And if you’ve been paying attention the last six months, it’s not surprising. Scam artists using Amazon as a vehicle to sell AI generated books is not just happening in the witchcraft community. Romance writers report a huge amount of AI slop entering the genre, and the fear of mistakenly publishing an AI novel has become so serious at major houses they are going so far as to cancel highly anticipated novels on the suspicion AI has been used.

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But Amazon’s problem with counterfeits extends way beyond AI generated books. The past year or so I’ve become a great fan of Korean beauty products, and the first lesson that I learned as I started researching products was that buying from Amazon was a no-go. Korean Customs & Trade reported that up to 35% of transactions for K-Beauty products on unauthorized platforms (i.e. sales platforms that do not have a specific authorization from the seller to market the product) were counterfeit. They estimated that up to 1 in 5 purchases of a K-Beauty product was “high risk,” i.e. likely to be counterfeit. Unless you research the specific Amazon seller offering the product, you don’t know if they are an authorized seller of your fave K Beauty brand.

In many cases even if the seller IS authorized, because they use Amazon as their fulfillment engine, their legit product might get mixed with counterfeit product in drop ship bins at the warehouse because the packaging has the same barcode. What that means is that as the end user, you have no idea what’s in that box Amazon just dumped at your door. You can order from a legit listing on Amazon and still get fake product.

The Korean beauty industry and the Korean government have become so concerned the industry has started offering authentication apps that will allow you to scan the product for a special, hard to photocopy holographic tag, that will allow you to verify that it is an authentic product from the factory. Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) even launched a major campaign in Korea in July 2026 that included a major pop-up in a hip neighborhood in Seoul to draw attention to the issue.

And as I look at the advice that I’ve gotten about how to make sure I’m getting authentic Korean skincare and beauty products, I find there are some lessons that as witches we can extrapolate and implement to protect ourselves from the AI slop that is being peddled to seekers on Amazon, and on social media platforms.

Figure Out Who’s Behind the Brand

If you were on social media in 2025 and your algorithm had even the slightest inclination towards K-Beauty, you probably saw reel upon reel from a makeup brand called Smooche, that promised to deliver Korean beauty color matching technology in a stick foundation that cost less than $40. The ads played heavily on the idea that Korean women had access to to this product for years, and looked so much better and younger than you because of it. Usually the story was, “I went to Korea to visit with my relative and she thought I looked old, and told me I should use this product to make me look younger.”

The problem? Smooche isn’t a Korean brand. It’s made in West Hollywood. There are multiple consumer complaints that the product doesn’t do what it says it does. If you go onto real K-beauty sites in Korea, they have never heard of the stuff. The whole thing is a scam. The hype is produced with huge marketing spends to purchase ads, advertorials, paid reviews and content creator recommendations. All of it is fake.

This is highly analogous to a trend that you see a lot in witchy publishing circles today. Noted author Morgan Daimler has built the case against “Mari Silva,” who is listed as an author on literally more than 500 book titles on witchcraft and spirituality, and who has zero footprint in the offline world. “Mari Silva” is a pen name used to market AI generated books.

I have found similar authors on an imprint called Hentopan Publishing -- occult authors with multiple books, all with vague credentials, a single, obviously doctored photo and absolutely ZERO footprint in the offline world. Let’s look at Hentopan author Bridget Bishop. She has quite a few publications on Amazon, and her bio claims that she’s been teaching witchcraft in the Pacific Northwest for more than 15 years.

And yet there is not a single instance that I can find online of her teaching at a public workshop of any kind. There are no photos of her doing book fairs or book signings. No podcast interviews. One would think that an author of multiple books would be promoting those books offline. But there’s absolutely NOTHING. In many ways the folks behind her books were cagey. Bridget Bishop is actually the name of a famous witch who was hanged as part of the Salem witch trials, so there are many, many entires and photos about THAT Bridget Bishop, who died in the 17th Century and whose identity is often played in reenactments of the Salem Witch Trials.

But there is absolutely nothing from “Bridget Bishop” who supposedly wrote 20+ books on witchcraft in the last six years and has been teaching for more than 15 years except a single, obviously doctored photo on the back of her book. Honestly, if someone can verify to me that she’s a real person who really wrote these books, I am all ears and will happily publicly admit to being wrong. Until then, I’m going to hold all of her work and anything on Hentopan Publishing as being highly suspect and likely AI slop.

Hentopan itself has only a Facebook page and a website. The website lists no editorial staff, no real information about itself. Can you imagine being a publisher of legitimate occult books by legitimate occult authors and NOT trying to promote them online? I call bullshit.

It’s likewise completely nonsensiscal that a reputable teacher and author of so many books should have zero evidence of her offline existence. Not a blog or website. No socials. No classes offered online or at local bookstores. Nothing. Most authors, to sell their books, do all in thier power to get themselves and their words in front of people. They do book signings, they do social media, they do classes, public speaking.

The horrifying thing? “Bridget Bishop” has the #41 witchcraft title on Amazon.

You should know who’s writing the book you’re buying or reading. A few google searches and common sense questions asked before you hit “Buy Now” is important to know if the product you’re purchasing is what it says it is. Look for evidence of offline existence -- real life people attending real world events or doing things that you can attend in real time.

Buy Direct When You Can

My favorite K-Beauty product is the cushion foundation from legendary Korean makeup artist Jung Saem Mool. I won’t go into all the reasons I love it, but I use it every single day. When I first took it into my head to purchase the product I got a little bit relentless about making sure I was buying directly from the JSM Beauty website, because I was aware of the counterfeit problem. There are some retailers who are considered trusted resellers of Korean brands in the US, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to go straight to the source.

Buying directly has served me well. There are products available on the JSM Beauty site that are not available anyplace else. And I’ve become such a known quantity (or addict, depending on your POV) that when I get shipments they come with free goodies. My last box had about $150 worth of moisturizing beauty masks, purely as a thank you for being a loyal customer.

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We need to do the same with witchcraft books and classes and other products. Where possible, buy directly from the witchy creator’s website. Many of the most well-known authors will sell their books direct from their website. This has the added benefit of maximizing the take-home pay the author is getting for their work. When a book is sold in a bookstore, the store takes a cut, the publisher takes a cut, and there is a nominal amount left over for the author. If the author sells direct, they functionally get to keep the amount that ordinarily would go to the reseller. It also means that you’ll usually have the opportunity to sign up for alerts and newsletters from the author that will often give you inside access to special events, signings, and first access to new publications.

If You Can’t Buy Direct, Buy from Trusted Sellers

The more that you research how to buy authentic K-Beauty in the United States, the name you’ll hear over and over is Olive Young. You can purchase from the TikTok shop, from Amazon, Temu, SHEIN, from any of many retailers online, but the only one that seems to have the trust of the Korean government and the K-Beauty industry itself is Olive Young. There are other retailers who are considered authorized resellers, and you can go to a retailer’s site to determine who is and is not an authorized seller, but Olive Young is considered the gold standard for authenticity.

In the witchy publishing community, there are trusted sellers -- the major book publishers like Llewellyn, like Crossed Crow, Weiser, Hay House, and Moon books. There may be more. But in the end, buying direct from a reputable publisher’s website is another way to make sure that you are getting a good product. These are companies that have editorial staff and safeguards in place, and who contractually bind their authors to NOT use AI without disclosure in their work. These publishers show up at conferences, have social media accounts, and make themselves a presence in the witchcraft community.

When you’re looking to buy a book, take a look at who the publisher is. If it’s NOT published by a well-known, reputable publisher, you’re going to have to do a lot more homework to verify whether the book is made by a real person. Self-publishing is now a very significant red flag. I know this is deeply unfair to the many witches who self-publish their work for very legitimate reasons. I have a lot of friends who have self-published books. They are very real, and their books are worth buying. But in an age where AI slop has become a deluge, I can no longer recommend an independently published book without a significant verification process for the author.

If You Find You Have a Fake, Call It Out

The Korean government has been very proactive about protecting its reputation as a source for cutting edge, high-quality beauty products. They’re not only tracking instances of counterfeits, but they are actively engaging companies and consumers to make sure that people are aware of what to look for, and who to avoid. They know that if K-Beauty is to remain the sine qua non of skincare and beauty trends, if all of the investment that companies make into new ingredients and technologies is going to remain the foundation of their success, they must not let their identity be diluted with fakes.

Consequently, KIPO created a whole public awareness campaign called “K-Brand Guardian Angels,” complete with a mascot and apps to help consumers authenticate products. K-beauty advocates are constantly publishing information about how to spot fakes, and what to do when you get a fake, including how to get your money back. They recognize that they need to protect their domination of the marketplace by actively combatting the scam artists who are trying to profit off the reputation of K-beauty.

It’s time for witches to get loud about this. It’s time for us to protect the integrity of our practice. By this I DO NOT mean reading for filth every witchcraft account on TikTok that dares to disagree with us or promote a bit of Craft we don’t think is valid. THere’s too much of that kind of acrimony on social media already. I mean we need to start giving flowers to the authentic teachers among us. We need to start empowering new seekers of Craft with the tools to understand what’s real and what’s fake.

The thing that is most protective against AI scams is to build community offline, especially when it comes to teaching new witches. The more we can teach and learn person-to-person, the more we build discernment that allows us to combat fakery.

There is, of course, one important difference between the witchcraft community and the K-beauty industry -- we are diverse and embrace a wide range of identities as magical practitioners who mostly just want to be left in peace to practice their brand of magic without being preyed upon. We are not trying to create a single “brand identity” or acheive dominance in a marketplace. Witches are not trying to corner the market or rule the world. And that makes it all the more important that we share information and cultivate community to protect ourselves. Too much division, and we are way too easy to conquer.

Blessed be, witches. And stay safe from fakes.

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Which brings me to today’s misunderstood tarot card: The Four of Cups.

The Four of Cups is one of those cards that when it appears in a spread, the reader’s eyebrow goes up. Because something has just taken a left turn.

The image in the Waite Coleman Smith (WCS) deck shows a young man who is seated cross-legged at the base of a tree, his gaze downcast, his arms folded. Before him are three cups in a row. A disembodied hand reaches from a cloud, from nowhere, offering a fourth cup, but the man does not acknowledge it.

The interpretation that was originally published with the WCS deck reads as follows: Weariness, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein. This is also a card of blended pleasure.

For most people looking at the card and interpreting it, the focus is on that new cup, the one that’s being offered out of nowhere, a miracle that hearkens back to the Ace of Cups. Why isn’t the young man more excited about that new cup? I mean, don’t we all yearn for the kind of new opportunities that typically follow the Aces? Clearly he is rejecting that new opportunity represented by the fourth cup.

Everything about the man’s stance suggests a lack of openness -- his arms are crossed, his gaze is downcast, his legs are crossed. Much like the Four of Pentacles, there is absolutely nothing about this young man that is open to receive. He is closed for business. It does not matter that there is a gift being offered by the Universe, he’s not having it.

And here’s where unpacking the card a little further reveals more meaning. The fours in tarot are the first spot in the arc of the numbered cards where the energy in each of the suits stops going forward or expanding. The fours are the exploration of what happens when the energies of each of the suits is stalled. In the case of the Four of Swords, we see the sanctuary of the quieted mind. With the Four of Wands we see that the flow of energy is stopped by a commitment, a marriage.

But in the case of the Four of Cups, we aren’t seeing something restful like sanctuary or celebratory like a wedding. Because creativity and feeling, the realm from where the energy of the Cups suit originates, doesn’t do particularly well when it’s not in motion. Flow is deeply important to the suit of Cups. Impede that flow and things become sour rather quickly.

That’s probably why the WCS description of the Four of Cups is so fixated on “imaginary vexations” or joy that has been sullied with other concerns. The natural flow of good feeling and celebration that was suffused in the three of cups is disrupted, and so the mood has changed from celebration to frustration.

But is it really frustration, or is it something else? You see, the figure in the card isn’t engaged with the new, cup being shoved at him by the invisible hand. He is deeply preoccupied with the three cups that are lined up in front of him in the grass. The disruption of flow isn’t because he is actively rejecting the new cup, it’s because he can’t seem to disengage from the other three cups long enough to realize there is anything new to take in.

Perhaps what we’re seeing here isn’t a young man who is inconsolable because he is unhappy with what’s on offer, but someone who is so complacent with what he has that he’s almost unaware that there are more options available to him. This isn’t about dissatisfaction or restlessness. It’s about when someone stubbornly believes that all that they know is all they need to know, and all they have is all they ever need to have.

So what does that mean from a divination perspective? When this card shows up, what does it really mean? The Four of Cups urges you to look for the places in your life where you’re not moving, where your feelings seem stagnant, where complacency has set in.

The deceptive thing about complacency is that it isn’t angry. Someone who’s complacent isnt in any state of urgency about where they are and what they are doing. They are actually satisfied with where they are. They are not looking for anything more or different. They may not be completely happy with what they have or where they are, but they have given up seeking anything else. It’s a form of emotional stasis, which makes it way more of an appropriate way to look at the Four of Cups than the idea of someone who is weary, disgusted or unable to find consolation. Those kinds of disruptive feelings are better suited to the fives, not the fours.

In the end, the Four of Cups indicates a moment where a person is stalled emotionally. They are in an environment where they believe that they are satisfied. They aren’t actually looking for anything to disrupt their current state of being. They believe that what they are and what they have and most importantly, what they feel is all they need. And yet, they are missing out, because there is more on offer, and they probably don’t even realize it. If they do realize it, then they are in denial, and refusing to see that which is right in front of them.

When you see it in a spread, you don’t necessarily need to look for hard emotions. In fact, you’ll want to look more at complacency, at a place where you have cut yourself off from strong feelings and heavy emotional demands. It’s time to shake things up.

Blessed be, witches.

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It launched a conversation about wearing a crown.

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Now, I have an interesting perspective on wearing a crown, because I spent a good two decades of my life participating in a hobby where people wore crowns on the regular: the Society for Creative Anachronism, a.k.a. The SCA. The short explanation of the SCA is that it was an Arthurian themed birthday party that over the course of 50 years grew into an international living history recreation organization that has more than 30,000 members worldwide, and holds events in 19 different regions (called Kingdoms) that span five continents. The biggest event on the SCA calendar, Pennsic, is actually happening right now on a former dairy farm in Western Pennsylvania. It’s an inter-kingdom war event that involves more than 10,000 people camping for more than two weeks, and includes a week of martial combat events that are punctuated by several melee battles involving about a thousand people in full armor who yes, really are hitting each other.

It’s good fun and an interesting social experiment in that the Kingdoms do have actual Kings and Queens, who wear actual crowns and rule their fictitious Kingdoms for three to six months. You learn a lot by watching how someone you thought you knew changes when you put a crown on his head and call him “Your Majesty” for six months. And also how everyone around them changes too. Because even though an SCA crown all by itself, is worth only the sum of the brass and stones it is built out of, it is extraordinary to watch how people become highly deferential to the person wearing one. Even though most SCA monarchs don’t have a lot of administrative power over the game, they have enormous social power. If they understand how it works they can make a huge difference.

I’ve seen royals who understand that they’re there to improve the game for everybody. I’ve known royals who see the crown as an opportunity to settle scores and aggrandize themselves. It’s instructive, (and kinda entertaining) to watch first-time royals as they make the sudden realization that wearing the crown means they have everyone’s attention all the time (whether they like it or not), and then make the equally sudden discovery that that attention departs as soon as they pass the crown on to their successors. The smart ones realize that this is how Crowns work. The not so smart ones are disappointed to discover that many of their newfound friends were really befriending the Crown, not the person wearing it.

As someone who is called High Priestess, I do not want to wear a crown. I don’t think anyone who aspires to the role of priestess should wear a crown, at least, not as part of their role as priestess. There are times, magically, when you want to evoke the power of being a king or queen, and as such might want to wear a crown as part of kitting yourself out for a specific spell having to do with sovereignty.

But it’s highly dangerous when a priestess confuses herself with a queen. Crowns change you, and often not for the better.

And the sneaky part of it all, is that the psychological shift happens before you even realize it, and it happens not just in you, but in everyone else around you too. It’s that deference from the people who see the crown on your head and instinctively understand that that makes you somehow higher status than their common self. And as that deference happens, you respond to it, internalize it, and start to think of yourself as that higher status human others seem to believe you are. It becomes pretty easy to adopt an attitude where you feel entitled to that treatment.

We already have enough problems in the witchcraft and pagan communities with placing our leaders on pedestals, and by so doing making it inevitable that they disappoint everyone when they demonstrate their inexorable human frailty. Because that’s the problem with crowns. A crown raises the expectations, but it doesn’t actually make the human wearing it a better person. Moreover, the crown is an indicia of rulership. We expect a King or Queen to be in charge and to give orders. A crown is earthly power, and earthly power is about making people do what you want them to.

I am a priestess, not a queen. And that’s a very specific proposition. A priest or priestess’s role is to stand in the gap between the human and the divine, to stand in the space of liminality and guide others in the experience of that space and the divinity and magic within it. The priestess is a facilitator. She leads people in ritual not for her own aggrandizement, but to be a bridge and conduit for others to reach the magical or divine experience to be had. And while I deserve a certain amount of respect for the service I perform, that doesn’t change the fact that I am there to serve, not rule. It’s important to make sure that no one forgets that, especially me.

Good magical practice pays attention to detail and operates with intention. What that means is that when you design a ritual or magical working, everything you include should have a purpose, because within that rite everything you do will influence the energy you are raising. Nothing is superfluous and nothing is inert. With that in mind, in most rituals that one might choose to do, a crown is not actually appropriate. It may look cool. It may feel terrific to wear. But unless there is a specific relevance to the spellwork or ritual being done, most of the time wearing a crown is not doing you, or the people you circle with, any favors.

It’s fashionable right now, in the name of empowerment, and especially if you are a woman, to claim the title of “queen.” And as a feminist, I am here for it. Queen energy is fantastic and we as women don’t claim it with near the frequency that we ought to. But unless that energy is specifically needed in the ritual that you’re doing in order to accomplish the objectives of the working, wearing a crown is probably unhelpful at best and creates misleading connotations at worst.

