Jaymison

The non-Christian half of this equation goes by many names. Through a decades long process of factions splintering off, recent history going lost, and self-identifying as Wiccan becoming increasingly less socially accepted, it has gained, absorbed, and appropriated an unforeseen number: (neo)paganism, witchcraft, the craft, "spirituality," eclectic paganism, Traditional Witchcraft, magick, and many more. A lot of these names have semantic variations in what they actually mean or were originally meant to mean, but ultimately they have all - unfortunately - come to represent more or less the same thing: this unnamed, informal magic tradition of spell jars and eclectic 'deity work' that finds its roots in 20th century Western Occultism.

I would like this post to address the entire spectrum of this problem. From self-identifying Wiccans who still adhere to rigid binary or triple gender role beliefs in their magic, to a resident Hellenic pagan working with Apollo and doing the occasional money bowl - and even into those traditions that adopted aspects from 19th and 20th century spiritualism and occultism out of necessity, like afrodiasporic practices. Not because I believe that all of these manifestations of this problem are equally severe or do equal harm, but because I think everybody who engages with 'spirituality' on the internet needs to hear this and contemplate it. Christian imperialism never left our midst. It just repackaged itself to even more effectively infiltrate our minds and behaviors; because it's easier to make symbolic changes than real, radical ones.

Please keep an open mind while reading this, understanding that while some of this undoubtedly will not be about you, some absolutely will. Even if you yourself do not practice anything so much as mentioned in this post, you will find yourself around it, and if you do not act, you will eventually be colonized by it. This has bearing on everyone in the community, not just those who engage in it actively, but also everyone else who is at risk of having their words and practices co-opted, their history erased, their morals misrepresented, or even just their words twisted.

Other Mothers, Same Father: Imperial Britain and New Religious Movements

In 16th century Europe, the Protestant Reformation swept across great parts of the continent. In England, particularly, protestantism fought viciously to shed the political and theological underpinnings of Catholicism, and gained a strong cultural foothold as the Church of England. From the Church of England sprang new Christian movements, often called proto-evangelical, such as Puritanism, Pietism, Moravianism and Quakerism. Though these respective denominations each went on to carve completely different futures for themselves, they influenced Christian theology and the soon to form evangelical movement immensely, causing a new movement founded in spreading the Gospel, and accepting the Bible as the sole authority.

During the so-called First Great Awakening, the rapidly solidifying evangelist movement gained intense momentum across the 18th century Anglosphere, springing new denominations like Methodism, and rooting itself into the newly forming American identity. It has continued growing, through further 'Awakenings' and revivals, and is now a cornerstone of American culture, as well as a well-recorded religious presence worldwide. The World Evangelical Alliance estimates that some 600 million Christians worldwide can be counted among evangelists.

But something else was happening in western Europe at the same time. Non-Abrahamic schools of thought and spirituality founded in ancient traditions like Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism started being grouped together as 'esotericism', and initiatory traditions within it, like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, arose. Then, with the Enlightenment, esotericism gained a branch rooted in Enlightenment thought: occultism. Between the Age of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Victorian Era, esotericism and occultism continually evolved and organized, founding groups like the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as countless schools of thought like Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Spiritual Science, and New Thought, which all influence modern spirituality to this day.

During the Victorian era in Britain, scientific advancements were deeply shaking the foundations of religion, and rapid industrialization was changing the landscape in unprecedented ways. In response to these pressures and changes, esotericism and occultism experienced a boom in popularity. In the English-speaking world, this fascination with occultism carried a distinctly anti-Christian twinge, because it found its origins more in the Enlightenment aspect of esotericism than that which was heavily influenced by organized religion. For this reason, 19th and 20th century occultists believed that true(r) wisdom could be found in what they thought was the 'ancient pagan tradition', and it is to this motivation that we owe the creation of Wicca, Cochranian Witchcraft, Druidry, and other neo-pagan traditions.

Wicca gained rapid popularity after its formation, thanks to its creator's dedication to the press, and the 1960s counter-culture movement in the Anglosphere took a special interest in these forms of spirituality, bringing them further into relevance and giving rise to the New Age movement in the 70s. And, of course, this extremely complex spiritual landscape was changed forever with the advent of the Internet.

A Social History of Contemporary Witchcraft

For more information on the origins of modern witchcraft, please see my post on Wicca.

'Witchcraft' as we know it now is almost impossible to define, because it is never the same between two witches. The popularization of new religious movements after the 60s, followed by the creation of the Internet, meant that what were once fairly niche and structured communities adhering to roughly the same doctrines now started to exponentially multiply. They interchanged (and indeed confused) ideas and ideologies, formed new streams and movements, and spread this game of spirituality-telephone like wildfire. It was being called by many names depending on what corner of the internet you were in, but whatever they called it, people felt that these new ideas were empowering, mystifying, and meaningful.

But, despite the sheer size of the Internet making it almost impossible to trace the recent history of witchcraft step-by-step, we can trace its many constants back to their historical origins. The magic that is now practiced by possibly hundreds of millions of people across the globe, often regardless of what they call it, shares many common features between different self-identifying labels. Many witches and practitioners borrow the concept of the 'astral plane' and 'energy' from Theosophy, 'manifestation' or the 'law of attraction' from New Thought, 'energetic blockages' from Mesmerism, so on and so forth. But, of course, the central-most influence on contemporary witchcraft always has been and always will be Wicca.

Contemporary witchcraft was built on the foundation that Wicca laid. Most people, even if they don't identify as Wiccans, found magic and/or paganism through Wicca or Wiccan-aligned resources. Favorite authors like Cunningham, Murphy-Hiscock, Auryn, Illes, Adler, Buckland, Kelden, etc are or were Wiccans at one point in their lives, or practice a form of magic that is derived from Wicca. Almost all common practices, motifs, beliefs, and tools utilized and acknowledged by modern practitioners are Wiccan in origin. To name a few: - the Wheel of the Year and the modern conceptions of the 'sabbats'; - the idea of historic 'witches' as cunning women; - styling every deity as 'Lord' or 'Lady'; - pagan priesthood; - intention; - 'eclectic' practice; - the binary between covens and solitary magic; - a 'Book of Shadows'; - deity work (as opposed to standard religious worship); - the notion that the same system of magic and religion can be universally applied with different pagan deities; - the unification and flattening of regional traditions into broader categories like Hellenism, Heathenry, Celtic paganism, etc; - and, indeed, calling yourself a 'witch' at all. ... and uncountably more. If there is anything you can think of as quintessentially 'witchy', odds are it either came from Wicca or evolved from the contemporary witchcraft built off of Wicca.

Some are comparatively old and fairly structured elements of a relatively organized religion, like the Wheel of the Year, the soft-polytheist Lord/Lady model, Book of Shadows traditions, and the slightly younger divide between solitary practitioners and coven-goers. Others are completely new and came about through the effects of the Internet, such as the notion of 'intent': according to Wiccans who lived the early days of Wiccan web forums, the notion of 'intent' came about to illustrate that 'doing magic' necessitates a goal for the magic to fulfil, and that simply repeating a ritual from a book with no goal to achieve in mind was not a functional way to approach magic. The more experienced Witches would educate the newbies by borrowing terminology from Chaos Magic's concept of a Statement of Intent, to encourage new practitioners to do magic according to their needs rather than purely for the sake of doing it. In between that time around 2010 and now, 'intent' has transformed from a personal tool to structure your practice into the cosmological driving force behind all magic. Rather than the great cosmological force of 'magic' being channeled through a Wiccan ritual, personal mental processes have turned into the operative power of a magical performance, which seems to reflect a broader pattern of individualization.

White Egocentrism and Post-Colonial Neo-Religion

Individualism, hyper-individualism even, is becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of western society. Spurred on by capitalism, the 'you don't owe anyone anything' propaganda and the milder sounding 'put yourself first' mentality promote an emphasis on personal autonomy, self-reliance, and independence in our lives. Individualism, definitionally, necessitates egocentrism. Individualism and hyperindividualism are well-known to abandon the well-being of the community for the sake of personal gain, and in order for that to feel like a reasonable thing to do one must be both entitled and egocentric. We are all, unfortunately, conditioned to be entitled and egocentric by modern, especially western, society. Yay, capitalism! But some experience it more severely than others, and white people in particular are taught extreme entitlement and egocentrism by postcolonial capitalism. There are many ways in which those traits show up in western religious expression, but I want to call attention to a few specific ones that I think do by far the most harm and are by far the most pervasive.

Individual Egocentrism and Egotism Individual egocentrism shows up in the most offputting ways of all, compared to its counterpart entitlement. While entitlement is often the driving force behind cultural appropriation and ethnocide, which is perhaps more cosmically disturbing, egocentrism in neocolonial religion can be quite terrifying to witness personally. The foremost egocentric feature that nondenominational Christianity and contemporary witchcraft share is the emphasis on personal empowerment through religion. Religion is not a communal expression of faith in the consensus reality one's culture has constructed, but a tool for personal satisfaction and stability. The community, or the culture, is always secondary to the individual. This much is obvious, cannot be hidden: it shows up even in such simple things as correspondences, where coming up with your own associations based on what jives with you is recommended over learning the cultural narrative. The same is true in evangelism: faith, church attendance, and religious products are commodities for personal satisfaction and actualization, and can be abandoned if they don't fulfil those needs to the desired extent.

Christianity is hard to imagine without this level of disinterest in other people, perhaps because monotheism teaches that there is a center to the universe to begin with. Ironic, given Christ's original selfless message. Regardless, as a result, living our lives in a Christo-secular world means that we are imbued with egocentrism from birth. On a personal level this often spirals into egomania. Both of these religions, in their cultural contexts, breed delusions of grandeur in their adherents. You are so special, you are so good, divinity is calling YOU to do its bidding! In evangelism it's being told by Jesus to move to LA and preach the gospel in a Starbucks, in 'Paganism' it's being called out to by myriad deities, being 'trained' by your 'patron deity' to become their 'priest'. To be an oracle and spread revelations to an audience you've not yet garnered. To personally be the mouthpiece of the god of your choosing, no matter who is listening.

It's disturbing, and worrisome. Individualism, egotism and hyper-independence create a social environment without support networks, without structural accountability, without mutual respect and trust. Much like in evangelism, cultic behavior - in the modern sense of that word - is rampant in our community. And, much like in evangelism, abuse on religious grounds is everywhere and extreme, with no way to combat it effectively. Micro- and personality-cults are appearing left and right in pagan communities, spearheaded by people who believe themselves worthy religious leaders. Nevermind that you can't be a 'pagan priest' because 'paganism' isn't a religion and 'priests' are exclusively Christian. Nevermind that the various forms of clergical service that European pagan religions had could only exist in the context of service to a community, not a personal relationship with divinity - assuming we know anything of them at all. Nevermind that being 'spoken to' or 'called out to' by pagan gods was not a thing before the Internet invented it. Nevermind that the age of oracles is decidedly ended. After all, 'paganism' isn't about practicing the religions of the cultures whose names are unfortunately claimed for this purpose. It's about practicing white religion, something that feels comfortable, but still rebels against the Christianity we've come to hate. Only we cannot imagine a world without it, so we just reinvent it.

