Initiated: Memoir of a Witch

Empathy is a spell that creates intimacy and connection, a free exchange of information. Protection spells are sometimes necessary, but their objective is to keep things out. Create peace, and protection becomes less necessary.

Witches use magic to compost suffering into something nourishing, something that brings the world around us to life.

Be on good terms with the other beings in your environment. When you speak sharply to a person, you make them your enemy. Kindness is a powerful ward and can help you learn many secrets.

As soon as I walked in, he offered me the job. After pounding the pavement all day and finally getting a job, I thought to myself, We make our own luck.

She was rediscovering her roots as a witch. But she always saw it as a practice of devotion. Witchcraft wasn’t a means to become rich or attract a lover; it was a way to honor what was sacred in her life: to comfort the sick, empower the weak. It was a means of understanding the nature of reality.

We tend to think of magic as hair-of-bat potions and anointed candles, when in reality magic is a shift in perception that allows us to open up new worlds, new possibilities for our lives. It wasn’t that other people’s beliefs changed me as a child; it was that suddenly, their encouragement made me believe in myself. That belief in myself changed me so profoundly it rewired my brain. Magic works.

But when we’re encouraged to be rational, often we’re really being encouraged to be more individualistic. We’re being encouraged to see ourselves as separate and in competition with others. But magic is about connection, collaboration, magic is a process of bringing things together. Ultimately, magic is about love.

Life itself initiates each of us according to our own peculiar stories. Our stories lead us toward our purpose in this world. Each initiation strips something away and gives us a gift. If we want to meet our full form, we are obligated to give that gift to the world. I

The fact that we are so often convinced that our misery is our own fault, and not the direct consequence of deliberate political and social oppression, is one of the greatest examples of mind control magic the world has ever seen.

Though magic does often bring us the things we desire, satisfying our cravings is not magic’s primary purpose. Magic connects people to their roots, to their spiritual ancestors and allies, to the hundreds of thousands of beings who have gone before them experiencing similar struggles. A creative act, magic brings richness to your life. When you’re cold and alone, your chants might be all you have to keep you alive. Even when it feels like all of civilization has conspired in its effort to take it from you, magic gives you hope, magic gives you pleasure, and most importantly, magic helps you remember you have power, even if you can’t see a way to use it yet. The fact that magic connects people to their power is the main reason most systems of oppression attempt to ban it.

We reject capitalism because it is abusive. Because it’s a system that argues: as long as the oligarchy is profiting, no atrocity is too grave, no violation too gross. Slavery, genocide, atomic war, swamps drained, forests burned, animals brought to extinction. Nothing is out of bounds and there are always plenty of reasons why it has to be this way… free market, forked tongue.

Again and again, our goddesses and heroines travel to the underworld. Again and again, we descend in our own lives. Why do we tell this story over and over again? The underworld is where we confront the wounded, exiled pieces of ourselves. The pieces we'd forgotten, hidden, or didn't want to see in the first place.

The Threefold Law of witchcraft is less a description of a universal truth and more a statement of intention: a commitment to living AS IF your actions will come back to you. A commitment to holding your own pain and transmuting it into something that leaves the world better than you found it. A witch is an agent; with her community, she takes responsibility for her own pain, her own experience, we take responsibility together. Witches use magic to compost suffering into something nourishing, something that brings the world around us to life

Our knowledge is held not in a computer chip but in the living, thinking organism of the planet, in the bodies of plants and animals and stones and roots and rain. When “Man,” colonizer and castle-dweller, enters the swamp, he dies. But the swamp teems with life. A watery world, navigable only by boat, the shores of the swamp are constantly shifting with the tides. Our swamp represents the unconscious, the lizard brain, the root system that expands infinitely beneath the surface of the water. It’s the undifferentiated place from which all forms emerge.

Through my wounds I can find my strength and my power. I can touch ancient places. My wounds may not come to me of my own volition, but they appear like bullet holes in the wall guarding my internal garden of Eden. I am not grateful for my wounds, but I am grateful for the power that has come seeping into my world through them.

I recommend no one ever say, “I will do X, or die trying.” The Universe will take your maxim as a challenge. It will delight in testing to see just how serious you really are. And if you keep telling yourself, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” your trials will never end.

This is what magic is: singing in caves, lighting candles, meditating in groves of trees, taking care of each other. Rituals heal us because they honor our experiences; they help us to remember that the earth, and our lives, are sacred. And in fact, by doing these rituals, we make them sacred. We consecrate them.

That’s the criticism: people turn to the occult because they either (a) don’t want to deal with the real horrors of the world and have the privilege of turning away from it, unlike the oppressed who have no choice but to face reality, or (b) are losers who can’t hack it in industrialized civilization and so choose to play Dungeons & Dragons instead. Western post-Enlightenment civilization defines itself as being rationalist and therefore against magic, but all cultures have magical practices, including our own. Christianity is full of magical practices, and the language of economics is permeated by spirits and invisible hands. Magic is everywhere; it’s just that the central power figures of a culture get to determine whose magic is considered “real” and whose is just considered embarrassing. Further, magic is not just a practice of the privileged; otherwise only the privileged would practice it, and that just isn’t the case, as you can see by visiting the fetish markets of Togo, the witch markets of Brazil, or any botanica in Los Angeles.

Art history in the West forked in the 1800s, splitting into Romanticism and Realism. Realists depict “reality as it is,” with its economic dialectics, materialism, and class struggle. It deals in facts, in science, in things we can prove; it is not ecstatic but pragmatic, political. Realism tells the stories of real people, the factory worker, the industrialist architect, the provincial housewife having an affair. Not fairies, not women who talk to spirits, certainly not witches. The Romantics, on the other hand, turned away from the modern world as a reaction to the ugliness and brutality of the Industrial Revolution. Retreating into the world of folk and fairy tales, into the exotic, “the Oriental”; the Romantics lived in an opium den of avoidance.

One purpose of magic is to help release us from our family’s karmic bondage.

In our travels through the underworld, witches become map makers. Culture, art, the mystery religions, these systems of symbols are maps. Somebody has to create them. Our musicians and healers, poets and witches, travel through the corridors of the underworld by torchlight. We were not wrong to descend into these caves, but for our own sakes, for the peace of mind of those we love and for the sake of the planet, we who travel there must not get lost. We can join our lights together and return to the world. We can use our symbols, our stories, our mystical methodologies to forge connections with each other in these underground spaces. Symbols and stories order our world; they create the narratives by which we live. It matters whose stories get told; it matters how we tell them. Imagination matters. Our connections to one another matter, as does the pleasure we take in our experience. Witches stand in solidarity with those already doing this work. Because people have been doing this work since humans first appeared on the surface of the earth. Now we listen to them, we participate, we use techniques of the healer, the poet, the artist, the scholar, the cunning folk, the green men, and the medicine women to heal ourselves and care for our wounded world.