Be intentional about your accessories. Because they often mean more than you might intend them to.

Blessed be, witches.

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Being proud of my Greek heritage, I saw no reason at this tender age to place the Greek gods in a separate category of “realness” from the Christian god. They were equal in legitimacy as far as I was concerned.

The many, many Christians I would subsequently encounter would quickly try to disabuse me of this notion, and I won’t lie, for awhile it worked. Until it didn’t. The attic room also had a copy of “The Active Enzyme, Lemon Freshened Junior High School Witch,” by E W Hildick, which was published in 1973 -- YA witch fiction before the genere really existed.

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When my latent paganism and witchy side reasserted itself, I was finding myself called not by the Greek gods of my heritage, but rather by the Norse and Celtic gods of my Knotted Ash tradition. I’ll confess my relationship to the gods of my heritage for most of my life has been a lot like how one relates to distant cousins in a typical WASPy family -- cordial and respectful, perfectly willing to engage at a major ritual like a wedding, but lacking the real emotional depth produced by true affinity.

But however much my affinity for the gods of my ancient ancestors may be lacking, my sense of devotion to my ancestors themselves (both modern and ancient) was another matter altogether. My Greek heritage on both sides of my family tree is pretty special. There’s a general who fought the Nazis, an Olympian, and a man who worked as a foreman for Thomas Edison when he was working on the phonograph. I steeped myself not just in the history of Ancient Greece, but of modern Greece.

That said, my relationship with Ancient Greece, like most people of Greek extraction, hits different than it does for most people of European descent. Like a lot of children of the diaspora, my parents would send me to visit relatives in Greece for long sections of the summer, in my case to a town that was at the foot of Mount Parnassus, where Apollo’s Temple at Delphi was. One of my many, many uncles (Greeks have big families) was a tour guide at Delphi, and so I would go up and follow him around on his tours, hearing all the stories of the site and the art and the Pythia over and over and over again. And my brother and I would then wander away from the tour group, and explore the ruins unsupervised. (It was the 1980’s, and there were less protections than there are now.) Sure, it’s a site of deep historical significance to the whole world. And I got to roam it like it was my backyard.

Greeks fought hard for their independence as a nation. The revolution that created the modern nation in 1821 and separated Greece from over 400 years of oppression under the Ottoman Empire lasted nine years and was deeply bloody. It almost didn’t succeed. Greece was overrun during WWII by Hitler and Mussolini, and the country was occupied by Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. The resistance was passionate and committed. And because it was split in different factions, the country fell into a civil war during the 1950’s. At one point during the 1970’s Greece was ruled by a military junta. Eventually, it has evolved into the fractious but committed democracy that it is today. (Okay that was the 10,000 foot in the air summary of the history of modern Greece... it is OBVIOUSLY more complicated than that. But we have space concerns, so this wholly inadequate thumbnail is what you get.)

And despite our storied history, both ancient and modern, Greece is fetishized by the rest of Europe, and particularly by the British and also the Americans, as being “the cradle of Western Civilization.” Even during Greece’s revolution in the early 1800’s the British decided to play at being a “savior” and sent money and men to “liberate” the poor, benighted Greeks. Did you know that British poet Lord Byron died in the Greek Revolution? And of course, when the opportunity arose to begin unearthing and studying major archealogical sites in Greece, the British brought their adventurers and their academics and stripped Greece of many of her treasures, carting them off to the British Museum without so much as a by your leave from the Greek government, and certainly without paying anything for the privilege.

Northern Europeans and Americans love to wax poetic about the wonders of Ancient Greek thought and language, mathematics and civics and history, and love to ally their own cultures with the legacies of democracy and medicine and philosophy. But they treat the modern nation of Greece like it’s a second-class junior partner in Europe, one that must be patronized and chided for not having the same culture as them. All while in the same breath lauding their own cultures as being built off of the legacy of Ancient Greece. White fascists in particular love to talk about rescuing the legacy of Ancient Greek culture and ideas, while at the same time treating the Greeks themselves as if they are degenerates and slobs. Ask any child of the Greek diaspora living in America or in Northern Europe about the teasing and the othering. The teachers in my preppy middle school were proud to teach the kids Homer and Plato, but those kids saw my olive skin and different food as markers that made me a suitable target for bullying.

And then Christopher Nolan does his movie that is supposed to be a retelling of Homers “Odyssey,” which does not have a single Greek involved in the cast or in major production roles. On the one hand, the idea that a British man would feel free to take it upon himself to retell an Ancient Greek classic without bothering to involve Greeks in the picture is kinda par for the course really. The British Museum insists to this day that it does not need to repatriate the marbles it stole from the Parthenon, after all.

In America and in other places, the pagan community has long felt comfortable constructing a Hellenistic practice, focused on the Greek pantheon, that was not led by people of Greek heritage. Indeed, much of European ritual magic has relied upon Ancient Greek concepts and evoked Greek gods. Hermetic magic gets its name from the god Hermes. I’m not here to say there is anything wrong with those practices, or that working with Greek gods is somehow a “closed practice.” I think that ship has sailed, and the truth is that there isn’t a consistent throughline of historic indigenous Hellenic pagan practices extant in the modern day that is strong enough to support a claim that such practices are proprietary.

Yet there is also a budding movement within Greece to explore our pagan history and gods, and to create from within our culture a practice that worships the Greek pantheon of our ancestors. There are a number of incredible scholars, ritualists and priestex both in Greece and in the diaspora that are working in this vein, and I won’t lie, I find this an inspiring development. The idea of being able to join the threads of my Greek heritage and my pagan practice in such a holistic way is exciting.

That said, this situation isn’t much different from the dichotomy between many of the pagan traditions that work with Celtic and Norse gods in the United States, and practices by those native to historically Celtic lands and Nordic countries. The conversation between these modern pagan practices of the last 100 years and the more localized and less prominent indigenous practices, some of which have long histories and others that don’t, is important and necessary. And, as always, we need to be aware of when being focused on the gods connected to our cultural heritage becomes a vehicle for racism or anti-immigrant or anti-inclusion sentiment.

And as much as it sticks in my craw that Nolan’s Odyssey represents yet another example of a Brit feeling perfectly comfortable siezing upon a Greek cultural icon and making it his own without involving any Greeks, I also do think that there is value in retelling the Odyssey to a 21st Century audience, and introducing a new generation to the classic, and particularly to Emily Wilson’s translation, the first published by a woman. Greek culture is built on telling stories as a vehicle for wisdom and community connection. And the Odyssey is one of those stories like the legend of King Arthur and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, that are at once simple stories, but at the same time can be readily adapted to serve as containers for larger meditations on various aspects of the human condition. It is the relatability and adaptability of the story, replete with adventure and magic, that makes it a good vehicle to freight in conversations about weightier subjects. We need tools like that to start conversations that can promote change, and when we can build a cultural event around them, so much the better.

So yeah, I saw Nolan’s version of the Odyssey, and will read Wilson’s translation (I’ve been working on her translation of the Illiad currently). And I’m going to spend more time learning about this resurgent indigenous practice involving the Hellenic pantheon. These relatonships have history, they are complicated, both on the systemic level, and for me personally.

But is there a broader lesson here?

Cross-cultural interaction, especially in this day and age, isn’t simple. But that’s actually a good thing. “Simple’ in these matters typically devolves into the more prominent or dominant cultural identity absorbing and absconding with the other culture’s practices and stories and vision. Simple ends up erasing the experiences and identity of one of the participants, and everyone loses out when that happens. Encouraging the complication of keeping both cultures as truly equal participants in the exchange, letting things be messy and difficult and sometimes uncomfortable is important.

It’s also much more rewarding. Nolan’s Odyssey is entertaining and retains some of the important reference points of Homer’s epic, but with an “auteur” like Nolan, there is no expectation that there will be any other voices in the dialogue than Nolan’s, really. It’s one of the reasons that I am not a fan of auteur directors like Nolan. They tend to become solipsistic. You look over his work, and most of his stories are about troubled men who struggle with guilt about their own bad deeds in a violent/inhumane world, and (with the exception of Tenet), these men are overwhelmingly white. They are very well-constructed, entertaining, visually engaging movies, becauase Nolan is an exceptional visual storyteller. And yet his work is thematically repetitive, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

It’s ironic that there are white supremacists out there who are bellyaching over the diversity that is in the movie, namely the casting of a black woman and a transgender man in secondary roles on the basis that it is “anti-historic.” The Odyssey is, and has always been, a work of mythos, of fantasy. While the geography is based in the real wold, nothing else is. And again, it’s white Northern Europeans claiming Greek culture as their own, asserting they are entitled to police and set standards for how Greek culture should be portrayed, when it has never belonged to them in the first place.

The issues around Western European magical practices and pantheons are equally complex. There are cross cultural issues that need to be acknowledged and explored, and latent practices rooted in specific places and culture that we need to be curious about and respectful of. While a practice might not be closed, it still comes with cultural context that cannot be ignored. This isn’t a chore. It’s added dimension, richer practice, better understanding. We are doing more work, yes, in exchange for more powerful, more complete craft.

The problem with those who want cultural dominance, the ability to have their culture be centered and all other cultures relegated to the role of quaint decoration or provider of exoticism, is that it is ultimately a path to mediocrity. When everything is glossed over with a homogenous sheen, it becomes sanitized, the rough edges are made smooth, the points of contention are papered over. And everything becomes dull and lifeless.

Like it or not, the tension between cultures as they rub up against each other is part of what drives more and better ideas. And the more equally empowered those cultures are as they engage with each other, the better the outcome. Much in the same way that a leader who surrounds themselves with “yes men” who tell them what they want to hear will start making bad decisions, when one culture is permitted to run roughshod over every other culture it encounters, many of the best opportunities for interesting collaborations and innovation are lost.

White people in particular need to stop whining about how hard it is to create cultural dialogues that are not centered on them, that are built on sharing power and space on a more equal basis. Of course it’s hard! But that’s when you get to the good stuff. Operating in a “power over” environment is always going to be more comfortable and require less effort than “power with” situations (but only if you are the one with the most power). But magical practice (just like anything that will make you grow) has never been about taking the easy way out. Good magical practice will challenge you, cause you to become more authentic with your feelings and thoughts, your approach to your life. It demands effort to be successful, and it is anything but comfortable. And that is exactly as it should be.

Blessed be, witches.

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So most witches keep to themselves, calling themselves “eclectic” practitioners, and opting to take a self-directed path that draws on many forms of magic from many origins and traditions. This is not a bad thing. As a firm believer that every witch should be sovereign over their own path, I have deep respect for the self-directed, eclectic practice.

For some, staying apart from groups and traditions is actually a matter of mental health. They’ve had bad experiences with toxic teachers or groups with horrible abusive dynamics. Being solo is healing for them, and keeping authority figures and traditions at arm’s length is a boundary they are setting to protect their peace. I want to be very clear that while I believe in the good that traditions and groups can bring, every witch’s path is different, and where you have specific needs that require you to stay apart from groups and traditions, of course you should trust yourself, and care for yourself first.

But all other things being equal, there are some important things to think about before you decide to knee-jerk reject the idea of becoming part of an organized witchcraft tradition.

First of all, what makes a group of witches a “tradition?”

As with most questions in the world of pagan spirituality, there are many different answers, so understand that my answer will differ from yours and differ yet again from what your favorite witchfluencer might say.

In my observation, a group of witches practicing together become a tradition when certain factors are present. First, the witches must have a collective set of magical practices that they perform together in the context of the group. Second, the magical practices are designed to be part of a whole, a magical system. Lastly the system is shared within the group, and usually only taught to those who are considered members of the group. That membership may or may not require an oath of secrecy.

Note that I don’t say anything about history, about traditions needing some kind of glorious origin story or generations-old provenance. We have a tendency in the witchcraft community to be a little bit self-conscious about the idea of history. After all, the word “tradition” conjures up images of an ancient legacy that has been handed down generation to generation, something that has “stood the test of time.”

We absolutely should do our level best to know the historical origins of the magic we’re doing. It makes us better witches. And we also need to understand that whether a thing has history, all by itself, does not make it inherently more valid or valuable as a magical operation. Witchcraft in particular has always been a very pragmatic practice, very grounded in the everyday and what is ready-to-hand. Judging witches for adapting their craft to their circumstances, for trying new ideas, is counterintuitive to the nature of witchcraft itself, which has always been highly adaptive.

It’s not so much a storied history that makes a tradition so much as an intentional design. The collected magical practices need not be wholly invented by the group to be a valid tradition. They merely need to be intentionally assembled to work together towards a definite purpose, and the practice as a whole should be materially distinct from other existing traditions. To put it more simply: it can absolutely feel like it’s related to existing traditions, but there should be some original thought behind what’s being done.

Determining whether you’re dealing with a legitimate tradition therefore becomes a lot like what you do when you’re trying to tell whether a person plaigarized or properly authored a story or a research paper. When you question a purported author, are they able to articulate how they got their ideas, and discuss in detail why they chose some details in the work and not others? A plagairist or someone who outsourced the work to AI will be unable to offer a coherent account without seeming overly rehearsed, because they didn’t actually do the work. A true author will be able to have an in-depth conversation quite readily “off the dome,” as they say. Likewise, a tradition’s leaders should have a detailed understanding of how their system works, why their practices are they way they are, and how they differ from what other traditions are doing.

So now that you have some idea of what makes something a “tradition” and not just a group, what do you gain by becoming part of a tradition?

The first and most important thing you gain is access to an organized magical system and coherent instruction. There’s a reason why even the famed Montessori learning method, which is known for being focused on self-directed learning, still has a teacher in the room to guide students. The big downside of going it alone is that you don’t necessarily know where the gaps in your knowledge are. You don’t know what you don’t know, and also don’t always understand what you need to know or in what order you need to learn it.

You can read a book, but sometimes translating what you read into concrete real-world practice is hard. And you don’t always have ready access to an author to ask them what they meant by that thing on page forty-five. You can take an online class, and there are some really good ones out there, some are even gateways into some very well-known and respected magical traditions. The best ones provide plenty of opportunities for questions and feedback, and give you access to a coherent magical system. But sometimes classes are hot garbage. Some are AI generated or presented by someone who doesnt have the required skill level to teach. And if the teacher has never been trained in a coherent magical system, they may not understand how to present magical practice in a functional way.

Classes can be a positive experience, when you find a good one, but what they don’t always provide is an ongoing community of practice. Building a magical practice is not a three week or even a three month affair. It can take years. Having a relationship with a teacher and/or a group in the context of a tradition provides a structure that can help you continue to advance in your practice, even when you might be feeling stuck or demotivated. Having others around who are working the same system as you, who may be farther along than you, who have done what you are doing now, is incredibly helpful. You have people you can turn to who will answer questions, commiserate with your frustrations, and celebrate your victories.

And that’s another thing about traditions. They often have milestones for when you have completed aspects of the training. Gardnerian Wicca, for instance, has three degrees of initiation. Other traditions have levels, that may be marked in a variety of ways, with initiatory rituals, exams, or celebrations. Sure, you don’t need degrees or initiations or certificates to prove that you’re a skilled witch. Being a third degree Gardnerian High Priestess is great, but that and a dime won’t buy you a cup of coffee. And yet, there is something satisfying about placing a goal in front of yourself, driving towards it, and obtaining it. Degrees and other milestones in an organized tradition provide those opportunities for goal-setting and for recognition when the goals are achieved.

One of the biggest fears that witches have when they consider joining a tradition, is the fear of limiting themselves. After all, if I become a Gardnerian Wiccan, then what happens to my interest in learning more about local folk magic? And what if I want to study with this really awesome astrologer I met at a conference? Won’t being part of a tradition restrict what I can learn?

The answer, of course, might be different depending on the tradition you’re part of, but let me let you in on a little secret: even members of an established witchcraft tradition will often learn and do magic that is outside of their tradition. I’m a member of the Knotted Ash Tradition. But not all the magic I do is based in that tradition. There are practices I do regularly that are derived from other magical systems, things I have been taught by teachers outside my tradition, or learned from books. There are even practices that I’ve developed on my own.

If your definition of an eclectic witch is a witch who draws off of multiple sources to inform their personal practice, then all of us, even those of us who are prominent within a recognized tradition, are technically eclectic witches.

Is being part of a witchcraft tradition right for you? That’s not a question I can answer for you. Only you know for sure. What I can tell you is that very often in our community we treat organized traditions like they are some kind of cringey relic from a bygone era. And the truth is, practicing as part of a tradition has a lot to offer a witch, especially as they are just starting out in the Craft. Don’t let the pooh-pooh-ing of others take the idea of pursuing your Craft in the context of an established tradition off the table for you too quickly. There’s lots to consider, more than you might realize at first. Consider it well, and make the best choice for you.

Blessed be, y’all.

I was very fortunate at one point in my life to be a budding jewelry craftsperson and designer. And as I pursued this objective, I had the privilege to work as an intern for the late great Cindy Edelstein for the designers’ pavilion at JCK in Las Vegas. JCK at the time was the largest wholesale fine jewelry show in America, filling one of the largest convention centers on the Strip to brimming with hundreds of booths by hundreds of manufacturers from all over the world.

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The designers pavilion was the place you showed if you were an up and coming jewelry designer who offered original designs and fine craftsmanship. Everyone from David Webb to Sarah Graham to Todd Reed and others looked to Cindy to advise them and help promote them to retailers. And the retailers looked to Cindy for advice as well. Helene Fortunoff, the head of the famous retailer Fortunoff, would swan into the designers pavillion, always with a beautiful scarf around her neck and dripping in the finest gold jewelry, and turn to Cindy and say, “Show me who you like.” Cindy’s picks would become featured offerings in her Manhattan store.

It was an amazing experience. Cindy sadly passed away in 2016, but she was a lion for her designers, and a treasure to the fine jewelry industry.

