Moi! My name is Willow, any pronouns, I'm an Alaska-based folk magic practitioner, heathen, and aspiring seiðköna, hailing originally from the Low Saxon part of the Netherlands. Nederlandstalige blog: @schietwilg
I intended this blog to be about my practice, but my own posts are mostly about animistic theology and cosmology, connecting with your environment, getting in touch with culture, spirit work, functional syncretism, magic everywhere, and general ramblings and opinions about related topics.
I am always on my knees begging for asks!! Vagueposting about me is cringe, I can back up my arguments politely and in conversation! Ask me about my stances and engage in dialogue with me, it's my favorite thing!
Tags:
#apothecaric allerlei for my own blog posts;
#apothecaric art for my art;
#musings for substantial reblogs and short posts;
#willow reads will have all of my book reviews;
#herbarium for all of my plant musings and info!
#reblogs is where I collect stuff I really love.
#willow's asks for asks.
More under the cut!
Resource masterlists:
Germanic Paganism Resources
Herb Magic/Folklore Resources
Spirit Work/Animism Resources
Anglo-Saxon Heathenry Resources
I update them very slowly, so sorry! These resources are not a reflection of my sources nor my practice.
Community | Services | "Website"
More about me:
My faith is a central part of my life and I spend a lot of time with it. I am a Germanic polytheist, I syncretize the Norse pantheon with the Continental, but I often end up using Norse names for convenience. Óðinn/Wōden is who I have the most personal devotional relationship and he informs most of my life, practice, and values. I would say pagan animist theology and cosmology are my special interest and I write about them a lot.
My magical practice consists of Low Saxon, Frisian, Dutch and broader Germanic folk practice/magic/medicine. I consider house spirit work, card divination, and herbal magic to be my strong suits. In recent years I've started dabbling in seiðr and galdr and I hope to keep expanding those skills to the point where I feel confident calling myself a seiðr practitioner and not just margkunnig. By trade I was apprenticed as a gemologist and I enjoy researching the use of minerals in magic!
I would describe myself as extremely skeptical of the witchcraft community and I write a lot about it. If you are confused about my hostile attitude towards Wicca and seemingly conventional witchcraft practices, please refer to this post and this post, which will explain why I feel the way I do.
I believe in liberation, joy and well-being for all equally first and foremost. Get to know me!
Where to contact me:
- I have a carrd with more information about me.
- Consider joining my Discord community!
- Asks are always open! You are highly encouraged to use it for whatever.
I hope you appreciate what I put out there and find it useful to your practice. Hold 'oe kreggel! (Take care of yourself!)
Musing and reblog tags:
#hearth
#ethics
#cackled
#spirit complex
#resources
#dutch folk magic
#heathenry
#i hate wicca
(I'm really shit at using these but trying to get better)
ngl, I immediately lose respect for anyone who starts a conversation on [topic] by listing out their degrees and credentials as though that should instantly grant them authority over the situation.
I've worked in academia for years, and some of the most ignorant, bigoted, and misinformed people I've ever met have PhDs and professorships (and will never let anyone forget it!); while some of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and educated people I know didn't even finish grade school. you can be an excellent teacher & researcher without any formal credential, and equally you can be a terrible one with all the degrees in the world.
not to say that credentials are meaningless, of course, only that they do not necessarily correlate to one's level of knowledge or quality of scholarship. formal tertiary education is much more about maintaining class barriers, upholding the status quo, and engaging in assimilationist nation-building than anything to do with 'real' learning - and more often than not, it strikes me as rather disingenuous when people feel the need to establish their supposed expertise in that way!
because expertise is something you demonstrate, and something you continually have to reinforce & put work into. it's not something that's automatically conferred & unquestioningly accepted forever ad infinitum just because you passed a few exams at some point.
and I shamelessly feel the same way about practitioners who flex that they have 'x many years of experience' or are a such-generationeth "witch" or call themselves 'advanced' or 'experts' or brag about how educated or learned they are.
it immediately reads as a soulless brag meant to make sure people just assume you're right because you said so. I don't care. when I am in discussion with people about my practice you will never catch me using the amount of time I've practiced or the history of magic in my family or the amount of successful workings I've done as an argument, because I don't want my potential expertise in a given thing to be something I talk about, I want people to see it and trust it.
I could be talking to the densest, most intentionally obtuse, hateful person who refuses to take anything I say seriously because they just hate me and want me to be wrong, and I still am not going to do that. my arguments and points will always be based on how well I can argue for them and support them, not how much of a reason other people should have to think I'm correct. and if that doesn't convince them, then so be it. that's where my moral compass ends. me and that person have no business with each other beyond that point.
and that should be how everybody else treats the same thing. if you need to tell people about how trustworthy you are, or how much of an expert you are, you're almost definitely not an expert. and certainly it will make me take you less seriously, or even treat you as immediately suspect based on how willing you are to make appeals to authority in a social system that rewards that.
stop using chatgpt!!!! take a bronze pin and carve your questions onto an ox scapula, then toss it into the fire!!!! use the cracks to divine the gods answer!!!!
citations still have to be APA 7th edition though. if you plagiarise, the gods will flood the yellow river again. and you'll lose your academic standing.
Finally managed to harvest some monkshood (aconitum delphiniifolium) to make a tincture with, despite the weather and my health. On the way there I also spotted (top to bottom, left to right) swertia perennis, valeriana capitata, a white variety of lupine (probably lupinus nootkatensis), mycena spp, and my favorite fern, gymnocarpium dryoptera (?)
I don't know where that white lupine came from. It has grown in that same place year after year since the first time I discovered it. The first year it grew, it had sprouted from a pile of white feathers. Another anomaly, as we don't have any all-white wild birds around here. Coincidentally it grows right beside a magic passage, which is how I tend to explain it - a breach of containment, if you will. I tend to pay my respects to it when I see it
A weekly harvest log like this is worth more than most how-to posts, because it keeps the plant in its actual place and season instead of reducing it to a line on a correspondence table. The note about the white lupine returning year after year from a pile of feathers is the kind of detail that only shows up when you work the same ground long enough to notice it. Folk practice lives in that patient attention, not in the shortcut.
for indigenous people on the alt-body spectrum, or those who feel their alt-body identity is in some way related to, connected to, or informed by being indigenous or one’s indigenous culture
alt-body or the alter body spectrum is a spectrum of bodily experiences that differ from or feel misaligned to the expected human norm. physical characteristics, traits, configuration, or the body as a whole may feel modified, atypical, cross species, or nonhuman at all, generally diverging from standard human body norms. this includes otherkin and alterhuman bodily experiences, sex characteristics that may or may not be intersex or personally identified as that, bodily modifications, or other non-human experiences
many indigenous nations have social and spiritual roles often connected to a form of alterhumanity, atypical body modification, or an outward divergence from the colonial expectations of bodies
From a new population I found on one of my hikes. One of my absolute favourite moss species. A. androgynum has these little stalks with pompoms of gemmae on the end to help disperse themselves further. They release spores too but extremely rarely, and using different structures of course. I just love biology that breaks a couple rules.
Like there is a difference between "My trauma creates impulsive urges and has changed my instinctive reactions to be irrational, I need to relearn shit." vs "I'm traumatized so I Can't Help It and you're not allowed to expect better of me"
we are all always interconnected. you already have a relationship with your ancestors, with the spirits in your area, with the gods. you are never truly alone. reach out to them! strengthen your bonds and take solace in the community that cannot be taken from you
white european communists are obsessed with talking about wanting to nuke the entire landmass currently known as the united states because they feel an ancestral call towards killing Indigenous people
Southern Alaska, from the Aleutians to the Panhandle in longitude and from Fairbanks to Ketchikan in latitude, has a curious landscape feature. Once you notice it, it's hard not to notice it. Between the apparent monotony of spruce trees and the great displays of wildflower fields, the entire state south of the arctic circle is embroiled in an unending turf war between two great and cruel kings: Pushki and Devil's Club.
The names of either plant are sure to strike fear into the hearts of all those who have lived in the Pacific Northwest, though to many, 'pushki' might be better known as cow parsnip or Satan celery, government name heracleum maximum. The name 'pushki' (also puchki or poochki) is a relic of the Russian colonization of Alaska, though what exactly it was ever meant to mean isn't known. The most famous theory is that the Russians thought the dead pushki stalks which remain during winter looked like small cannons, for which the word is pushka in Russian. But it is also speculated that it may have come from the Russian word for fur (after the hairs on the stems) or puchok, meaning 'bundle' or 'bunch', in reference to the flower habit. Even less well known are the indigenous names for pushki: ggis in Dena'ina, vgyuun (meaning 'dead stalk') or ugsuuteq in Alutiiq.
