Panels! Workshops! Talks! Vendors! Community fun for science type witches!
Virtual All-Access live panels, workshops, talks, community events, and Discord server $25
Recorded Only panels, workshops, talks, and Discord server $15
Scholarships Available
We aim to bring together a community of Secular, Atheist/Agnostic, Skeptical, and Science (SASS) witches to meet, commune, work together, network, share and learn from each other in a virtual symposium.
This is a safer space where we respect magic and science equally, acknowledging that sometimes there is genuine beauty in the mysterious. This space welcomes, respects, and seeks to empower those who, like witches, are on the fringe and do not have mainstream support including but not limited to ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTQ+, sex workers, those with disabilities, those formerly incarcerated, those struggling with home/food/work insecurity.
Finally and importantly this space is to enjoy each others’ company, engage in riotous fun and laughter with kindness, curiosity, and SASSy creativity.
Check out our evolving schedule including our FREE Witch's Brew on August 6th to meet organizers and panelists to find out what it's all about.
Vendor Slots still available! This even includes your own Discord sever at the event.
And check out our neat merch! We have jars! Witches love Jars! We've got a fold up bag, We've got sticker and button pack and you can even get all of them together!
So, what do you actually do as an agnostic secular witch?
(here’s and draft of expert from the zine I’m working on about my personal practice of witchcraft)
I’ve joked that my personal practice of witchcraft looks like a cottage or hearth witch got set loose in a punk house of a Philosophy major drop-out who read too many Discworld books.
However, that statement doesn’t mean much to you if you don’t know what a cottage or hearth witch is, some aspects of Philosophy, or the glory of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld witches’ concept of “headology”.
A lot of what I do falls into the category of hearth witch or cottage witchcraft, a style of witchcraft that focuses on the home. This includes making the home a refuge; a safe place. I do a lot of work with protection, prosperity, and just fostering a space for creativity, comfort, and safety to all that enter my home.
Some of the things I do include setting wards and boundaries in my home and property, growing herbs and plants to be used in magical workings, candle spells, building charms, making jar spells, kitchen witchery in cooking and eating food to aid in a desired outcome. I use tarot cards and other aspects of divination not so much to tell the future, but as a tool for decision making or to spot things I should pay more attention. However, I do all of this through my own filter of experiences as a vegan DIY punk. This means making magic through trial and error or building charms from things I find in free boxes, or even weeds and trash I find on the street.
I draw a lot from folk magic traditions using herbs and stones and symbols through sympathetic magic, which is concept coined by James George Frazier in the Golden Bough (1889) to describe existing magical workings he observed that operate based on correspondences or imitations to gain specific outcomes: like produces or attracts like. This could be something like using the shape of a heart to represent a heart, or creating poppets to represent yourself, or certain colors like green in plants to represent growth or prosperity. A lot of magical correspondences are based on this: What does a plant look like? How does it grow? Does it have medicinal properties? If so, what?
I draw from my Philosophy background and that mixes with folk magic in ways that I use Jungian archetypes in a similar way as correspondences to represent personal things that correspond to universals, which is pretty much a thread that I feel has run through all my zines, actually: making specifics correspond to universals.
I’ve always been a sucker for patterns and Jungian Synchronicity, which is the experience of two or more causally related things or things that are unlikely to occur by chance, yet are experienced occurring together in a meaningful way. Basically stating that you draw the conclusion, it’s not “the universe trying to tell you something”, but rather you inferring something from the experience that is meaningful to you. So when you see 11:11 on the clock, or cars that are the same as yours after you buy one, or when your phone rings and it was your friend you were about to call. The meanings are subjective and you get to decipher the significance and find your own value in the experience.
Another aspect of my practice is what I like to call “soft animism”. Animism being the idea that all things from plants, animals, rocks, natural phenomenon, or even places have a soul. I wouldn’t go so far as things having souls (as I’m a bit iffy on the idea of the soul to begin with), but I do like the Aristotelian concept of essence. The idea that each thing has a thing that makes it uniquely that thing, which is incredibly vague, I know, but that’s just how I think about. Collecting these things, and sometimes asking these things if they wanna come along for an adventure, to aid you in a task helps nudge that task along to your desired outcome.