I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, mostly because I am remembering her advice to young designers who were worried about knockoffs. You’d see the knockoff makers at JCK, usually young women who would surreptitiously photograph items in the cases of the younger, more innovative designers, so that the companies they worked for, usually based in China, could produce copies at a fraction of the cost of the real items. Small shop designers, unlike larger brands like Hermes or Chanel or Tiffany and Co., usually didn’t have the resources to combat the copycats. It was a real and legitimate threat to their businesses.

I’ve been thinking about it because the age of AI has posed a similar, perhaps even more intense threat to creators today, and the witchcraft and occult community is no exception. There is a flood of AI-generated books, tarot decks, social media content aimed at practitioners, cheap slop being offered at expensive prices. It can be very hard to tell the difference between AI copycats and counterfeits and the real thing. I’ve already clocked one AI generated deck being proudly displayed as guaranteed NOT AI on the website of my favorite tarot deck shop. (Here’s a YouTube video that offers some good advice on how to tell the difference).

One of my favorite Tarot creators was lamenting the seemingly endless deluge of AI generated decks and content, and Cindy’s advice to the designers came back to me.

Here’s the gist of it: The best thing to do is keep creating. Stay ahead of them. They can only copy what you do. They don’t have what it takes to deliver your originality. They are stuck following you. So keep going, keep creating.

Now, generative AI is a little bit different than Chinese knockoff manufacturers. They purport to be creating original things. Notice that I don’t say they ARE creating original things. Because that overstates what generative AI really does when it spits out a song or a design or a text. As you probably already know, AI creates in response to a prompt from a user. The user inputs their prompt, which details what they want created, with some instructions as to style and influences and other limitations, and the AI program pulls from its vast library of material that it has been “trained” on to generate something that hopefully meets the criteria established in the prompt.

This isn’t really creation. This is basically the equivalent of what McDonald’s does when it makes its Chicken McNuggets. When McNuggets were first introduced nationwide in the United States in 1983, they were unidentified chicken bits that had been industrially extruded into a chicken mush that was then formed into the famous bell, bow-tie, ball and boot shapes. They are then breaded and deep fried. Since 2016, the recipe calls for chicken breast meat only, and McDonald’s claims that its McNuggets are now free of articficial preservatives. But it’s still reconstituted chicken mush that has been reformed into pleasing shapes and fried.

Here’s the thing about Chicken McNuggets -- yep, they are hella tasty. And when I am pressed for time and out of the house and need a quick snack, they can really hit the spot. And while technically they are made from real chicken breasts, they are not real chicken. Real chicken is when you roast a whole bird in the oven. Real chicken is when you take whole parts of the bird -- breasts, wings, thighs -- and properly batter and fry them. Offered a choice between real chicken and McNuggets, all other things being equal, most people who have any appreciation of food will choose the real chicken, not the McNuggets.

AI generated creations will never be real chicken creations. They will always be McNuggets. McDonald’s can improve its process for McNuggets all it wants. It can remove artificial preservatives, use the best quality chicken, add really interesting spices. But in the end its really never going to taste as good as real chicken, because it’s still reconstituted chicken mush formed into pleasing, predetermined shapes.

AI generated creations are never going to be better than original human creations. Now, if all you’re doing is composing an email to your boss, it doesn’t have to be. But the reason that people are balking so hard at AI generated content, books, tarot decks, actors, music, designs or other creative product is because it just isn’t as good as the real thing and it never can be, because the work isn’t really the product of original human thought. It’s reconstituted thought mush.

So witchcraft creators, be they authors or oracle deck creators, or musicians or artists or ritualists, I’m not saying AI isn’t something to be concerned about. It absolutely is. But don’t get discouraged that somehow the McNugget style thought mush might replace you. It can’t. Especially not if we make sure that consumers understand the difference involved in purchasing from a real creator, and insisting that creators either disclose whether and how they are using AI, or refuse to use it altogether. We need to be as vigilant and vociferous about that as moms in the 2000’s were about the content and process around McNuggets.

Keep going. Keep creating. Don’t get discouraged. You are always going to be the real chicken to their McNugget thought mush. And make sure everybody knows it.

Blessed be, y’all.

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The card as we know it from the standard Waite Coleman-Smith (WCS) deck is profound. A man and a woman stand naked, in an open stance, the woman in front of a tree with fruit and a snake in it, and the man in front of a tree with fire in its branches. Above them is an angel who fills the sky under a bright and shining sun. The card is meant to be a moment of embracing love and partnership. Typically when a reader encounters this card in a spread it means that love is here for the taking. You will be embraced and all things good will be available to your union.

But The Lovers as a card isn’t just about that. It’s way deeper. In fact, the card has a history. It didn’t always look the way it looks now. If you were to look at the version of The Lovers in the Tarot de Marseille deck, which dates roughly to 1500, and has existed alongside the more classic imagery of the standard tarot deck, the card would look much different. You have a pair of young lovers, a man and a woman, who are looking to a third figure, an older woman, who is coming between them. There is a sun above, but the angel is now a cherub, with a bow and arrow, obviously a reference to the classical image of the Roman god Cupid, known for causing chaos by shooting his arrows into unsuspecting men and women and thus infecting them with lovelorn longing for the object of their desire.

In the Tarot de Marseille, the Lovers represents that classic moment every good Italian mother dreads, when her son is forced to choose his wife and therefore leave behind the protective embrace of his mother. The presence of Cupid rather than the Archangel in the WCS image (which I tend to believe is Uriel, though others maintain it is Raphael) lends a much different vibe. This is not a divinely sanctioned love that is the blessed union between Adam and Eve, it is a far more earthly love, and Cupid’s presence makes the love that is present far more capricious in nature, perhaps unwise in fact. The Lovers in this card are embarking on a fraught path. They have made a choice that is going to separate them from the protection of prior generations, and expose them to potential harm.

And in fact, that is what the Tarot de Marseille Lovers card evokes -- the excitement of making that big choice about love, the one that has you embarking on an adventure. But unlike the Fool, who’s about to stride off a cliff, the Lovers are choosing the risk and safety of each others’ arms.

But I am going to go out on a limb here and go a little bit further with the interpretation. Because I think that this card is about more than just romantic love between a couple. I am starting to believe that the Lovers is a framework for how we mobilize divine love in the world, one that stands in contrast to another framework that is presented in the Major Arcana.

One of the things you notice as you start to move through the Major Arcana is that the first third of the deck, cards numbered one through seven (which does not include the Fool, who is numbered zero and is considered able to move wherever it wishes through the Major Arcana) follow a progression that culminates in the raw, driving power of the Chariot. And it does so by moving in dualistic pairs. First there is the pair of the Magician and the High Priestess, each representing a different side of the coin for spirtual power. The Magician is about manifestation. He is the lightning rod calling down spirit from the heavens and using it to manifest his desires. The High Priestess is the embodiment of spiritual power, the keeper of mysteries and the one who does not need to call spirit because the High Priestess IS spirit.

Next comes the pair that expresses earthly power. Both the Empress and the Emperor are capable of great and powerful feats of creation. But again, their individual approaches represent two sides of the same coin. The Empress’s power, like the High Priestess, is embodied. Her creative will is exercised through gestation, through marshaling the unlimited power of her divine body to bring forth the desired thing. She births.

The Emperor, on the other hand, makes things happen by fiat. I explain it to my tarot clients this way: When the Empress wants to use her power to do something she births it from herself. When the Emperor wants to use his power to do something he commands his minions to do the thing to his specification. He orders it to happen and so it does.

You hopefully have noticed that I have tried to avoid using terms like “masculine” and “feminine” to describe the energies involved here, even though the cards as created by Waite and Coleman-Smith do present in a gendered way. This is not me being “woke.” This is me acknowledging that the qualities here -- willfulness and embodiment -- are not the sole province of a specific gender identity. Anyone can be willful and use that will to manifest things, both in spirit a la the Magician, or in a more conventional power dynamic as with the Emperor. And one does not need to be a woman to understand how to embody the power of spirit or earthly power.

And it also helps to unlock the final pair -- The Hierophant and the Lovers. These two cards are different from the previous pairs in an obvious way in that unlike the prior two pairs, these cards present three figures each, and those three figures are both specifically arranged in a formation that I refer to as “thralldom” -- three figures arranged loosely in a triangle formation, with two subordinate figures below and a larger figure overtop them who is exerting control over them. The “thrall” structure is something you see repeated a lot in the WCS tarot.

A “thrall” was a specific type of slave in old Norse and Germanic cultures. Unlike the chattal slavery that was exercised over Black people in Western cultures that began in the 15th Century, thralls had rights, and while they might be slaves, their children could be born free in some circumstances, and they could purchase their freedom. Thralls were considered people, even though they could be bought and sold, and had a man price attached to them.

I use the term to refer to this triangle configuration because whenever you see it in the tarot, you should be asking questions about power, agency and control between the top figure and the two subordinate figures. Who is the top figure, and what kind of control are they exerting over the two subordinate figures? in the case of the Hierophant, the card just preceding the Lovers, you see the kind of control we see traditionally in institutions like the church. The primary figure looks a lot like a kind of Pope -- seated enthroned and with an elaborate crown headdress, holding a golden staff and wearing robes that resemble ecclesiastical robes typical of the Catholic and Orthodox churches with crosses on them. At his feet are two figures in similar robes -- one covered in red roses and the other in white lilies -- and with the tonsure hairstyle with the center of the head shaved that is typically associated with monks from the medieval period.

The Hierophant is typically associated with organized religion and other types of ideological institutions. When you see it in a reading, what you’re seeing is the influence of traditional thinking and institutional ways of operating. In other words, what happens when the earthly and spiritual power that is raised in the prior cards is translated into a collaborative enterprise and pushed outward into the world in a willful, determinative way. What you get when you take earthly power and spiritual power and push it out into the world collectively and with willful intent is an institution like the church -- evangelical, enforcing codes of behavior and expressing itself through repetitive rituals that are highly scripted.

But what happens when you take earthly and spiritual power and begin to collaborate to push it out into the world in an embodied way? That is the true nature of the Lovers card -- in counterpart to the strict and institutional ways of the Hierophant, the world of the Lovers is creating an organic expression of love not just as sex or romance, but as the ultimate embodiment of the earthly and spiritual power that has been raised before in the first four cards of the Major Arcana, a flipside of the coin to the Hierophant. The lovers in the card are enthralled to an expression of divine action and wisdom, an Archangel. And that divine inspiration pushes the people in its thrall to extraordinary things.

Here we see that the Lovers are offering the revolution presented when Eve ate the apple and offered it to Adam, the idea that love is a sharing not just of bodies and goofy feelings of need, but the collaborative union of lovers that results in the settling of divine power upon human flesh. In contrast to the willful divine power that is called “love” as exerted by the church, the Lovers is divine power in an embodied state, as expressed in the sharing between a couple in physical, sexual and emotional union, guided by an agent of the divine.

The thralldom you see here is the man and woman in the control of the Archangel Uriel. Uriel is often identified as the angel who guards the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword, and is considered an agent of wisdom and redemption, and in some traditions, the keeper of all things that are born of beauty and light and fertility. This is people being in the control of divine power, but in an entirely different way from the Hierophant. Interestingly, he is sometimes depicted in Christian iconography as a cherub.

Thus the Lovers is not just about the ordinary aspects of romantic love -- the feelings of giddyness and excitement and sexual need and succumbing to the overwhelming power of those feelings. The Lovers is a visual expression of the line from Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess: “For behold! All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals!” Think that all the way through for a moment. ALL acts of love and pleasure are holy rites that express and promote divine power in the world. This transforms sexual pleasure from something dirty and embarrassing into something holy and empowering, not merely because it may result in a pregnancy, but because it celebrates our divinity and our capacity for joy and pleasure.

But it is not merely an ennobling of sexuality, but a broadening of the scope of love as well. Love is about all the things that connect us as human beings, that bind us together not just out of need, but out of joy and pleasure. It is the divinity that arises over a group of friends dining together and sharing stories and conversation. It is the divinity that expresses itself when family members support one another through the dark months of winter by sharing food and the warmth of a hearth fire. It recognizes that the purpose of human existence is not suffering and toil, but the proliferation of joy.

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The Lovers is what happens when divine power and love escapes the confines of the church and runs rampant in the world, in a more organic and unfettered way, binding us each to the other and empowering us to create beautiful things with our collective power. The embodiment of divine power and divine love in human beings is that collaborative spirit, that rush that comes when we do things not out of our own base needs, but from a desire to elevate our community, and the world more generally. It is not an inward turning, self-focused, myopic joining of two individuals. It is what happens when the union of those individuals creates expansive energy that enlivens everything around them.

The eating of the apple by Eve and Adam in the myth is cast by the church as requiring the expulsion of the pair because they are now unholy. But consider this: Now in possession of all the creative power that comes from ingesting divine wisdom and divine power, a walled garden where all their needs are automatically fulfilled in every way is too confining for them. There is nothing for them to do, no way to exercise the creative power and divine spark they have received. Thus elevated, they now go forth to create and build beyond the garden, not as exiles, but as explorers and promoters of the capacity to generate pleasure and love and joy in the world at large.

Thus the Lovers is not just about romantic love with a partner, or even the choice a person makes to partner up with someone, it is about the expansiveness and expressiveness and creativity that only comes when we join in love with those around us. Not just physically, but emotionally, collectively, and with that divine spark that makes it mean more than just filling a need, but fulfilling a purpose.

May we all become Lovers in this bold and exhilarating way.

Blessed be, witches!

You stare at a blank screen. You try to make words come out of the keys and they just won’t.

You sit in front of your altar, and you breathe and you make sounds and even words. And your spirit stays stubbornly rooted in mundanity.

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Even the most experienced practitioners get stuck. The most ethereal and spiritual people you know, the ones who seem to float through life they’re so spirit driven and filled with energy that you imagine that they pretty much live in the liminal space between worlds, even these people sometimes feel stuck.

Realizing that you’re stuck can cause a kind of panic. What used to come just isnt there. It’s like turning on the faucet and not having the water come out, or flipping the switch and the light not going on. The questions come in torrents. What is happening? Why is this happening? What caused it? Was it something I did? Something I failed to do? How do I get unstuck? How do I make it go back to the way it used to be?

You start to cast around furiously looking for answers. You sign up for a workshop. You buy books. You read articles. You attend an open circle or a Pagan Pride event or a meetup. Nothing seems to connect. Where you used to be able to easily slip into a state of consciousness that made spellcasting or divination or anything magical a cinch, now there’s nothing but a brick wall.

So what do you do now?

First, release your judgements. The most toxic words that you can allow to slip into your practice are “supposed to.” They come packed full of unrealistic expectations, preconceived notions and judgement. Lots and lots of judgement. If you are obsessed with how things are supposed to be, or how you are supposed to experience things, or what results you are supposed to get, you will nearly always be disappointed. When you’re stuck, however, it’s hard not to focus on how things were before you got stuck, and to cast that as how things are “supposed to be” now.

There is no witch police who is going to monitor your practice and make sure it’s “correct.” There is no Witch Olympics handing out medals for “best spell” or “worthiest meditation.” There are no winners or losers in the Craft, and no judges handing out scores or prizes. No one is going to “take away your Witch card” because you’re struggling right now with knowing what to do or whether what you’re doing is working. The only person who needs to be satisfied with your practice and your Craft is you.

“But I have high standards!” you’re crying out. “I’m used to feeling like I’m a badass. Hell, I’m used to feeling at the very least competent. And right now I struggle to feel anything at all! I’m not worried about what others think of me. I’m not meeting MY goals and standards.”

Excuse me, but where does it say in the laws that govern the Universe that you get to be perfect or a badass or even competent all the time? None of us is perfect. All of us have our moments when we are not all that we hoped we’d be or even all that we usually expect to be. Shit happens. You lose your grip occasionally. There is not a human being alive who hasn’t had those moments. Anyone who claims they haven’t is lying to you. You are having a moment. Congratulations, you are a human being having a vey human experience. Embrace it and stop trying to punish yourself for it.

Next, embrace that things are changing. What you’ve been doing is no longer working for you. That much is obvious. And so that means that probably you need to do something different. As human beings we often fear change, particularly when it comes unbidden. Unwanted change is scary. it’s inconvenient. We don’t like it.

And that’s where you might be making a mistake. Because the fact is the Universe is powered by change. It is unrealistic to expect that things will always stay the way they are now. The seasons change, the weather changes, circumstances are changing, you’re changing. Almost nothing stays the same forever. Resisting change is not only futile, it means you miss opportunities.

The fact that you’re stuck means that what you’ve been doing is no longer working. Which means you need to do something else. This is not a moment to groan and bemoan your terrible misfortune. It is a moment to embrace a sense of adventure. You get to try something new. How cool is that?

The cold, hard truth is that you’re not going to be able to control the fact things are changing. The only thing you can do is control your approach to that fact. You can either dig your heels in and try to defy reality by resisting the change or trying to ignore it, or you can treat this as an opportunity, as a moment that you can leverage to your benefit. You don’t have to change. You get to change.

Become an explorer and a scientist.

So something’s changed, and you’re not sure what it is. Now comes the adventure where you get to figure it out. Get curious, start noticing things. What things have changed in your life? What’s changing in the larger world? Do not underestimate the impacts of the stress of world events on our psyche or our energy levels. What new things have started appearing that weren’t there before?

Start trying things, but be careful.

I grew up racing sailboats. Big ones, in highly competitive regional and national races. And the best way to maximize your boatspeed in a race is to do what we used to call “tweaking.” You would modify something -- drop a few degrees off the helm, tighten the sheet on a sail a few cranks, adjust the spinnaker pole a few inches. And then you would wait and see what happened to the boatspeed. Up or down? If boatspeed decreased, or stayed the same, you reversed the adjustment. If it increased, you waited a bit and tried something else. And again, watched the boatspeed. Up or down? This was how you squeezed every ounce of speed out of boat during a race.

You did this because if you made a lot of changes willy-nilly, you would have no idea which of the changes you were making was having what effect on the boat speed. Some things would help, others would hinder. You made each change individually and monitored the result before you made another.