Devil's Club, however, is a universal name in the United States - though it may sometimes also be called Alaskan ginseng, which in my area in Alaska is comically considered something of a marketing term, not generally used by locals. In Dena'ina it's heshkeghka'a, in Alutiiq cukilaparnak. Its scientific name is the appropriately metal sounding oplopanax horridus, and though I dislike being rude to my neighbors, I think it would appreciate being thought of as quite horrid. Related to the placid ginseng it might be, it lives up to its name by being covered in thorns and spines that snap off on contact and leave hard fragments and minor phytotoxins sitting in the skin, which causes irritation and infection on top of the surprising amount of damage it manages to do to clothes and hide.
To match the horror of the Devil's walking stick, Pushki's terror factor is chemical warfare: even brief contact with the stems or leaves can rub off its sap, which contains chemicals that react with the skin and make it extremely photosensitive, causing immediate sunburn and sometimes even blisters. The subsequent photodermatitis - a condition where exposure to UV causes skin inflammation - can stay for months to years after contact depending on how long the sap could work on the skin.
A handsome devil's club. The biggest leaves are about a foot and a half wide. Notice the spines on the leaf veins.
Few places in Alaska have an even distribution of both plants, as they occupy the same ecological niches and compete for resources fiercely. You will never have to wonder whose territory you're in, either, as both have a habit of growing in dense clusters in marginal open spaces. As a result, if you live anywhere remotely rural, needing to wade through seas of one or the other is practically unavoidable.
Where I live on the Kenai peninsula there is an undisputed victor, at least for now. Pushki hordes march alongside me down every path and pasture, their great green hands brushing me as I trot past. I prefer living in pushki territory, being genetically resistant to their poison. My partner, who is easily affected, would rather be among the hoplite troops (if you got that joke, I see you linguistics nerd) some 10 hours north.
The pushki king is young and virile, like these boggy woods: his progeny lead his legions under his noble guidance. Pushki reproduces through heavy seeding before dying back in winter, bringing forth new soldiers with only few biennial veterans to guide them. But moreso than potent, he is also a talented strategist. He knows how to disperse his troops, how to hold his own and encroach on the other. He teaches his people how to create food stores, and how to negotiate with the locals. He lets the landscape do his work for him, allowing the wind to carry his forces wherever they are needed. They find meadows and margins to colonize, gulping up sunlight and shading the fragile borders of moss groves. The spruces allow them, because the pushki king agreed to shelter spruce children amongst their leaves. He even allied with his European cousins, whose men mingle with the Alaska natives. But all is not lost for his opponent. In all his ambition and productivity, the young king wastes energy, thinks the lord of thorns. Pushki may have leaves of similar size to a devil's club, but they use their stores quickly, and could never afford to be in the shade. So deep within the spruce trees, where needles obstruct soil and sky, scouts of the enemy team break between the lines.
Wizened by his exceptionally long life, the devil's club king is perhaps no king for battle at all. But he is cunning, and sly. When you first spot one of his kin, they look inviting. Huge, soft-green leaves like hands outstretched, bright red drupes delicately stacked on the whole. The entire plant possesses an air of elegant stillness. You wish to lay your hand on the leaf, to put into perspective how big it truly is. But as your palm lowers you find this soldier armed down to their wiry knuckles. Once wounded by this overzealous defense, the plant becomes quite menacing to the beholder; the elegant visage changes into a villainous creature peering out from its prickly armor. The stillness turns eerie and calculated. These warriors do not frolic in camps like their hotblooded enemies, waiting for orders. Here on the battlefront, they creep through the woods in silence, for they are many in the body of one. Once past the enemy lines, unbounded by the need for sexual reproduction, the spearbearers clone themselves through rhizomes, slowly forming thickets as dense as the opponent's. Once established, they entice bears with their bright berries to spread their seed. Strength and numbers they have not, not here. But they have arts unknown to the pushki king, of magic and medicine.
Both kings are people of immense contradiction. The pushki king is in many ways the very picture of stateliness, but he has not the courage to flaunt his defenses as openly as the devil's club. His forces feign an air of casual coexistence until an unlucky traveller brushes past with bare calves. While the other, in turn, seems wry and loveless, but in fact nurtures many, from the bears eating his berries to salmon growing in the shade of his leaves.
In some ways, the plants resemble each other. Notice the spines on the devil's club, and the malefic red stalks of the h. mantegazzianum, the giant bear claw.
Where devil's club is a relative I had never met before I came here, whose respect I gained simply because of their goodwill, pushki are a people I have an ancestral tie to. In my native language, we call pushki species bear claws. It is mete to respect the defenses of a plant my ancestors thought to name after an animal so revered its name was never to be spoken aloud, only called by the epithet of 'the brown one'. So unspeakable was it, that the original word has been forgotten. Unaffected I may be by their poison, but they have my utmost respect still. Many people go years handling pushki without effect, only to suddenly become severely allergic. And I have seen firsthand that the old belief is true: the redder the claw, the bloodier. Red is pushki's European cousin, which we call giant bear claw. That king has conquered before, brutally and without mercy. He is the cruelest of all the bear claw chiefs, his poison is the strongest and his stalks the very tallest. His tribe marks their victories by painting themselves in the lifeblood of their victims. I sometimes wonder if once the noble green-stalked pushki king wins his war, his bloodthirsty cousin has a coup planned for him. Undoubtedly that would be a fearsome battle, one not without collateral damage. The same logic that informed my ancestors of the nature of bear claw was applied by Alaska natives, who shared the belief that both pushki and devil's club were protective plants and strong defenders. Many of the natives on phalanxeer turf¹ use them as protective amulets, and striking amulets they are. Beaches here are littered with the bones of the devil, bleached by the sun, the dark cavities where their cruelest thorns used to sit made clearer against the grey.
On wet days, the plants of both tribes announce their presences boldly on the air. You either love it or hate it, the thick musk of soldiers at war permeating the atmosphere. Devil's club carries the distinct medicinal quality of ginseng, where pushki goes from an agreeable sweetness in flower to a dank, wild scent in the fall. Fragrance, good or bad, has been associated with purification since time immemorial. It is no surprise that Yup'ik peoples used the smoke of wild celeries² to purify bodies, Tlingit practitioners ate devil's club root to cleanse themselves ritually, and the Haida chewed on the sticks and bark for it. My faith has it that a home is just the body of a bigger beast we live in, and here too homes could be fumigated with the smoke of either.
The Bladder Festival is a Yup'ik feast which honors the yuit (personhood) of seals, which is believed to reside in their bladders. Wild celery played a role in this: offerings would be made to the celeries before they were harvested and hosted in the casgiq (men's house). An idol would be constructed with the celery stems, who would be honored like a living person. Based on reports from white anthropologists about the roots of wild celeries being believed to "represent each man's partner from the underworld,"³ and resembling ancestral spirits, it is thought that the rites of the Bladder Festival may have revolved around invoking the relationship between ancestral spirits and the yuit of the seals, to encourage the seals to be plentiful the upcoming year, on top of the veneration of the seals.
In their world, where kingship is divine providence, it makes sense that the features of the rulers are reflected in the individuals. Who knows who first started this war, and how long it will go on. Who knows who will reign as victor, if anybody. But it is customary for fairy kings to be at odds with one another, and competition is no evil in nature. My personal pushki platoon is one I am happy to see each summer. To the untrained eye it looks samesy, but it houses a diverse understory of grasses, bistorts, mint family members, chocolate lilies and horsetails. The pushki have stood this dutiful watch along the paths between our houses and the church since anyone here can remember, and with time a mutual respect has grown. I do not harvest much pushki - we do not tend to eat them, rather the nettles, and we have an abundance of angelica lucida around to take for roots. I have no need of them over my doorway for protection when they have chosen of their own accord to grow by the entrance. But though we do not speak much, I think we are good friends.
These kings I hope to never meet. I can only imagine the magnificence of their courts, contrasted against the terrible sight of their majesties. But I am not ready to be swept to the realm of the ancestors by their enchantments. Even here, in the land of the living, their generals and princelings command respect and reverence. Hail to them, who nourish the land with their sons, and buttress the veins of the earth.