Racial Egocentrism I would like to draw your attention, for a moment, to what is known as the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, AKA the American Restoration movement. This movement was formed in the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century, from several independent strands of evangelical revival that highly idealized early Christianity, not unlike the convergence of occultist groups that idealized what they conceived of as 'paganism'. These evangelists sought to return to what they considered the 'one true faith' of Christianity, and unify all Christians without creeds, cultural differences, or denominational banners. They wanted to just be Christians, no further specification necessary. As any denomination does, evangelical and nondenominational Christianity has deep structural and doctrinal flaws, but nevertheless seeks to place itself at the center of Christendom, treats itself as the modern baseline that anyone can return to or join to align themselves with the true nature of Christianity. It is reminiscent of Wicca, and its notion of an ancient pan-European pagan religion with consistent core tenets that anybody can practice under the banner of 'pagan' or 'witch'. Of course, there was never a pan-European pagan religion, or witch-cult, or other such thing. That would require a universal European cultural identity, one that was distinctly lacking in actual history.

Western people cannot think away whiteness. Whiteness is accepted as a standard fixture of reality, within the racist model where race is an objective feature of the natural world. Thusly modern people apply whiteness, forcefully, to cultures and religions that existed before the entire concept of whiteness did. Racism as we know it now only emerged after the colonization of Europe by the Christians, and indeed it perpetuates the colonization of pre-Christian Europeans by forcefully applying whiteness to cultures that couldn't be white, because whiteness did not exist. It was only after they were already colonized that the process of flattening, destroying, and misrepresenting their cultures took hold to absorb them into the delusion of a culturally unified white race. From Christian scholars skewing, misrepresenting, and destroying the memory of their faiths, to Nazi Germany producing false historical texts attributed to them, to us, modern people engaging with their cultural heritage in retrospect, colonizing them by forcing them to conform to our deluded notions of race and racial unity.

It is not a secret that neopagans are more interested in practicing whiteness - and you do not need to be white to practice whiteness - than the religions whose cultures they claim. It only takes a little squinting to see it. Disregard, or even condemnation, of the historic practices that these religions find their roots in is a common feature both of neopaganism and of evangelism. Though both of them were founded by movements that severely idealized their mental images of what the 'original religion' looked like, in practice they show little interest in their features. An easy example in the case of neopaganism is love magic. For most historic pagans and folk believers, love magic was a standard fixture of adolescence, methods ranging from harmless divination to sometimes kind of gross spells. Modern pagans, however, on some delusional claim of universal cosmological immorality, condemn love magic and love divination altogether.

But that's a cheap shot, how about the fact that most neopagans fundamentally disagree with the philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological underpinnings of their religions? 'Mundane before magic' is a prime example about which I have written at length, where neopagans and witches discard the original form of their religion in favor of the more modern, whiter notions of scientism. This isn't to say you cannot believe in science and be a pagan, but it is to say that you cannot claim to practice a religion whose entire construction and justification you disagree with. Then there's the issue of moral realism, hard good/evil binaries, and punitive justice among pagans, when their religions generally teach subjective morality and take a restorative approach to justice. Further, European pagan religions were orthopraxic, in contrast to Christianity's orthodoxy. This means that rather than believing that religion is made up of correct belief, like Christianity, it is made up of correct practice. European pagan religions, and their sister systems like justice and medicine, were oriented around the right rituals, the right protocols, the right actions, not organized and dogmatic belief.

And yet, where have the rituals gone? Why is every pagan community full of people asking for ideas on how to 'get back into their practice', or practicing contrived rituals whose roots are in 20th century occultism rather than the actions the ancients valued so much? Much like evangelism's departure from tradition in Christianity, its rejection of ritualization and mysticism, tradition and perpetuity in paganism are dead. Much like business casual pastors standing on a stage with electric guitars blasting in between unchecked, scripture-less preaching, much like the Mysteries of the Eucharist have turned into a symbolic, dry-cracker-fueled half joke, magic has disappeared behind the noise of 'spicy psychology' and 'intention'. Rituals have changed from the anthropological definition of time and space carved out from the ordinary, into quick, symbolic blips of an ancient understanding. The barrier to entry is low, all you have to do is claim to believe, and you're saved. You do not need to sit with discomfort, you do not need to be made to think or ask questions, you do not need to deconstruct your preconceived notions.

All of which is not to mention the worship of anti-cosmic and adversarial beings, purely on grounds of them being 'misunderstood', the rejection and indeed even loathing of primary deities purely because subconsciously, to us, they are too much like God, the rampant heno- and mono-theism of pagans whose religions have the word polytheism in them. Theocentrism in general, the constant emphasis on 'the gods' as some defineable category that paganism has, and that those 'gods' should be at the center of someone's faith and practice, rather than the beings and features that ancient pagans actually centered, insofar as anything was centered at all? One must ask: at what point is it no longer the same religion(s)? The answer is that we are way past that point. Neopaganism is not the search for ancestral religion. It's the construction of a new, uniquely white religion, in response to Christianity. Why else would it use a Christian-made label for itself, pagan, that the old believers thought of as an insult?

Neopaganism, witchcraft, 'paganism', whatever you want to call it, is nothing more than white people's shameless appropriation of countless ancient religions. And the goal of it is nothing more than to rebel against Christianity, one of the few traumas white people have in common, while never actually deconstructing it. This is why these features that ancient paganism didn't have (heno/monotheism, theocentrism, orthodoxy, mundane before magic, etc) are ones directly reflected by Christo-secularism: they're directly transferred, one-to-one. There was a brief window in history, very brief, where almost all Europeans had indigeneity in common. But we are so deeply immersed in our own colonization now that we have gone to spread it to the rest of the world and rescinded our right to claim that title as a group. So far, it has come, that we are somehow intensifying the indigeneity of our ancestors even in their death. Because we feel entitled to everything they had, because we're white.

Entitlement and Autonomy After Colonization

White entitlement gains complexity when the object of the entitlement is someone or something that cannot fight back. The cultures whose religions we are appropriating no longer exist except in memory and history books. They cannot jump off the page to defend themselves, correct our mistakes, tell us that they want their heritage and legacy respected. Living minorities can retaliate against oppression, or at least resist it in spirit, but the dead cannot. Anyone can oppress the dead. And anyone who is indoctrinated or imbued with whiteness can act with white entitlement towards the dead. Neopagans seem to think nothing wrong with this. When confronted with questions about why they deviate so strongly from what the religion(s) they claim prescribe, their answer often revolves around the inconsequence of their actions. Sometimes it's that "there's no sources" to work with, so they're basically forced to make it up as they go, other times it's that the original culture is dead so it doesn't matter what we do, or that "times have changed." But do the religions we supposedly align ourselves with not emphasize the autonomy of the dead? Moreover, do we modern woke people not claim to be against appropriation and think that ancestor work is oh, so important?

Cultural imperialism is the dominant feature of white supremacy in the 21st century. White people, or perhaps western people at large but especially white people, are spiritually homeless. Colonialism took communal values, interpretations and beliefs from us, and then supplied us with enough audacity and entitlement to take it from others as a weakened replacement for our own. When it is being done to cultures that have been absorbed into the idea of 'whiteness', like pre-Christian European religions, it's deemed acceptable, and nobody bats an eye at an 'eclectic pagan' with fingers in every pie loudly proclaiming that they're against cultural appropriation. But the mechanism is the same. The entitlement is completely unchanged. The arguments of 'well the culture is dead,' and 'well times have changed,' are weak excuses to be able to turn a religion - that they don't really believe in in the capacity that it was believed in by its original adherents - into whatever suits their needs best. Even if what suits their needs best is a reinterpretation of modern protestantism. Worse yet is that by creating a new religion, borrowing the aesthetics and terminology of the ancient religions and nothing else, those who relied on the language supplied by anthropology to explain their cultural traditions, those who grew up in folk traditions are being absorbed into the white narrative. The culture of white peoples is continually being erased by the illusion of 'white culture', and so neopaganism perpetuates white supremacy and colonizes indigenous European survivals (and peoples).

In both neopaganism/conventional witchcraft and evangelical Christianity, the closer somebody is to the traditional roots of their movement, the more of a systemic victim complex they openly express. More traditional evangelists often mirror the emphasis traditional branches of Christianity place on their perceived persecution. Preaching about the persecution of Christians in Rome and Martyrdom, or even going so far as to claim that they are still actively being oppressed on a large scale in the modern day. Wicca and its mythology does the exact same thing. It pretends that the witch-hunts were truly a genocide on their direct spiritual ancestors, and that Christians oppress them to this day. Further, just like evangelists, because religion is a matter of personal identity, any criticism of their approach to religion is treated as oppression. To the point of not only attacking each other in retaliation, and breaking off into bizarre factions, but also to the point of vilifying other religions altogether. Resistance against their entitlement is treated as a violation of their personal autonomy, and those who revolt against their colonization are not seen as vulnerable people or cultures, but as an institution dedicated to diminishing their personal rights.

The Autonomy of the Dead Though many pagans online claim to be animists, few are in practice. One symptom of this is the lack of agency ascribed to the dead by modern practitioners. Ancestor work is a touchy topic in the community, with many white practitioners betraying their toxic relationship with their own whiteness by staunchly avoiding the entire subject, let alone body, of their ancestors in between now and two thousand years ago. Ancestor work is often reduced to thinking about your ancestors' actions and repenting for them so that you may cleanse yourself of your colonial sins, though, as illustrated, it hardly comes to fruition. More importantly yet, an impossible contradiction has been created in our treatment of our white ancestors.

On the one hand, they are unilaterally described as directly oppositional and adversarial. Many report that their ancestors hate them, reject their practices, or say racist things to them, as though they have a phone line into the afterlife through which these messages can be received. But almost none actually put effort into establishing a relationship with their ancestry or ancestors, especially not before claims of rejection and hatred are made. On the other hand, precious little autonomy and agency is ascribed to the dead when it comes to their rights, or their influence over our lives in modernity. Aside from the blatant appropriation of their cultures, and disregard for what effects this might have on them, they are also never honored, nor welcomed into our spaces. They are not seen as capable of change or growth after death, depicted and understood as the exact people they were prior to their passing, as though most animistic religions do not teach that there is much learning to do in the afterlife. Not one of these people has enough of an emotional investment in their ancestors to be patient with them like you would a living family member. To let them have their feelings and see if with time something can be accomplished, to help them work through it. It seems that agency is only ascribed to the dead when it can serve as an excuse to avoid them at all costs.