When you begin exploring and testing different things, it’s easy to get excited and allow yourself to succumb to a sense of urgency. You want to get the answers, and you want them now. And that desire sweeps away your patience, and you try all manner of things, all at once. looking for the thing that breaks open your sense of being stuck. Slow down. Have the eagerness for new places and things of an explorer. But also maintain the diligence of a scientist. Consider making a record of how each thing you try affects you. Notice patterns.

Most of all, be okay with the idea that you might have to go on like this for a bit. It’s perfectly okay to “fake it until you make it” for a little while. Keep exploring. Keep recording. Stay curious and disciplined.

Give up the need for a dramatic resolution. It’s also easy to get caught up in the preconceived ideas about what “unstuck” will feel like. Remember, things have changed. That means you’re not supposed to end up back where you were before. You should expect to end up someplace you’ve never been. That means you won’t necessarily know how it’s supposed to feel. There’s that pesky phrase again -- “supposed to.” Whatever you think that getting unstuck is “supposed to” feel like, it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s not going to actually feel like that when it happens.

Don’t cheat yourself out of progress by insisting it look like what you expect it to. Allow yourself to be surprised by the fact that it feels nothing like you expected. You should even be prepared for it to sneak up on you, and for it to have arrived without fanfare, and for you to not realize it until well after it has actually happened.

In fact, the most likely thing that will happen is that as you are putting yourself through your paces, exploring and noticing and recording, you might find that a new practice emerges. And it’s asserted itself into your magical life without fanfare, without some kind of “eureka” moment. You’re so busy with what has emerged from your exploration that you might not even realize that you’re already on your way to the next thing. You’re not stuck at all. Not anymore.

It’s the best and realest kind of magic -- the ordinary kind.

Blessed be, witches!

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As magical practitioners we’re already a little bit sensitive to this kind of thing, given that many in the 21st Century seem to think that magic is at best overhyped psychological trickery and at worst charlatanism or mental illness. We all have that hardcore atheist friend who insists that science is the only thing worth trusting, and low key thinks we’re actually a bit daft for believing that deities exist and that magic works.

Add in the wacky, wild world of Instagram woo-woo types and the mess that is WitchTok and witches might be excused for having a bit of a chip on our shoulder when it comes to being taken seriously.

Enter the “serious practitioner.”

The serious practitioner wants you to know that they’ve been doing this a long, long time. Decades, in fact. They will tell you at the drop of a (pointy) hat that they have been initiated into a variety of traditions, and they have been taught by some of the Craft’s most notable teachers. If they come from a culture that has its own indigenous form of magical practice, they will tell you how much they learned from their parents, their grandparents, their great aunts, elders and ancestors.

They have studied. Oh, how they have studied! They have not only read all the basic magical texts that have become the standard syllabus for modern western eclectic witches, they have gone on a deep dive study of historical and ancient magical texts that date back to the Middle Ages, or maybe even to Antiquity. The more obscure the magical tome is, the faster you’ll find it cited in their conversation. They want you to know that they are more than mere wiccans, and their magical practice is based on texts with “real” magical provenance, not the musings of a British civil servant.

And here’s the thing. I am a huge advocate of historical rigor in the practice of witchcraft. I advocate and teach workshops aimed at getting witches to understand how to history and why they should. I think it’s important that witches be aware of the provenance of the tools and practices they are using, because it makes them better witches.

And I love the fact that we’re recognizing and developing a body of knowledge as a community that goes well beyond one tradition, one culture, one set of ideas. Not only are “serious practitioners” going deep into the source material, they are broad in their areas of expertise. So many different cultures, different types of magical practice, and that’s fantastic. We need that diversity. It’s been sorely lacking for a long time and it’s important as we work towards an inclusive and welcoming community.

“Serious practitioners” who have devoted time and energy to increasing the knowledge base of our community have a lot to contribute. I don’t want anyone to come away from this thinking that being a “serious practitioner” is a bad thing. We need them as part of our community, and what they bring is important.

And it is also true that “serious practitioners” need to know when to stop being so serious.

What do I mean by that?

Sometimes, in their passion for the pursuit of excellence, of historicity, the serious practitioner can make the craft inaccessible and quite frankly, a drag (and not in the awesome RuPaul way).

Read a post by a “serious practitioner” and sometimes you can get that feeling that I used to get back in the 90s when I was a budding rock zine editor. Yep, that’s right. Your girl used to publish an indie rock zine. Record labels would send me dozens of albums to review and tickets to shows and I was pretty much a fixture at the handful of dark clubs on the edge of the transitional neighborhoods in my city, the ones where the beer was cheap, the floor was sticky and the bands were up and coming.

My partner in the zine and I were both women, which meant that we often ran up on the “indie rock bros.” They were a dime a dozen in this scene. The look was easy to spot -- ringer tee with an obscure band or label name on it, messy hair that was often longish and dirty. Almost always drinking a Rolling Rock. They would love to engage you in conversation so they could show off how much they knew about the band on stage, and the “scene” more generally. They loved to tell you about the deep cuts on the latest album, or tell you about the homage to [insert classic rock influence of your choice] from the ep they did two years ago before anyone knew who they were. Their goal in the conversation was to show you how much they knew, and tacitly challenge you to demonstrate that you were on their level. And yes, if you were a woman, they were very keen to “check your indie cred.” They frequently complained about sellouts and poseurs.

Needless to say, my partner and I could do more than “keep up.” But we were there to enjoy the music and document artists who we thought deserved a platofrm. Dunking on fellow fans held no appeal. We were happy to have the conversations about deep cuts and influences and fantastic performances and label politics, we just didn’t see the need to judge anyone based on how much or how little they knew. If they were there to enjoy the music and love on the band, I didn’t care that they hadn’t been there “since the beginning” or that they had no clue about the obscure lyrical references.

Listening to the “serious practitioner” talk about the craft can often feel like listening to an “indie rock bro” waxing poetic about his favorite band. They know it all, and are prepared to geek out about their greatest love, but they’re determined to impress upon you how extensive their knowledge is, and how vastly superior their practice is to those who can’t be bothered to beccome a deeply researched expert like them. They complain about the “fluffy bunnies” at festivals, and basically anybody who hasn’t taken the “go hard or go home” approach that they have adopted.

The problem isn’t the depth of knowledge, the depth of commitment, or even the desire to share those things with anyone who happens to be within earshot. The problem is the tacit judgement, the undertone that suggests that anyone who’s not embracing the same approach or not willing to acknowledge the superiority of their approach is somehow less than or incomplete. Sometimes they don’t even bother to make it tacit or use an undertone. Sometimes it is overt and explicit.

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Here’s the thing: while the Craft is served well by the presence of “serious practitioners,” that doesnt mean that everyone has to be one, or even that being one makes you “better” than other witches. Not every witch has the time and the capacity to do the deep dive and relentless study that would give you the kind of practice the “serious practitioner” claims to have.

And not everyone who takes up the Craft does it to become a “serious practitioner.” In fact, most don’t. Most folks are looking for a practice that provides spiritual fulfilment and some practcal assistance with the trials and tribulations of their day to day existence. Just like there were some folks who came to the rock show because they’d heard a song on the radio and liked it, or even because their friend liked the band and they decided to tag along, there are some folks for whom the Craft is a thing they think is cool and they want to see if it works for them. They don’t need to go deep into it in order to get everything they need and want out of it.

Are these superficial practitioners going to be able to do the more complex or powerful workings that the serious practitioner does? No. Do they need to in order to be decent at their craft? No. Can a witch have a practice they enjoy and that satisfies them without becoming “serious” about their craft? Absolutely.

And in the end, that’s the point. Every witch deserves to build a practice that they enjoy and that satisfies them. And that practice doesn’t have to live up to anyone’s standards but the witch to whom the pratice belongs. Most witches are trying to do the best they can to learn effective craft and eek out a satisfying practice in these challenging times. Most of us struggle to find free time to read books and try out spells and do a devotional practice in between doing a job, keeping a house and raising kids and all the other stuff that we have to do on a regular basis as part of being an adult here on planet earth in the 21st Century. That anyone has the time and the energy to devote to becoming a “serious practitioner” is laudable. But celebrating the person who has the time, skill and circumstance to pursue magic in a serious way does not simultaneously require making the witch who does not have those things feel guilty.

Witchcraft and magical practice, if it is to have a chance at making the world a better place for us all to live in, needs both depth and breadth. Serious practitioners who embrace intense study and build out the knowledge base of the craft are vital. While I think we can all agree that we want our craft to be based on good information, not everyone’s practice needs to be intense and deep.

In fact, what the unserious practitioner may lack in rigor, they make up for in sustainability and accessibility. Having a rigorous understanding of magic that is honed with endless study does no one any good if you never actually do the magic. Unserious practitioners remind us that magic is not just esoteric, it is also deeply practical. Magic is not just for out of body experiences and summoning elemental entities and transcending space and time. Magic is also as real as a station wagon. It’s the spell you cast to help along your salary negotiations. It’s the meditation you use to calm yourself down when life gets stressful. It’s the healing rhyme you say over your son’s knee when he scrapes it by falling off of a scooter.

These are not impressive displays of magical prowess. They are not the kind of “high magic” that one studies in books dating from the nineteeth century. They are often passed down casually from person to person, much in the same way that you pass on a recipe for macaroni and cheese or a home remedy for hiccups. These bits of magical practice have no provenance that can be discerned from a historical record. But they are magic, just as much as any elaborate summoning spell.

It’s easy to become fascinated with magic that has a big legacy or carries big, world-changing ideas. It is easy to believe that sort of magic is just more special and more important than the stuff that unserious practitioners do to muddle through their day. Magic that may be no more than a harebrained idea from the mind of an Instagram creator who’s mashing up stuff she read somewhere and learned in an online workshop last year, well, it’s easy to see it as just not on the same level.

Because it isn’t. It’s not meant to be. It’s like comparing Bach to Taylor Swift. Both created music, music that in its time was wildly popular. Both are and were in their respective times, considered cultural icons. And yet their music is deeply different in its structure and its legacy and its perceived importance. One can make arguments as to why one might be “better” than the other, but if one is being honest, that is really a matter of personal preference.

But this has always been the truth: knowing more about a thing than someone else doesn’t make you a better person. It also doesn’t make you an asshole. Not all by itself anyway. It’s only when you think that knowledge gives you a way to make comparisons that place you at an advantage, that make you better than someone else, have you wandered into asshole territory.

Every witch deserves to build a practice that they enjoy and that satisfies them. And that practice doesn’t have to live up to anyone’s standards but the witch to whom the pratice belongs. There is not only room in the craft for the unserious practitioner, the unserious practitioner is as vital to the advancement of magic as any high-falutin’ scholar with esoteric flair and a stack of dusty books. Sneering at someone because their craft is more everyday, less studious and more practical is unfair. It makes you the Indie rock bro who can’t just let someone love the music on their own terms.

Blessed be, witches!

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Our kids (if we have them) are staring down the barrel of a future filled with war, poor job prospects, accelerating climate catastrophes and creeping fascism and technofeudalism.

The stack of crap that your average adult needs to contend with on a day to day basis is large, and feels like it is growing larger. If you’re wondering why you’re feeling overwhelmed, look no further.

I’m not saying anything new here. And that’s part of the problem. It’s the same crap over and over again. And the solutions? You’ve heard them all before. Some of them are great -- get outside, touch some grass, exercise, hang out with a friend and put away the phones. Some of them are ridiculous. There is no gummy or green drink in existence that is going to fix your life. Crypto is a worse bet than a roulette wheel in Atlantic City. And Chat GPT doesn’t know what it’s talking about more than half the time, but it’s happy to feed you bullshit while it steals from human creators, sucks up all the usable investment capital and pillages our clean air and our clean water.

The challenge of adulthood has always been the same. Being a whole grown person is figuring out how to manage that stack of crap that’s necessary to your continued survival and occupying your time, and still find love and joy and space for you to be you.

Lately, however, this has gotten harder, because the stack of crap has grown larger, the crap is way more foul than it used to be, and managing it feels so much harder than it should. And the imperative to manage the stack of crap feels so insurmountable and so all-encompassing that we’ve forgotten an important truth:

The stack of crap isn’t you, and your success as a human being is not reliant on beating the stack of crap.

Now, that sounds like a direct contradiction of what I said before -- that being an adult means managing the stack of crap. But it’s not. Managing the stack of crap and beating it are two different things.

Management of a thing implies its continued existence. A thing that is being managed is being regularly addressed, and is being corralled into a state where it is controlled, where you know what it will do, where it will go, and most importantly, what it will require to stay in that controlled state.

Beating a thing, on the other hand, suggests that it is a thing that may be vanquished, and in so doing you can be in the position of never having to address that thing again. When you “beat” an infection for instance, it’s gone. You did what was needed and the infection is gone .

Diabetes, on the other hand, is never “beaten.” It is a chronic condition that requires routine actions to manage it, to keep blood sugar controlled within acceptable levels. Those actions can be small, like a once a week injection, or might involve a full on insulin pump that you wear 24-7. Diabetes can be managed to the point where it does not pose an active threat to your future. But it’s never gone, and that management activity will be necessary forever.

That stack of crap that is your adult obligations in this world. You will never beat them. You will only ever manage them.

And that is why you need to understand this, so I will say it again:

The stack of crap isn’t you, and your success as a human being is not reliant on beating the stack of crap.

If you are waiting for the day when you wake up and the stack of crap is gone, never to return, when you have successfully done all the things you need to do, and done them so well you will never have to do them ever again, you will be waiting forever. You will never “beat” the day to day obligations of your adult life. At best you will manage them. And that is all you ever need do.

So is my success as a human being therefore reliant on managing the stack of crap?

A little. But mostly no.

The stack of crap is the noise you have to get through in order to live your one and only life. If you don’t manage the stack of crap, it will grow, and ultimately overwhelm your life until there is nothing else but the crap. Endless upon endless demands from the stack of crap. So, the stack of crap is not irrelevant and you can’t ignore it.

But being able to manage the stack of crap isn’t really what makes you you. It’s what happens beyond the stack of crap -- the relationships you cultivate, the things you make and do that are for you and for the people you love. That’s your real life as a human. And how you do those things is what’s going to make or break your life as a human being on planet Earth.

I’m putting this all out here because I think a lot of times we forget that. We forget that we are not the stack of crap, so we judge ourselves based on the size and nature of the stack of crap. We think that somehow, if our stack of crap is higher and more stinky than someone else’s that means we are not as successful, not as good as the person who seems to have a smaller stack of crap than ours.

How big your stack of crap is honestly only has partly to do with what you do. The accident of your birth will have a lot to do with the size of your stack. Chronic illness or disability, race, economic circumstances will all impact the size of your stack and how easy it is to manage. Your family circumstances will also have a role to play. Have an autistic kid? That will affect the size of your stack as it compares to someone without kids. Are you caring for a parent with dementia? That will also impact your stack size.

You are not your stack of crap. And the size of your stack isn’t entirely in your control.

But the even bigger fallacy we live under is the belief that we must postpone living our one and only life until we make the stack of crap go away. We think that only when it is fully gone or at the very least very small and manageable are we permitted to do and be the things that we really love. That’s unmitigated bullshit.

The stack of crap is never going to be gone. You will never fully defeat it. It’s going to be a part of your existence for as long as you live. The goal is to grab as much life for yourself as you can in spite of that stack of crap.

So don’t wait to live your life. It’s okay to sometimes ignore the stack of crap if you can in order to grab time with the people you love, or grab time to do the things you really love to do. If you can fix it so that doing what you love helps you manage the stack of crap (by providing income or other resources), then do it.

Organize your time and your resources so that insofar as it is possible, you are prioritizing your life ahead of your stack. It’s okay to leave the laundry unfolded for an afternoon if it means you get to enjoy a sunny day in the park with your kids. It’s okay to occasionally splurge on supplies for your favorite hobby.

The trick is balancing that against the fact that if you ignore the stack entirely, you’ll quickly be at its mercy. Your life is waiting for you beyond the stack, but you can never forget the stack or leave it behind. That is the conundrum of life on Earth.

And this is where magic comes in. As a witch you have an arsenal of tools at your disposal to help you tip the balance in your favor in the endless struggle against the stack of crap in your life. And it has the added benefit of being one of those things that expresses who you really are beyond the stack. The time spent at your altar, meditating and preparing to meet the day not only sets you up to better engage with the stack of crap that day, but it’s also part of your witch life, which is part of that life beyond the stack. Likewise with participation in that holiday Sabbat ritual. Those few hours can supply some great energy and insight to help power the next few months as you grapple with the latest developments at your job.

Sometimes, magic can help you reduce the size of your stack. It can be that extra push that helps you land that better job with the bigger salary, or it can remove that obstacle in your way, the one that’s been preventing you from having time to volunteer at the pet shelter. That tarot reading you did last week can give you the confidence you need to pursue the audition for the community theater production that you have been thinking about.

Too often, we put the cart before the horse. We think that we don’t have time to pursue a magical practice because our “mundane” life -- that stack of crap -- is too busy or complicated. I would urge you to remember that your magical life isn’t less real or less important simply because it is not part of that “stack” we live with and manage on a day to day basis. In fact, what lies beyond that stack is what makes life really worth living, and the more we orient ourselves to experiencing and engaging that part of our lives, (which includes our magic) the better. There will be days when we can devote hours, maybe even a whole day to the things beyond the stack. And there will be days when we can only steal a few moments.

But however much we can get, we need to chase it with vigor and without apology. And when we get those moments, we need to inhabit them fully and not feel guilty for them. What we need to do is not get lost in the mechanics of life so much that we actually stop living. Now more than ever, magic can help us to do that.

Blessed be, y’all.