---------------
The Kenai Peninsula (Dena'ina: Yaghanen, the good land) is sacred land to the Dena'ina people, specifically the Kahtnuht’ana Dena’ina who historically inhabited this region. The Kenaitze Indian Tribe was federally recognized as a sovereign, independent nation in 1971 under the Indian Reorganization Act as amended for Alaska. The Kenaitze tribal government provides some of the most important care and education services on the peninsula. I used Outer Inlet Dena'ina (as spoken in Seldovia) for the Dené plant names to the best of my knowledge, as that dialect is most local to me. My interpretation of this landscape as an immigrant is transplanted with respect to the beliefs both past and present that continue to shape this region, and which inform my own interactions with the land. By interpreting the same land through diverse lenses with respect to the first inhabitants, something new can blossom.
Notes:
¹ The Tlingit used devil's club sticks to beat suspected witches, and the Haida place it above doorways and on fishing boats to ward off evil. The Tsimshian and Nuxalk, and probably others, wore the plant as a protective amulet.
² Pushki is also referred to as 'wild celery' by Alaska Natives, but that name serves more as a plant category defined by its relation to mankind than as a species identification. 'Wild celery' is a food category, and individual species within that category have their own names. Species of angelica are also called wild celery. Everything that follows when discussing the Bladder Festival is about wild celery, see Yungcautnguuq Nunam Qainga Tamarmi below.
³ That is not the only thing to suggest that wild celery has a special association with women's bodies. In the same book it is cited that a nursing mother with a newborn boy was not allowed to eat wild celery as it was considered to have 'female flesh', and that another woman was given wild celery as medicine when she was sick as a child, and thereafter she could never eat it again, but her body "grew fat and thin along with the plant each spring and fall." A different white anthropologist, Charles Gillham, recounts a legend about a Yup'ik man who mistakes a wild celery for a beautiful young woman.
Bibliography and Further Reading:
- Alutiiq Museum Plant Gallery: pushki | devil's club
- Medicinal Flora of the Alaska Natives - Ann Garibaldi
- Traditional Use of Devil's Club by Native Peoples in Western North America - Nancy J. Turner, via ethnobiology.org
- Alaska Native Plants Program
- Russian history survives in Kenai Peninsula place names - Elizabeth Earl in the Peninsula Clarion
- Yungcautnguuq Nunam Qainga Tamarmi: Edible and Medicinal Plants of Southwest Alaska - Ann Fienup-Riordan et al
- The population ecology and ethnobotany of Devil's Club - Trevor C. Lantz
- Tla Yahda: Haida Museology Makes Things Right - Lucy Sdahl Ḵ’awaas Bell
- USDA FS Index of Species Information: Devil's Club | Pushki
- Alaska's Wild Plants - Janice J. Schofield
- Discovering Wild Plants - Janice J. Schofield
Two different expressions of pushki flower: flat and bulbous umbels.
Some highlights from today's foraging trip. This orange hawkweed matches beautifully with this fire-rim tortoiseshell, I thought.
aglais milberti - pilosella aurantiaca
And orange seemed to be the theme of the day, as I also found several orange growths that I was fascinated by. The left is rose rust, phragmidium mucronatum. It's a common disease on wild roses in this area, as the summer temperatures here are extremely mild and humidity is always high. I believe the right are aethalia of Lycogala epidendrum, which is actually not a fungus but rather an amoeba that grows on rotting wood. The individual blobs are aggregates of individual amoeba that find each other through chemical signals to come together and reproduce. They will eventually burst to release dark grey spores.
I also saw that the single flower wintergreen (moneses uniflora) was flowering, right next to the pink wintergreen. Funnily enough, though they share the name 'wintergreen', these white wintergreens and the below pink ones are not in the same genus. Moneses have their applications in indigenous medicine, particularly by the Haida people. Haida scholar Lucy Sdahl Ḵ’awaas Bell talks about using Moneses (xiláawg in Haida) as a cleansing agent and to prepare herself for new knowledge. (Link) They're sometimes said to be good as a mosquito repellent, but for a mosquito magnet such as I that will never be true. These flowers are also amazing to look at, and not for no reason. They have features that suggest that the plant reproduces through 'buzz pollination', which is where specific species of solitary bees and bumblebees (like those native to Alaska) vibrate their wings in ways other bees can't, to free pollen held by the anthers. I lifted them by hand for the pictures, but they naturally face downwards, where the long stigma points to the ground like a little shooting star. They're sometimes called shy maiden, single delight, frog's reading lights and wood nymphs, but in Alaska Orthodox communities they're also commonly known as the stars of Bethlehem or St. Olaf's candlesticks. This species of wintergreen is the only one in its genus and can thus be referred to simply as moneses, which is very stylish, in my opinion. Coolest of all was this mutated wood nymph, who had only four petals.
Pink wintergreen, or as I know it, bog wintergreen (pyrola asariflora) is a much flashier and more visible kind of wintergreen: it is her leaves you see shining in the background of the moneses. Those leaves are often the first green leaves - aside from the spruce needles - that appear when the snows melt, as they never die back to begin with; hence wintergreen. They look mighty edible, but are in fact horrifically astringent and bitter. I could only select ten photos, or I would have put another one here - when properly upright the bog wintergreen has flowers like little round bells. The wonderful shape of these mushrooms - further unidentified, I can barely identify as mycena when I see one as it stands - however, outcompeted the picture of the upright bog wintergreen.
Lastly (for this post) I also had the pleasure of running into these bachelor's buttons, and seeing the first fruits of the trailing raspberries. The bachelor's buttons are a risky invasive in Alaska and will be pulled - these were on the edge of the graveyard where I cannot forget about them. They are, however, very beautiful to look at. The trailing raspberries on the other hand are undoubtedly native and a pleasure to watch. They are inconspicuous and easily go unnoticed, but once you see them, you see them everywhere - they form the canopy of the microscopic woodlands that are moss groves and sneak along paths in the woods. They are closely related to 'real' raspberries, and so the berries are indeed edible. In my experience not nearly as palatable as proper raspberries, which is why I leave them for the birds.
centaurea montana - rubus pedatus
I didn't find what I set out for today, which was some healthy bundles of wormwood or mugwort. Most of the wormwood in the area grows on the northern sides of driveways, where it gets beaten down by the midnight sun in accordance with its preference. Those stands are both polluted by the cars driving by and, because of the amount of sun they receive, more stem than leaf, which makes them terrible for my purposes. Nevertheless the trip was worth it - if not for all the wonderful plants I saw then certainly for the little sharp-shinned hawk I watched harass a squirrel. I believe her to be a little lady, based on nothing but vibes, and she has been a consistent resident of this stretch of the woods for at least since the start of the year. She is remarkably small compared to the other birds of prey here, dwarfed by great grey owls, northern harriers and bald eagles, and a pleasure to watch as she careens through the trees. I hope to someday soon catch her sitting still, so I can photograph her or even just look at her properly - I've only ever seen her hurtling past to the cries of outraged mother squirrels.
Finally managed to harvest some monkshood (aconitum delphiniifolium) to make a tincture with, despite the weather and my health. On the way there I also spotted (top to bottom, left to right) swertia perennis, valeriana capitata, a white variety of lupine (probably lupinus nootkatensis), mycena spp, and my favorite fern, gymnocarpium dryoptera (?)
I don't know where that white lupine came from. It has grown in that same place year after year since the first time I discovered it. The first year it grew, it had sprouted from a pile of white feathers. Another anomaly, as we don't have any all-white wild birds around here. Coincidentally it grows right beside a magic passage, which is how I tend to explain it - a breach of containment, if you will. I tend to pay my respects to it when I see it
Brothers from different Mothers: Evangelical Christianity and Conventional Witchcraft
Or: White Religion, A Comparative Study.