It is no coincidence that this has happened. The Christo-secular world has a phobia of morbidity, so that accounts for a great deal of these symptoms. But it is also that Christianity teaches that the afterlife is stationary and constant, and believers have no agency in what their afterlife looks like. They will either go to The Good Place or The Bad Place based on their actions in life, be magically transported there after death, and will stay there, unchanged, for eternity. Aside from shallow neoliberal approaches to decolonization, which account for the other half of problems white people face when trying to reconcile their ancestry, people view themselves and, by extension, each other, as stationary figures, to whom life and death is happening. From the Christo-secular perspective, we are passive, and life and death are moving around us and coming over us. This explains why neopagan religious expressions don't seem to take any interest in funerary custom, death cosmology and eschatology, as they generally apply the same sense of circumstantial victimhood to what they believe 'paganism' is. But animistic religions do not teach passivity, nor that people are just victims to circumstance in their own lives.

The Autonomy of the Self Pre-Christian European religions were religions of struggle. How this feature presented itself varied, and how it was represented in the literature from or about the religions is even more skewed. But religions that are as old as time to a given group of people reflect the nature of life, and the nature of life is to struggle and fight. It was even more so then, especially for those not in the elite, towards whom sources are often biased. It is because of this that active participation in one's own life, and indeed perhaps even the afterlives or the lives of descendants, are so highly emphasized. It is one's own responsibility to move through life, to travel to the afterlife, to navigate the world tree as it were, to borrow terminology from my own religion. Often the success of descendants is spiritually generated by ancestors through their great deeds, teaching how such expressions of personal agency and willpower fuel the living for generations after one's death. Often the very most important themes in pagan mythologies and symbols are the willingness to fight against inevitability and do great things. But what white people lack most, even those who would number themselves among the very wokest, is accountability. The lack of it is a monstrous problem in the west, perhaps its own institution on a systemic scale.

Despite the religions whose names they claim being religions that revolve around taking accountability for the state of your life, religions that promote being an active participant in your own existence, neopaganism expresses a strong belief that everything will simply be handed to the believer on a silver platter. A hallmark of a person who has never truly struggled, whose ancestors have not truly struggled in quite some time, perhaps. A lot of this sense of anticipatory entitlement to the world also loops back around to the aforementioned egomania. Often, the conflictions in belief seem to suggest that the world is not inherently spiritual, but they are. Rather than there being an external web of magic that human actions take place on, magic is inherent in a person in the form of 'intention'. Rather than tools having inherent, naturally magical traits, a 'universal substitute' imbued with personal power can perform any function needed. Spiritual gifts are not obtained in life or learned from external individuals but something one is born into. Mundane over magical for thee, but not for me. Sometimes the entitlement appears as true laziness: that reading signs is a matter of ruling out mundane possibilities until it couldn't possibly mean anything else, rather than a skill of discernment one has to learn. That an AI chatbot or a Discord bot can truly perform a tarot reading, with no real explanation for how or why. That rather than the world being a complex web of interlocking ecology, both physically and metaphysically, from where one could theoretically divine anything from a single augur if only they were brilliant enough, it is thought that you really only have to wait until the most obvious, impossible symbols start crossing your path at the hand of 'the gods'.

In fact, it is 'the gods' around whom the most disturbing symptoms of privilege show. It is in how neopagans believe themselves to be sought out by the gods, their worship or even companionship to be specially requested. That the gods appear to them personally, speak to them directly, attend to the smallest matters in their lives. That they all have a deity for a spiritual parent, in extreme cases even an entire harem of deities from various pantheons with whom they have personal, usually romantic relationships. It gets so bizarre, at times, that I begin to feel it is spitting in the face of those who have sacrificed in prayer every day of a war-torn life and never been helped by their gods, and I do believe the gods have the power to interfere in such matters! Which leads into the next section:

The Autonomy of the Divine In many ways, the autonomy ascribed to 'the gods' is only a tool for their pagan adherents to evade accountability. One has already been mentioned, the way that people truly believe the gods are seeking them out personally, which detracts from one's own responsibility in practicing religion and building relationships with your gods, downplays that religion is a personal choice - perhaps to further the victim complex, persecution on religious basis narrative - and aggrandizes the person making that claim. Moreover, it leads to what people sometimes dub 'salad bar paganism', where people have a fairly random selection of deities from various pantheons in that semi-omnist model of "paganism." That appropriation is frequently criticized in the community these days, but is briskly refuted on grounds that the deities in question told the eclectic it was okay. Yet another kind of agency described to deities that only exists to evade personal responsibility. By attributing words and actions like those to the gods, people place the responsibility for their immorality on a non-human being that cannot respond empirically. It makes the gods complicit in their crime of entitlement. 'Revivalism' as a code word for simply ignoring all primary and secondary sources in favor of pop-spirituality would have their personal opinion on what a deity believes and wants weigh as much as that of mythology, a collaborative, deeply cultural, symbolic narrative. Not only is it once again placing the self above the culture, often as an outsider to said culture, but it is also forcing that culture's heritage into a level of personhood it can't have. It's a familiar pattern, strongly resembling modern Christians ascribing all of their deeds to Jesus. God wants them to harass people in the street, Jesus told them to throw that rock at that queer person, God hates this and that, but God needs us to do x or y.

And there is another strong parallel between evangelism and paganism here, in much the same vein of evasion. When modern protestants do bad things, or experience hardships in life, these things are attributed to the Devil. Neopagans blame energy. Negative energy, energy blockages, curses, even - which are of course negative energy sent by other people. Funnily enough, I think evangelicals on average attribute more positive things to their God than neopagans do. This is completely anecdotal, but where I see quite a few Christians thanking god for pre-sliced fruit, refilling hairspray, or cured cancer, neopagans do not match their negativity-offloading with the inverse, and do attribute their victories to themselves. Be it because of 'mundane before magic', or because after the spell you do have to 'put the work in', or else it won't work.

Reactionary, but Not Radical

I've already posited that neopagan religious expressions exist in retaliation and response to Christian trauma several times in this post. I think that much is very obvious, but because it is a shared trauma and sensitive topic, it is not often discussed or examined among pagans. I do see that people are, often, quite frank about their personal Christian traumas, which I would admire were it not so often used as an excuse of some kind. I already went into the history of anti-Christian tendencies among occultists, and how it bled over into modern neopaganism, which is a western occultist stream by nature. I think the amount of religious trauma neopagans have on a personal level and how conversion to paganism is often a response to it speaks for itself, and doesn't need elaborating on. But, like any toxic relationship with a parental figure does, the expression of this trauma leads to some significant ironies that are worth exploring. Because in ignoring and perpetuating those ironies, much harm is being done.

Religion versus Spirituality One very transparent rebellion against Christianity is the refusal that pagans show to treat pagan religions as 'religions', for many reasons. Most obvious is the unwillingness to identify as religious, as self-styled pagans commonly perpetuate the notion that there is a binary between 'religion' and 'atheism', and that any break away from those two concepts is what constitutes 'spirituality'. In order to distance themselves from what they hate, they claim that 'religion' necessitates the same kind of organization and hierarchy that they see in Christianity, and they thus are 'spiritual, but not religious'. They are blithely unaware of the fact that the dichotomy between 'spiritual' and 'religious' is very loaded with anti-indigenous sentiment, and western anthropology is even catching up with that. It is becoming increasingly clear to anthropologists that 'religion' cannot be easily defined, because at its most complete it is the entire sum of a given culture's way of understanding reality. If you were to want to truly encompass the scope of 'religion', science would be a religion, and some argue it is. The characterization of 'religion' as 'like Abrahamic religion' is Christo-centric, white-centric. And, inversely, the attribution of 'spirituality' to all religions that do not conform to the standards set by Christianity is a kind of pan-indigeneity. It flattens those religions into a monolith and looks directly past their unique forms of organization, structure and transmission - pagan religions included. It is also a heavily ethnicized word, treated as exotic and more arcane than 'religion'.

Further, people tend to define 'spirituality' as being less dogmatic, less strict, and more oriented around one person's journey unbound by organized culture or communal experience. There lies another tie to hyper-individualism, but also to entitlement. Because neopagans refuse to treat pagan religions as the religions they are, they refuse to treat them with respect and reverence. Spirituality is supposed to be less weighty, and despite the material at hand being endangered, deeply damaged, colonized heritage from a dead culture, despite that material representing the entirety of a peoples' way of existing, it is treated as though it can be picked up and discarded whenever. People do not treat their conversions to 'paganism' as conversion, but as a new hobby or aesthetic trend to be picked up. And the rest of their treatment, when it comes to study, honoring, practicing, decolonizing, doesn't suggest that it's anything other than a trendy hobby, a facet of identity consumption. Pagan religions are not treated as religions, despite being indigenous heritage from a long gone ancestral culture, often cultures whose descendants still live and breathe and practice what remains. They are products, commodities for personal satisfaction, for metaphysical decoration. They are an aesthetic adopted to convey something to other people, not enrich oneself. Nothing is safe from consumerism.

Consumerism, Materialism and Prosperity Gospel For a more elaborate explanation of colonial cultural consumption please see my post about ethnic envy.

Consumerism presents itself both materially and not. Materialism does occur frequently in both religions, as both are very white, and whiteness is deeply imbued with capitalism. Some examples are very obvious, crystals and incense for neopagans, modest-chique clothing and white cars for evangelicals. But there is also the cultural consumerism, and the consumerism that's hidden behind a veil of piety, using materialism as tangible proof of one's devotion. Loaded bibles, fancy grimoires, altar decorations and cross necklaces. Everything about religion is commodified, so that it can either be consumed or displayed. It reaches such extremes that people have tons of altars strewn about their home, one for each deity they worship, which is one of my favorite pecularities about neopagan domestic religion.

But there is another highly capitalistic mindset that has infiltrated white religion, and it is prosperity theology. Prosperity theology is a common feature of evangelical Christianity, and it views the Bible as a contract between humanity and god, that in exchange for worship God will provide security, wealth and comfort. It has its direct presentations, like the parallel between evangelists thinking that poverty is punishment for insufficiency and neopagans claiming that you cannot be good at magic if you're ugly or poor - because surely if you were good at magic, if you did have enough of a soul and that inherent human intention-power, you would be pretty and rich. But more abstractly there is also the fact that most neopagans believe in egregore theory - the idea that the gods require human worship to sustain themselves and be able to exist. It feels equally contractual and transactional, and it's no wonder that there tends to be a sense of superiority about what you can offer the gods. It's no wonder that people expect returns from the gods for being a good worshipper and giving them objects, rather than upholding their rituals and values, or being a good person.

Enlightenment Influence and Performative Rationalism See my post on performative rationalism for a more elaborate explanation.