At the time it came out in 1970, “Jesus Christ Superstar” was unusual. Rock and roll was not typically the music upon which musical theater was based, despite the success of “Hair.” And it was also unusual for there to be no dialogue, for the whole work to be carried out in an operatic format. The original concept album (which I nabbed from my older brother’s record collection and listened to relentlessly as a child) featured the lead vocalist from Deep Purple as Jesus. When it came out, many Christian groups condemned it because it didn’t go far enough in proclaiming Jesus as the Christ. Jewish groups worried that it fueled the dangerous and antisemitic “the Jews killed Jesus” trope. But it became an obsession for those who loved rock and roll and Broadway, and launched the career of Weber and Rice as the most famous Broadway production duo since Rodgers and Hammerstein.

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One of the most tense and critical moments in the musical is the face off between Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruling Jerusalem on Caesar’s behalf, and Jesus. Pilate is grappling with the position he’s been placed in, being asked to deliver a death sentence to a man whose only crime under the law appears to be that some people think he’s a messiah, and there were actually a lot of those running around Jerusalem in the first century. Jesus has delivered the cryptic response to Pilate’s inquiry as to whether he is the “Son of God” by saying “It’s you that say I am. I search for truth, and find that I am damned.”

Weber and Rice raise the stakes in this section of the musical with a chorus in the back singing “Crucify him! Crucify him!” — a persistent, slightly off key plea in the background while Pilate questions Jesus. Pilate grows louder and more aggravated. Jesus gets quieter and more submissive until he makes no more sound. Pilate then turns to dialogue with the dissonant and progressively more insistent crowd/chorus. The music from this point forward grows more frenetic and fevered in pacing, tone, and pitch, spiraling up and up in tension until Pilate finally snaps in the climactic moment of the whole musical and delivers the order to kill Jesus. Suddenly the central theme music of the work bursts forth majestically with the support of the full orchestra, signaling that finally, at long last, THIS is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Everything else from this point on is denouement, even the crucifixion itself.

But it is Pilate’s response to Jesus in the moment before all hell breaks loose that has always been for me the quiet beating heart of the musical, the underlying question upon which everything turns:

But what is truth?

Is truth a changing law?

We both have truths — are mine the same as yours?

Years and years later, as a pagan, this the moment in the work that still lingers in my memory. It shouldn’t be a surprise. All people who walk a path seeking spirit are also looking for truth. And Pilate’s questions (which it should be noted, Jesus does not answer) are really good ones, no matter what path you are on. It is perhaps the subversive in me that relishes the idea that the best, most relevant issues raised in a now cherished musical about the Christian gospel should be asked by the lone pagan character.

We are living in an age where the truth is up for grabs. We have a Presidency filled with flunkies whose lies number in the tens of thousands, and happen daily, and fuel chatter for entire news networks dedicated to convincing people that those lies are true. This is the battle for facts, what some would call “objective truth.” I am a human person who resides at a certain address. These are facts that one may show to be true by varying means with tangible evidence that demonstrates their veracity. These are facts that I can prove to someone and they’ll believe it and take it as truth.

But evidence is a tricky thing, because sometimes there isn’t enough of it, or the available evidence doesn’t lead to a cut and dried conclusion. No matter what you believe about Jesus, the only thing that can really be said with any honesty is that we in the 21st century have no idea what happened to him other than he was prosecuted by Rome and crucified. We just don’t know, and we never will.

And then there are attempts to manipulate evidence, to hide it, or to encourage people to ignore it. This last issue, the ability of the human brain to ignore outright pieces of evidence it does not like, is something that can be scientifically documented. (Yes, there’s some irony there.) And one needs look no further than the headlines to see instances of blatant attempts to “spin” facts to assert something as truth.

And then there are the truths that we hold based on our perspective. These are the truths most audiences think Pilate is getting at. We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours? This is the realm of subjective truth, or truth that is influenced by one’s identity and perspective. A Christian sees Jesus of Nazareth and says he is the Son of God and the Messiah. A Roman administrator sees a man who has broken the law and who has a following, and who may pose a danger to Roman rule. Looking back at that moment from over 2000 years in the future, deciding who this Jesus person was gets even trickier. There are no contemporaneous records that settle the question. The earliest of the gospels comes several decades after Jesus’s death, and builds off of oral accounts from followers. And anyone who’s ever played a game of telephone knows that oral accounts often shift significantly over time from what actually happened.

But here’s what’s even more exasperating about truth: we divide the world into subjective and objective truth as if that’s a real distinction that we can operate with. But they really are just mental constructs. To the human mind, ALL truth is a matter of subjective thought. There is nothing in our experience that is not filtered through our brain, which is lousy with prejudices, biases and preconceived notions. If we actually DO stumble upon objective truth, we’re still deciding whether it’s truth based on a subjective assessment performed by a biased brain.

All truths, even the ones that are easy to prove with evidence, could just as easily be questioned if enough pressure is applied, and enough evidence is concealed, eradicated, or called into question. This is what has made Donald Trump’s assault on the truth and particularly on the media so dangerous. By removing scientific studies from government websites, by repeating lies so often people stop questioning them, by continually attacking those who investigate the truth and produce evidence of wrongdoing, the aim here is to make certain things true even though most of the evidence is conclusive in the other direction. He’s not the first person to ever try this, and he’s had a lot of help.

Truth is, in many respects, merely an expression of the collective belief. And truth can change. I love to talk about oceanographer and explorer Robert Ballard, who begins many of his presentations by holding up his high school physics text and explaining that everything he was taught in that book has since been proven wrong. In his own deep-sea exploration, he discovered a whole ecosystem of life forms operating on chemosynthesis, upending the “truth” that life was not possible without photosynthesis.

What is truth? Is truth a changing law? We both have truths — are mine the same as yours?

These are in fact, the questions of our age. They are of vital importance these days, now that we are faced with leaders who would build a version of “truth” not on evidence, but as an expediency to obtain power, wealth and control. Truth, it turns out, is a remarkably fragile thing, and yes, what you know to be true isn’t necessarily always going to be so. And what you think is true might not be viewed as such by everyone else.

The dirty little secret is that truth is much more elastic than we give it credit for. But it also has limits. While one can certainly try to argue that 2 + 2 = 5 (Read Orwell’s “1984” to get the reference more fully), one cannot do so with much credulity or for very long before the evidence to the contrary breaks through. But we can and often do hold on to things that are not true for a very long time, and there are in fact things that can be both diametrically opposed and true at the same time. (I am very smart, but sometimes the evidence demonstrates that I am also capable of great stupidity.) The reconciliation of disparate or competing truths is hard, and sometimes impossible. The psychological term for this is cognitive dissonance, and its presence in a situation can generate some pretty messed up results.

All people who walk a path seeking spirit are also looking for truth. But what do they find when they look? Do they find a set of absolutes that they cling to, tenaciously, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary? Some people certainly do. They have their beliefs and nothing, no nothing at all, will shake them. They believe that there are absolute truths in the Universe and those truths must be protected at all cost from anything that might challenge them. If the moment comes when those seemingly immutable truths are called into question, the person who believes them is often thrown for a loop. So much of who they are and how they think about the world is wrapped up in that one sacred belief. And to render that belief at all questionable is to unmoor them from their sense of who they are. It’s threatening, so much so they will lash out at the person or group producing the evidence that challenges their deeply held truth. It’s why in so many cultures and groups, being a heretic, someone who opposes the traditional orthodoxy, is considered so terrible they must be punished by death.

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One of the hallmarks of this age, I believe, is that we are finally, as a human race, starting to acknowledge that truth and perception are irrevocably tied together, and that perception is almost always driven by context, and context is really just a nicer way to talk about power. We are finally reaching the place where we maybe, just maybe, can shed our need as humans for orthodoxy, the need to dominate each other and subjugate ourselves to attempts at truth that are no more than thinly veiled bids for power. It is often said that “the truth will make you free.” The phrase has its origins in the Gospel of John (which at this point should come as no surprise.) The writers of that work of course were talking about THEIR truth, and asserting that only through belief in THEIR version of deity may one find real freedom.

As a pagan, I reject the idea that there is one god who embraces and expresses all of deity. I reject the idea that there is one absolute truth to which I must ascribe in order to obtain freedom. In fact, quite the opposite — freedom is the ability to embrace the truth as YOU understand it, without fear of being harmed for it, and even knowing that what you think is truth might actually not be the same for someone else as it is for you. Your truth will make you free. You and no one else. And in fact, if I try to apply my truth to you, that’s precisely the opposite of freedom. It’s an attempt at control.

But nor can we live in anarchy. This brings me back to the point I made earlier — there are limits. The truth may be stretched, but there is a breaking point past which an untruth cannot hold. There are truths that we do, as a human collective, need to know, understand and believe to survive. But there are far fewer of them than we once thought, and they are not the truths some of us expected.

The truths we need to survive as a species will not be handed to us. They are not the ideas that are being sold to us as “the truth” by the people and institutions that seek to control us. What makes this time in history so difficult is that figuring out and acting upon those truths is not enough — we each need to both step in to our own truths, and simultaneously learn how to live alongside each others’ truths peaceably.

Jesus never answered Pilate because he couldn’t. No one god, no one philosophy or way of thinking can. It’s going to take all of us, working together, to come up with a way to do this, and even THAT won’t be perfect. Whatever truths we come up with will have to stretch and grow to meet the challenges we face, and be resilient enough to not break. It will need all of us to stretch and grow along with our individual truths. But while all of us has our own truths, not all of those truths are equally capable of holding fast in a world of coexistence. Not all of us will have what it takes. Some of us will snap as our truths are shown to be insufficient to encompass the world we hope to live in. Remember, when someone’s truth is shown to be not so truthful, they usually get hostile. People will do a lot and say a lot to avoid acknowledging their truth has snapped under the tension of trying to accommodate reality.

I believe we’re seeing a lot of that today. I believe much of the anger that’s out there is because people feel the tension as their long cherished truths are stretched past the breaking point. They don’t lack comprehension so much as imagination. They cannot imagine who they might be without their jankey unyielding truth.

This is why, after all is said and done, I’m a pagan. I’d much rather spend my time asking the important questions that acknowledge the real nature of truth than guard the truths themselves, most of which will eventually let me down in the end. Truth has its limits, but the Universe, it turns out, is infinite.

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The Eight of Pentacles, when it shows up, is painfully obvious as to what it’s about. The Waite Coleman-Smith (WCS) deck image is pretty straightforward. A young man wearing a workman’s smock, seated at a bench with a hammer and a chisel is working over a pentacle that is on the bench. Another pentacle lays on the ground beside him, and six more are hanging along the bench and up the wooden wall in front of him.

The meaning is seemingly obvious. The young man is an apprentice who is doing his work, and he is, by all evidence, very productive. He is a hard worker, adn he is engrossed in his work. So the eight of pentacles is about that good solid worker who can get shit done, and when it shows up in a reading, that’s the point -- do the work. It’s time to buckle down and make things happen. Simple, right? Almost boring.

And that’s where this card gets misunderstood. Because most people end the inquiry right there.

But there is so much more here if you want to look for it.

Eights in general represent a certain level of stability -- they are essentially doubled fours, and so after the mobility of the sixes and the sevens, eights in general represent a place where the energy that has been volatile and lacking consistency resolves and stabilizes in some important way. In the case of the eight of pentacles, after the uncertainty about the availability of resources and the willingness to work that progresses through the five, six and seven, at the eight we finally see everything coming together and work being done. Whatever obstacles there were are gone and now the work is going smoothly.

The eight gets dispensed with rather quickly as “the diligent apprentice.” He’s pigeonholed as the guy at your workplace who clocks in, does his job well and quietly and without complaint, and produces what he’s supposed to, when he’s supposed to. He’s reliable. No one ever worries about whether he’s going to get the job done, or whether it will be of appropriate quality. This is the guy that if he calls out sick, you feel the loss, but when he’s there, you never really notice him. He never really gets promoted because no one can imagine him in any other role, and they are secretly scared that if he were to advance you’d never be able to find anyone who can do his job as well.

The traditional thinking around this card is that there is nothing exciting here. It’s just getting the job done.

The way into the hidden deeper meanings in the eight starts by recognizing that the eight happens at the end of a progression. In the five we saw lack of resources. In the six we saw generosity and the acquisition of resources, but in a very controlled way designed to preserve the status quo. The seven involves a question around the motivation and the value of additional effort. So many questions as we move through these cards -- Do I have enough? Can I get enough? Will doing this pay off? Is this worth my time? What will happen if I add my own resources?

When we get to the eight, the questions have all been answered, and now we are doing the work. Instead of all the energy spilling out addressing questions of resources and effort, the energy is now being poured into the transformative power of work being applied to resources. The end result is the creation of usable product. What was once disjointed and lacking clarity is now seemingly so effortless as to appear boring.

But as any high performing individual will tell you, there is so much more to it than that. The great painter Vincent Van Gogh used to say that “it is difficult to be simple.” Ask anyone who is that good worker, that individual who is the backbone of their team, and they will tell you that a lot goes into what they do that is never seen from the outside. There is not just harmony in the application of effort to resources, but artistry. The apprentice is not just supplying his labor, he is also supplying know-how and expertise. It is that intangible aspect that has transformed the roller coaster of questions into a well-oiled machine.

When something is working well, we tend not to pay attention to the transformation that has happened to make it that way.

The eight of pentacles is not just about hard work and productivity. It is about commitment to the process of creation, about skill and bringing a maturity to the role that is only possible when someone knows their craft and cares about their craft. This is not a greenhorn apprentice who just arrived on the job yesterday. This is the seasoned veteran whose knowledge base is so solid that you never realize that it’s being applied. It’s that seamless. Which makes it easy to miss.

That kind of creativity, and excellence, is exciting, if you are willing to stop and notice it. That is the challenge of this card. If you don’t pay attention, it’s easy to miss all the amazing things that are going on. This worker will find their value overlooked in favor of workers who are demand more attention, either because they are better at showing off their skills or because they make mistakes that require correction.

This is the magician whose magic has become so commonplace that everyone has forgotten that it’s magic. When the eight shows up in a reading, resist the urge to see it as merely a representation of the daily grind of working on things. It is so much more. This is also everyday excellence, the application of expertise in a sustained way that allows for all the best things to happen. These pentacles are being transformed using the humble diligence of passion and will applied with a steady hand that is not interested in drama. This is workmanship rather than showmanship.

I tell my students that a big part of being good at magic is noticing things. Noticing things is how we connect with spirit and with energy. Noticing things allows us to see the unseen with better clarity. The amazing, magical things that this apprentice is doing could easily escape our notice, because we tend to ignore things that do not proactively demand our attention. The quiet hum of competence, of the engine of the Universe quietly running in the background, of magic, is often overlooked. We don’t notice it. But we gain a lot when we do.

The eight of pentacles is not just about doing the hard work, of being that apprentice with the expertise and diligence to create, it is about noticing that quiet background hum of goodness that happens because of the consistent workmanship provided by the things and people in our lives that we usually ignore. The appearance of this card can be an encouragement to appreciate the quiet stalwarts in your life, because if we don’t appreciate those who do for us, they can become disaffected and lose enthusiasm. Appreciation of the usually unseen machinery of our lives, the ways in which things go right without much effort on our part, is important to our well-being. Becuase that which we pay attention to grows. If you want more seamless success in your life, start by acknowledging those things that are already working hard for you and producing results.

The quiet stalwarts are not boring. They are essential. And when we get curious about them, we can see the most remarkable things.

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I was not wrong.

Most cosmologies have creation myths. After all, where did all this come from is a pretty reasonable question for any sentient being to ask. And because every cosmology views the Universe differently, creation myths are diverse and often have a touch of the ridiculous, which makes them fascinating.

So couple that with bold music and bright lights and wonder is bound to ensue.

And as I contemplated the act of creation in the midst of this stunning display of lights and music, some things occurred to me.

First, it occurred to me that this is what we are here for -- to create things of wild beauty and meaning. It is the highest and best thing we can be doing with our time in this world. It is the thing that is undeniably positive and the thing that makes us most satisfied and most human.

What if we could live in a world where all of our ingenuity and resources were aimed at creating opportunities for humans to build wonderful things for each other? Things like renewable energy sources, beautiful homes, medical centers where sick people are healed, community spaces where we can be together and sing and dance or create kick ass light shows.

What if every day we got the chance to turn to the folks around us and proclaim, “BEHOLD WHAT I HAVE MADE!” What if that was how we lived our lives? How awesome would that be? And what if our fellows were there to cheer us on as we created, with resources and encouragement and constructive help?

BEHOLD I HAVE CREATED A LIGHT SHOW!

BEHOLD I HAVE CREATED A POWERPOINT!

BEHOLD I HAVE REBUILT AN ENGINE!

BEHOLD I HAVE WRITTEN A STORY!

BEHOLD I HAVE HEALED A BROKEN LEG!

BEHOLD I HAVE HELPED SOMEONE BUY A HOUSE!

What if we could have a moment like this every day? What if we lived our lives looking for those moments and being loud and joyful about them?

What if we measured success by how much joy and wonder we could incite in those around us with the things we shout “BEHOLD” about?

Yeah, it sounds polyanna-ish and a little strange. But we are living in some strange times, where a deranged old man and the craven lickspittles who follow him are being allowed to perpetrate atrocious things that are stupid as fuck. And you know what? I’m tired of being appalled and afraid. I’m tired of the cruelty and destruction and people looking for ways to flex on each other to show how powerful they are by how they can dominate each other. I am tired of gotcha games and “owning” people we don’t agree with. If we’re gonna get strange and stupid, let’s get strange and stupid in ways that might actually make the world a better place to live.

I sat in that light show and wondered at it, and thought, what a gift to be able to do this, and to partake in it. Everyone deserves to have this gift. How do we make a world where people, all people from every place and every stratum of society, has the opportunity to exist in this kind of creative joy?

We are in the midst of a war. Actually, more like many wars whose lines are all blurring together and threatening to engulf us all. And wars are about destruction. So much of our world is about domination, destruction, and what you can own instead of what you can make. Those who try to sell us on those things usually have no soul. They destroy because they cannot create, and therefore want to negate creation.