In the last century, and especially in the last fifty or so years, a new kind of spirituality has taken the euro-west by storm. Free from the shackles of traditional groups and the constraint of denomination; modern and contemporary, with an explicit focus on the future; oriented around relationships with the divine, but never with the expectation of formality or ritualization. It views the acts of religion as symbolic, and its own unspoken doctrine as common sense, unbound by superstition and mystery. It focuses on personal growth and satisfaction through spirituality, and rejects institutionalized authority, affirming that anyone, truly anyone, can be a priest. While some more 'extreme' or 'old-fashioned' sects within this newfangled stream are highly exclusive and generally intolerant, most of this community prides itself on inclusivity and modernism, never rejecting the opportunity to set somebody on this path. It finds its roots in post-imperial Britain, and since the advent of the internet, it has grown exponentially in size and cultural foothold. Had I shared this blurb without the title, half of readers would have assumed nondenominational Christianity, and the other half some interpretation of paganism or witchcraft. But having seen the title, you may already be uncomfortably aware that this describes them both, equally, to a T.
The non-Christian half of this equation goes by many names. Through a decades long process of factions splintering off, recent history going lost, and self-identifying as Wiccan becoming increasingly less socially accepted, it has gained, absorbed, and appropriated an unforeseen number: (neo)paganism, witchcraft, the craft, "spirituality," eclectic paganism, Traditional Witchcraft, magick, and many more. A lot of these names have semantic variations in what they actually mean or were originally meant to mean, but ultimately they have all - unfortunately - come to represent more or less the same thing: this unnamed, informal magic tradition of spell jars and eclectic 'deity work' that finds its roots in 20th century Western Occultism.
I would like this post to address the entire spectrum of this problem. From self-identifying Wiccans who still adhere to rigid binary or triple gender role beliefs in their magic, to a resident Hellenic pagan working with Apollo and doing the occasional money bowl - and even into those traditions that adopted aspects from 19th and 20th century spiritualism and occultism out of necessity, like afrodiasporic practices. Not because I believe that all of these manifestations of this problem are equally severe or do equal harm, but because I think everybody who engages with 'spirituality' on the internet needs to hear this and contemplate it. Christian imperialism never left our midst. It just repackaged itself to even more effectively infiltrate our minds and behaviors; because it's easier to make symbolic changes than real, radical ones.
Please keep an open mind while reading this, understanding that while some of this undoubtedly will not be about you, some absolutely will. Even if you yourself do not practice anything so much as mentioned in this post, you will find yourself around it, and if you do not act, you will eventually be colonized by it. This has bearing on everyone in the community, not just those who engage in it actively, but also everyone else who is at risk of having their words and practices co-opted, their history erased, their morals misrepresented, or even just their words twisted.
Other Mothers, Same Father: Imperial Britain and New Religious Movements
In 16th century Europe, the Protestant Reformation swept across great parts of the continent. In England, particularly, protestantism fought viciously to shed the political and theological underpinnings of Catholicism, and gained a strong cultural foothold as the Church of England. From the Church of England sprang new Christian movements, often called proto-evangelical, such as Puritanism, Pietism, Moravianism and Quakerism. Though these respective denominations each went on to carve completely different futures for themselves, they influenced Christian theology and the soon to form evangelical movement immensely, causing a new movement founded in spreading the Gospel, and accepting the Bible as the sole authority.
During the so-called First Great Awakening, the rapidly solidifying evangelist movement gained intense momentum across the 18th century Anglosphere, springing new denominations like Methodism, and rooting itself into the newly forming American identity. It has continued growing, through further 'Awakenings' and revivals, and is now a cornerstone of American culture, as well as a well-recorded religious presence worldwide. The World Evangelical Alliance estimates that some 600 million Christians worldwide can be counted among evangelists.
But something else was happening in western Europe at the same time. Non-Abrahamic schools of thought and spirituality founded in ancient traditions like Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism started being grouped together as 'esotericism', and initiatory traditions within it, like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, arose. Then, with the Enlightenment, esotericism gained a branch rooted in Enlightenment thought: occultism. Between the Age of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Victorian Era, esotericism and occultism continually evolved and organized, founding groups like the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as countless schools of thought like Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Spiritual Science, and New Thought, which all influence modern spirituality to this day.
During the Victorian era in Britain, scientific advancements were deeply shaking the foundations of religion, and rapid industrialization was changing the landscape in unprecedented ways. In response to these pressures and changes, esotericism and occultism experienced a boom in popularity. In the English-speaking world, this fascination with occultism carried a distinctly anti-Christian twinge, because it found its origins more in the Enlightenment aspect of esotericism than that which was heavily influenced by organized religion. For this reason, 19th and 20th century occultists believed that true(r) wisdom could be found in what they thought was the 'ancient pagan tradition', and it is to this motivation that we owe the creation of Wicca, Cochranian Witchcraft, Druidry, and other neo-pagan traditions.
Wicca gained rapid popularity after its formation, thanks to its creator's dedication to the press, and the 1960s counter-culture movement in the Anglosphere took a special interest in these forms of spirituality, bringing them further into relevance and giving rise to the New Age movement in the 70s. And, of course, this extremely complex spiritual landscape was changed forever with the advent of the Internet.
A Social History of Contemporary Witchcraft
For more information on the origins of modern witchcraft, please see my post on Wicca.
'Witchcraft' as we know it now is almost impossible to define, because it is never the same between two witches. The popularization of new religious movements after the 60s, followed by the creation of the Internet, meant that what were once fairly niche and structured communities adhering to roughly the same doctrines now started to exponentially multiply. They interchanged (and indeed confused) ideas and ideologies, formed new streams and movements, and spread this game of spirituality-telephone like wildfire. It was being called by many names depending on what corner of the internet you were in, but whatever they called it, people felt that these new ideas were empowering, mystifying, and meaningful.
But, despite the sheer size of the Internet making it almost impossible to trace the recent history of witchcraft step-by-step, we can trace its many constants back to their historical origins. The magic that is now practiced by possibly hundreds of millions of people across the globe, often regardless of what they call it, shares many common features between different self-identifying labels. Many witches and practitioners borrow the concept of the 'astral plane' and 'energy' from Theosophy, 'manifestation' or the 'law of attraction' from New Thought, 'energetic blockages' from Mesmerism, so on and so forth. But, of course, the central-most influence on contemporary witchcraft always has been and always will be Wicca.
Contemporary witchcraft was built on the foundation that Wicca laid. Most people, even if they don't identify as Wiccans, found magic and/or paganism through Wicca or Wiccan-aligned resources. Favorite authors like Cunningham, Murphy-Hiscock, Auryn, Illes, Adler, Buckland, Kelden, etc are or were Wiccans at one point in their lives, or practice a form of magic that is derived from Wicca. Almost all common practices, motifs, beliefs, and tools utilized and acknowledged by modern practitioners are Wiccan in origin. To name a few:
- the Wheel of the Year and the modern conceptions of the 'sabbats';
- the idea of historic 'witches' as cunning women;
- styling every deity as 'Lord' or 'Lady';
- pagan priesthood;
- intention;
- 'eclectic' practice;
- the binary between covens and solitary magic;
- a 'Book of Shadows';
- deity work (as opposed to standard religious worship);
- the notion that the same system of magic and religion can be universally applied with different pagan deities;
- the unification and flattening of regional traditions into broader categories like Hellenism, Heathenry, Celtic paganism, etc;
- and, indeed, calling yourself a 'witch' at all.
... and uncountably more. If there is anything you can think of as quintessentially 'witchy', odds are it either came from Wicca or evolved from the contemporary witchcraft built off of Wicca.
Some are comparatively old and fairly structured elements of a relatively organized religion, like the Wheel of the Year, the soft-polytheist Lord/Lady model, Book of Shadows traditions, and the slightly younger divide between solitary practitioners and coven-goers. Others are completely new and came about through the effects of the Internet, such as the notion of 'intent': according to Wiccans who lived the early days of Wiccan web forums, the notion of 'intent' came about to illustrate that 'doing magic' necessitates a goal for the magic to fulfil, and that simply repeating a ritual from a book with no goal to achieve in mind was not a functional way to approach magic. The more experienced Witches would educate the newbies by borrowing terminology from Chaos Magic's concept of a Statement of Intent, to encourage new practitioners to do magic according to their needs rather than purely for the sake of doing it. In between that time around 2010 and now, 'intent' has transformed from a personal tool to structure your practice into the cosmological driving force behind all magic. Rather than the great cosmological force of 'magic' being channeled through a Wiccan ritual, personal mental processes have turned into the operative power of a magical performance, which seems to reflect a broader pattern of individualization.
