The real Witchcraft, in my humble experience, is making the packets of ramen noodles stretch to the end of the month.
I’m a practitioner who has never had an easy time separating being a Witch from a job. Maybe it’s the capricorn stellium, maybe it’s my long lineage of crafters, makers, farmers, and factory workers – but for me magic has always been a labor.
The magic of the common people has always been used around work. I’ve been reading the collection Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois, published originally in 1935, and whole sections are Witchcraft about keeping work, getting work, and staying safe at work. For people who didn’t have the money to pay to have their problems solved, there is sewing bread in a bag and hanging it above the door.
Historically, Witchcraft, both the acts and accusations, came down to the villainy of action. Too much independence, too much importance, being too out of control, and being generally unpleasant could put you in a lethal relationship with the government. It mirrors the persecution of the working class and organizing, and as we’re about at American Labor Day, that feels important to me.
Industrial Workers of the World Labor Day Picnic, Oakland, California, 1939 [Labor Archives of Washington State, UW Special Collections]
About 10% of people in America have a union job and those jobs largely fall in the public sector – teachers, librarians, and protective service positions. Many of these budgets get cut every year as a means of economic crackdown and government control. In the ideal fascist world, the only union would be the police force… until even that is crushed. We have limited concepts of the worker and working class that come down to gender and what we consider valuable work. When we think of the American Worker, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time listening to NPR, it’s coal miners and production jobs: always men, always about expansion. It’s a very limited scope, because so much labor is not about production, but maintenance and investment. It’s teaching, it’s caregiving, it’s dishwashing. It’s domestic labor.
Folklore around Witches or Witching, however, is the subversion of what we would consider domesticity. It’s poisoning the cow, dowsing for fresh water, cursing away warts, or brewing good beer. But all of the people doing any of these things were and are neighbors, townsfolk, and local weirdos. It’s medicine, midwifery, animal husbandry, and general care of people.
Being a Witch and being a worker are the same thing. Witchcraft is a worker’s solution. It’s the realm of poor and marginalized people without access. The Witch represents the wilderness and the worker the metallic factory, both described with inflated senses of power. Workers only have power in numbers and if there is need. Witches only have power if it’s satisfying to accept their help or hunt them for hysterical relief.
And under fascism, workers and Witches are hunted with the same intensity.
Labor Protest [Pixabay]
The question rings out: “Whose side are you on?” The structures that be are protected by one of the largest and most vile deities we’ve ever invented – money. The messaging we get is that it’s better to be resourced than resourceful, because if we’re resourceful, we’ll team up and become a force. We are told to perform self-care through purchasing and consumption rather than identifying that behavior for what it is, which is simply self soothing. Being a Witch is more than just spells and coven work and haunting pastures; it’s a direct service position.
Which brings me to Labor Day.
The history of American Labor Day is both an honor of labor and a disruption of its recognition. We celebrate it in the fall because Grover Cleveland was too concerned that International Workers’ Day would encourage people to connect with the anarchistic and socialistic beliefs of the Haymarket Affair (in which police shot into a striking crowd). Workers had successfully gone on strike for the eight hour workday. The achievements of labor were paid for with blood and death.
So what does that mean for the Witch as a worker now? The chants of the Battle of Blair Mountain, how do they echo with the mumbled magic words of today, under our current fascism?
It’s in the removal of FLOCK cameras. It’s city council meetings about not allowing data centers. It’s not allowing ICE officers any peace. It’s funding libraries and social programs. It’s healthcare for all. It’s community service: I know a magician who uses the I Ching to help lost pets find their ways home and he just circles his neighborhood looking at all the lost pet posters and does his roster.
The Witch does not hide in the realm of the Witch. We are doing the work of reminding the paranoid environments around us that all we have is each other. We are doing the begrudging, exhausting work of being neighbors.
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]
This Labor Day, I wrote a different call to the quarters. Feel free to use it.
- North: We call upon the ancestors who felled the trees. The timber workers, sawmill, the chimney sweeps, the midwives, the carpenters, the park stewards. Those who have their hands wrapped around a saw, and those who have blocked a pipeline, put their bodies on the line to protect a forest. Who replanted the fallen forests. Hail and welcome.
- East: We call upon the ancestors who harnessed electricity. The communicators. The connectors. The switchboard operators, child caregivers, elder care workers, the relationship workers, the fast food servers, the nurses, the therapists. Those who put their minds to the work of advancement, and their voices to activism. Hail and welcome.
- South: We call upon the ancestors who worked with the heat. The firefighters, miners, textile workers, healers, the bread bakers, the farmers, the moonshiners, the blood stoppers, the ranchers. Those who held the hot coals in their hands. Hail and welcome.
- West: We call upon the ancestors that heard the roar of the sea. The sailers, the longshoremen, the builder of the railroads, the laborers, the farmers, fisherman, the whores, the laundresses, the parents. Those that beheld the salty water and sought the voyage anyway. Hail and welcome.
We owe each other the world, and owe each other the ability to receive the world. Community care cares for us all.
So mote it be.
Author’s note: I like playlists, so have a Labor Day playlist.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.