The thing is, creation, the state of making something out of nothing, of building the seeds of a thing into a full grown entity, that’s why I do magic. THAT’S why I’m a witch. I live for the moment when I can shout out SO MOTE IT BE (which is a witchy version of saying BEHOLD!) and announce to the Universe that something beautiful and alive that wasn’t before, now is. That something that was broken or un-whole is made new again, or maybe for the first time. That shit is amazing when you can make it happen. Nothing can beat that feeling. It’s what magic, and being human, is for.

I do understand that conflict is inevitable. Sometimes the thing you want to shout BEHOLD about is gonna make someone else unhappy. But I think we might be able, if we try, to have fewer of these awkward moments than we do now. And the fact that it doesn’t work out every time is no reason to stop trying to make it work as many times as you can.

And let’s be clear on something -- ownership and creation are two different things. This is why guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t really count as creators. Elon hasn’t created a damn thing in his life. He just buys shit other people have made and adds more money and people to it until someone tells him it’s more valuable than when he bought it. Jeff Bezos hasn’t created anything that wasn’t made off the exploitation of others in a long long time, and it’s why he’s become so pathetic to watch now as he tries to live his best oligarch life, at the expense of the rest of us.

We are fighting for our lives, to have a future for ourselves and for our planet. And it’s easy to forget as we try to fight those that know only how to own or destroy, that what we are fighting for is the ability to create the future we want.

And here’s the really important part: we cannot create a thing in the world until we have first created it in our minds. That’s the basic underlying principle of all magic, and all creation. So we need to make sure that we don’t lose the power to wonder. We must keep a mind that imagines the best of all possible worlds, even as we grapple with and fight against the worst offenses against humanity and democracy and creation that we have ever seen.

In the midst of doubt, darkness and fear, find the places and spaces where you can indulge in the wonder of imagination and the magic of creating and the joy of sharing it in community. Find moments where you can shout BEHOLD! They want you to forget that power when you claim the battle cry of the creator. Because it’s the one thing that will overwrite their attempts to own things and destroy them.

Stay creative, witches. Make really great shit for you and your community and shout BEHOLD! into the Universe with wild joy and profligate generosity. Do it every day. Get your friends to do it too. Do it together and egg each other on to do it more and more. This is the thing that delivers the wonderful world we all want to live in. It’s the thing they can’t destroy.

Blessed be.

But shadow work isn’t a chore.

It’s technically not even a requirement.

There’s no ancient grimoire that proclaims “Thou shalt do your shadow work.”

The historic figures of the modern witchcraft movement -- Gardner, Valiente, Buckland, the Farrars -- none of them talked about “shadow work.”

Shadow work in fact, isn’t even really a witchcraft practice.

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The idea that we all have a “shadow self” comes from Jungian psychology, not from any craft practitioner. Jung himself never actually used the term “shadow work,” although a lot of Jungian concepts of therapy involve managing and integrating your “shadow.”

So does this mean that anyone who says that as a witch you must “do your shadow work” is full of shit?

Actually, no.

Here’s the thing -- witchcraft is not about purity of origin, or even purity of practice. The fact that the concept of “shadow work” is borrowed from Jungian psychology does not disqualify it from being a useful and even necessary practice for witches.

Most attempts at policing the “purity” of magical practice are a fool’s errand. The origins of many of our most beloved practices are often lacking in some kind of legit historical provenance. And even the best researched attempts at “restoration” are often nowhere close to being a full-scale reproduction of ancient magical practice. Often our attempts to link ourselves to “the old ways” are vague and based on very patchy historical record. The most honest among us (looking right at you, modern druidry) admit they don’t have the faintest idea what the ancients did, and that they are reconstructing based on spotty records of questionable veracity, UPG and vibes.

And even if we can assert that a particular school of witchcraft is brimming with authenticity because of its meticulously researched lore, the dirty little secret of modern witchcraft is that most witches who are members of a distinct magical tradition don’t exclusively practice the magic of their tradition. The fact that we know a system and have been initiated into it does not mean that our tradition is the only source for the magical tools we have or use. Even the most sincere initiate in the most reputable tradition, if you examine the magic they do on a day to day basis, is an eclectic practitioner who uses a lot of different types of magic.

That is not to say that we shouldn’t try to work with magical systems with integrity and consistency. Or that we shouldn’t care about the origins and history of our cosmology, our practices and our tools. We absolutely should. I consider “How to History and Why Witches Should” an essential unit in any Witchcraft and Wicca 101 series. Knowing how to evaluate source material and determine the historicity of a thing is important to having integrity as you practice the Craft. Because knowing where things come from, and who has used them before and how is vital to your ability to use (or not use) those things yourself. It’s astonishing how much bad history is out there in the Craft, and how credulous we all are when we’re presented with new lore. Witches need to do better with understanding the origins of their craft.

But being scrupulous about knowing the history of your witchcraft practices is different from inventing a history for a tool or a practice in order to make it more “witchy.” Witchcraft is first and foremost about doing what works to bend the Universe to your will. Unlike ceremonial magic, witchcraft is built on a certain amount of jury-rigging and winging it.

I often compare the differences between the two disciplines to the difference between cooking and baking. If you are engaged in ceremonial magic you are effectively baking, meaning you will be following a recipe that has precise combinations of ingredients and instructions that must be followed to the letter or else the whole endeavor will fail. Witchcraft is much more like cooking, which is much more tolerant of improvisation. How much oregano do I add to the sauce? I keep adding it until my ancestors whisper, “That’s enough, child.” In the end, witchcraft leaves lots of room for the use of tools and techniques that have no provenance other than it seemed like a good idea at the time.

To make the long story short, shadow work doesn’t need to have its origins in some ancient magical tradition for it to be useful, even essential, to good magical practice.

Why do I think shadow work is essential to good magical practice?

Because magic is not a safe substance, and we are all of us imperfect users. Consequently, I have found that engaging in a practice that is actively pursuing self-awareness and encouraging the compassionate management of our less-than-helpful traits is essential if one is going to have a prolonged relationship with magical practice.

Shadow work can contain magical elements and non-magical elements. A very basic thing you can be doing is having a therapist in your life in some capacity. Journaling is also a really good idea. There are any number of really great meditation techniques that help you connect with the parts of yourself that you don’t like and can help you create a better, more integrated and compassionate relationship with those parts. And yes, there are spells that can be helpful too. Shadow work doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be probing, honest and consistent.

I tell every one of my students that they need to take up some kind of shadow work, because I have seen what happens when a witch ignores that work.

Magic is not a safe substance. What do I mean by that? It means that once you begin taking up magical practice, engaging in spellcraft and doing acts and rituals that place you “on the map,” as it were, in the otherworld, the beings of that otherworld notice you. And parts of you that are particularly sensitive to the influence of spirit will become activated. Spirit, the force that moves and enlivens the Universe wakes up in you and around you, and it’s heady stuff.

Magical practice, when it is being done well and in earnest, will make you feel things. It will require you to confront those feelings honestly. It will challenge your assumptions about yourself, and your relationship to the Universe and everything and everyone in it. You will need to be vulnerable in ways you never dreamed of. Whatever nuggets of unresolved emotional detritus may be lurking in your psyche, believe me when I tell you that you will have to deal with them. Magical practice will demand that you bring forth your whole self, and if you can’t handle that, for whatever reason, that will be on you. The reward if you can handle it is equally substantial, and daunting in its own right.

Bottom line, magical practice will change your life. How it changes your life will depend on how well you manage the issues it raises. And those issues are very often closely tied to your shadow self.

I’ve seen witches get so enamored of their identity as a witch that they start to devalue their mundane identity, to the detriment of their relationships and their well-being. I’ve seen witches fall prey to paranoia and fear that stems not from any actual threat, but from their own shadow self. I’ve seen people “get high on their own supply” and become arrogant and predatory, believing that their magic means they need not be accountable to anyone or anything. There are probably dozens of ways that messing about with magic can cause you to go to a mentally or physically unhealthy place if you aren’t being careful.

Responsible magical practice therefore requires that the practitioner also proactively engage in appropriate “shadow work.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise really. Some activities require you engage in self-care practices to make sure you are able to proceed safely. If your big hobby is mountain climbing, you’ll want to make sure you are doing the right things to acclimate yourself to high altitudes. If you’re a scuba diver you are careful to not dive and fly on the same day. That magical practice might require that one also pay attention to one’s mental, spiritual and physical health isn’t an outrageous suggestion when you think about it.

The good news is that “shadow work” isn’t some kind of mystical, deep practice that has its origins back in the mists of time that you have to decipher and endure. It’s the recognition that awakening the power of spirit in your life through magical practice is going to demand that you address your physical, mental and spiritual health, and acknowledge and integrate your “shadow self” with compassion and love. It’s not about ticking a box, but about developing care protocols that assure that you can sustain your magical practice for the long haul and obtain the best results.

Because the thing is, witches, you deserve to have your magical practice be a positive force in your life, and doing your shadow work is an excellent way to ensure that will be the case.

Blessed be, witches!

And indeed, in the team competition that led the figure skating events, Ilia delivered a strong showing that sealed a gold medal for team USA.

And then he went out onto the ice for the free skate in the Men’s Individual Figure Skating competition and choked. Badly. Not just one missed jump but several. He fell. Twice. In the end, his showing was so poor he finished eighth, not even close to a medal.

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I am not sure how many of us can really understand the level of disappointment that is. To go from being the overwhelmingly recognized favorite to win an Olympic gold medal to not even breaking the top five. And knowing that the reason it happened was because you didn’t perform to the level that you know you can.

And yet, this 21 year old who has been recognized as a force to be reckoned with since he landed the quad in the 2022 U.S. International Classic, who has never been off the podium in a major competition since that day, and who hasn’t received anything less than gold since November 2023, didn’t storm away from the kiss & cry, didn’t pull faces or make drama when it became clear that he’d fucked up big time. In fact, he was the first to congratulate the gold-winning skater from Kazakhstan, Mikhail Shaidorov, doing so with an aplomb that I doubt many other men his age could have mustered.

Contrast this to Norwegian skier Atle Lie McGrath, 25 year old five time World Cup winner and two time Olympian, the favorite and leader in the Men’s Alpine Slalom competition, who upon straddling a gate and disqualifying himself on the final run, when he was more than half a second ahead of his next competitor, threw his poles into the woods off the track, took off his skis and stomped off into the snow to visibly sulk.

In the days since, nearly every sports journalist and sports psychologist in the world has weighed in to try and explain what happened with Ilia Malinin. Everyone from Simone Biles to Snoop Dogg has lined up to console him. Ilia has made a statement, talking about the perils online commentary and bullying, and has given some interviews where he has talked earnestly about how Olympic ice just got to him, and how he plans to redeem himself in the coming weeks when the World Championships happen in Prague in late March. He’s still going to appear in the figure skaing Exhibition Gala at the end of the games.

The weird part is, Ilia Malinin was not the only skater in the Men’s figure skating competition who turned in a less-than-optimal performance that evening. Shaidorov was in fifth after the short program, but many of the skaters ahead of him failed to land jumps cleanly and also fell down. The entire day was a lesson in the truth that being flashy or having the hardest jumps isn’t going to save you if you can’t land your elements cleanly when the moment comes. And having a less difficult program, that you know you can do well, might be your best bet for gold when everyone else is overdoing it and being risky and letting stress get the better of them.

Okay, so why am I talking about Ilia Malinin in a blog about witchcraft?

Because the lesson of the Men’s Individual figure skating competition in Milan is relevant to us as witches. Actually there are number of lessons to be had here.

Let’s start with the one that we just identified -- how skating a less difficult program cleanly will beat a more flashy program that is skated poorly. We are in a moment where there is a lot of emphasis on doing magic to help save the world. WitchTok, Instagram and even Substack are filled with witches who are calling for big magic to address creeping fascism, climate change and all sorts of public travesties. My other blog is about addressing climate change with magic, so I’ll admit that I’m part of all this, too.

Big magical workings are great. I’m going to be at Sacred Space and Between the Worlds this weekend, a joint conference that will feature at the heart of it a major ritual working designed by the staff of the conferences to harness the current stellium of energetic forces being caused by several planetary conjunctions, an eclipse and the Lunar New Year. Big magic is awesome.

I also believe in the empowerment of witches, even witches who are still new to the practice of magic. I don’t like it when witches feel disempowered to try magical things becasue they feel they are “too new” or “don’t know enough” to even attempt something. And hell, I just wrote a blog last week about how the threat that your magic might not be skilled enough is not a reason to stop doing magic.

Am I saying the opposite of all these things now?

No.

What I am saying is do YOUR magic at YOUR pace and at the levels YOU feel is best for YOU. The problem with having a “Quad God” in the hunt for figure skating titles is that now anyone else who wants to compete for gold has to start figuring out how to land a quadruple axel, or at the very least drive towards the most difficult combinations they can.

Driving for ambition, all by itself, isn’t a bad thing, so long as you are doing it for the right reasons. Ambition can be about pushing yourself, striving to compete against yourself. But it can also be a need to “beat” everyone else, and prove that you’re “better” than the other people out there who do what you do.

And the thing is, ambition, no matter its source, has the potential to blind you to certain things, most specifically the objectives of the work you do. Whether your ambition works for you or against you is decided not by how much of it you have, but whether you are capable of pointing it at the right thing.

When ambition gets bound up in ego, it becomes too easy to forget why you are doing what you are doing. The job of an Olympic skater is to skate their program the best it can be done. The moment you start skating to prove something about who you are as a skater, or to impress the public or even the press,or to be better than a different skater, you’ve lost the plot. Those are ego-driven objectives that will take your eye off the discipline you need to get the job done and land your program effectively. While sometimes our monkey mind can distract us and mess with our heads (brains can be tricksy sometimes), we do need to make a conscious effort to stay in an ambition that is determined to do the job, rather than feed the ego.

If we want our magical efforts to succeed, sometimes we need to be a little more of Shaidorov -- maybe less flashy but more steady, and clean -- and leave the Quad God aspirations for another time. There is no shame in that. You don’t have to push the extreme envelope of what is possible to be a winner. Do your best magic, at your best pace. That is more than enough.

As witches there is sometimes a strong temptation to take on “big magic” for ego driven reasons. Whether it’s to “prove yourself” to other witches by talking about how badass your spellwork is, or to make yourself feel important or relevant to a larger world, when your magic is ego driven, you’re not focused on the right thing, and the chances that your magic will be actually effective at achieving its objectives drops dramatically,. Big magic is there to make change in the world. And if your mind wanders from that objective, the magic will suffer.

Whatever its source, ambition will push you to do everything in your power to succeed in your endeavors. But the second lesson for modern witches that comes from Malinin’s Olympic performance is that it is something else again to be gracious when you fail to live up to your ambitions.

When Malinin finished his program, having delivered a performance that would not even put him in medal contention, you could see the shock and disappointment on his face. And yet, he didn’t sulk. He kept his composure and offered genuine congratulations to the skater who won. Sometimes as witches we have bad days. We go after things we want, and sometimes we get them and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes the magic doesn’t work the way you want it to. Sometimes we meet witches who have things that we wish we had, or who have capabilities that we don’t. If you live long enough on this earth, you will be bitterly disappointed in an outcome in your life. Malinin’s example of grace in the face of disappointment is palpable and inspirational.

The thing that should make it easier for witches than perhaps it was for Malinin is the fact that witches really don’t ever need to be in competition with each other.

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Let me say that again louder for the folks in the back: Witches really don’t ever need to be in competition with each other.

There are no prizes for being the best at witchcraft. There’s no one giving out medals or keeping score. There are initiations and different traditions might have degrees, but achievements within a tradition are not awarded based on your being better than some other witch. What you achieve you do because of how you are measured against yourself and no one else.

That’s why Malinin’s example of graciousness in defeat is so inspiring. This is a guy who had every reason to be devastated by his loss, to be surly and mad about not getting a medal when he was (and really still is) far and away the best men’s individual skater in the world. Indeed, McGrath, the Norwegian skier, confronted with a similar situation, stormed off the course. And instead, Malinin humbly congratulated the man who did win, and took the stance of being humbled by the outpouring of support, and thoughtful and vulnerable about the reasons for his failure.

It’s important here to note that while McGrath’s reaction was not the shining example that Ilia’s was, it was deeply human and understandable. Before we judge Alte too harshly we need to remember that emotions are not biddable, and sometimes we get overwhelmed, and while McGrath may have come off like a “sore loser,” he didn’t hurt anybody and he was processing some pretty strong feelings. He deserves a little bit of grace.

That said, we hope that we can all be able to approach even the worst disappointment with Ilia’s kind of humility and thoughtfulness. While emotional reactions are certainly part of the experience when we’re disappointed, and those reactions aren’t always from our best selves, we do have some power to decide which of the many possible reactions are going to be embodied at any given time. And if we find that exercising that power is difficult, it’s important as witches to cultivate it.

If there is one thing that you are as a world champion figure skater, it’s disciplined. No one lands double, triple and especially not quad jumps on ice without a lot of discipline (and tolerance for pain.) Learning how to stay mentally strong in the face of heavy competition is difficult in any sport, especially when there’s world championships and Olympic medals at stake. Malinin has been cultivating his “game face” for most of his life. He’s also had two world class figure skater parents to educate him on the possible disappointments and how to manage the fishbowl that is the kiss & cry. Malinin has had a lot of advantages on that score. But that shouldn’t for a second take away from the magnitude of his hard work to get himself to the place he is in, or to do what he seemed to do so naturally after seeing his hopes dashed.

The Craft, if it is to be done well, also requires discipline. For all the moments where we as witches “wing it,” (one of my favorite anecdotes that I tell beginner students is about the time that I created an altar and cast a blessing in a friend’s diner using only tools I made out of shit I found in the diner), there is no question that our magic is always better served the more attention to detail and precision we bring to it. And it is precisely at the moment when our emotions are running the highest that our discipline provides the best aid. It takes discipline when the stakes are high to harness your stress and your fear and your excitement so that it helps you instead of hurts you. When that discipline slips and your emotions get the better of you, being disciplined can help you make the most of your recovery.