White Egocentrism and Post-Colonial Neo-Religion
Individualism, hyper-individualism even, is becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of western society. Spurred on by capitalism, the 'you don't owe anyone anything' propaganda and the milder sounding 'put yourself first' mentality promote an emphasis on personal autonomy, self-reliance, and independence in our lives. Individualism, definitionally, necessitates egocentrism. Individualism and hyperindividualism are well-known to abandon the well-being of the community for the sake of personal gain, and in order for that to feel like a reasonable thing to do one must be both entitled and egocentric. We are all, unfortunately, conditioned to be entitled and egocentric by modern, especially western, society. Yay, capitalism! But some experience it more severely than others, and white people in particular are taught extreme entitlement and egocentrism by postcolonial capitalism. There are many ways in which those traits show up in western religious expression, but I want to call attention to a few specific ones that I think do by far the most harm and are by far the most pervasive.
Individual Egocentrism and Egotism
Individual egocentrism shows up in the most offputting ways of all, compared to its counterpart entitlement. While entitlement is often the driving force behind cultural appropriation and ethnocide, which is perhaps more cosmically disturbing, egocentrism in neocolonial religion can be quite terrifying to witness personally. The foremost egocentric feature that nondenominational Christianity and contemporary witchcraft share is the emphasis on personal empowerment through religion. Religion is not a communal expression of faith in the consensus reality one's culture has constructed, but a tool for personal satisfaction and stability. The community, or the culture, is always secondary to the individual. This much is obvious, cannot be hidden: it shows up even in such simple things as correspondences, where coming up with your own associations based on what jives with you is recommended over learning the cultural narrative. The same is true in evangelism: faith, church attendance, and religious products are commodities for personal satisfaction and actualization, and can be abandoned if they don't fulfil those needs to the desired extent.
Christianity is hard to imagine without this level of disinterest in other people, perhaps because monotheism teaches that there is a center to the universe to begin with. Ironic, given Christ's original selfless message. Regardless, as a result, living our lives in a Christo-secular world means that we are imbued with egocentrism from birth. On a personal level this often spirals into egomania. Both of these religions, in their cultural contexts, breed delusions of grandeur in their adherents. You are so special, you are so good, divinity is calling YOU to do its bidding! In evangelism it's being told by Jesus to move to LA and preach the gospel in a Starbucks, in 'Paganism' it's being called out to by myriad deities, being 'trained' by your 'patron deity' to become their 'priest'. To be an oracle and spread revelations to an audience you've not yet garnered. To personally be the mouthpiece of the god of your choosing, no matter who is listening.
It's disturbing, and worrisome. Individualism, egotism and hyper-independence create a social environment without support networks, without structural accountability, without mutual respect and trust. Much like in evangelism, cultic behavior - in the modern sense of that word - is rampant in our community. And, much like in evangelism, abuse on religious grounds is everywhere and extreme, with no way to combat it effectively. Micro- and personality-cults are appearing left and right in pagan communities, spearheaded by people who believe themselves worthy religious leaders. Nevermind that you can't be a 'pagan priest' because 'paganism' isn't a religion and 'priests' are exclusively Christian. Nevermind that the various forms of clergical service that European pagan religions had could only exist in the context of service to a community, not a personal relationship with divinity - assuming we know anything of them at all. Nevermind that being 'spoken to' or 'called out to' by pagan gods was not a thing before the Internet invented it. Nevermind that the age of oracles is decidedly ended. After all, 'paganism' isn't about practicing the religions of the cultures whose names are unfortunately claimed for this purpose. It's about practicing white religion, something that feels comfortable, but still rebels against the Christianity we've come to hate. Only we cannot imagine a world without it, so we just reinvent it.
Racial Egocentrism
I would like to draw your attention, for a moment, to what is known as the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, AKA the American Restoration movement. This movement was formed in the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century, from several independent strands of evangelical revival that highly idealized early Christianity, not unlike the convergence of occultist groups that idealized what they conceived of as 'paganism'. These evangelists sought to return to what they considered the 'one true faith' of Christianity, and unify all Christians without creeds, cultural differences, or denominational banners. They wanted to just be Christians, no further specification necessary. As any denomination does, evangelical and nondenominational Christianity has deep structural and doctrinal flaws, but nevertheless seeks to place itself at the center of Christendom, treats itself as the modern baseline that anyone can return to or join to align themselves with the true nature of Christianity. It is reminiscent of Wicca, and its notion of an ancient pan-European pagan religion with consistent core tenets that anybody can practice under the banner of 'pagan' or 'witch'. Of course, there was never a pan-European pagan religion, or witch-cult, or other such thing. That would require a universal European cultural identity, one that was distinctly lacking in actual history.
Western people cannot think away whiteness. Whiteness is accepted as a standard fixture of reality, within the racist model where race is an objective feature of the natural world. Thusly modern people apply whiteness, forcefully, to cultures and religions that existed before the entire concept of whiteness did. Racism as we know it now only emerged after the colonization of Europe by the Christians, and indeed it perpetuates the colonization of pre-Christian Europeans by forcefully applying whiteness to cultures that couldn't be white, because whiteness did not exist. It was only after they were already colonized that the process of flattening, destroying, and misrepresenting their cultures took hold to absorb them into the delusion of a culturally unified white race. From Christian scholars skewing, misrepresenting, and destroying the memory of their faiths, to Nazi Germany producing false historical texts attributed to them, to us, modern people engaging with their cultural heritage in retrospect, colonizing them by forcing them to conform to our deluded notions of race and racial unity.
It is not a secret that neopagans are more interested in practicing whiteness - and you do not need to be white to practice whiteness - than the religions whose cultures they claim. It only takes a little squinting to see it. Disregard, or even condemnation, of the historic practices that these religions find their roots in is a common feature both of neopaganism and of evangelism. Though both of them were founded by movements that severely idealized their mental images of what the 'original religion' looked like, in practice they show little interest in their features. An easy example in the case of neopaganism is love magic. For most historic pagans and folk believers, love magic was a standard fixture of adolescence, methods ranging from harmless divination to sometimes kind of gross spells. Modern pagans, however, on some delusional claim of universal cosmological immorality, condemn love magic and love divination altogether.
But that's a cheap shot, how about the fact that most neopagans fundamentally disagree with the philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological underpinnings of their religions? 'Mundane before magic' is a prime example about which I have written at length, where neopagans and witches discard the original form of their religion in favor of the more modern, whiter notions of scientism. This isn't to say you cannot believe in science and be a pagan, but it is to say that you cannot claim to practice a religion whose entire construction and justification you disagree with. Then there's the issue of moral realism, hard good/evil binaries, and punitive justice among pagans, when their religions generally teach subjective morality and take a restorative approach to justice. Further, European pagan religions were orthopraxic, in contrast to Christianity's orthodoxy. This means that rather than believing that religion is made up of correct belief, like Christianity, it is made up of correct practice. European pagan religions, and their sister systems like justice and medicine, were oriented around the right rituals, the right protocols, the right actions, not organized and dogmatic belief.
And yet, where have the rituals gone? Why is every pagan community full of people asking for ideas on how to 'get back into their practice', or practicing contrived rituals whose roots are in 20th century occultism rather than the actions the ancients valued so much? Much like evangelism's departure from tradition in Christianity, its rejection of ritualization and mysticism, tradition and perpetuity in paganism are dead. Much like business casual pastors standing on a stage with electric guitars blasting in between unchecked, scripture-less preaching, much like the Mysteries of the Eucharist have turned into a symbolic, dry-cracker-fueled half joke, magic has disappeared behind the noise of 'spicy psychology' and 'intention'. Rituals have changed from the anthropological definition of time and space carved out from the ordinary, into quick, symbolic blips of an ancient understanding. The barrier to entry is low, all you have to do is claim to believe, and you're saved. You do not need to sit with discomfort, you do not need to be made to think or ask questions, you do not need to deconstruct your preconceived notions.
All of which is not to mention the worship of anti-cosmic and adversarial beings, purely on grounds of them being 'misunderstood', the rejection and indeed even loathing of primary deities purely because subconsciously, to us, they are too much like God, the rampant heno- and mono-theism of pagans whose religions have the word polytheism in them. Theocentrism in general, the constant emphasis on 'the gods' as some defineable category that paganism has, and that those 'gods' should be at the center of someone's faith and practice, rather than the beings and features that ancient pagans actually centered, insofar as anything was centered at all? One must ask: at what point is it no longer the same religion(s)? The answer is that we are way past that point. Neopaganism is not the search for ancestral religion. It's the construction of a new, uniquely white religion, in response to Christianity. Why else would it use a Christian-made label for itself, pagan, that the old believers thought of as an insult?
