Opinion: Why Witchcraft will keep rising, no matter how poor the public perception

Today’s offering comes to us from Diana Helmuth, whose memoir, The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling through Modern Witchcraft, released last year. She is a nonfiction author, freelance writer, Silicon Valley startup veteran, hiker, producer and cupcake baker. You can find her at her website and on Instagram as definitely_not_lost.

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If you are part of the 0.4% of Americans that identify as “Pagan or Wiccan,” October marks the time of year where the rest of America remembers that you exist.

I know that 0.4% looks tiny. However, the dizzying rise in occult content and online Witchcraft hashtags tells us another story. Numerous academics and research institutions have declared that Witchcraft is the world’s fastest growing spirituality. Americans are hungry for Witchy and Pagan stuff – even if they don’t want to admit it. Because those who consider themselves serious people still think of it as cringe.

I speak from experience on that last part – not just because I tried (skeptically) to turn myself into a Witch for a year and then publish a book about the experience, but because of the book tour that followed. Strangers sat down with me in book stores and convention halls, mildly curious about my book, but more wanting to talk about their own journey into the shadowed world of Witchery.

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“Can you tell if I’m psychic?” I was asked, and “I think I’m a Witch, but how do I know?” “What are the signs, if it’s happening to me?” I had no idea how to answer these questions. I don’t even identify as a Witch, half the time. I wrote a cheeky memoir about trying to summon one of King Solomon’s demons with printer paper and scotch tape, and suddenly people were talking to me like I was Starhawk. I think it was because they were so blinded by spiritual hunger that they couldn’t tell the difference between a goof like me and an actual Pagan thought leader.

At the same time, bookstores seemed to have no idea where to shelve my book. Most put it in the “Witchcraft 101” section, next to Silver RavenWolf, Juliet Diaz, and other “how-to” books. Some refused to carry it entirely. “We don’t carry books like that,” they would tell me, skeptically eyeing the cover and the word “Witching” that was emblazoned upon it. I still have not figured out how to explain that this is a book about exploring the self-doubt that comes with a serious spiritual endeavour. It is not an infomercial about a successful transformative experience into Witchcraft.

I have felt, since publishing The Witching Year, that I have been letting both the booksellers and book readers down. But it’s the book readers I understand the most.

 

I define Pagan Witches (and the Witch-curious), as a group of people who received, but didn’t fully digest, the Gen-X cultural memo that organized religion was unfashionable and that in order to be reputed as an intelligent, forward-thinking individual, you must eschew adherence to any governing body that claims interpret orders from a magic man in the sky. This memo was issued to America by atheist luminaries like Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. It was a breath of fresh air, frankly: white men screaming “bullshit” on spiritual systems that had been weaponized to benefit them. And deep down, I think many of us were tired of having our honest desire to be held by the divine mutilated into instructions on how to conform, who to judge, and who to hate.

However, although people like Hitchens and Dawkins correctly diagnosed Western civilization’s diseased relationship with religion, they bungled the cure. There is a clawing hunger in the brain that is left behind when you remove the conception of deity. Christianity may be tainted, but our desire to feel a connection with the divine is not.

I believe that modern Witchcraft is so tenacious, despite how goofy it appears to most people who consider themselves intelligent, because it’s not just a replacement for a magic man in the sky. It’s an entirely different conception of spirituality. It’s a self-determined path that offers to lead its walkers back to their pre-colonized, pre-Christian past. This is a tonic to many, including throngs of white liberals who have no connection to their ancestry and are desperately trying to work through white guilt. Modern Witchcraft may not be an accurate path to the past, from a historic and academic standpoint, but that is actually irrelevant. Even if the thinking mind knows that what is being passed around as “Witchcraft” today is reconstructed from the scraps of Pagan knowledge that survived two millennia of burning and rot – and is necessarily contrived and imperfect  – it still speaks to the part of the mind that wonders “what would have happened if Constantine never painted a cross on his shield?”

The thing is, for most of us who badly shuffle the tarot cards, or imagine the crystal is vibrating even if we can’t quite tell you what a “vibration” really is, or who flip through Cunningham’s old copy of Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner even though we know it’s cringe, or who want to stop and linger in front of the occult shop because it smells nice — what we’re actually doing is searching for a spirituality we feel was robbed from us some 1000 generations ago. We are pondering the idea that if this robbery had not occurred, perhaps we ourselves, our community, and our world would be much better than they are. We have no compass on how to get it back. We are doing the best with what we can find.

For this quest, we are looked down upon by most of the part of society that considers itself intelligent. We are also insulted within our own community, for being silly, for being wrong, for appropriating, for daring to be moved by something that the cool Neopagan kids (yes, there are cool and uncool Neopagan kids) have decided is cringe and dated. There is very little community within the Pagan community. This is because it’s more likely that we don’t share beliefs, rather than that we do. Such is the nature of a self directed spirituality. The only thing we really have in common is feeling misunderstood.

However, despite this environment of mutual misunderstanding, I believe that Paganism and Witchcraft will continue to be the fastest growing spiritualities in America. It is the closest thing to a path away from the colonial structures that we have become so jaded with. It’s a grasp towards a religion that isn’t infused with violence and shame.

Maybe we have to do it while getting it wrong, and laughing at ourselves the whole time. Maybe that’s the price of trying.

It’s still worth it.

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