Both the Campbell Movement of the Second Great Awakening and Western Occultism share significant enlightenment influences. Their descendant religions, as such, have syncretized themselves with rationalism and later scientism, to various extents. Some, especially the more traditional streams of white religion, still have distinctly irreconcilable differences between their beliefs and those of scientism. But many, especially more modern, Internet-founded streams of neo-religion, prioritize bending as much as possible to scientism. Where 'science' describes a method of gaining knowledge, which is not inherently harmful, scientism is a deeply colonial belief system and enjoys many perks under white supremacy. It is viewed by many as an objective form of knowing, and thus as the ultimate truth the universe has to offer, that all religions must defer to and accept, or they have failed morally. Belief systems that do not rely on science, do not accept scientism, et cetera are accused of being dangerous, primitive, backwards or downright unintelligent. If you, as a practitioner, irregardless of your culture, do not prioritize the conclusions of science over anything your culture teaches, you are seen as endangering yourself and others in your stupidity. Cry about decolonization they might, neopagans do not actually do all that much deconstructing, and as a result they still enjoy the privilege of not being oppressed and condemned for their beliefs, no matter how much they claim to be. They still fall neatly in step with the status quo, never questioning or challenging it.

Another, more obscure influence from Enlightenment thinking can be found in the Campbell movement, and is reflected in neopaganism and its founding witch-cult theory. Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Edward Herbert sought to "reduce religion to a set of essentials upon which all reasonable persons might agree." Campbell, who was a student of Locke's, went on to elaborate on this idea by striving to unify and restore apostolic Christianity, by removing all obstacles that could divide Christians. He believed that one such obstacle was the uncertainty around how to interpret the Bible, and believed that the only way it could be interpreted and the only way it was intended to be read, was as literal fact. White supremacy mirrors this unifying movement by creating a mythological past of united whiteness, and striving to create that by eradicating all cultural and philosophical differences that European people had. Wicca, in turn, emulated this by espousing the witch-cult theory that posed there had been a pan-European pagan religion that was being persecuted by the Christians. All of them have as a final goal to create a single, monolithic group of people that can bend the outsiders to their ways. Further, there is the problem of mythic literalism, which came to a head with Campbell's insistence on the Bible as a factual source, and still influences both anthropological interpretations of pagan mythologies as well as popular ones. People have not developed sufficient literary skills to be able to think of ways a mythology can be interpreted other than more or less literally. As a result of this, a bizarre balance is struck between ignoring the myths entirely, and condemning them by taking them literally.

Moralism and Moral Superiority Mythic literalism adds a layer to the problem of divine agency previously discussed. On top of placing one's own responsibility on the gods to offload complicity or accountability, sometimes undue responsibility is also placed on the gods for actions that humans symbolically or culturally attribute to them. Because in Christianity, God is the superior moral arbiter, who decides what is good and what is bad in his system of objective good and evil, neopagans ascribe that same responsibility to pagan deities. They are forced into the role of perfect moral examples and expected to perform that duty well, and failure is reason for condemnation and abandonment. Consider the trend of pagans who refuse to 'work with' such figures as Zeus or Óðinn because, despite being placed in the hole that God left, they are not equipped by their mythologies to fulfil that role, and thus turn into a scapegoat for the hatred people feel for God. The lived experience of somebody who hasn't unpacked their evangelical trauma moving on to paganism will invariably be that pagan gods fail them just like God did, except this time it's not a preacher claiming God can do no evil while you assess his failures in the world, it's yourself placing a deity in that position, doomed to fail from the start.

There is no inquiry into the role of morality being depicted with nuance in mythology. In a world where moral realism is the predominant model, and most believe that good and evil are not just objective, but measurable, mythologies that dissect morality are useless. They fall flat, and are sneered at. The condescension neopagans have for their own adoptive mythologies doesn't seem to be a problem to them, even when it gets to such extremes as being directly contradictory to the religion they claim. Take Lokeanism, which often condemns Óðinn for 'what he did to Fenrir' among other such things. Not only is there no acknowledgment that the undisputed meaning of the myth is that if Fenrir hadn't been bound the world would no longer exist, but the entire myth and its meaning has a kind of dualism shoved down its throat that flattens the entire narrative, and turns the characters into caricatures. The morality depicted in the myths should be subject to discussion, undoubtedly, and some actions that the gods are depicted as performing in the original mythology should be condemned. That much is not a question. But there is a difference between discussing the material and foundation of your religion, and disagreeing with it completely, but still appropriating its aesthetics.

Further, ascribing a superior moral judgment to your god of choice is how alt-right Christianity came to be so fervently convinced that their will is God's will, and leftist neopagans are not immune to this same process. White leftism is a weak imitation of true intersectionality, and the white leftism most popular among neopagans has truly dangerous features, like the tendency toward extreme punitive justice. One cannot learn to deconstruct Christianity, nor colonialism, without deconstructing objective morality. One cannot understand or put into practice the restorative practices that pagan justice and morality promoted. Neopaganism likes to present itself as the religion of the woke, the leftist's solution to the binary between alt-right Christians and militant atheists. But it doesn't live up to how much it pats itself on the shoulder for its harmlessness.

White Woman's Spiritual Evolution: One to the Other, and Back Again

One fine day I found myself reading a TikTok comment I almost couldn't believe. It was on a video of somebody pretending to control fire, to which I hoped I would find something amusing in the replies. It was so revelatory to me I wrote it down in my journal, to revisit and think about, which is how I know exactly how it read.

tips i wanna give as an ex witch, very spiritually gifted. make sure to never do a spell on someone who is truly for god. i learned the hard way. i js wanna add i'm now a follower of Christ. god bless <3!!

Everything about it, honestly, is gold. From the 'ex witch' just as how 'ex christians' style themselves, to the casual statement of 'very spiritually gifted' which betrays the hallmark arrogance. I was soon to find out there was an entire community of self-styled 'ex witches' who found Jesus and are now practicing evangelists. The traffic goes both ways, with frequent exchanges and reverts. It's a traffic that reveals a new syncretism emerging, with ex-witch evangelicals still believing in the witch-cult theory or espousing that 'witches' are healers, or other fascinating blends of mythology. It should be no surprise: after all, they both serve near-identical social functions, acting in retaliation against each other while being almost perfect mirror images. When one fails, you can return to the other, until that fails again too. It plainly displays all the features here described. The lack of critical thinking and deconstruction, the relational ties and shared ancestry of both religions, the lack of respect and sense of risk, the lack of significance in conversion, the lack of effort being put in.

It's not just these extreme cases who reflect this broader pattern, however. Think of how many people enter the space in retaliation against Christianity, try that for a while, but eventually fall back on their interpretation of 'folk magic', which generally serves to blend the most comfortable aspects of each into something posing as a compromise, with not much reference to historic or living folk magic and its cosmology and beliefs. Or even how many people find other Abrahamic religions through paganism and end up converting to Judaism or Islam, or worse, fall down white supremacist new age pipelines, which neopaganism and witchcraft also share their roots with. And, ultimately, how most if not all pagans eventually leave the space by finding something that is easier to practice, scientism included, and falling back on it time and again for failure to connect with paganism.

Conclusion

A connection with paganism cannot be established through the pop spirituality, neopagan lens. It is a fundamental misrepresentation and misunderstanding of these religions, and until significantly more cultural literacy is injected into the zeitgeist, most people do not have the tools nor humility to engage with cultural heritage sensitively, especially not that of cultures that cannot act on their oppression. This post has effectively been created to serve as a sequel or elaboration to my essay titled Yes, I Hate Wicca. In that essay I did not manage to adequately delve into the great structural and systemic problems represented by contemporary witchcraft and neopaganism, especially as descended from Wicca.

The non-Christian half of this equation goes by many names. Through a decades long process of factions splintering off, recent history going lost, and self-identifying as Wiccan becoming increasingly less socially accepted, it has gained, absorbed, and appropriated an unforeseen number: (neo)paganism, witchcraft, the craft, "spirituality," eclectic paganism, Traditional Witchcraft, magick, and many more. A lot of these names have semantic variations in what they actually mean or were originally meant to mean, but ultimately they have all - unfortunately - come to represent more or less the same thing: this unnamed, informal magic tradition of spell jars and eclectic 'deity work' that finds its roots in 20th century Western Occultism.

I would like this post to address the entire spectrum of this problem. From self-identifying Wiccans who still adhere to rigid binary or triple gender role beliefs in their magic, to a resident Hellenic pagan working with Apollo and doing the occasional money bowl - and even into those traditions that adopted aspects from 19th and 20th century spiritualism and occultism out of necessity, like afrodiasporic practices. Not because I believe that all of these manifestations of this problem are equally severe or do equal harm, but because I think everybody who engages with 'spirituality' on the internet needs to hear this and contemplate it. Christian imperialism never left our midst. It just repackaged itself to even more effectively infiltrate our minds and behaviors; because it's easier to make symbolic changes than real, radical ones.

Please keep an open mind while reading this, understanding that while some of this undoubtedly will not be about you, some absolutely will. Even if you yourself do not practice anything so much as mentioned in this post, you will find yourself around it, and if you do not act, you will eventually be colonized by it. This has bearing on everyone in the community, not just those who engage in it actively, but also everyone else who is at risk of having their words and practices co-opted, their history erased, their morals misrepresented, or even just their words twisted.

Other Mothers, Same Father: Imperial Britain and New Religious Movements

In 16th century Europe, the Protestant Reformation swept across great parts of the continent. In England, particularly, protestantism fought viciously to shed the political and theological underpinnings of Catholicism, and gained a strong cultural foothold as the Church of England. From the Church of England sprang new Christian movements, often called proto-evangelical, such as Puritanism, Pietism, Moravianism and Quakerism. Though these respective denominations each went on to carve completely different futures for themselves, they influenced Christian theology and the soon to form evangelical movement immensely, causing a new movement founded in spreading the Gospel, and accepting the Bible as the sole authority.

During the so-called First Great Awakening, the rapidly solidifying evangelist movement gained intense momentum across the 18th century Anglosphere, springing new denominations like Methodism, and rooting itself into the newly forming American identity. It has continued growing, through further 'Awakenings' and revivals, and is now a cornerstone of American culture, as well as a well-recorded religious presence worldwide. The World Evangelical Alliance estimates that some 600 million Christians worldwide can be counted among evangelists.

But something else was happening in western Europe at the same time. Non-Abrahamic schools of thought and spirituality founded in ancient traditions like Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism started being grouped together as 'esotericism', and initiatory traditions within it, like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, arose. Then, with the Enlightenment, esotericism gained a branch rooted in Enlightenment thought: occultism. Between the Age of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Victorian Era, esotericism and occultism continually evolved and organized, founding groups like the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as countless schools of thought like Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Spiritual Science, and New Thought, which all influence modern spirituality to this day.