In the end, Ilia Malinin may have botched his individual long program, and his shot at Olympic gold, but because of his discipline and his graciousness he has emerged from the 2026 Winter Olympics more of a hero and a legend than ever. The Quad God isn’t just a jump-landing, podium-climbing machine. He’s a gracious young man with a heart and a soul who has carried himself well through the most bitter of disappointments.

And maybe that’s the most important lesson of all for us as witches -- sometimes in our ambition to be “legendary” in our Craft or our impact on the world, we forget that how you manage failure will do as much for you, if not more, to demonstrate who you are and the power of your spirit and your Craft. The point isn’t to be so beyond what normal humans can do that you never fail, but to be so human that even if you fail, you still win.

Blessed be, witches.

I’m going to say up front, this is not about the uses and perils of hexing or baneful magic. I already did an essay about that here.

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Rather, these are my thoughts on the idea that there is qualitatively good and qualitatively bad magic, and what might the propagation of low quality, or “bad” magic might mean for witches and the world at large.

To even start to answer the question requires an unpacking of the idea of magic being qualitatively measured in any objective way. What makes a magical endeavor of good or bad quality?

More importantly, who gets to decide?

Because that’s a big sticking place. A person who’s been trained in classic hermetic magic is going to have a vastly different answer to the question of what is high quality vs. low quality magic than someone who’s been trained in classic Gardnerian Wicca. And someone who’s been trained in Feri or Reclaiming will have different ideas as well. And what of the eclectic solitary who has cobbled together a syncretic practice drawing from many different ideas and frameworks? We do not have “one Craft to rule them all” so is this in fact a fool’s errand from the outset?

If you want to make this work, you might need to take a page from the Westminster Dog Show. How do you decide who is best in show in a dog show with dozens of different breeds, all of which have a differing idea of what makes for a perfectly fashioned dog? The judges at Westminster answer that question by evaluating each breed of dog based on how closely it meets the breed standard. The “best” dog is the one that is the best example of is breed. Likewise, what’s “bad” or “good” is probably best measured based on what the tradition or system you’re working with would define as “bad” or “good.”

Here’s the thing -- magic may come in different flavors, with different traditions, different gods, different cultures. But magic is rarely “purebred” when it’s done in practice. This is especially true the more skilled we become. A gifted witch doing a spell might start with a Gardnerian altar and circle cast with some technique borrowed from Appalachian folk magic and blended with some ideas copped from writings from a reclaiming witch. And that doesn’t mean that the work is somehow deficient.

As much as we might want to talk a good game about our witchy pedigree, which tradition we belong to, or who we studied with, the truth is that even those of us who wear cords and talk about degrees and initiations will, when we’re actually practicing magic, likely do so in an eclectic and syncretic way.

All of that said, there is a much more simple benchmark that we can look at -- does it work?

After all, as one of my favorite authors likes to say, paganism as a path is built on orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy. What that means is that the focus is not on what we believe so much as what we do. We are, at bottom, solidly grounded in the natural world around us, in the recognition of the sanctity of our own bodies, and in the acts of devotion we make, usually centered around the Wheel of the Year. We are not people of faith, we are people of pragmatism.

So, the good magic is the magic that works and the bad magic is the magic that doesn’t. That seems rather simple, yes?

Except that magic is rarely so cut and dried in its working.

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Sometimes our spell works exactly as we hope it will, delivering precisely what we’ve designed it to. And sometimes it delivers what we’re supposed to have, not what we’ve asked it for. Sometimes it delivers something that is not what we wanted, but is precisely what we asked for. Magic can be funny that way. Good magic is not always the magic that does precisely what we ask it to, or works the way we expect it to.

And the truth is, there are commonalities. There are guiding principles that tend to work across traditions and schools and types of magic. Despite all of my going on about differences and one size does not fit all and the Rule of 100, the fact of the matter is that a witch knows good magic when they see it. You can feel when a spell or a ritual has tapped into something greater than the sum of its parts. You can tell when magic is good because it doesn’t just change your external circumstances or the “universe,” it changes you.

Good, well-executed magic is thoughtful in its creation, well-designed, and brought forth with passion and will, drawing and directing energy in a way that you can feel. Good magic is like good poetry -- every word and gesture and element that is brought to bear is essential to create the meaning and the impact, and there is nothing extraneous or unnecessary. And you feel it down to the marrow of your bones and the bottom of your soul.

So if that’s good magic, what is “bad” magic? Because that is as equally difficult to pigeonhole as “good” magic.

There’s the obvious point that if magic doesn’t meet the standard of good, then it is bad. Or at the very least mediocre. Some might say that mediocre magic is actually the worst of all. After all, actively “bad” magic can be executed with as much passion and with as much thoughtfulness as good magic, but ends up being “bad” because the elements and the materials being worked with are wholly wrong or ill-conceived. And while bad magic will fail and perhaps even leave chaos in its wake, there can be an epic-ness in how it fails that is almost admirable. The spectacular failure that happens because of ambition and courage and daring, even when it is misguided in some way, can be impressive. I wonder whether it is possible that magic, like some movies (”Hot Tub Time Machine” comes to mind), can be so bad that it is actually good.

So what is the impact of bad magic? Does badly-executed, mediocre magic cause harm? In an environment where there have never been so many people unleashing their magic in the world, many of whom have not received the kind of instruction that might enable them to be good at their craft, is there an impact from so much “bad” magic being done?

Again, it depends on what you think bad magic is and how it operates in the world. If bad magic is magic that does not work, then bad magic isn’t having any impact because it’s not actually doing anything. If bad magic does in fact create an impact on the world, but does so in an incomplete, chaotic, or bungled way, then how significant is that impact? Does the presence of bad magical impacts cause harm or interfere with the results of good magic? Does an abundance of bad magic create some kind of energetic damage that undermines magic or the universe more generally?

I think which conclusion you draw is dependent upon whether you believe we are living and working in a universe that embodies some intelligence (either in the form of deity or some other concept) or not. If the universe is basically a big dumb machine, with no guiding intelligence that guides it, and magic is just using energy to manipulate the workings of the machine, then perhaps bad magic can be quite powerful. But if you believe that the universe ultimately has some kind of intelligence at its heart, that the universe does to some extent decide which magical acts it will allow to take effect and how much effect it will take, then you might rest easy knowing that the universe only responds to the good magic, or at the very least dulls the impact of the bad magic.

Personally, I think an intelligent universe is capable of having mercy on magicians who are either under-educated, or who make mistakes. While certainly if you put bad magic into the world, you will own the consequences of that, I think that often the universe allows us to avoid the worst impacts of our bad magic if it means that we learn and grow and eventually get to where we’re doing the good magic.

While I personally prefer to believe the universe is deeply intelligent, I’m not going to be prescriptive in that. I honestly don’t know, and I could be wrong. Others are free to choose what they think and feel about that as they are sovereign over their own paths.

One thing I do know, however, is that an over-emphasis on dividing the world into “good” and “bad” magic and the assertion that the presence of “bad” magic undermines good outcomes from good magic creates an environment where practitioners do not have room to make mistakes. By that light, errors cost too much to be suborned. After all, if “bad” magic ruins the world, then we should all take it upon ourselves to never do magic unless we know for certain we can do it well, and have it be “good” magic.

And that would be a real tragedy. I teach a lot of beginners who already feel disempowered because they don’t feel they know enough to do the spells they read about, or to try and work magic on their own. It sets up a high hurdle and creates a sense that magic belongs only to those who are capable of reaching a certain level of education or skill. It smacks of an elitism that actually runs counter to what the Craft is about. The Craft has always been a tool for those who lack other kinds of power or influence or resources. Magic is what you do when all other means to change a thing have failed or are unavailable. It is more than that, of course. Magic can be a tool for daily growth and improvement. Magic can be a way of life. But none of those use cases thrive when you insist that one should only use the tool if you can be good at it.

As Phyllis Curott likes to say, the world needs her witches. Witches who do only good magic do not happen overnight. All of us do a lot of bad magic before we get to the good stuff. We need to be able to make mistakes. We need to be able to fail spectacularly from time to time. I personally believe that deity provides the necessary grace for us to do “bad” magic, perhaps even a lot of bad magic, so that we can grow into the powerful good magicians we are meant to be. Obviously we should work to make sure that witches learn how to do good magic and not bad magic. The world benefits from her witches being as skilled as possible. But I’m not sure promoting a perfectionism vibe really helps with that.

Blessed be, y’all.

Imbolc isn’t one of the holidays that gets a lot of love and attention. Not like some of the other pagan Sabbats, anyway. It’s got the fire, but not the wild, connective, sensual energy of Beltane. It’s not got that spooky, spirits from beyond the veil vibe that you get at Samhain. It hasn’t got the frenetic, hardworking, harvest energy of Lammas or the Autumn Equinox. Sandwiched between the deep community and warm hearth fires of Yule and the wild, rangy energy of Ostara when life bursts forth from the ground, Imbolc is often treated in a perfunctory manner. Ask a pagan about Imbolc, and they might search for words until they manage to mention the goddess Brighid, and a word about milk, and maybe a corn dolly.

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It is perhaps the contrarian in me, the part that likes to find the hidden beauty that few others see, that draws me to Imbolc. I have written before about how Imbolc represents a moment of human defiance,the moment when we light a fire against the darkness, and choose to step forward to drive the wheel of change rather than be carried along by it. It is the recognition of the invincible summer within us. And
that’s what makes it one of my most favorite of the pagan Sabbats.

If there’s one thing that we’ve learned this year is that we’ve all of us needed an invincible summer within us just to get to the other side of all that’s been coming at us. Our nation has been deep in the throes of a dark winter for more than the season usually lasts. We have a President who is hell-bent on destroying our democracy and lining his pockets, and destroying anyone who isn’t white, wealthy, cis-het and Christian. If there has ever been a moment where we needed to light a fire in insubordination to the cold and the bleakness, it’s right now.

But what does it mean to have within you an invincible summer? How do you begin to light the flame that will drive back the cold and the dark?

Fire as an element is hungry. It consumes, without ceasing. One does not conquer fire with strength. It may only be defeated by depriving it of fuel. Fire is insatiable. It will find whatever fuel it can to sustain itself, to grow. And even from a tiny spark from a single strike of a match, it will grow, consume, reach higher and farther until it eats entire landscapes. Fire doesn’t need anyone’s help to drive back the cold and the dark, once it’s lit. And that light, that heat, once we have it in our lives, it keeps us going, it gives us the energy we need to change things, to make things better.

But to start this fire is the tricky part — because we need the spark. In the modern age we take it for granted. We have boxes of matches and lighters that operate with a simple hand movement. Gas stoves light up with the twist of a knob. We don’t spend much time anymore trying to generate a spark from nothing. But ask any Boy Scout or Girl Scout, or someone who’s taken a survival skills course and they will tell you — it’s a lot of work. It’s chancy. The conditions have to be right. Your kindling has to be dry as bone. You need a flint and steel, or something that will create friction, or a lens that will magnify the sun’s splendorous rays to a fine point. Sparks must be squeezed into being from intense energy, through focus and force and will come tiny delicate things that leap forth and when they fall, if they fall in the right place, on kindling that is dry as bone, will catch fire.

You’re not imagining it — things feel blacker and bleaker than they have for a
long, long time. Some folks have lit a fire -- the protests in Minneapolis are an exemplar in this regard. Thousands upon thousands of protestors took to the streets in subzero temperatures for a general strike in protest of the surge of ICE thuggery and lawlessness that has resulted in the murder of Renee Good, the use of a five year old as bait, and other atrocities. Many, many people are now on fire with the desire to protect their neighbors.

But we need more. These sparks bring hope and brief spasms of light in the darkness. But sparks are not a fire. We need the light and power of the flames to beat back the darkness, and there doesn’t seem to be much time to lose. This is the work of Imbolc in 2026.

Many of us are already activated, already on fire. I have friends doing “bridge protests” every weekend, manning overpasses on the highways around DC with signs protesting the occupation of DC and the Trump regime’s general lawlessness. There is already a network of people through my county that is supporting marginalized communities, and there is probably a network where you live too.

But what if you are struggling to find that spark? What if you are scared or overwhelmed? Some folks are having trouble finding their spark.

Where do we find that dry space, and where do we direct all that effort that it takes to generate that spark? In this time, in this place, it always starts within. The invincible summer starts within. What is the thing inside of you that is bare and dry and ready to receive the fire’s touch? What would you have the fire light up in your life this year?

As for focus and intense energy, if you’re a witch, you know how to do that. Raising and directing energy is our bread and butter. If you’re new to this pagan thing, we’ve all had an experience where we feel filled with energy, and use it to accomplish something. important. Remember a time in your life when you had that feeling, when you did that. It’s time to nurture that sensation again.

It may feel a little harder to do than usual right now. Some of that is natural, given the time a year. We have been in the cold and the dark of winter, and energy does not move so readily. And given what’s going on in the world, paralysis isn’t so surprising a reaction. But that’s what a Sabbat is for — the Wheel and the Sabbats are here to provide that natural energetic assist that you can use. Imbolc is about lighting a fire, it is all about the focus and intensity that draws forth a glittering spark, that arcs aloft and finds its way directly into the dry place prepared for it,the place in your life that is ready to burst into flames.

It is difficult, and at the same time, nothing could be more simple. The beauty of fire is that once a spark has hit the kindling and lit the flame, the fire knows what to do, and it will do it relentlessly. This is the magic of Imbolc. Gather the energy. Focus. Prepare the part of your life that will receive the flame’s touch — and make a beautiful, delicate, incandescent spark.

It’s Imbolc, y’all. It’s time to get lit.

You can access the event page and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/online-knotted-ash-wicca-and-witchcraft-101-series-2026-tickets-1975185821964?aff=oddtdtcreator

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The class is one I have taught a lot over the last decade. It’s meant to be for those who are new to the Craft and looking to learn more about magical practice, and particularly of the Wiccan variety, although seekers who are interested in western eclectic witchcraft will find that this class provides a pretty good roadmap for learning about practices beyond Wicca as well.

The Knotted Ash Tradition offers this class as a first step for anyone who wants instruction in our ways, but more importantly, this class provides valuable knowledge to anyone in the community who is just getting started, whether or not they have any interest in our tradition or Wicca more generally.

I know that I’m not the only one out here offering beginning instruction on witchcraft. Far from it, in fact. There are probably at this point dozens of books and classes that will teach you almost any magical system that is out there. Many of those books and classes are very good.

So why am I doing this? Is what I’m offering so very much better than what’s already out there? And honestly, why does a seeker need a class in the first place when there is so much educational content available for free on Substack, on YouTube, on TikTok and Instagram? Why would I pay $40 to take a nine week course when I can get so much for free through the miracle of the Internet?

These are all very good questions. And you may or may not find my answers helpful. But nonetheless, here they are:

I teach this class because I believe that the world needs witches, and right now it has never been harder to be a seeker. Why do I think it is so hard to be a seeker right now?

The truth is that you don’t need my class to become a really great witch. There are plenty of books, videos, podcasts, substacks, classes, etc. that can offer you really good information that you’ll find helpful and that works for you. But first you have to find them, and then you have to engage with the material, and inevitably, you will have questions, and the material hopefully provides the answers, but very often it doesn’t.

And if you’re new to all this, navigating the landscape can feel daunting. I usually explain it this way: Imagine you have been invited to a party, one that you’ve always wanted to go to. But you get there and you don’t know anyone. And even worse, everyone who is there seems to already know everyone else, and they are having all these conversations about their shared experiences and their mutual friends. And you are standing out the edges of these very animated, very engaged discussions, trying to find a way into the conversation. It can be daunting even for the most self-assured among us.

And yet, that is the experience of nearly every seeker who has shown up to their first festival or meetup or Discord server.

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Ultimately, that’s why a seeker would want a class like mine, and why they would pay for it. And I know that’s the reason because nearly every student who has taken my class in the last decade or so has told me some variant of this. They wanted to take my class because they felt overwhelmed by the amount of available material, and the material was often confusing, or contradicted itself, and my class offered a means to obtain reliable information from a real person who they could ask real questions to.

Witches are a fractious bunch. Nothing is ever 100 percent true for 100 percent of witches 100 percent of the time. That’s the beauty of the Craft. And it’s also infuriating when all you want is a straight answer. Being new to the Craft has always been hard, but the seemingly endless array of options available to the seeker now makes finding your way harder than ever.

And often us experienced witches aren’t always able to meet seekers where they are, either because we’ve forgotten what that feels like, we’re busy with our own challenges or we lack empathy or patience. No tea no shade, helping seekers find their way is a skill set that not everyone has, and not everyone has an interest in. Hoping you run into a person who has the skill, time and inclination to teach you isn’t a strategy for learning something. So when a teacher offers a class? That’s clearly need meeting opportunity.

My goal for each and every one of my students is that they finish this class with the information they need to be able to take the next step on their path, in whatever direction they choose to go, with confidence that they are making the choice that is right for them.

I believe very strongly that each witch is absolutely sovereign over their own path. Yes, my class is centered on the style of practice with which I am most familiar -- modern Wicca and its larger influence on western witchcraft. But I’m not here to teach you how to be a witch like me. I’m here to help you figure out what it looks like to be a witch like you.

The truth is most witches in America are eclectic and syncretic in their practice (even the ones that hail from a particular tradition). But it’s hard to develop that kind of practice without understanding the source material you’re drawing from. And in western witchcraft, Wicca is an inevitable part of that source material. It is as wrong a place to start as any other. And it’s definitely not the be all and end all. A class like mine is a starting point. But completing it does not constitute a finish line.

So, if you’re still seeking, and you think a class like this might help you, you know what to do. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/online-knotted-ash-wicca-and-witchcraft-101-series-2026-tickets-1975185821964?aff=oddtdtcreator

I hope to see you in class!

