Why Witchcraft Isn't Going Anywhere
And the Merit that Entails
When I cast feelers here and on social media about people’s individual Witchcraft practices, I received no response. It turns out there’s very good reason for that, and much is revealed by teasing it out.
There are two essential features of contemporary Witchcraft:
1.) It is deliberately against authoritative organization &
2.) It is seamlessly interwoven with Feminism and Gender Equity activism.
Both of these features give a sense of why any individual Witches would not want to engage with a writer like myself, a roughly cis-male hetero-ish writer with a penchant for Aristotelian rhetoric. No practicing Witch needs their ritual mansplained, nor do they need or even seek mainstream acceptance.
To put a very fine point on it, here’s a taste of Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton, a primer on the new “Remixed” religious culture of secular “Nones”:
This fits in with a larger historical narrative that has been in play since at least the 70s, when Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology created a sense of suspicion among feminists that some fields of science were tending toward “Biological Essentialism” in the way that they approached themes of sex and gender. But the roots of the narrative go back centuries before that.
The story goes like this: before modern developments in medicine, the bulk of “healing” was done by wise-people known as witches. They were foragers of herbs, midwives of childbirth, and shamanic consultants who spent actual time listening to and working with the individuals they sought to treat. Witches were both male and female but, as the Enlightenment took hold (which is at least as much a symptom of Patriarchal power structures in the church — the church having had way more influence on modern Science than is generally acknowledged) witches began to be more and more characterized as female.
As medicine became more and more institutionalized, there was more and more motivation to attempt to depict practitioners of folk medicine as crazies, and as Puritanism became more and more the religious flavor de jour, these practitioners were portrayed more and more in demonic terms.1
So, fast forward a few hundies and you see why a yoga-empowered class of educated women have opted to take their Spiritualities into their own hands (as well as their health and their politics). While it might be easy to think of Modern Witchcraft as a bourgeois fad a bit too ideologically diffuse and easily commodifiable, that alleged weakness is also its strength. To whatever degree an individual “believes” (gives their heart and faith to) things like spells and hexes, or the magical properties of rare gems, the real merit of the faith is individual women’s devotion to an embodied experience of the cosmos, and all that entails.
The endeavor steps into the realm of Virtue Ethics when one sees that the prime motivation of many of these Sapiens is Justice. They’re sick of seeing their world exploited by capital venture that robs the earth of the majesty that Source has bestowed to it. (Even mosquitoes are important as food stuffs to various birds, etc. And, as Ani DiFranco once put it: “I just happen to like apples, and I’m not afraid of snakes.”2
Thanks to everyone for tolerating my somewhat cavalier goings-on this weekend. I certainly don’t want to use this platform as a site to vent. I appreciate your support, and aim to continue to provide you with quality content.
Stay tuned for Friday, when I’ll be putting up an interview with Richard Mirabella, whose novel Brother & Sister Enter the Forest we reviewed in March. The interview promises to be fruitful.
If you have reading recommendations / authors you’d like to see interviewed, please feel free to comment!
It’s worth noting here that even the idea of the Demonic is itself a malicious development in Christian thought. In the Greco-Roman world all variety of spirits and Daimonia were considered to be a part of the pantheon. Indeed the Eudaimonia of the Aristotelians, Stoics, and (neo)Platonists involved developing a relationship with your good Daimon, similar to a guardian angel. It was only after Constantine, when it became public dictum that Christ was the One True Way, that these spirits began to become exclusively characterized as being evil.
“Adam and Eve.” Ani DiFranco. Dilate. Righteous Babe. 1996.