Simplify, Simplify: Witchcraft and Consumerism, Part One
The commodification of witchcraft has left the field at large with a lot of issues-- cultural appropriation and exploitation of various persons in the sourcing of crystals and other materia are some of the most notable. It would be a fool's effort to try and sum up all the problems with the industry in one post, so for now, I'll just talk about the one that drives me up the wall the most-- the oversimplification and watering down of various concepts in witchcraft.
Now, I'm coming at this from a folkloric/traditional witchcraft perspective, so what I say may not apply to your personal methodology. As it is with any tirade, YMMV; take what's useful, leave the rest.
Long post under the cut :)
People who write witchcraft books for mass consumption (so, not like Three Hands Press, I'm talking about your standard Barnes and Noble book) are very invested in making their writing accessible to as many people as possible. Often, that means cutting out materials that may put people off of reading-- the inclusion of the devil, for example. But in the process, the pendulum swings completely in the other direction, and the book becomes less about a personal practice and more about misrepresenting historical fact.
Saying that the devil is not a part of your practice is all well and good.
Saying that the devil was never a part of anybody's practice, through the entirety of history, is both an oversimplification and inaccurate. For many people in the past (and many today), it's an important part of their craft.
Another example of this is the oft-used device of the "correspondence list." Humans like to categorize things and put them in boxes. This, of course, falls apart when you realize that plants, like all other things, are complicated. Even with a clean system of planetary categorization, one planet could fall under multiple categories-- dandelions, for instance, being both Solar and Saturnian in appearance, growing habits and occult usage. And this is all assuming that the people who came up with that method of categorization were correct in a testable way! People make up correspondences out of whole cloth all the time (see also: the wild discrepancy between medieval crystal uses and post-New Age crystal uses).
But nobody wants to read a wall of text about any of that, so all dandelion ends up getting is a little box in a spreadsheet that reads "purification, protection, wishes."
Or how about this? I've seen at least a few books (and blogs, for that matter) that say that the "consorting with spirits" part of witchcraft is optional. And that may be true if one happens to be doing Chaos Magic or a similar mode of practice. But if one tries to apply that to folkloric witchcraft, that just turns into a dead end. Spirits and spirit work are pretty integral to that facet of witchcraft. The author does not bother, in most cases, to make the distinction, and often puts multiple styles of witchcraft and/or magic usage into a single umbrella category.
All of these examples stem from the same root issue-- the author wanting to simplify a complex concept, or sanitize it, or otherwise make it suitable for mass consumption. But in the process, the information that they're trying to convey becomes so bowdlerized that its occult functionality is drastically reduced. Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to care about accessibility for your readers, nor am I saying every witchcraft book needs to be super academic and hard to read. What I am saying is that simplified material becomes limiting when you want to start exploring the concepts presented in greater complexity or use them as jumping-off points to do your own research.
Watered down information doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help them build their own practice, it doesn't help them research, and it definitely doesn't help them when they actually want to go do some magic. What is required, instead, is to read with a critical eye, recognize when something requires a more in-depth exploration, and not to take what one reads in any book at face value.
Listen, I've always loved the UK, the culture and the more progressive and multicultural aspects of it. But let's not pull the wool over our own eyes here: it is, to this day, a profoundly classist society with the biggest colonial past. Where despicable men like Johnson can do their worst basically unopposed, because they're rich and went to an elite school.
There's no actual separation of church and state (the monarch is the head of the Anglican Church) and the Upper House (The House of Lords) is made entirely of unelected people.
Plus, the political game is swamped in this illusion of objectivity, à la "they're all the same" promoted by the British press, where you don't talk about political ideas anymore and instead you work on character assassination of the opposing political leader. (Murdoch's ghoulish paparazzi taught you this).
Plus, the tokenism of particular interest groups is more important than having a movement who looks for solutions to the very real problems you guys have to face.
And you discourage young people to step up, because when they show even a bit of passion more than you like, you immediately accuse them of being a "cult". That's very Tory of you, I must say. You're the reasonable ones at all times, aren't you? Even in a debacle like this, that's the only thing you care about.
I don't know where I was going with this. It's not like there's someone out there who would listen to me, right? It's just that I see you going over the edge of a cliff, you're collectively going for a stroll to Beachy Head and I can't do anything to stop you.
If I'm going to snap, I want to snap into something akin to Donald Duck. Because really, nothing—and I mean nothing—is scarier than how how Donald snapped and what he did when he became angry.