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There is still fight left in us, yet, however. Minnesotans, both civilians and electeds, are not letting the DHS write a false narrative. Protestors have been flooding the streets in Minneapolis and showing up in other cities around the country. People are of course deeply affected by the shooting of 37 year old mom Renee Nicole Good, and, combined with the kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign nation, are unsettled by what it all means for the descent of our country into corruption and lawlessness.

So yeah, maybe good people around here are all a little bit on edge.

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One of the things I am most grateful about is that my Craft practice gives me tools to manage times like this. And specifically, this morning’s daily Tarot pull had some really important insights that I’m sharing with you because I think it might be helpful.

So today’s pull was the Nine of Swords, reversed, and then the Six of Cups, also reversed, which if you’ve read about how my daily practice works, you know that when both cards show up reversed, the deck is shouting, and both cards get turned upright.

The first card, the Nine of Swords, of course speaks directly to the situation at hand -- the deep-seated anxiety of the current moment. The Nine of Swords is the ultimate expression of one’s thoughts running away with you, the depiction in the WCS deck is of someone literally waking up in terror. So if this is the energy we need to be on the lookout for today, well that’s pretty on the nose obvious, ain’t it?

What is much more interesting is the card that comes in as the answer to this energy -- the Six of Cups.

The Sixes as a whole are always more complicated than they seem at first. In every suit they represent a respite, a moment of positivity that breaks through the disruption caused by the fives. But in each case, if you scratch the surface of it, there’s a lot more going on here than initially meets the eye.

Specifically in the case of the Six of Cups, the simple, surfacey engagement of the card is one word -- nostalgia. The iconography of the card is sweet and nurturing -- an older person is handing what appears to be a young girl a cup that is filled with flowers, and they are surrounded by five other cups equally filled with flowers. The scene is set in the middle of a town square, indicating that this card is about social interaction, thoroughly entrenched in the man-made world of humans, rather than in the realm of spirit or of the natural world.

The first instinct is to say It’s the remembrance of things in the past that are being brought forward into the current situation. A reader upon seeing this card will typically tell the querant that maybe an “old flame” will be returning, or someone else from your past is going to be involved in the situation, and whoever it is, and whatever they are bringing is by and large, positive. And that’s perfectly adequate.

But like all the sixes in the Tarot, there is more here than meets the eye.

As with all the sixes in Tarot, there is a duality at work, an inherent assumption that you make upon seeing the card, that you really should interrogate more closely, because when you do, you realize there is another way to see the dynamic. With Six of Cups, the typical assumption is that the querant is the child receiving the flowers, the one being gifted beautiful flowers from the past, represented by the elder figure in the image.

But what if this isn’t about being the recipient of good things from the past, but rather being the figure bestowing the flowers? What if this isn’t about someone returning from the past, but rather about remembering who YOU were in the past?Because the Six of Cups is not always just someone or something from the past coming back, it can also be the version of you when you engaged with that person or thing that is making a return as well.

In fact, when you dig deeper into the duality of the Six energy, it becomes even more clear that this card, the Six of Cups is not just about feelings connected to people and things in your past, it is also about remembering who you are, where you’ve come from, and how that’s made you what you are today.

And that is precisely the energy that we as American citizens need right now. Because how we react in this moment, what we say, what we stand up for, is going to decide how things go forward.

Are we a nation of laws that does not allow its citizens to be terrorized by masked men with guns who feel comfortable shooting people in cold blood and leaving them to die? Are we a country that tries to exert “hemispheric dominance” by disrespecting the sovereignty of other nations in order to deliver profit to private citizens and and corporations?

Now, there is another wrinkle in all of this (with Sixes there is always another wrinkle) -- the quality of the remembrance is a matter of perspective, because memory is not a fixed substance. We know from research that memories can be manufactured. Memories can shift or change over time. Two people in fact, often have different memories because the initial experiences that they are remembering are different from the outset. America does need to remember who it is, but that memory is by no means consistent across all Americans.

Nor is that memory always positive. The gods know the United States actually does have a long history of meddling in the affairs of other countries in the Western Hemisphere (Grenada, anyone? Bay of Pigs? Iran-Contra?) And likewise, US History is littered with shocking examples of its government killing innocents or condoning such killing without compunction, compassion or due process. (Kent State, a long list of massacres of Black people including Wilmington in 1898, Tulsa in 1921, and anti-Union massacres including Chicago in 1937 and West Virginia in 1921.)

The truth is that our horror at what is happening right now has been a long time coming, and the forces that have been emboldened to be so brazen in their cruelty and lawlessness did not come out of nowhere. They’ve been here all along.

We are indeed in a moment where we need to remember not only who we are but who we’ve been, who we’ve claimed to be, and reckon with the discrepancies between those things. Because while the Six of Cups is definitely a card that invokes the past, it does not mean that that’s where we need to be living.

I say all the time that the past is our teacher, not our identity. Usually when I’m saying that it’s because someone is holding on to a narrative that was true of a past version of themselves, but which they have no use for anymore. And I speak from experience here, having done this myself on occasion. (Remember that anything here that passes for wisdom comes from surviving my own stupidity....) We experience trauma, we do crappy things and make mistakes, and those things become part of our narrative going forward. Big traumas, big mistakes can loom large in our lives afterwards, impacting our reactions and decisions and feelings for a very long time.

But another thing happens over time -- we live. We grow, we have new experiences that also fold into our identity and our narrative. We become something else, we move beyond what we were. It’s not that past mistakes, or traumas or defining experiences disappear or fail to be relevant. But whatever it is ceases to be the biggest thing, the most present thing. It becomes part of a larger bouquet of experiences that is informing who we are in the moment. And at some point, we need to examine that old narrative that we’ve been reciting, and ask ourselves if it still matches who we are right now. More often than not, it doesn’t.

The fight we’re in right now is as much about reckoning with who we’ve been as a country as it is who we would like to be as a nation going forward.

Remember, there are six cups with flowers in them, but the child is only being handed ONE. In other words, we choose what we gift ourselves from the past to carry forward, and what we leave in the cups around us, things that may decorate our memories but do not belong in our future.

The Six of Cups, especially in this moment, isn’t asking us to look for our past to give us flowers, to give us fine feelings of nostalgia for days gone by, when we weren’t living in this moment of high emotions and extreme peril. It is asking us to draw from the past, learn from it, and use its lessons to write ourselves a narrative going forward that is better, that is more consistent with who we want to be, our aspirations as opposed to our limitations.

The Six of Cups tells us that we can’t live in fine feelings of the past. It tells us that whoever it is we’ve always wanted to be, now is the time for us to be it.

Let’s get busy, Witches.....

A side note: yes, my politics are showing. If your instinct here is to chastise me for that, then clearly you haven’t been paying attention here. My politics are almost always showing, because I believe that to properly undertake the path of the Witch you must concern yourself with the welfare of your community, and that means per force that you will be political to some extent. Honestly on this point, I don’t care if you agree with me or not.

If you’re lucky, this is not as earth-shattering as it sounds. Hopefully, you’ve already had your childish expectations dashed by life. Sadly, this is not always the case.

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Western culture for about 150 years has been dominated by the idea of “normalcy.” The word “normal” comes from a Latin word, that meant “a carpenter’s square” which was used for creating standardized right angles, and in most of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries was an architectural and mathematical term. But in the 1800’s that began to change. Things began to be ascribed to “norms” or were “normal” and the term began to be associated with the idea of a set standard that one conformed to. By the late 19th century, the concept that something could be “normal,” meaning meeting agreed upon social conventions, was a part of the Western European zeitgeist.

By the time the United States reached the 1950s and 1960s there was almost an obsession with “normal.” American life was being rigidly reflected to its citizens through media, particularly radio and television, and anyone who didn’t fit in the stifling constraints of the conventional American identity for men, women and children, was to be ostracized and considered weird, unwholesome, or even “un-American.”

Even as the counter-culture of the 1960’s arose and flourished in the 1970’s, and as more and more people came to realize that there are many, many ways to live in this world that were not “normal” by the classic American standard, we still as a people, have fetishized the idea of “normalcy.” When something happens with our bodies or our health, we ask our doctor, “is that normal?” Whenever we want to critique a person’s behavior or their dress or their opinions or their looks, we might frequently say, “That’s just not normal!” Whenever we’re trying to plan something or evaluate something, whether it’s our retirement plan or how long it’s taking us to find a job or the fact that our kid is flinging his porridge at the wall, we ask the question, “is this normal?”

We very desperately spend a ridiculous amount of energy pursuing “normalcy.” And at the very same time, we’ve also properly understood that “normal” is not always a ringing endorsement. Something that is “normal” is indistinct from everything else around it. You’re part of the herd, the great unwashed. And something our American culture also prizes is exceptionality. Witness how many slogans and advertisements prate on about how their product makes you a standout as an individual. You should buy L’Oreal cosmetics “because you’re worth it.” If you’re an Apple customer it’s because you “think different.” Starry soda “hits different.” And the US Marines urged young men and women to enlist by promising that they would be part of “the few, the proud.”

So we want to be exceptional. And we want to be normal. Welcome to the hard-wired schitzoid underpinning of American identity in the 21st Century.

But here’s the tricky thing about normal -- it’s not nearly as rigid as the right angle that provides its origin. What constitutes “normal” in any given situation is highly dependent on the context. That’s why as children, we are molded by our experiences and presume them as “normal,” even when they are anything but. Both my parents were the children of Greek immigrants. I grew up in a house where cooking was done with olive oil, which came from a five-gallon metal drum that my mom kept under the sink. Butter was what you used on bread and on phyllo dough. Crisco was an unknown substance. This was normal.

I didn’t figure out that most Americans didn’t cook this way until my junior year of college, when my roommate, a born-and-bred North Carolina mountain girl who grew up in a town so small the phone company barely knew it existed, asked me why I’d bought olive oil for the kitchen we shared in our on-campus apartment. Where she came from, olive oil was a thing you might put on salad if you were trying to be fancy. If you were cooking, it was with butter, Crisco if you were making fried chicken. Clearly I was not normal.

But neither was she. I went with her to visit her small town in western North Carolina and the fixtures of her childhood, including a grandma who made a quilt out of every single Easter dress she and her sister had ever worn, seemed lovely but decidedly NOT normal from my perspective having grown up in New England.

Normal is not objective. And yet it becomes a standard by which we judge everything around us, as if it is something immutable and capable of making coherent distinctions. Normal is very much a subjective concept. The human need to belong, however, keeps our heads on a constant swivel, seeking the tacit approval that comes with being “normal,” even though it’s nearly impossible to nail down a universal definition of what that is, because it will shift based on who is attempting to define it.

The biggest favor you can do for yourself and for your Craft is to free yourself from the need for normal.

What exactly do I mean by that?

By this I am not referring to enthusiastically embracing an aesthetic and suddenly finding yourself wearing all black, listening to Stevie Nicks, and wearing crystals all over your body in a performative display of being “witchy” and therefore different from whatever the socially accepted practices are in your community. There’s nothing wrong with doing any of these things if that’s what you like, of course. But merely trying to look different or act different as a way to separate yourself from the crowd and avoid “normalcy” isn’t what I’m talking about.

Being normal or not normal isn’t a state of being. It is a perception that is imposed on people externally, based on standards that may or may not have anything to do with what people actually do or what is actually, verifiably good for them in terms of health and well-being.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered normal for a person to smoke cigarettes. My mom did it. It was regularly featured in movies and television. It wasn’t necessarily a welcome habit in all circles, but if you were a smoker in that era of American life you were not a deviant or terrible person. Of course now, smoking is considered a dirty habit, and we know unequivocally that it has devastating health impacts on people. It’s not good for you. But for a time, it was considered within the bounds of “normal.”

Nor is normal a binary. Human beings’ lives are comprised of so many different practices and habits and ideas, and the mix is different for everyone. While my choice of olive oil for cooking might not have been “normal” in the context of 1980s American cooking habits, many other facts of my life -- getting a drivers’ license at 16, wearing clothes I purchased at the local shopping mall, and eating Kraft mac and cheese -- were incredibly “normal” for a young American woman of my age at that time.

On the one hand, the decision to even pursue the study of witchcraft is to embrace something that places you outside the bounds of what is considered “normal” in many circles. We can’t ever forget that no matter how many shows on TV or movies popularize witchcraft, no matter how many public influencers embrace being a witch as part of their identity, and no matter how many women embrace the iconography of the witch to bolster their feminist cred, we are still a marginalized population, and we are still (falsely) considered a threat to many in the dominant religious identity in the United States, Christianity.

In witchcraft, where the pursuit of “normalcy” shows up is in the witch questioning whether their experiences with spellcraft, with meditation, with ritual are “normal.” In other words, did I do this right? Are my feelings and sensations and outcomes with respect to this magical work inside the acceptable bounds of “working?” Or did I mess it up?

If you’re asking this question, congratulations! You’re actually already “normal.” Because every student I have ever had has asked this question at some point on their path. Hell, I’VE asked this question more than once. The answer to the question, however, is not that simple. Because the truth is that everyone’s magic feels a little bit different. What feels “right” to me might not feel “right” to you. What you excell at and have a natural affinity to is going to be different from what I am good at and naturally gravitate to. And because of that, different types of magical working are going to feel different from one witch to another, and that is exactly as it should be. My student who is has a natural affinity for working with the dead will have a very different experience with a spell that involves ancestors than I will -- while I certainly can work with the dead, it’s not my strongest suit, and as such my feelings, experiences and outcomes will not look like theirs.

Does this mean that my student is ill-suited to me? I mean, shouldn’t I seek to only teach students whose magic is most closely similar to my own?

The answer to that is an absolute, categorical NO. Because if a person only seeks to teach students whose magic closely resembles their own, they will either have no students at all, or they will endeavor to turn ALL their students into cookie-cutter replicas of themselves. Neither of those approaches is acceptable. In the first instance, the fact that the magic I am best at is not the same as yours doesn’t mean you have nothing to learn from me. In fact, I might suggest that it’s better to learn from someone whose magic isn’t too similar to yours, because it forces you to really feel your feelings and experience your experiences when it comes to your magic, rather than rely on the crutch of what your teacher tells you your feelings and experiences ought to be.

Two witches can do the exact same spell and have entirely different experiences with it, depending on their own level of comfort with the tools, the magical forces being deployed, and their overall experience and skill. And they can have those differing experiences and feelings and both be completely correct in how they did the spell and completely sufficient in the results.

The magical world is wide, and has room for a broad range of experiences, tools, feelings and practices. One of the things I dislike most about witchcraft on social media is the inevitable encounter with the witch who thinks they know better than someone else what their magic should look like/sound like/feel like. They try to police someone else’s practice, and in doing so usually demonstrate how little they actually know. Nothing is 100 percent true for 100 percent of witches 100 percent of the time, and I can guarantee you that the moment you step in with unsolicited “help” or “instruction” for another witch that boils down to “you’re doing it wrong,” you are probably showing your ass. If you really feel a need to offer unsolicited advice to another witch online, I guarantee you that you are much better served by taking the approach that your proffered knowledge is “an alternative that’s worked well for you” as opposed to a rule that everyone needs to follow because of course you (and only you) know what’s most correct here.

When you become obsessed with duplicating someone else’s idea of what’s “correct” and therefore “normal,” you are guaranteed to actually make your magic less effective, because you now have a preconceived notion as to how your magic ought to be experienced. As a result, you spend so much time observing your reaction and trying to monitor it for whether it is “correct” or “normal” that you don’t actually have the experience or feel the feelings. You’re no longer doing magic at that point, you’re performing magical theater.

Even worse, if I’m trying to turn you into a duplicate of myself, I am not teaching you how to be witch, I am turning you into a follower. And the truth is, the community is not served if I create followers. The world needs witches who are sovereign over their path and who are fully empowered with their own magic. The world has no use for a bunch of copycat Alythias who are not doing their best magic and who aren’t exercising their full sovereign power. I don’t have any use for that either. Beware of someone who does, because that’s usually a marker of someone on an ego trip.

Now, there are types of magic I am not qualified to teach because I don’t know enough about it or haven’t got the credentials or the cultural permission to teach it. If you want to learn Native American indigenous practices, for instance, I am NOT your girl. And while I know a lot about a lot of different types of divination practices, work with some Irish and Celtic deities and I’ve even taken classes on Ogham, I’m not your girl on Ogham. Other people are much more knowledgeable, and if you’re coming to me to learn a divination practice, your better bet is to learn tarot or runes from me. Those are tools I am much better equipped to teach you how to use. And yes, your experience with runes or tarot can, will, and probably should be different from mine.

“Normal” is a mental crutch that we impose on ourselves as a way to make us feel more secure in our outcomes. It’s a way to placate our uncertainty. “Normal” means we’re safe. We’re doing and experiencing what is expected, and therefore our outcomes will likewise be safe and expected.

But here’s the thing: Magic is not a safe substance. It never has been, it never will be. Magic always inolves risk. Yes, we can reduce risk by becoming skilled, by using the right tools and by being careful in how we do our work. But at no point does that risk ever reach zero. If you are learning magic in the hopes to live a risk-free existence, you are kidding yourself and I beg you to seek some professional counseling. And I say that not because believing in magic is somehow delusional (it’s not), but rather because a compulsive need to control risk to the point where it no longer exists is evidence of obsessive thought patterns that require a psychological remedy, not a magical one.

The trouble with normal as a concept in magical circles is that its usefulness is pretty narrow. What is “normal” for you will probably not be “normal” for someone else. Normal can help you define your own practice, but isn’t necessarily useful for assessing anyone else’s. Normal may be able to reduce risk in some scenarios, but it can’t eliminate it entirely. The social rigidity of “normal” in the end can constrain a person’s thinking with respect to their magic, putting them in the role of observing and performing magical acts, without authentically being in the magical experience. Releasing the need for “normalcy” in your magic frees you to build your magical experiences based on what you are actually good at, what you actually feel, what you are actually experiencing. Your magic is therefore truly yours, and no one else’s. In a world that loves to try and mold and shape people and put them into well-defined boxes so they may easily be controlled, true sovereignty requires us as witches to surrender the idea of being “normal.”

Blessed be, witches.