Witch Hunts, Purity Tests & the Vatican: What Actually Matters?
Community Over Clicks
Magic is the most important aspect of life. For me, anyways.
Myth, ritual, the unfettered transformation and growth made possible by deciding to navigate the divine for yourself with no middleman: that’s what life is about for me. Nothing else holds a candle. That’s what called me to it as a child. I was raised by two different flavors of fundamentalist: one a hardline Evangelical Christian, the other a Persian Jew with an understandable level of defensiveness around her culture, given that most of her family fled their homeland to survive during the Islamic Revolution. But as much as I can understand that cultural connection that spits in the face of persecution as an adult, it doesn’t change that neither religion was ever right for me. I remember talking to bushes, thanking spirits for my water, spending hours and weeks and years as a child trying and failing to understand the concept of monotheism… one god, that created everything. One god, where all divinity starts and ends. One god, controlling it all. One god. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t believe it, or that I grew up and disliked it on ideological grounds: I have never been able to force my brain to truly understand the concept. When I finally found the word “pagan” and “witch,” it was something that didn’t even require an attempt at force to make sense of. It just did.
Across my life, I’ve seen people identify with certain religious paths for a number of reasons. Cultural protection and heritage, like my Iranian mother. Plain old community, like plenty of folks coming from any number of backgrounds. Curiosity, confusion, loneliness. Status. Politics. Power. I’ve seen people identify with religion for anything but religion itself, more often than I’ve seen people with sincere faith. So for people who walk their path sincerely, I understand concerns about what amounts to political infiltration. You don’t want to see people using your religion, your faith, your path as window dressing for whatever their real agenda is. That’s an insult to the path, and any who walk it sincerely. It’s a spit in the fucking face. I’ve long said that in particular, to put pedigree over practice, that’s an insult to the gods as much as it is to fellow humans. And anyone who thinks that their race or involuntary identifiers alone will mean more than their actions in this life in front of the gods, good fucking luck- you’ve got another thing coming. In any case…
A bit over a year ago, a guy who I ultimately ended up having sincere, empathetic conversation with made his absolute best effort to tar and feather me and others out of magic itself because of two primary things— one, who I associated with on a social level. Two, I- gasp- wore a T shirt that said “abandon modern culture.” But really, because I reject wholesale the ideas of original sin, groupthink, ideological bandwagons and dog piles, and as a daughter of the Morrigan I don’t merely believe in: but I live for sovereignty. Sovereignty starts in the mind. In short, I think for myself and value that in others as well. I’d never actually had a conversation with the man that slandered me and tried his best to destroy the lives, livelihoods, reputations and all that mattered to me and those I knew until he put out this hit piece— which if you haven’t read and don’t understand either what I’m referring to or why you’re not supposed to listen to a damn word I ever say again if he and his bandwagon had their druthers, is still the most popular post on his blog.
I’ll be honest, it’s tempting for me to lash out at it on a personal level even now— lashing out that people would brand someone they’ve never met as something so vile without knowing me personally or caring what I have to say, tempting to go blow for blow because many of the attacks on me and those I knew were personal, and not made with any sense of community in mind— just social cannibalism for clicks. That’s exactly why I won’t be responding that same way. That’s why this post is about community, methodology, and the love of the Craft itself. This is bigger than me.
What happened with me over a year ago now- the blog post, the subsequent dog piling, the slander, the harassment, the scarlet letter branded with the intention that I wouldn’t be able to make friends or practice publicly without one stranger’s witch hunt speaking for me before I can speak for myself… yes, that showed a clear power grab on the author and dogpilers’ parts. It also clearly shows that serious concern that people have, and are right to have: a concern over political infiltration. And who wouldn’t? Anyone who’s been around the pagan world for any real length of time has seen it. That’s not the part I question, criticize or condemn.
While I can and do fully understand the concerns around political infiltration of religion, this ground I will not give: religion is not politics.
I don’t just mean “I understand concerns of political infiltration” as in “I understand that you simply don’t want your particular political opposition to use your religion as decoration”— I mean to have any sense of clarity, any hope of conversation, you need to clearly define terms. Religion and politics are definitionally not the same realm.
You may choose to blend them; many do. For you personally, perhaps your politics and religious practice are enmeshed, inseparable from your religious expression. I know and like people who feel that way, although I personally couldn’t disagree more and consider it misguided at best, damagingly coercive at worst.
