The exact term for my spirituality isn’t something I lose a lot of sleep over. In many ways it’s the ultimate form of insider baseball, a fractal pattern of definitions and subdivisions that are only useful if I’m speaking to someone else as thoroughly embedded in the Pagan community as I am.
In those spaces, I have half a dozen specific terms to pinpoint exactly where my spirituality lies, but they’re not terms that are particularly useful elsewhere. Most folks I meet, newly introduced to the term “Pagan,” aren’t yet ready for the fine distinction between Druid and Heathen, or the histories that have led some to identify as “polytheists” while others with similar practices use “animist” to capture their views. As their world gets bigger before my eyes, these new friends grasp at something familiar in an attempt to contextualize what I’m telling them – not Christianity, not any of the other religions they might know about, but something else. They usually land in the same place.
“So you’re a Witch?” they’ll ask, and I will find myself shaking my head.
“No,” I say. “I don’t do magic.”
It’s not a fair thing to say, because they’re not wrong, exactly. My experience of most people outside the Pagan community is that their main references for Pagan spirituality are still firmly rooted in 90s TV. My house, with its many altars and divination tools, is probably closer to the set dressing for a late season of Buffy than to anything else they’ve ever seen. They are gesturing towards a worldview they don’t understand, where spirits are real and rituals follow the sun, and they are correct in that.
Still, it seems important to me to draw this single line, to differentiate between one world they don’t understand and another. I’m not sure why.
A diorama of a cunning woman on display in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle, Cornwall. [Ethan Doyle White, Wikimedia Commons, CC 4.0]
It’s not as though the term has a simple definition. “Witches serve the community,” one of my friends says, ladling salve from her stove into another carefully labeled jar. “It’s a job, not a practice. I’m a Witch because people come to me for help, and I do my work to heal them.”
Another friend shakes his head, needles never stopping as the fabric in his hands becomes a garment. “Witch is just another word for Wiccans,” he says with a dismissive shrug. “You incorporate Wiccan rituals? You’ve read Cunningham? Great, you’re a Witch.”
A third friend shakes their head. “To be a Witch is to be the speaking tongue of the cosmos,” they say, looking up from their writing. “It is participating in the history of our practice, it is engaged in the Great Work of existence. It is the path of the both-and-neither, the hedge riders, the profane and holy.”
“Well, I don’t think I’m any of those things,” I drawl. “I mean, I vibe with liminality, but -” I look at their projects, each of them filled with intention, each in its own way a spell. “I really feel like magic is the difference, one way or the other. I don’t do magic.”
This earns me three disbelieving looks, and I can feel myself getting defensive. “Listen,” I say, “I’m not out here doing money draws, or protective amulets. I basically just have a craft project from time to time.”
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I think back on the first Witchcraft book I’d found in my local library as a teenager. I had not, at the time, even tried to check it out. Instead I found a quiet corner and flipped through it quickly, ready to hide it if anyone came around the corner. It was filled with spells another teenager might have jumped on – minor curses, charms for popularity, chants to draw love. In the back was a list of herbs and stones, each short entry listing a meaning and potential uses. It left me disappointed in a way I didn’t yet have words for.
Now, surrounded by talented Witches with magic in their hands, those words escape me again, and I shrug. “I own, like, three herbs, and I couldn’t tell you what kyanite’s for if you paid me.”
“Depends on which kind of kyanite,” one of my friends mutters, and I gesture to them emphatically.
“You see?” I say. “I just make things sometimes. They’re devotional, not magical.”
There’s a long pause, and then someone laughs. “You think there’s a difference?”
A selection of jars containing herbs and other ingrediants used by Cunning folk in Britain. Artifacts at the Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle, Cornwall [Midnightblueowl, Wikimedia Commons, public domain]
On the days in which I am most honest with myself, I know that part of my discomfort, here, is my own judgmental side. Too often, the way people talk about magic feels to me like a combination of capitalism and spiritual bypassing rather than a real expression of spirituality. I have an idea of spells as specifically goal-driven, a way to access and edit the coding of the universe to achieve a particular result. There are very few things in my life that seem worth the effort or the potential consequences of that sort of work. If I can approach a goal in any other way – therapy, conversation, even prayer – that is what occurs to me first.
