where the magus is independent, connected to the whole through the web and able to access names of demons or angels and conjure them at will for pleasure. Where I grew up, magic was familiar in the sense that ‘The Bakers run the Bakery, the Carpenters build houses, the X’s sell dope and pawn and barter, the Spencer’s do the books and the Y’s do the Magic’.
No one (where I grew up) would ever question my authority to withhold information to them or work magic for them to my own ends (and thus to the ends of my family) in the interest of the communal whole, unless that person were blood kin.
I don’t live there anymore, and I doubt a witch worth the title (unless my nieces shape up) will ever reside in that holler again. I’ve no intention of going back, I built a life outside the place.
But to me, Gatekeeping is pro forma, satisfying the caveat that the Magus operates under community service & interest. IF they don’t, well, that’s how you get lynched, drowned or burnt (ask my mother, our house got burnt to the ground (by a biker gang) in 2008 and my mother’s first words to me after were “The dumb motherfuckers didn’t even have sense to chain me to a stake first! They’ll pay for that!” And they did. But she should have done a better job at being a-political and providing a service instead of making the whole thing about what she wanted to do).