Neopaganism, witchcraft, 'paganism', whatever you want to call it, is nothing more than white people's shameless appropriation of countless ancient religions. And the goal of it is nothing more than to rebel against Christianity, one of the few traumas white people have in common, while never actually deconstructing it. This is why these features that ancient paganism didn't have (heno/monotheism, theocentrism, orthodoxy, mundane before magic, etc) are ones directly reflected by Christo-secularism: they're directly transferred, one-to-one. There was a brief window in history, very brief, where almost all Europeans had indigeneity in common. But we are so deeply immersed in our own colonization now that we have gone to spread it to the rest of the world and rescinded our right to claim that title as a group. So far, it has come, that we are somehow intensifying the indigeneity of our ancestors even in their death. Because we feel entitled to everything they had, because we're white.
Entitlement and Autonomy After Colonization
White entitlement gains complexity when the object of the entitlement is someone or something that cannot fight back. The cultures whose religions we are appropriating no longer exist except in memory and history books. They cannot jump off the page to defend themselves, correct our mistakes, tell us that they want their heritage and legacy respected. Living minorities can retaliate against oppression, or at least resist it in spirit, but the dead cannot. Anyone can oppress the dead. And anyone who is indoctrinated or imbued with whiteness can act with white entitlement towards the dead. Neopagans seem to think nothing wrong with this. When confronted with questions about why they deviate so strongly from what the religion(s) they claim prescribe, their answer often revolves around the inconsequence of their actions. Sometimes it's that "there's no sources" to work with, so they're basically forced to make it up as they go, other times it's that the original culture is dead so it doesn't matter what we do, or that "times have changed." But do the religions we supposedly align ourselves with not emphasize the autonomy of the dead? Moreover, do we modern woke people not claim to be against appropriation and think that ancestor work is oh, so important?
Cultural imperialism is the dominant feature of white supremacy in the 21st century. White people, or perhaps western people at large but especially white people, are spiritually homeless. Colonialism took communal values, interpretations and beliefs from us, and then supplied us with enough audacity and entitlement to take it from others as a weakened replacement for our own. When it is being done to cultures that have been absorbed into the idea of 'whiteness', like pre-Christian European religions, it's deemed acceptable, and nobody bats an eye at an 'eclectic pagan' with fingers in every pie loudly proclaiming that they're against cultural appropriation. But the mechanism is the same. The entitlement is completely unchanged. The arguments of 'well the culture is dead,' and 'well times have changed,' are weak excuses to be able to turn a religion - that they don't really believe in in the capacity that it was believed in by its original adherents - into whatever suits their needs best. Even if what suits their needs best is a reinterpretation of modern protestantism. Worse yet is that by creating a new religion, borrowing the aesthetics and terminology of the ancient religions and nothing else, those who relied on the language supplied by anthropology to explain their cultural traditions, those who grew up in folk traditions are being absorbed into the white narrative. The culture of white peoples is continually being erased by the illusion of 'white culture', and so neopaganism perpetuates white supremacy and colonizes indigenous European survivals (and peoples).
In both neopaganism/conventional witchcraft and evangelical Christianity, the closer somebody is to the traditional roots of their movement, the more of a systemic victim complex they openly express. More traditional evangelists often mirror the emphasis traditional branches of Christianity place on their perceived persecution. Preaching about the persecution of Christians in Rome and Martyrdom, or even going so far as to claim that they are still actively being oppressed on a large scale in the modern day. Wicca and its mythology does the exact same thing. It pretends that the witch-hunts were truly a genocide on their direct spiritual ancestors, and that Christians oppress them to this day. Further, just like evangelists, because religion is a matter of personal identity, any criticism of their approach to religion is treated as oppression. To the point of not only attacking each other in retaliation, and breaking off into bizarre factions, but also to the point of vilifying other religions altogether. Resistance against their entitlement is treated as a violation of their personal autonomy, and those who revolt against their colonization are not seen as vulnerable people or cultures, but as an institution dedicated to diminishing their personal rights.
The Autonomy of the Dead
Though many pagans online claim to be animists, few are in practice. One symptom of this is the lack of agency ascribed to the dead by modern practitioners. Ancestor work is a touchy topic in the community, with many white practitioners betraying their toxic relationship with their own whiteness by staunchly avoiding the entire subject, let alone body, of their ancestors in between now and two thousand years ago. Ancestor work is often reduced to thinking about your ancestors' actions and repenting for them so that you may cleanse yourself of your colonial sins, though, as illustrated, it hardly comes to fruition. More importantly yet, an impossible contradiction has been created in our treatment of our white ancestors.
On the one hand, they are unilaterally described as directly oppositional and adversarial. Many report that their ancestors hate them, reject their practices, or say racist things to them, as though they have a phone line into the afterlife through which these messages can be received. But almost none actually put effort into establishing a relationship with their ancestry or ancestors, especially not before claims of rejection and hatred are made. On the other hand, precious little autonomy and agency is ascribed to the dead when it comes to their rights, or their influence over our lives in modernity. Aside from the blatant appropriation of their cultures, and disregard for what effects this might have on them, they are also never honored, nor welcomed into our spaces. They are not seen as capable of change or growth after death, depicted and understood as the exact people they were prior to their passing, as though most animistic religions do not teach that there is much learning to do in the afterlife. Not one of these people has enough of an emotional investment in their ancestors to be patient with them like you would a living family member. To let them have their feelings and see if with time something can be accomplished, to help them work through it. It seems that agency is only ascribed to the dead when it can serve as an excuse to avoid them at all costs.
It is no coincidence that this has happened. The Christo-secular world has a phobia of morbidity, so that accounts for a great deal of these symptoms. But it is also that Christianity teaches that the afterlife is stationary and constant, and believers have no agency in what their afterlife looks like. They will either go to The Good Place or The Bad Place based on their actions in life, be magically transported there after death, and will stay there, unchanged, for eternity. Aside from shallow neoliberal approaches to decolonization, which account for the other half of problems white people face when trying to reconcile their ancestry, people view themselves and, by extension, each other, as stationary figures, to whom life and death is happening. From the Christo-secular perspective, we are passive, and life and death are moving around us and coming over us. This explains why neopagan religious expressions don't seem to take any interest in funerary custom, death cosmology and eschatology, as they generally apply the same sense of circumstantial victimhood to what they believe 'paganism' is. But animistic religions do not teach passivity, nor that people are just victims to circumstance in their own lives.
The Autonomy of the Self
Pre-Christian European religions were religions of struggle. How this feature presented itself varied, and how it was represented in the literature from or about the religions is even more skewed. But religions that are as old as time to a given group of people reflect the nature of life, and the nature of life is to struggle and fight. It was even more so then, especially for those not in the elite, towards whom sources are often biased. It is because of this that active participation in one's own life, and indeed perhaps even the afterlives or the lives of descendants, are so highly emphasized. It is one's own responsibility to move through life, to travel to the afterlife, to navigate the world tree as it were, to borrow terminology from my own religion. Often the success of descendants is spiritually generated by ancestors through their great deeds, teaching how such expressions of personal agency and willpower fuel the living for generations after one's death. Often the very most important themes in pagan mythologies and symbols are the willingness to fight against inevitability and do great things. But what white people lack most, even those who would number themselves among the very wokest, is accountability. The lack of it is a monstrous problem in the west, perhaps its own institution on a systemic scale.
Despite the religions whose names they claim being religions that revolve around taking accountability for the state of your life, religions that promote being an active participant in your own existence, neopaganism expresses a strong belief that everything will simply be handed to the believer on a silver platter. A hallmark of a person who has never truly struggled, whose ancestors have not truly struggled in quite some time, perhaps. A lot of this sense of anticipatory entitlement to the world also loops back around to the aforementioned egomania. Often, the conflictions in belief seem to suggest that the world is not inherently spiritual, but they are. Rather than there being an external web of magic that human actions take place on, magic is inherent in a person in the form of 'intention'. Rather than tools having inherent, naturally magical traits, a 'universal substitute' imbued with personal power can perform any function needed. Spiritual gifts are not obtained in life or learned from external individuals but something one is born into. Mundane over magical for thee, but not for me. Sometimes the entitlement appears as true laziness: that reading signs is a matter of ruling out mundane possibilities until it couldn't possibly mean anything else, rather than a skill of discernment one has to learn. That an AI chatbot or a Discord bot can truly perform a tarot reading, with no real explanation for how or why. That rather than the world being a complex web of interlocking ecology, both physically and metaphysically, from where one could theoretically divine anything from a single augur if only they were brilliant enough, it is thought that you really only have to wait until the most obvious, impossible symbols start crossing your path at the hand of 'the gods'.