During the Victorian era in Britain, scientific advancements were deeply shaking the foundations of religion, and rapid industrialization was changing the landscape in unprecedented ways. In response to these pressures and changes, esotericism and occultism experienced a boom in popularity. In the English-speaking world, this fascination with occultism carried a distinctly anti-Christian twinge, because it found its origins more in the Enlightenment aspect of esotericism than that which was heavily influenced by organized religion. For this reason, 19th and 20th century occultists believed that true(r) wisdom could be found in what they thought was the 'ancient pagan tradition', and it is to this motivation that we owe the creation of Wicca, Cochranian Witchcraft, Druidry, and other neo-pagan traditions.

Wicca gained rapid popularity after its formation, thanks to its creator's dedication to the press, and the 1960s counter-culture movement in the Anglosphere took a special interest in these forms of spirituality, bringing them further into relevance and giving rise to the New Age movement in the 70s. And, of course, this extremely complex spiritual landscape was changed forever with the advent of the Internet.

A Social History of Contemporary Witchcraft

For more information on the origins of modern witchcraft, please see my post on Wicca.

'Witchcraft' as we know it now is almost impossible to define, because it is never the same between two witches. The popularization of new religious movements after the 60s, followed by the creation of the Internet, meant that what were once fairly niche and structured communities adhering to roughly the same doctrines now started to exponentially multiply. They interchanged (and indeed confused) ideas and ideologies, formed new streams and movements, and spread this game of spirituality-telephone like wildfire. It was being called by many names depending on what corner of the internet you were in, but whatever they called it, people felt that these new ideas were empowering, mystifying, and meaningful.

But, despite the sheer size of the Internet making it almost impossible to trace the recent history of witchcraft step-by-step, we can trace its many constants back to their historical origins. The magic that is now practiced by possibly hundreds of millions of people across the globe, often regardless of what they call it, shares many common features between different self-identifying labels. Many witches and practitioners borrow the concept of the 'astral plane' and 'energy' from Theosophy, 'manifestation' or the 'law of attraction' from New Thought, 'energetic blockages' from Mesmerism, so on and so forth. But, of course, the central-most influence on contemporary witchcraft always has been and always will be Wicca.

Contemporary witchcraft was built on the foundation that Wicca laid. Most people, even if they don't identify as Wiccans, found magic and/or paganism through Wicca or Wiccan-aligned resources. Favorite authors like Cunningham, Murphy-Hiscock, Auryn, Illes, Adler, Buckland, Kelden, etc are or were Wiccans at one point in their lives, or practice a form of magic that is derived from Wicca. Almost all common practices, motifs, beliefs, and tools utilized and acknowledged by modern practitioners are Wiccan in origin. To name a few: - the Wheel of the Year and the modern conceptions of the 'sabbats'; - the idea of historic 'witches' as cunning women; - styling every deity as 'Lord' or 'Lady'; - pagan priesthood; - intention; - 'eclectic' practice; - the binary between covens and solitary magic; - a 'Book of Shadows'; - deity work (as opposed to standard religious worship); - the notion that the same system of magic and religion can be universally applied with different pagan deities; - the unification and flattening of regional traditions into broader categories like Hellenism, Heathenry, Celtic paganism, etc; - and, indeed, calling yourself a 'witch' at all. ... and uncountably more. If there is anything you can think of as quintessentially 'witchy', odds are it either came from Wicca or evolved from the contemporary witchcraft built off of Wicca.

Some are comparatively old and fairly structured elements of a relatively organized religion, like the Wheel of the Year, the soft-polytheist Lord/Lady model, Book of Shadows traditions, and the slightly younger divide between solitary practitioners and coven-goers. Others are completely new and came about through the effects of the Internet, such as the notion of 'intent': according to Wiccans who lived the early days of Wiccan web forums, the notion of 'intent' came about to illustrate that 'doing magic' necessitates a goal for the magic to fulfil, and that simply repeating a ritual from a book with no goal to achieve in mind was not a functional way to approach magic. The more experienced Witches would educate the newbies by borrowing terminology from Chaos Magic's concept of a Statement of Intent, to encourage new practitioners to do magic according to their needs rather than purely for the sake of doing it. In between that time around 2010 and now, 'intent' has transformed from a personal tool to structure your practice into the cosmological driving force behind all magic. Rather than the great cosmological force of 'magic' being channeled through a Wiccan ritual, personal mental processes have turned into the operative power of a magical performance, which seems to reflect a broader pattern of individualization.

White Egocentrism and Post-Colonial Neo-Religion

Individualism, hyper-individualism even, is becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of western society. Spurred on by capitalism, the 'you don't owe anyone anything' propaganda and the milder sounding 'put yourself first' mentality promote an emphasis on personal autonomy, self-reliance, and independence in our lives. Individualism, definitionally, necessitates egocentrism. Individualism and hyperindividualism are well-known to abandon the well-being of the community for the sake of personal gain, and in order for that to feel like a reasonable thing to do one must be both entitled and egocentric. We are all, unfortunately, conditioned to be entitled and egocentric by modern, especially western, society. Yay, capitalism! But some experience it more severely than others, and white people in particular are taught extreme entitlement and egocentrism by postcolonial capitalism. There are many ways in which those traits show up in western religious expression, but I want to call attention to a few specific ones that I think do by far the most harm and are by far the most pervasive.

Individual Egocentrism and Egotism Individual egocentrism shows up in the most offputting ways of all, compared to its counterpart entitlement. While entitlement is often the driving force behind cultural appropriation and ethnocide, which is perhaps more cosmically disturbing, egocentrism in neocolonial religion can be quite terrifying to witness personally. The foremost egocentric feature that nondenominational Christianity and contemporary witchcraft share is the emphasis on personal empowerment through religion. Religion is not a communal expression of faith in the consensus reality one's culture has constructed, but a tool for personal satisfaction and stability. The community, or the culture, is always secondary to the individual. This much is obvious, cannot be hidden: it shows up even in such simple things as correspondences, where coming up with your own associations based on what jives with you is recommended over learning the cultural narrative. The same is true in evangelism: faith, church attendance, and religious products are commodities for personal satisfaction and actualization, and can be abandoned if they don't fulfil those needs to the desired extent.

Christianity is hard to imagine without this level of disinterest in other people, perhaps because monotheism teaches that there is a center to the universe to begin with. Ironic, given Christ's original selfless message. Regardless, as a result, living our lives in a Christo-secular world means that we are imbued with egocentrism from birth. On a personal level this often spirals into egomania. Both of these religions, in their cultural contexts, breed delusions of grandeur in their adherents. You are so special, you are so good, divinity is calling YOU to do its bidding! In evangelism it's being told by Jesus to move to LA and preach the gospel in a Starbucks, in 'Paganism' it's being called out to by myriad deities, being 'trained' by your 'patron deity' to become their 'priest'. To be an oracle and spread revelations to an audience you've not yet garnered. To personally be the mouthpiece of the god of your choosing, no matter who is listening.

It's disturbing, and worrisome. Individualism, egotism and hyper-independence create a social environment without support networks, without structural accountability, without mutual respect and trust. Much like in evangelism, cultic behavior - in the modern sense of that word - is rampant in our community. And, much like in evangelism, abuse on religious grounds is everywhere and extreme, with no way to combat it effectively. Micro- and personality-cults are appearing left and right in pagan communities, spearheaded by people who believe themselves worthy religious leaders. Nevermind that you can't be a 'pagan priest' because 'paganism' isn't a religion and 'priests' are exclusively Christian. Nevermind that the various forms of clergical service that European pagan religions had could only exist in the context of service to a community, not a personal relationship with divinity - assuming we know anything of them at all. Nevermind that being 'spoken to' or 'called out to' by pagan gods was not a thing before the Internet invented it. Nevermind that the age of oracles is decidedly ended. After all, 'paganism' isn't about practicing the religions of the cultures whose names are unfortunately claimed for this purpose. It's about practicing white religion, something that feels comfortable, but still rebels against the Christianity we've come to hate. Only we cannot imagine a world without it, so we just reinvent it.

Racial Egocentrism I would like to draw your attention, for a moment, to what is known as the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, AKA the American Restoration movement. This movement was formed in the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century, from several independent strands of evangelical revival that highly idealized early Christianity, not unlike the convergence of occultist groups that idealized what they conceived of as 'paganism'. These evangelists sought to return to what they considered the 'one true faith' of Christianity, and unify all Christians without creeds, cultural differences, or denominational banners. They wanted to just be Christians, no further specification necessary. As any denomination does, evangelical and nondenominational Christianity has deep structural and doctrinal flaws, but nevertheless seeks to place itself at the center of Christendom, treats itself as the modern baseline that anyone can return to or join to align themselves with the true nature of Christianity. It is reminiscent of Wicca, and its notion of an ancient pan-European pagan religion with consistent core tenets that anybody can practice under the banner of 'pagan' or 'witch'. Of course, there was never a pan-European pagan religion, or witch-cult, or other such thing. That would require a universal European cultural identity, one that was distinctly lacking in actual history.

Western people cannot think away whiteness. Whiteness is accepted as a standard fixture of reality, within the racist model where race is an objective feature of the natural world. Thusly modern people apply whiteness, forcefully, to cultures and religions that existed before the entire concept of whiteness did. Racism as we know it now only emerged after the colonization of Europe by the Christians, and indeed it perpetuates the colonization of pre-Christian Europeans by forcefully applying whiteness to cultures that couldn't be white, because whiteness did not exist. It was only after they were already colonized that the process of flattening, destroying, and misrepresenting their cultures took hold to absorb them into the delusion of a culturally unified white race. From Christian scholars skewing, misrepresenting, and destroying the memory of their faiths, to Nazi Germany producing false historical texts attributed to them, to us, modern people engaging with their cultural heritage in retrospect, colonizing them by forcing them to conform to our deluded notions of race and racial unity.

It is not a secret that neopagans are more interested in practicing whiteness - and you do not need to be white to practice whiteness - than the religions whose cultures they claim. It only takes a little squinting to see it. Disregard, or even condemnation, of the historic practices that these religions find their roots in is a common feature both of neopaganism and of evangelism. Though both of them were founded by movements that severely idealized their mental images of what the 'original religion' looked like, in practice they show little interest in their features. An easy example in the case of neopaganism is love magic. For most historic pagans and folk believers, love magic was a standard fixture of adolescence, methods ranging from harmless divination to sometimes kind of gross spells. Modern pagans, however, on some delusional claim of universal cosmological immorality, condemn love magic and love divination altogether.

But that's a cheap shot, how about the fact that most neopagans fundamentally disagree with the philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological underpinnings of their religions? 'Mundane before magic' is a prime example about which I have written at length, where neopagans and witches discard the original form of their religion in favor of the more modern, whiter notions of scientism. This isn't to say you cannot believe in science and be a pagan, but it is to say that you cannot claim to practice a religion whose entire construction and justification you disagree with. Then there's the issue of moral realism, hard good/evil binaries, and punitive justice among pagans, when their religions generally teach subjective morality and take a restorative approach to justice. Further, European pagan religions were orthopraxic, in contrast to Christianity's orthodoxy. This means that rather than believing that religion is made up of correct belief, like Christianity, it is made up of correct practice. European pagan religions, and their sister systems like justice and medicine, were oriented around the right rituals, the right protocols, the right actions, not organized and dogmatic belief.

