The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/guest)
As warnings about AI “necromancy” circulate in Catholic discourse, Pagans once again appear as the unspoken cautionary tale. But the real ethical concern may not be communicating with the dead, but consent, authority, and imitation.
“Contemporary reclamations of ‘witch’ as feminist identity tend toward celebration,” writes Beatrix Kondo, “which Atwood declines. What she offers instead is something harder and more useful: these practices functioned as survival apparatus for populations the official world refused to protect.”
“If you’re drawn to folkloric density, ancestral memory, visceral horror that rejects comfort, or animist logic where houses and bodies blur,” writes Cosette Paneque in her review of Irene Solà’s novel, “this has power. But know what you’re walking into.”
“When we choose to honor a lineage,” writes Rev. Ron Padrón, “we cannot cherry pick only what makes our ancestor – and by extension, us – look good. We take on the responsibility of sitting in the totality of the legacy they have passed down to us.”
Alex J. Coyne looks into how some Witches and Pagans are using chatbots and other generative AI tools as components in their rituals and spells – and why that has potential to be a very bad idea.