My point is this: while your politics and your religion may well be interchangeable for you on a personal level, while you may feel that they are and should be related, that’s a voluntary association on your end. It’s crucial that the association is voluntary for it to be meaningful. They are not the same word, because they are not the same thing. For choice to mean anything, people need to be able to decide for themselves where their religion ends and their politics begin— without threat of force, social or otherwise.
When people are scared of social force, professional force, harassment, rape threats, exile, slander, all manner of coercion: they are never going to be honest. Most of the time, they’re going to say what they feel they’re expected to say to be seen as non-threatening. Most people are going to say what they need to say, because most people are not built to constantly fight uphill against any and all of that shit on a regular basis— just to step out of the “activist” default framework. To entertain the notion for a second, though, let’s say that you believe religion and politics are inherently enmeshed, even interchangeable— are you the one to enforce how that’s carried out? Are you judge, jury and executioner? That’s where it becomes clear when this methodology is about ego, power and control. When it’s not about “justice” of any kind, but about force. I did not sign up to bend the knee to any one person’s idea of what activism should be, any more than you signed up for mine. Without the freedom to choose what that looks like in each of our lives, it’s not meaningful- because it’s out of fear or outright force.
What happened with me was an attempt at purity testing and ideological force. Call me whatever you like; I’ve heard it all at this point, and it doesn’t change the truth. I initiated a human conversation, some back and forth correspondence at least with the author— but when it became clear that I won’t change who I am as a person, that I will not be scolded into compliance like a beaten child, he ignored that human connection and doubled down on what got him clicks. Because this methodology isn’t about religion, as its adherents would claim. Power, control, force— those tactics seem more at home with extremist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam, not the inherently anarchistic, anti-consensus practices and subcultures of the many crooked paths of witchcraft and paganry.
That isn’t what this is.
Paganus— it means those backwards country folk that are too uncivilized, too unsophisticated to just get with the program and convert to Christianity. We insist on our “primitive” traditions, our folk customs, our refusal to detach from our primal nature. Sound familiar? I am not a political activist. It’s not my calling. My calling, what makes my life meaningful and fulfilling, is my religion and practice- druidry. Specifically, primal druidry— an intentional cultivation of the primal and wild nature, fostering the sacred space of ritual as a source of catharsis, catalysts and transformation.
I do believe that religion is and must be a pure realm, purely what it is, without the mundane demands of politics and social cannibalism. I believe that fully. But what I’d draw your eyeballs to is not labels or trying to make you agree with any particular position or opinion, but the fact that my attitude itself reflects a priority that transcends political labels: sovereignty. I often find myself wishing that instead of a political label, I could simply tell people I’m a devotee of the Morrigan, and that would make my principles clear, without the pretentiousness of sitting around and telling you what I “believe” without actually showing it through actions.
So I won’t sit around and describe lofty ideals: I know what I live for, what I’ve bled for, and would bleed for again. Sovereignty. There’s no substitute. You wanna see real justice in this world, real honor? That doesn’t come from trying to scare the shit out of everyone that doesn’t agree with you. It doesn’t come from using every abusive tool of coercion in your arsenal— slander, vilification, harassment, rape and death threats, threats to livelihood and more— until people shut up and comply out of fear, or resent you so fucking badly that they reject what you’re forcing on them entirely and embrace the opposite just to rebel against the coercion. This actually isn’t hard to understand, but when we accept the precedent that it’s right to force compliance when it’s ideas we agree with, it’s easy to forget.
It’s often said amongst practitioners that magic is neither black nor white, but a reflection of its doer. That’s completely true. Why can people repeat that regarding magic, but not understand it socially— all while claiming that magic and politics are the same? I think we all know it’s not, but the word games persist in an effort to force a consensus where it never has, never will, and never should exist.
The occult, paganry as a whole is now being presented as left versus right, activism olympics of who can be more perfect or “unproblematic,” as ceaseless virtue signaling chest-thumping, as endless political bloodsport even when it’s not. And it’s not— but it’s discussed that way, and presented as if it is and should be. The attempts to shove me in a box should be proof enough that the framing there is insufficient.