And yet, where have the rituals gone? Why is every pagan community full of people asking for ideas on how to 'get back into their practice', or practicing contrived rituals whose roots are in 20th century occultism rather than the actions the ancients valued so much? Much like evangelism's departure from tradition in Christianity, its rejection of ritualization and mysticism, tradition and perpetuity in paganism are dead. Much like business casual pastors standing on a stage with electric guitars blasting in between unchecked, scripture-less preaching, much like the Mysteries of the Eucharist have turned into a symbolic, dry-cracker-fueled half joke, magic has disappeared behind the noise of 'spicy psychology' and 'intention'. Rituals have changed from the anthropological definition of time and space carved out from the ordinary, into quick, symbolic blips of an ancient understanding. The barrier to entry is low, all you have to do is claim to believe, and you're saved. You do not need to sit with discomfort, you do not need to be made to think or ask questions, you do not need to deconstruct your preconceived notions.

All of which is not to mention the worship of anti-cosmic and adversarial beings, purely on grounds of them being 'misunderstood', the rejection and indeed even loathing of primary deities purely because subconsciously, to us, they are too much like God, the rampant heno- and mono-theism of pagans whose religions have the word polytheism in them. Theocentrism in general, the constant emphasis on 'the gods' as some defineable category that paganism has, and that those 'gods' should be at the center of someone's faith and practice, rather than the beings and features that ancient pagans actually centered, insofar as anything was centered at all? One must ask: at what point is it no longer the same religion(s)? The answer is that we are way past that point. Neopaganism is not the search for ancestral religion. It's the construction of a new, uniquely white religion, in response to Christianity. Why else would it use a Christian-made label for itself, pagan, that the old believers thought of as an insult?

Neopaganism, witchcraft, 'paganism', whatever you want to call it, is nothing more than white people's shameless appropriation of countless ancient religions. And the goal of it is nothing more than to rebel against Christianity, one of the few traumas white people have in common, while never actually deconstructing it. This is why these features that ancient paganism didn't have (heno/monotheism, theocentrism, orthodoxy, mundane before magic, etc) are ones directly reflected by Christo-secularism: they're directly transferred, one-to-one. There was a brief window in history, very brief, where almost all Europeans had indigeneity in common. But we are so deeply immersed in our own colonization now that we have gone to spread it to the rest of the world and rescinded our right to claim that title as a group. So far, it has come, that we are somehow intensifying the indigeneity of our ancestors even in their death. Because we feel entitled to everything they had, because we're white.

Entitlement and Autonomy After Colonization

White entitlement gains complexity when the object of the entitlement is someone or something that cannot fight back. The cultures whose religions we are appropriating no longer exist except in memory and history books. They cannot jump off the page to defend themselves, correct our mistakes, tell us that they want their heritage and legacy respected. Living minorities can retaliate against oppression, or at least resist it in spirit, but the dead cannot. Anyone can oppress the dead. And anyone who is indoctrinated or imbued with whiteness can act with white entitlement towards the dead. Neopagans seem to think nothing wrong with this. When confronted with questions about why they deviate so strongly from what the religion(s) they claim prescribe, their answer often revolves around the inconsequence of their actions. Sometimes it's that "there's no sources" to work with, so they're basically forced to make it up as they go, other times it's that the original culture is dead so it doesn't matter what we do, or that "times have changed." But do the religions we supposedly align ourselves with not emphasize the autonomy of the dead? Moreover, do we modern woke people not claim to be against appropriation and think that ancestor work is oh, so important?

Cultural imperialism is the dominant feature of white supremacy in the 21st century. White people, or perhaps western people at large but especially white people, are spiritually homeless. Colonialism took communal values, interpretations and beliefs from us, and then supplied us with enough audacity and entitlement to take it from others as a weakened replacement for our own. When it is being done to cultures that have been absorbed into the idea of 'whiteness', like pre-Christian European religions, it's deemed acceptable, and nobody bats an eye at an 'eclectic pagan' with fingers in every pie loudly proclaiming that they're against cultural appropriation. But the mechanism is the same. The entitlement is completely unchanged. The arguments of 'well the culture is dead,' and 'well times have changed,' are weak excuses to be able to turn a religion - that they don't really believe in in the capacity that it was believed in by its original adherents - into whatever suits their needs best. Even if what suits their needs best is a reinterpretation of modern protestantism. Worse yet is that by creating a new religion, borrowing the aesthetics and terminology of the ancient religions and nothing else, those who relied on the language supplied by anthropology to explain their cultural traditions, those who grew up in folk traditions are being absorbed into the white narrative. The culture of white peoples is continually being erased by the illusion of 'white culture', and so neopaganism perpetuates white supremacy and colonizes indigenous European survivals (and peoples).

In both neopaganism/conventional witchcraft and evangelical Christianity, the closer somebody is to the traditional roots of their movement, the more of a systemic victim complex they openly express. More traditional evangelists often mirror the emphasis traditional branches of Christianity place on their perceived persecution. Preaching about the persecution of Christians in Rome and Martyrdom, or even going so far as to claim that they are still actively being oppressed on a large scale in the modern day. Wicca and its mythology does the exact same thing. It pretends that the witch-hunts were truly a genocide on their direct spiritual ancestors, and that Christians oppress them to this day. Further, just like evangelists, because religion is a matter of personal identity, any criticism of their approach to religion is treated as oppression. To the point of not only attacking each other in retaliation, and breaking off into bizarre factions, but also to the point of vilifying other religions altogether. Resistance against their entitlement is treated as a violation of their personal autonomy, and those who revolt against their colonization are not seen as vulnerable people or cultures, but as an institution dedicated to diminishing their personal rights.

The Autonomy of the Dead Though many pagans online claim to be animists, few are in practice. One symptom of this is the lack of agency ascribed to the dead by modern practitioners. Ancestor work is a touchy topic in the community, with many white practitioners betraying their toxic relationship with their own whiteness by staunchly avoiding the entire subject, let alone body, of their ancestors in between now and two thousand years ago. Ancestor work is often reduced to thinking about your ancestors' actions and repenting for them so that you may cleanse yourself of your colonial sins, though, as illustrated, it hardly comes to fruition. More importantly yet, an impossible contradiction has been created in our treatment of our white ancestors.

On the one hand, they are unilaterally described as directly oppositional and adversarial. Many report that their ancestors hate them, reject their practices, or say racist things to them, as though they have a phone line into the afterlife through which these messages can be received. But almost none actually put effort into establishing a relationship with their ancestry or ancestors, especially not before claims of rejection and hatred are made. On the other hand, precious little autonomy and agency is ascribed to the dead when it comes to their rights, or their influence over our lives in modernity. Aside from the blatant appropriation of their cultures, and disregard for what effects this might have on them, they are also never honored, nor welcomed into our spaces. They are not seen as capable of change or growth after death, depicted and understood as the exact people they were prior to their passing, as though most animistic religions do not teach that there is much learning to do in the afterlife. Not one of these people has enough of an emotional investment in their ancestors to be patient with them like you would a living family member. To let them have their feelings and see if with time something can be accomplished, to help them work through it. It seems that agency is only ascribed to the dead when it can serve as an excuse to avoid them at all costs.

It is no coincidence that this has happened. The Christo-secular world has a phobia of morbidity, so that accounts for a great deal of these symptoms. But it is also that Christianity teaches that the afterlife is stationary and constant, and believers have no agency in what their afterlife looks like. They will either go to The Good Place or The Bad Place based on their actions in life, be magically transported there after death, and will stay there, unchanged, for eternity. Aside from shallow neoliberal approaches to decolonization, which account for the other half of problems white people face when trying to reconcile their ancestry, people view themselves and, by extension, each other, as stationary figures, to whom life and death is happening. From the Christo-secular perspective, we are passive, and life and death are moving around us and coming over us. This explains why neopagan religious expressions don't seem to take any interest in funerary custom, death cosmology and eschatology, as they generally apply the same sense of circumstantial victimhood to what they believe 'paganism' is. But animistic religions do not teach passivity, nor that people are just victims to circumstance in their own lives.

The Autonomy of the Self Pre-Christian European religions were religions of struggle. How this feature presented itself varied, and how it was represented in the literature from or about the religions is even more skewed. But religions that are as old as time to a given group of people reflect the nature of life, and the nature of life is to struggle and fight. It was even more so then, especially for those not in the elite, towards whom sources are often biased. It is because of this that active participation in one's own life, and indeed perhaps even the afterlives or the lives of descendants, are so highly emphasized. It is one's own responsibility to move through life, to travel to the afterlife, to navigate the world tree as it were, to borrow terminology from my own religion. Often the success of descendants is spiritually generated by ancestors through their great deeds, teaching how such expressions of personal agency and willpower fuel the living for generations after one's death. Often the very most important themes in pagan mythologies and symbols are the willingness to fight against inevitability and do great things. But what white people lack most, even those who would number themselves among the very wokest, is accountability. The lack of it is a monstrous problem in the west, perhaps its own institution on a systemic scale.

Despite the religions whose names they claim being religions that revolve around taking accountability for the state of your life, religions that promote being an active participant in your own existence, neopaganism expresses a strong belief that everything will simply be handed to the believer on a silver platter. A hallmark of a person who has never truly struggled, whose ancestors have not truly struggled in quite some time, perhaps. A lot of this sense of anticipatory entitlement to the world also loops back around to the aforementioned egomania. Often, the conflictions in belief seem to suggest that the world is not inherently spiritual, but they are. Rather than there being an external web of magic that human actions take place on, magic is inherent in a person in the form of 'intention'. Rather than tools having inherent, naturally magical traits, a 'universal substitute' imbued with personal power can perform any function needed. Spiritual gifts are not obtained in life or learned from external individuals but something one is born into. Mundane over magical for thee, but not for me. Sometimes the entitlement appears as true laziness: that reading signs is a matter of ruling out mundane possibilities until it couldn't possibly mean anything else, rather than a skill of discernment one has to learn. That an AI chatbot or a Discord bot can truly perform a tarot reading, with no real explanation for how or why. That rather than the world being a complex web of interlocking ecology, both physically and metaphysically, from where one could theoretically divine anything from a single augur if only they were brilliant enough, it is thought that you really only have to wait until the most obvious, impossible symbols start crossing your path at the hand of 'the gods'.