In fact, it is 'the gods' around whom the most disturbing symptoms of privilege show. It is in how neopagans believe themselves to be sought out by the gods, their worship or even companionship to be specially requested. That the gods appear to them personally, speak to them directly, attend to the smallest matters in their lives. That they all have a deity for a spiritual parent, in extreme cases even an entire harem of deities from various pantheons with whom they have personal, usually romantic relationships. It gets so bizarre, at times, that I begin to feel it is spitting in the face of those who have sacrificed in prayer every day of a war-torn life and never been helped by their gods, and I do believe the gods have the power to interfere in such matters! Which leads into the next section:
The Autonomy of the Divine
In many ways, the autonomy ascribed to 'the gods' is only a tool for their pagan adherents to evade accountability. One has already been mentioned, the way that people truly believe the gods are seeking them out personally, which detracts from one's own responsibility in practicing religion and building relationships with your gods, downplays that religion is a personal choice - perhaps to further the victim complex, persecution on religious basis narrative - and aggrandizes the person making that claim. Moreover, it leads to what people sometimes dub 'salad bar paganism', where people have a fairly random selection of deities from various pantheons in that semi-omnist model of "paganism." That appropriation is frequently criticized in the community these days, but is briskly refuted on grounds that the deities in question told the eclectic it was okay. Yet another kind of agency described to deities that only exists to evade personal responsibility. By attributing words and actions like those to the gods, people place the responsibility for their immorality on a non-human being that cannot respond empirically. It makes the gods complicit in their crime of entitlement. 'Revivalism' as a code word for simply ignoring all primary and secondary sources in favor of pop-spirituality would have their personal opinion on what a deity believes and wants weigh as much as that of mythology, a collaborative, deeply cultural, symbolic narrative. Not only is it once again placing the self above the culture, often as an outsider to said culture, but it is also forcing that culture's heritage into a level of personhood it can't have. It's a familiar pattern, strongly resembling modern Christians ascribing all of their deeds to Jesus. God wants them to harass people in the street, Jesus told them to throw that rock at that queer person, God hates this and that, but God needs us to do x or y.
And there is another strong parallel between evangelism and paganism here, in much the same vein of evasion. When modern protestants do bad things, or experience hardships in life, these things are attributed to the Devil. Neopagans blame energy. Negative energy, energy blockages, curses, even - which are of course negative energy sent by other people. Funnily enough, I think evangelicals on average attribute more positive things to their God than neopagans do. This is completely anecdotal, but where I see quite a few Christians thanking god for pre-sliced fruit, refilling hairspray, or cured cancer, neopagans do not match their negativity-offloading with the inverse, and do attribute their victories to themselves. Be it because of 'mundane before magic', or because after the spell you do have to 'put the work in', or else it won't work.
Reactionary, but Not Radical
I've already posited that neopagan religious expressions exist in retaliation and response to Christian trauma several times in this post. I think that much is very obvious, but because it is a shared trauma and sensitive topic, it is not often discussed or examined among pagans. I do see that people are, often, quite frank about their personal Christian traumas, which I would admire were it not so often used as an excuse of some kind. I already went into the history of anti-Christian tendencies among occultists, and how it bled over into modern neopaganism, which is a western occultist stream by nature. I think the amount of religious trauma neopagans have on a personal level and how conversion to paganism is often a response to it speaks for itself, and doesn't need elaborating on. But, like any toxic relationship with a parental figure does, the expression of this trauma leads to some significant ironies that are worth exploring. Because in ignoring and perpetuating those ironies, much harm is being done.
Religion versus Spirituality
One very transparent rebellion against Christianity is the refusal that pagans show to treat pagan religions as 'religions', for many reasons. Most obvious is the unwillingness to identify as religious, as self-styled pagans commonly perpetuate the notion that there is a binary between 'religion' and 'atheism', and that any break away from those two concepts is what constitutes 'spirituality'. In order to distance themselves from what they hate, they claim that 'religion' necessitates the same kind of organization and hierarchy that they see in Christianity, and they thus are 'spiritual, but not religious'. They are blithely unaware of the fact that the dichotomy between 'spiritual' and 'religious' is very loaded with anti-indigenous sentiment, and western anthropology is even catching up with that. It is becoming increasingly clear to anthropologists that 'religion' cannot be easily defined, because at its most complete it is the entire sum of a given culture's way of understanding reality. If you were to want to truly encompass the scope of 'religion', science would be a religion, and some argue it is. The characterization of 'religion' as 'like Abrahamic religion' is Christo-centric, white-centric. And, inversely, the attribution of 'spirituality' to all religions that do not conform to the standards set by Christianity is a kind of pan-indigeneity. It flattens those religions into a monolith and looks directly past their unique forms of organization, structure and transmission - pagan religions included. It is also a heavily ethnicized word, treated as exotic and more arcane than 'religion'.
Further, people tend to define 'spirituality' as being less dogmatic, less strict, and more oriented around one person's journey unbound by organized culture or communal experience. There lies another tie to hyper-individualism, but also to entitlement. Because neopagans refuse to treat pagan religions as the religions they are, they refuse to treat them with respect and reverence. Spirituality is supposed to be less weighty, and despite the material at hand being endangered, deeply damaged, colonized heritage from a dead culture, despite that material representing the entirety of a peoples' way of existing, it is treated as though it can be picked up and discarded whenever. People do not treat their conversions to 'paganism' as conversion, but as a new hobby or aesthetic trend to be picked up. And the rest of their treatment, when it comes to study, honoring, practicing, decolonizing, doesn't suggest that it's anything other than a trendy hobby, a facet of identity consumption. Pagan religions are not treated as religions, despite being indigenous heritage from a long gone ancestral culture, often cultures whose descendants still live and breathe and practice what remains. They are products, commodities for personal satisfaction, for metaphysical decoration. They are an aesthetic adopted to convey something to other people, not enrich oneself. Nothing is safe from consumerism.
Consumerism, Materialism and Prosperity Gospel
For a more elaborate explanation of colonial cultural consumption please see my post about ethnic envy.
Consumerism presents itself both materially and not. Materialism does occur frequently in both religions, as both are very white, and whiteness is deeply imbued with capitalism. Some examples are very obvious, crystals and incense for neopagans, modest-chique clothing and white cars for evangelicals. But there is also the cultural consumerism, and the consumerism that's hidden behind a veil of piety, using materialism as tangible proof of one's devotion. Loaded bibles, fancy grimoires, altar decorations and cross necklaces. Everything about religion is commodified, so that it can either be consumed or displayed. It reaches such extremes that people have tons of altars strewn about their home, one for each deity they worship, which is one of my favorite pecularities about neopagan domestic religion.
But there is another highly capitalistic mindset that has infiltrated white religion, and it is prosperity theology. Prosperity theology is a common feature of evangelical Christianity, and it views the Bible as a contract between humanity and god, that in exchange for worship God will provide security, wealth and comfort. It has its direct presentations, like the parallel between evangelists thinking that poverty is punishment for insufficiency and neopagans claiming that you cannot be good at magic if you're ugly or poor - because surely if you were good at magic, if you did have enough of a soul and that inherent human intention-power, you would be pretty and rich. But more abstractly there is also the fact that most neopagans believe in egregore theory - the idea that the gods require human worship to sustain themselves and be able to exist. It feels equally contractual and transactional, and it's no wonder that there tends to be a sense of superiority about what you can offer the gods. It's no wonder that people expect returns from the gods for being a good worshipper and giving them objects, rather than upholding their rituals and values, or being a good person.
Enlightenment Influence and Performative Rationalism
See my post on performative rationalism for a more elaborate explanation.