The adherents of this cannibalistic methodology see morality, righteousness and virtue all in terms of political affiliation- and that’s a very shallow and in fact destructive way of thinking about something as complex and beautiful as the occult, which goes far deeper than political binaries ever could. And again, the occult is not Christianity. People say that, but don’t properly check their baggage of what that actually means. When I say “the occult is not Christianity,” I am entailing that the occult is not about the appearance of virtue. It is contingent upon deeds, not words. I don’t know how y’all practice, but with what I do— it’s literally impossible without my word, my integrity, meaning something real. This path is about the mitigation & navigation of honor and divinity for ourselves. It’s incumbent on us to, as the Oracle of the Matrix put it, make up our own god damn minds.
If you want the Vatican, it already exists. I didn’t sign up for that. Did you?
When someone’s a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if someone’s going to view me or anyone else as a Nazi fascist evil incarnate/insert insult here because I aint your nail and I never have been, I can’t stop you. Hell, I have no interest in spending my life fighting the perceptions people I’ll never meet have of their idea of me- that’s a waste.
My interest lies in cultivating real community in real life, with sincerely devoted practitioners who are drawn to the same focal points that I am: ritual as initiation, cathartic transformation- the cultivation of sacred space in a world bereft of it. Insisting on chances at real honor and real fucking sovereignty.
That can only exist without witch hunts and purity tests. It exists with the utter rejection of attempts to force us to act like we’ve got some pagan Vatican running around, setting the rules and standards who can do what and how. Are we witches or what? I find this ideology- that purity testing, that open use of force and social cannibalism- especially as it’s taken root in the pagan subcultures, to be unacceptable, and to be responsible for this widespread flattening, that sterilization and forced barrenness that’s taken hold of so many facets of society today. I reject that ideology, and I reject all of the frameworks it attempts to force over those that question it and think for themselves.
The fact is, the various online pagan and witch subcultures are not a “community.” They’re sure as hell not a collective with a consensus, that can or should enforce catechism like we’re the fucking Church. Good gods. The idea that they could or should be is, at best, delusionally out of touch. Plenty of people will consider my positions on on all this to be wrong or misguided at best; that while you may be able to entertain that I’m not personally a Nazi, that it’s best for people to basically be expected to agree with paganism being equated to extreme left-wing activism. What that effectively does is make paganism into something it isn’t: a purity test, a witch hunt. It strives to create a consensus that never existed and should never exist. If you want to enforce hierarchy so damn bad, go join the Catholic Church- I hear they’re hurting for numbers these days.
A renowned druid I admire and have had the pleasure to correspond online with, John Beckett, has called modern paganism a “big tent.” If you haven’t read his article, I recommend doing so. I like the metaphor, and I like the idea behind it. In his opening explanation, he acknowledges something I’ve seen fit to remind people: that just because we don’t fit the mainstream concepts of religion, does not mean we have a damn thing in common. I’ll cite him a bit more here as well.
John wisely said, “there are no fences and there are no guards. If you want to come in, you can come in. If you want to go out, you can go out.” And ultimately: “We are not one. There is no single Pagan religion and I have no desire to create one. But the Big Tent of Paganism is a useful and beneficial approach to grow and support our many pagan religions.”
No fences, no guards. Entry into the occult cannot be guarded by purity tests, period. If you can’t understand the value in skinning your own knees, then hell… I’d say you’ve probably never done real magic. Cause it doesn’t matter what I say, or what I think here: there’s a value to skinning your own knees bloody and learning from it that makes you not want to steal that from anyone else.
For the love of the gods, though, don’t go after John if you disagree with me. I shouldn’t have to say this, but please do not assume that he agrees with me on absolutely anything just because I’m citing his metaphor here- he doesn’t, and the assumption that everyone we talk to must certainly agree with us and speak for us 100% is part of the problem here. He and I respectfully disagree on a few things, the political nature of pagan practice being one of them. He just happens to have the grace and elegance to speak meaningfully to those who aren’t identical in belief, but no, I’m not speaking for him. I’m elaborating on a metaphor that I find value in, in my own words- no more than that. So at the end of the day, if people are going to complain about gatekeeping, political infiltration, the whole kit and caboodle of ego, coercion and bullshit that makes magic about anything but- which they’re completely right to do- that includes all of what I’m referencing here.
Personally, the title of this post isn’t a question for me. Magic is what matters. Sovereignty and dignity matter. Community with sincere, devoted, real practitioners matters. It’s worth the work… one must imagine Sisyphus happy, after all.
But don’t take my word for it. Make up your own damn minds.
Note: This post was originally published on Substack on June 30th. I’ve since decided to consolidate all my writing to my own website.