In fact, it is 'the gods' around whom the most disturbing symptoms of privilege show. It is in how neopagans believe themselves to be sought out by the gods, their worship or even companionship to be specially requested. That the gods appear to them personally, speak to them directly, attend to the smallest matters in their lives. That they all have a deity for a spiritual parent, in extreme cases even an entire harem of deities from various pantheons with whom they have personal, usually romantic relationships. It gets so bizarre, at times, that I begin to feel it is spitting in the face of those who have sacrificed in prayer every day of a war-torn life and never been helped by their gods, and I do believe the gods have the power to interfere in such matters! Which leads into the next section:

The Autonomy of the Divine In many ways, the autonomy ascribed to 'the gods' is only a tool for their pagan adherents to evade accountability. One has already been mentioned, the way that people truly believe the gods are seeking them out personally, which detracts from one's own responsibility in practicing religion and building relationships with your gods, downplays that religion is a personal choice - perhaps to further the victim complex, persecution on religious basis narrative - and aggrandizes the person making that claim. Moreover, it leads to what people sometimes dub 'salad bar paganism', where people have a fairly random selection of deities from various pantheons in that semi-omnist model of "paganism." That appropriation is frequently criticized in the community these days, but is briskly refuted on grounds that the deities in question told the eclectic it was okay. Yet another kind of agency described to deities that only exists to evade personal responsibility. By attributing words and actions like those to the gods, people place the responsibility for their immorality on a non-human being that cannot respond empirically. It makes the gods complicit in their crime of entitlement. 'Revivalism' as a code word for simply ignoring all primary and secondary sources in favor of pop-spirituality would have their personal opinion on what a deity believes and wants weigh as much as that of mythology, a collaborative, deeply cultural, symbolic narrative. Not only is it once again placing the self above the culture, often as an outsider to said culture, but it is also forcing that culture's heritage into a level of personhood it can't have. It's a familiar pattern, strongly resembling modern Christians ascribing all of their deeds to Jesus. God wants them to harass people in the street, Jesus told them to throw that rock at that queer person, God hates this and that, but God needs us to do x or y.

And there is another strong parallel between evangelism and paganism here, in much the same vein of evasion. When modern protestants do bad things, or experience hardships in life, these things are attributed to the Devil. Neopagans blame energy. Negative energy, energy blockages, curses, even - which are of course negative energy sent by other people. Funnily enough, I think evangelicals on average attribute more positive things to their God than neopagans do. This is completely anecdotal, but where I see quite a few Christians thanking god for pre-sliced fruit, refilling hairspray, or cured cancer, neopagans do not match their negativity-offloading with the inverse, and do attribute their victories to themselves. Be it because of 'mundane before magic', or because after the spell you do have to 'put the work in', or else it won't work.

Reactionary, but Not Radical

I've already posited that neopagan religious expressions exist in retaliation and response to Christian trauma several times in this post. I think that much is very obvious, but because it is a shared trauma and sensitive topic, it is not often discussed or examined among pagans. I do see that people are, often, quite frank about their personal Christian traumas, which I would admire were it not so often used as an excuse of some kind. I already went into the history of anti-Christian tendencies among occultists, and how it bled over into modern neopaganism, which is a western occultist stream by nature. I think the amount of religious trauma neopagans have on a personal level and how conversion to paganism is often a response to it speaks for itself, and doesn't need elaborating on. But, like any toxic relationship with a parental figure does, the expression of this trauma leads to some significant ironies that are worth exploring. Because in ignoring and perpetuating those ironies, much harm is being done.

Religion versus Spirituality One very transparent rebellion against Christianity is the refusal that pagans show to treat pagan religions as 'religions', for many reasons. Most obvious is the unwillingness to identify as religious, as self-styled pagans commonly perpetuate the notion that there is a binary between 'religion' and 'atheism', and that any break away from those two concepts is what constitutes 'spirituality'. In order to distance themselves from what they hate, they claim that 'religion' necessitates the same kind of organization and hierarchy that they see in Christianity, and they thus are 'spiritual, but not religious'. They are blithely unaware of the fact that the dichotomy between 'spiritual' and 'religious' is very loaded with anti-indigenous sentiment, and western anthropology is even catching up with that. It is becoming increasingly clear to anthropologists that 'religion' cannot be easily defined, because at its most complete it is the entire sum of a given culture's way of understanding reality. If you were to want to truly encompass the scope of 'religion', science would be a religion, and some argue it is. The characterization of 'religion' as 'like Abrahamic religion' is Christo-centric, white-centric. And, inversely, the attribution of 'spirituality' to all religions that do not conform to the standards set by Christianity is a kind of pan-indigeneity. It flattens those religions into a monolith and looks directly past their unique forms of organization, structure and transmission - pagan religions included. It is also a heavily ethnicized word, treated as exotic and more arcane than 'religion'.

Further, people tend to define 'spirituality' as being less dogmatic, less strict, and more oriented around one person's journey unbound by organized culture or communal experience. There lies another tie to hyper-individualism, but also to entitlement. Because neopagans refuse to treat pagan religions as the religions they are, they refuse to treat them with respect and reverence. Spirituality is supposed to be less weighty, and despite the material at hand being endangered, deeply damaged, colonized heritage from a dead culture, despite that material representing the entirety of a peoples' way of existing, it is treated as though it can be picked up and discarded whenever. People do not treat their conversions to 'paganism' as conversion, but as a new hobby or aesthetic trend to be picked up. And the rest of their treatment, when it comes to study, honoring, practicing, decolonizing, doesn't suggest that it's anything other than a trendy hobby, a facet of identity consumption. Pagan religions are not treated as religions, despite being indigenous heritage from a long gone ancestral culture, often cultures whose descendants still live and breathe and practice what remains. They are products, commodities for personal satisfaction, for metaphysical decoration. They are an aesthetic adopted to convey something to other people, not enrich oneself. Nothing is safe from consumerism.

Consumerism, Materialism and Prosperity Gospel For a more elaborate explanation of colonial cultural consumption please see my post about ethnic envy.

Consumerism presents itself both materially and not. Materialism does occur frequently in both religions, as both are very white, and whiteness is deeply imbued with capitalism. Some examples are very obvious, crystals and incense for neopagans, modest-chique clothing and white cars for evangelicals. But there is also the cultural consumerism, and the consumerism that's hidden behind a veil of piety, using materialism as tangible proof of one's devotion. Loaded bibles, fancy grimoires, altar decorations and cross necklaces. Everything about religion is commodified, so that it can either be consumed or displayed. It reaches such extremes that people have tons of altars strewn about their home, one for each deity they worship, which is one of my favorite pecularities about neopagan domestic religion.

But there is another highly capitalistic mindset that has infiltrated white religion, and it is prosperity theology. Prosperity theology is a common feature of evangelical Christianity, and it views the Bible as a contract between humanity and god, that in exchange for worship God will provide security, wealth and comfort. It has its direct presentations, like the parallel between evangelists thinking that poverty is punishment for insufficiency and neopagans claiming that you cannot be good at magic if you're ugly or poor - because surely if you were good at magic, if you did have enough of a soul and that inherent human intention-power, you would be pretty and rich. But more abstractly there is also the fact that most neopagans believe in egregore theory - the idea that the gods require human worship to sustain themselves and be able to exist. It feels equally contractual and transactional, and it's no wonder that there tends to be a sense of superiority about what you can offer the gods. It's no wonder that people expect returns from the gods for being a good worshipper and giving them objects, rather than upholding their rituals and values, or being a good person.

Enlightenment Influence and Performative Rationalism See my post on performative rationalism for a more elaborate explanation.

Both the Campbell Movement of the Second Great Awakening and Western Occultism share significant enlightenment influences. Their descendant religions, as such, have syncretized themselves with rationalism and later scientism, to various extents. Some, especially the more traditional streams of white religion, still have distinctly irreconcilable differences between their beliefs and those of scientism. But many, especially more modern, Internet-founded streams of neo-religion, prioritize bending as much as possible to scientism. Where 'science' describes a method of gaining knowledge, which is not inherently harmful, scientism is a deeply colonial belief system and enjoys many perks under white supremacy. It is viewed by many as an objective form of knowing, and thus as the ultimate truth the universe has to offer, that all religions must defer to and accept, or they have failed morally. Belief systems that do not rely on science, do not accept scientism, et cetera are accused of being dangerous, primitive, backwards or downright unintelligent. If you, as a practitioner, irregardless of your culture, do not prioritize the conclusions of science over anything your culture teaches, you are seen as endangering yourself and others in your stupidity. Cry about decolonization they might, neopagans do not actually do all that much deconstructing, and as a result they still enjoy the privilege of not being oppressed and condemned for their beliefs, no matter how much they claim to be. They still fall neatly in step with the status quo, never questioning or challenging it.

Another, more obscure influence from Enlightenment thinking can be found in the Campbell movement, and is reflected in neopaganism and its founding witch-cult theory. Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Edward Herbert sought to "reduce religion to a set of essentials upon which all reasonable persons might agree." Campbell, who was a student of Locke's, went on to elaborate on this idea by striving to unify and restore apostolic Christianity, by removing all obstacles that could divide Christians. He believed that one such obstacle was the uncertainty around how to interpret the Bible, and believed that the only way it could be interpreted and the only way it was intended to be read, was as literal fact. White supremacy mirrors this unifying movement by creating a mythological past of united whiteness, and striving to create that by eradicating all cultural and philosophical differences that European people had. Wicca, in turn, emulated this by espousing the witch-cult theory that posed there had been a pan-European pagan religion that was being persecuted by the Christians. All of them have as a final goal to create a single, monolithic group of people that can bend the outsiders to their ways. Further, there is the problem of mythic literalism, which came to a head with Campbell's insistence on the Bible as a factual source, and still influences both anthropological interpretations of pagan mythologies as well as popular ones. People have not developed sufficient literary skills to be able to think of ways a mythology can be interpreted other than more or less literally. As a result of this, a bizarre balance is struck between ignoring the myths entirely, and condemning them by taking them literally.

Moralism and Moral Superiority Mythic literalism adds a layer to the problem of divine agency previously discussed. On top of placing one's own responsibility on the gods to offload complicity or accountability, sometimes undue responsibility is also placed on the gods for actions that humans symbolically or culturally attribute to them. Because in Christianity, God is the superior moral arbiter, who decides what is good and what is bad in his system of objective good and evil, neopagans ascribe that same responsibility to pagan deities. They are forced into the role of perfect moral examples and expected to perform that duty well, and failure is reason for condemnation and abandonment. Consider the trend of pagans who refuse to 'work with' such figures as Zeus or Óðinn because, despite being placed in the hole that God left, they are not equipped by their mythologies to fulfil that role, and thus turn into a scapegoat for the hatred people feel for God. The lived experience of somebody who hasn't unpacked their evangelical trauma moving on to paganism will invariably be that pagan gods fail them just like God did, except this time it's not a preacher claiming God can do no evil while you assess his failures in the world, it's yourself placing a deity in that position, doomed to fail from the start.