One of the final aspects of my witchcraft practice is chaos magic. Which, when I try to explain, just looks like a pile of mashed potatoes, just sort of sitting there all amorphous and abstract. I mentioned this problem online but people just confirmed that yes, chaos magic does indeed look just like a pile of mashed potatoes, and then suggested I write a zine about potato magic. Chaotes, what some folks who practice chaos magic call themselves, are great! They can be goofy and at the same time way too serious, but they get shit done. I revere them as I revere buddhists, but neither of those paths could ever be completely me. It’s kind of a strange comparison, sorry, but it seems to make sense in my head.
Chaos magic is something I feel I understand intuitively, like how I understand punk, which is another concept I have a hard time pinning down to a definition. Chaos magic is another highly unique individualized practice with no core set of rules. Chaos magic uses the concept of belief more as a tool than an obligation. Belief is not objective. Belief is an active and malleable force and not a “thing we have faith in” when it comes to creating outcomes. All things are possible, some things are more possible than others. Magic is like the lottery, some things increase your chances from 1 in a million to 1 in 10,000. There are patterns and we can alter those patterns to manifest things. Chaos magic is pragmatic in its use of belief and that belief is flexible. When discussing chaos magic the idea of “paradigm shifting” is often mentioned. Paradigms, as well as beliefs, are modes of thinking and perceiving and these things are malleable in chaos magic.
The way this manifests in my practice is synthesized by my study in other areas of witchcraft through different techniques and structures. To see the structure, to break it down to component parts and build it back up into something that works for me. I talk of spell building, not casting. Some spells are built over years or in seconds and released into the world to nudge things in my favor. I could work with some of the techniques I discussed above or drop those into techno-witchcraft, plant based magic, pop culture magic, personal correspondences, or making shit up with garbage I found on the street. Chaos magic gives me the ability to move between systems or to smash them together. It allows me to work in the absurd, because it is my absurd.
“Headology”, is a sort of psychology as practiced by the fictional Ramtops witches from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. It sort of dovetails into that idea of belief as a tool. Our perceptions create our reality. What people believe is what is real to them. This makes subjective believe an important tool in witchcraft.
With all that in mind, I really do love the classic witch aesthetic. The wise women that lives in the cottage in the woods with a garden of poisonous plants. I love the earthy look and feel of raw wood and chests filled with artifacts. Trinket boxes and charms and candles dripping wax. I love smoke billowing from an incense burner and shelves filled with jars of dried herbs and oils. I love altars and shrines made ready for magical working covered in crystals. I’ve also gotten into dark mori fashion which is sort of dark layered clothing that leads into that aesthetic. I love it so much, I’ve always loved it but now I’ve found a way to bring it all together, luckily by mostly shopping at thrift stores.
Does the aesthetic really aid in my magic? sort of. It’s part of that soft animism thing where I surround myself with things that wanted to come along for the adventure and make me feel I can accomplish the goals I set. In my practice, I set the values of what is important and what is not. Or maybe I just like acorns, and candles, and jars filled with things, so what?
I don't usually take not of losing followers, but when there are only a few over 500 it's pretty obvious. I lost 4 of 5 followers after posting Punk Witches for Abortion pic. Ha!
I had a witchy dream last night, haven't had one one those in awhile. In the dream my friend J had asked me to read tarot cards for him. his daughter and one of her friends were bugging us but he was telling me about how how he only knew a few cards from something called The Compost Tarot and one of the suits was "garbage bags"*
Then I started reading the cards and they were pastel and had fairies on them and I'm not a fan of pastels or fairies. The cards had cut out in certain parts of them that looked like lace and when you read the cards with one crossing the other. Sort of like the transparent tarot, but cooler because you only saw the full picture when the cards were crossed.
Then I was at a shop with my family and looking at necklaces of crystal points. One was amethyst with a cap and a small quartz point sort of attached at the bail. The small one was really similar to quartz point earrings I had in jr. high. The other two that I was trying to decide between were double terminated amethysts with open silver caps and one had a cabochan of moonstone and the other was peridot.
I know that dreams that are not your own are kinda boring but I just wanted to write that down and now I want to search for my dream necklace. I hate it when I have dreams that I wake up from and can't shake, or maybe I actually like it. The problem is that I should be getting more work done but I'm searching websites to find my dream crystal and am having no luck!
*When I woke up I thought it would be cooler if it was The Dumpster Tarot and the suits were bagels (earth/pentacles) pallets (fire/wands) broken bottles (water/cups) and then I couldn't think what would represent air/swords, maybe scissors or box cutters?