Both the Campbell Movement of the Second Great Awakening and Western Occultism share significant enlightenment influences. Their descendant religions, as such, have syncretized themselves with rationalism and later scientism, to various extents. Some, especially the more traditional streams of white religion, still have distinctly irreconcilable differences between their beliefs and those of scientism. But many, especially more modern, Internet-founded streams of neo-religion, prioritize bending as much as possible to scientism. Where 'science' describes a method of gaining knowledge, which is not inherently harmful, scientism is a deeply colonial belief system and enjoys many perks under white supremacy. It is viewed by many as an objective form of knowing, and thus as the ultimate truth the universe has to offer, that all religions must defer to and accept, or they have failed morally. Belief systems that do not rely on science, do not accept scientism, et cetera are accused of being dangerous, primitive, backwards or downright unintelligent. If you, as a practitioner, irregardless of your culture, do not prioritize the conclusions of science over anything your culture teaches, you are seen as endangering yourself and others in your stupidity. Cry about decolonization they might, neopagans do not actually do all that much deconstructing, and as a result they still enjoy the privilege of not being oppressed and condemned for their beliefs, no matter how much they claim to be. They still fall neatly in step with the status quo, never questioning or challenging it.
Another, more obscure influence from Enlightenment thinking can be found in the Campbell movement, and is reflected in neopaganism and its founding witch-cult theory. Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Edward Herbert sought to "reduce religion to a set of essentials upon which all reasonable persons might agree." Campbell, who was a student of Locke's, went on to elaborate on this idea by striving to unify and restore apostolic Christianity, by removing all obstacles that could divide Christians. He believed that one such obstacle was the uncertainty around how to interpret the Bible, and believed that the only way it could be interpreted and the only way it was intended to be read, was as literal fact. White supremacy mirrors this unifying movement by creating a mythological past of united whiteness, and striving to create that by eradicating all cultural and philosophical differences that European people had. Wicca, in turn, emulated this by espousing the witch-cult theory that posed there had been a pan-European pagan religion that was being persecuted by the Christians. All of them have as a final goal to create a single, monolithic group of people that can bend the outsiders to their ways. Further, there is the problem of mythic literalism, which came to a head with Campbell's insistence on the Bible as a factual source, and still influences both anthropological interpretations of pagan mythologies as well as popular ones. People have not developed sufficient literary skills to be able to think of ways a mythology can be interpreted other than more or less literally. As a result of this, a bizarre balance is struck between ignoring the myths entirely, and condemning them by taking them literally.
Moralism and Moral Superiority
Mythic literalism adds a layer to the problem of divine agency previously discussed. On top of placing one's own responsibility on the gods to offload complicity or accountability, sometimes undue responsibility is also placed on the gods for actions that humans symbolically or culturally attribute to them. Because in Christianity, God is the superior moral arbiter, who decides what is good and what is bad in his system of objective good and evil, neopagans ascribe that same responsibility to pagan deities. They are forced into the role of perfect moral examples and expected to perform that duty well, and failure is reason for condemnation and abandonment. Consider the trend of pagans who refuse to 'work with' such figures as Zeus or Óðinn because, despite being placed in the hole that God left, they are not equipped by their mythologies to fulfil that role, and thus turn into a scapegoat for the hatred people feel for God. The lived experience of somebody who hasn't unpacked their evangelical trauma moving on to paganism will invariably be that pagan gods fail them just like God did, except this time it's not a preacher claiming God can do no evil while you assess his failures in the world, it's yourself placing a deity in that position, doomed to fail from the start.
There is no inquiry into the role of morality being depicted with nuance in mythology. In a world where moral realism is the predominant model, and most believe that good and evil are not just objective, but measurable, mythologies that dissect morality are useless. They fall flat, and are sneered at. The condescension neopagans have for their own adoptive mythologies doesn't seem to be a problem to them, even when it gets to such extremes as being directly contradictory to the religion they claim. Take Lokeanism, which often condemns Óðinn for 'what he did to Fenrir' among other such things. Not only is there no acknowledgment that the undisputed meaning of the myth is that if Fenrir hadn't been bound the world would no longer exist, but the entire myth and its meaning has a kind of dualism shoved down its throat that flattens the entire narrative, and turns the characters into caricatures. The morality depicted in the myths should be subject to discussion, undoubtedly, and some actions that the gods are depicted as performing in the original mythology should be condemned. That much is not a question. But there is a difference between discussing the material and foundation of your religion, and disagreeing with it completely, but still appropriating its aesthetics.
Further, ascribing a superior moral judgment to your god of choice is how alt-right Christianity came to be so fervently convinced that their will is God's will, and leftist neopagans are not immune to this same process. White leftism is a weak imitation of true intersectionality, and the white leftism most popular among neopagans has truly dangerous features, like the tendency toward extreme punitive justice. One cannot learn to deconstruct Christianity, nor colonialism, without deconstructing objective morality. One cannot understand or put into practice the restorative practices that pagan justice and morality promoted. Neopaganism likes to present itself as the religion of the woke, the leftist's solution to the binary between alt-right Christians and militant atheists. But it doesn't live up to how much it pats itself on the shoulder for its harmlessness.
White Woman's Spiritual Evolution: One to the Other, and Back Again
One fine day I found myself reading a TikTok comment I almost couldn't believe. It was on a video of somebody pretending to control fire, to which I hoped I would find something amusing in the replies. It was so revelatory to me I wrote it down in my journal, to revisit and think about, which is how I know exactly how it read.
tips i wanna give as an ex witch, very spiritually gifted. make sure to never do a spell on someone who is truly for god. i learned the hard way. i js wanna add i'm now a follower of Christ. god bless <3!!
Everything about it, honestly, is gold. From the 'ex witch' just as how 'ex christians' style themselves, to the casual statement of 'very spiritually gifted' which betrays the hallmark arrogance. I was soon to find out there was an entire community of self-styled 'ex witches' who found Jesus and are now practicing evangelists. The traffic goes both ways, with frequent exchanges and reverts. It's a traffic that reveals a new syncretism emerging, with ex-witch evangelicals still believing in the witch-cult theory or espousing that 'witches' are healers, or other fascinating blends of mythology. It should be no surprise: after all, they both serve near-identical social functions, acting in retaliation against each other while being almost perfect mirror images. When one fails, you can return to the other, until that fails again too. It plainly displays all the features here described. The lack of critical thinking and deconstruction, the relational ties and shared ancestry of both religions, the lack of respect and sense of risk, the lack of significance in conversion, the lack of effort being put in.
It's not just these extreme cases who reflect this broader pattern, however. Think of how many people enter the space in retaliation against Christianity, try that for a while, but eventually fall back on their interpretation of 'folk magic', which generally serves to blend the most comfortable aspects of each into something posing as a compromise, with not much reference to historic or living folk magic and its cosmology and beliefs. Or even how many people find other Abrahamic religions through paganism and end up converting to Judaism or Islam, or worse, fall down white supremacist new age pipelines, which neopaganism and witchcraft also share their roots with. And, ultimately, how most if not all pagans eventually leave the space by finding something that is easier to practice, scientism included, and falling back on it time and again for failure to connect with paganism.
Conclusion
A connection with paganism cannot be established through the pop spirituality, neopagan lens. It is a fundamental misrepresentation and misunderstanding of these religions, and until significantly more cultural literacy is injected into the zeitgeist, most people do not have the tools nor humility to engage with cultural heritage sensitively, especially not that of cultures that cannot act on their oppression. This post has effectively been created to serve as a sequel or elaboration to my essay titled Yes, I Hate Wicca. In that essay I did not manage to adequately delve into the great structural and systemic problems represented by contemporary witchcraft and neopaganism, especially as descended from Wicca.
Though based heavily in retaliation against Christendom, witchcraft, paganism, the craft, spirituality, whatever you want to call it, has proven to be nothing but a new interpretation of evangelism. It does not deviate from the accepted standard of white religious expression in any capacity other than those in which it can style itself as a victim and solution to Christianity. It shares all the same toxic and harmful traits as the religion it tries to rebel against, teaching adherents both that they are the center of the universe, deserving of all its goodness, as well as a helpless bystander within it. It replaces personal agency and interpersonal ecology with identity consumption and moralism. It is a tool for practitioners of whiteness to distance themselves from the whiteness whose harm they can recognize, the whiteness that's harmed them. But it inquires not into the whiteness that harms others, it does not acknowledge or appreciate the experience of those outside of their paradigm. It amounts to nothing but a perversion of ancient culture, for the sake of the perpetuation of a thousand year tradition of Christian colonization, and it has a long way to go towards decolonization - if ever it reaches it before 'paganism' is absorbed completely into the white mainstream.