When I feel like a spell might be necessary, it’s intuition more than anything else that guides me. I need to find the language that allows me to communicate with the cosmos, the shared understanding that operates past language and symbol, that carries meaning with enough power to change the way things are. I have to draw on my own understanding for that, mapping out my intention and the best ways to encapsulate and communicate it.
Which means that I tend to think lists of correspondences are useless. Not only correspondences, but any ritual text or magical direction that claims to tell me how a spell ‘should’ be cast. If someone’s advice isn’t based in the physical, scientific properties of a resource – like using shungite for cleansing – or a detailed account of the cultural history of a practice – like the many traditions contextualizing spinning in the household – I am very likely to dismiss it out of hand. The small red bouncy ball I keep on my desk means joy and luck to me more than a chunk of amazonite ever will. I have no feelings at all about agrimony – I’m not even sure where it’s from – and using it in a spell is more likely to annoy and confuse me than to lend power to my working.
It’s a rare day that a spell requires me to buy something I can’t find in a grocery store. But metaphysical shops depend on selling spell components and crystal shops are more likely to list the spiritual impacts of their wares than their geological qualities. I love pretty stones – but the idea that someone trying to cope with the difficulties of living in 2024 might be sold a $90 piece of rock to cure their depression leaves me feeling ill.
On the other hand, I know that this level of judgment is based in my own privilege. It takes money, time, and inclination to spend this much effort on forging my own practice. I have the resources to pursue my goals without magic, and the additional energy to approach magic itself like a programmer instead of an end user. There’s nothing ‘better’ about that – they are simply two ways to achieve a result, two paradigms used to engage in the same project.
I think of Eglantine Price, one of my own cultural touchpoints, learning magic from a book sold to her as nonsense. I think of the early scientists, who knew that certain conditions led to certain results even if they weren’t sure why. I believe it’s possible to move the heavens with a ritual learned by rote and a handful of herbs – I’m just salty about it.
At the end of it, I know that the projects I do take on – be they jars of herbs or small rituals, necklaces made of certain stones or clothes woven just so – are few and far between. If I light a candle and say a few words, they are more likely to be a prayer than an incantation. Surely that’s not Witchcraft.
Some days this feels honest, a recognition of a practice that is not mine. Other days it seems like the rankest form of hypocrisy. I read my books on Trad Craft, call on my devils, feed my familiars, and say because I cannot tell a posset from a tincture I am not a Witch. How much, I ask myself, is true? How much is my attempt to distance myself from Charmed and Sabrina, to make some claim at legitimacy in the eyes of those who don’t know enough to understand the conversation?
No, not a Witch, I tell them. Something else, something strange that you haven’t heard of, something that you don’t understand. Something you’ll take seriously.
Statue of Greek god Hermes, so-called “Hermes Ingenui”, carrying a winged caduceus upright in his left hand. Roman copy after a Greek original of the 5th century BCE. Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums, Rome [public domain]
At last count, I had 20 images of Hermes on his altar. They vary from statues to tarot cards to defunct railroad bonds, a platoon of curled-hair figures with well-turned ankles and laughing eyes, scantily clad and always in motion. It isn’t so much that I collect them as I have a hard time leaving them where they are when I encounter them in the wild. Some of them are expensive. But unlike the devotees of old, they are never bought as payment for a favor or as propitiation for Hermes himself. I have them because they make me smile, because they remind me of a beloved friend, because they make my house feel a little more like home.
They aren’t the only things here. The little box dedicated to him contains coins and herbs, dice and wax, railroad memorabilia and an incense burner that is only his. The candles I burn have been made just for him, with dill and anise and in a color that reminds me of his grin. I have bought items that have become his fetishes, anointed them in oils made by someone else in his name. The altar is filled with his energy, and I sit with the candles burning to talk to him, and I do not call it Witchcraft.
I wash my hands in salt water, use a white cloth to ceremonially clean my face and hair. I read about this ritual on a blog, and learned years later that it’s a modern invention. Still, the gods seem to like it. A coin glints up at me from the bottom of the bowl, silver enough to meet my needs for right now. I didn’t come up with this, but it gives me peace, reminds me why I’m here. The air tastes like burnt bay leaves. I don’t particularly like bay leaves.
“Guide me in my journey,” I ask. “Fleet-footed traveler, see me there and back safely. Friend of man, be my companion now and when I arrive at last in the clearing at the end of the path.”
Hermes has always been a god of magic. What does that make me?
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