There is no inquiry into the role of morality being depicted with nuance in mythology. In a world where moral realism is the predominant model, and most believe that good and evil are not just objective, but measurable, mythologies that dissect morality are useless. They fall flat, and are sneered at. The condescension neopagans have for their own adoptive mythologies doesn't seem to be a problem to them, even when it gets to such extremes as being directly contradictory to the religion they claim. Take Lokeanism, which often condemns Óðinn for 'what he did to Fenrir' among other such things. Not only is there no acknowledgment that the undisputed meaning of the myth is that if Fenrir hadn't been bound the world would no longer exist, but the entire myth and its meaning has a kind of dualism shoved down its throat that flattens the entire narrative, and turns the characters into caricatures. The morality depicted in the myths should be subject to discussion, undoubtedly, and some actions that the gods are depicted as performing in the original mythology should be condemned. That much is not a question. But there is a difference between discussing the material and foundation of your religion, and disagreeing with it completely, but still appropriating its aesthetics.

Further, ascribing a superior moral judgment to your god of choice is how alt-right Christianity came to be so fervently convinced that their will is God's will, and leftist neopagans are not immune to this same process. White leftism is a weak imitation of true intersectionality, and the white leftism most popular among neopagans has truly dangerous features, like the tendency toward extreme punitive justice. One cannot learn to deconstruct Christianity, nor colonialism, without deconstructing objective morality. One cannot understand or put into practice the restorative practices that pagan justice and morality promoted. Neopaganism likes to present itself as the religion of the woke, the leftist's solution to the binary between alt-right Christians and militant atheists. But it doesn't live up to how much it pats itself on the shoulder for its harmlessness.

White Woman's Spiritual Evolution: One to the Other, and Back Again

One fine day I found myself reading a TikTok comment I almost couldn't believe. It was on a video of somebody pretending to control fire, to which I hoped I would find something amusing in the replies. It was so revelatory to me I wrote it down in my journal, to revisit and think about, which is how I know exactly how it read.

tips i wanna give as an ex witch, very spiritually gifted. make sure to never do a spell on someone who is truly for god. i learned the hard way. i js wanna add i'm now a follower of Christ. god bless <3!!

Everything about it, honestly, is gold. From the 'ex witch' just as how 'ex christians' style themselves, to the casual statement of 'very spiritually gifted' which betrays the hallmark arrogance. I was soon to find out there was an entire community of self-styled 'ex witches' who found Jesus and are now practicing evangelists. The traffic goes both ways, with frequent exchanges and reverts. It's a traffic that reveals a new syncretism emerging, with ex-witch evangelicals still believing in the witch-cult theory or espousing that 'witches' are healers, or other fascinating blends of mythology. It should be no surprise: after all, they both serve near-identical social functions, acting in retaliation against each other while being almost perfect mirror images. When one fails, you can return to the other, until that fails again too. It plainly displays all the features here described. The lack of critical thinking and deconstruction, the relational ties and shared ancestry of both religions, the lack of respect and sense of risk, the lack of significance in conversion, the lack of effort being put in.

It's not just these extreme cases who reflect this broader pattern, however. Think of how many people enter the space in retaliation against Christianity, try that for a while, but eventually fall back on their interpretation of 'folk magic', which generally serves to blend the most comfortable aspects of each into something posing as a compromise, with not much reference to historic or living folk magic and its cosmology and beliefs. Or even how many people find other Abrahamic religions through paganism and end up converting to Judaism or Islam, or worse, fall down white supremacist new age pipelines, which neopaganism and witchcraft also share their roots with. And, ultimately, how most if not all pagans eventually leave the space by finding something that is easier to practice, scientism included, and falling back on it time and again for failure to connect with paganism.

Conclusion

A connection with paganism cannot be established through the pop spirituality, neopagan lens. It is a fundamental misrepresentation and misunderstanding of these religions, and until significantly more cultural literacy is injected into the zeitgeist, most people do not have the tools nor humility to engage with cultural heritage sensitively, especially not that of cultures that cannot act on their oppression. This post has effectively been created to serve as a sequel or elaboration to my essay titled Yes, I Hate Wicca. In that essay I did not manage to adequately delve into the great structural and systemic problems represented by contemporary witchcraft and neopaganism, especially as descended from Wicca.

Culture and Commodity: Understanding Appropriation

Most of us are content to blame racism for the prevalence of appropriation in our midst. And we should by no means downplay its significance in this matter; its existence is one of the reasons cultural appropriation is so dangerous. Racially motivated cultural appropriation perpetuates stereotypes and instils hate and misunderstanding - blackface is the prime example. But, if most appropriation that happened was explicitly racially motivated, there would not nearly be as much appropriation as we see. After all, wearing feather headdresses or sexy qipao halloween costumes has been thoroughly cracked down upon in comparison to the appropriation we still see. It's simply not that acceptable anymore. Most appropriation that occurs isn't explicitly racially motivated, or indeed, motivated at all. From what we see among our peers, most cultural appropriation is accidental, unintentional. So how does that happen?

Turns out, there is a fouler enemy using racism to deflect blame. In her essay, Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks famously wrote:

Within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference. The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.

What I would like to draw special attention to here is this phrase: the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.

Most of us know white supremacy as the explicit belief that white people are better than other races, based in the idea that "races" exist at all (racial theory). But in reality, it goes quite a lot deeper than that. WS has created, and aims to perpetuate, a worldwide social system that regards whiteness as the 'default', and racial features as deviating from that default. This is the 'Otherness' Hooks describes in the above quote. This system is so thoroughly integrated into every aspect of our world, that nobody is free from this bias. You, reader, and me, and everybody we both know, have been conditioned from birth to be able to perceive whiteness, assess it, assimilate into it, and view it as the default way of existing. In order to accomplish this, white supremacy aims to destroy the existing cultures that various white peoples have, to homogenize them under the banner of 'white'. This is why so many white people truly believe that white people have no culture, and also why every time someone says that you should loudly protest.

But keen readers may think back to instances where white supremacists have stolen aspects of certain "white" cultures to justify their actions, like for example the fake Germanic spirituality of historic and contemporary Nazis. And if that was you, I applaud you! You have discovered exactly how this relates to the modern spiritual community.

Desire and Resistance: the History of Modern Witchcraft What we now know as the modern pagan or witchy community was built on the back of the very first community who were willing to call themselves pagans and witches: Wiccans. I have a longer form post detailing the origins of Wicca and its contribution to white supremacy, but in short, here is what you need to know.

Wicca was created in the 1950s by a con artist named Gerald Gardner. He based this new religion partially off of things he learned from various Western Esotericist groups, and partially off of the pseudoscientific Witch-cult hypothesis. This hypothesis claimed that, rather than it being already marginalized groups who were being persecuted during the European witch trials, it was actually a pan-European pagan religion oriented around fertility magic that had gone underground. Gardner claimed to have met some modern descendants and practitioners of this witch-cult religion, and to have been initiated into their tradition, which he called The Wica. This new movement was supposed to be an ancient, traditionally European religion. Later evolutions of Wicca furthered this agenda, using the Lord/Lady model as a soft-polytheistic way to combine all European paganisms into one, ready-made religion. Homogenization, anyone?

At the time of its creation, Wicca was an almost direct result of the growing resentment toward industrialism and Christianity in colonial Britain. The Victorians yearned for a deviation from what they perceived as the boring, straight-laced Christian culture, their default-ness, their bland means of existing. They craved indigeneity, ethnicity, the perceived 'ancient wisdom' of a fake pagan past - so they sought it by using culture, real or imagined, as a tool for personal satisfaction. And that sense of need, along with the commodification that it causes, has persisted into the modern day. It got more severe in with the advent of the counter-culture movements in the 60s and 70s, which is where we can trace some of the appropriation of Native American spirituality that we can still see today. And then came the internet, and what was originally a fairly structured community of Wiccan and New Age practitioners unintentionally started to mix and mistake ideas and ideologies, as well as import new ones. Today, the modern community of spiritual practitioners is deeply diverse, but conventional witchcraft maintains most of its core features from those early days. Indeed, the very act of calling yourself a witch at all, comes from Wicca. But more importantly, what was once a fringe new-religious movement has turned into one of the west's leading expressions of spirituality. Why? Because the desire for ethnicity has not faded, but only gotten stronger.

So thus armed with information, we return to bell hooks. "Mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference." Mass culture, in this context, is conventional witchcraft. Uncomfortable as it is for us to admit, over the last decades but especially since COVID, "witchcraft" has become a trend. The desire Hooks describes made this ready-made religion an easy way to deviate from the white mainstream, and a lack of resistance meant that those perpetuating this cycle couldn't and wouldn't be held accountable. The process of adopting magic into the mainstream could thus be boosted by extreme commodification, like the new idea that 'intention is everything', or the notion of 'universal substitutes', as well as quick and easy identity labels. All designed to make it as easy to swallow, practice, and make part of your identity as possible.

By being a "witch," by buying into the habit of setting yourself apart as those among the oppressed, the unconventional, the ancient or subversively traditional, one is acknowledging and enjoying the pleasure of racial difference, and perpetuating that idea. The desire to be a witch at all, is the desire to be racial. The desire to shed whiteness and embrace ethnicity. The desire to use Otherness as a spice, to season the dull dish that is what people perceive to be mainstream white culture.

And that is where we find the heart of appropriation in contemporary spiritual spaces. The appropriation we see is not that which is driven by hate or contempt, but ethnic envy. The compulsive draw towards all that which appears, to many, to deviate from what they perceive to be plain whiteness. Modern, conventional witchcraft, is often nothing but the perpetuation of a long-lived imperial tradition of cultural consumption, exoticization, and commodification that finds its roots in white supremacy. The appropriation that we see is not meant to mock, but to use culture and defiance as an escapist tool to satisfy a personal malcontent with the entrapment of a post-industrial, post-colonial world. White people's sense of self, sense of own, inherent culture, has been whipped to shreds by the vice of Christian imperialism and white supremacy. All that is left now for them is to take indigeneity from others and wear it as a costume. Right?

Race, Racialization, and the Cycle of Consumption

Wrong. Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of all, in this discussion, is that cultural appropriation only affects non-white people. It is that implicit notion - that white people have no culture, and therefore cannot be appropriated from, or alternatively that white people do not deserve their cultures to be preserved and therefore cannot be appropriated from - that has allowed this harm and envy to live so long in the first place. Appropriation itself has been racialized, perpetuating the cycle of desperate envy directed at anyone perceived as ethnic. It is no longer just racist ideals of mystique, freedom, and exoticism contained in indigeneity, it is also the fervent envy of the associated sense of home and its protection.

In actuality, the appropriation of various "white" cultures is a massive contributor to the problem. Wicca itself is the main perpetrator in our modern community, it's a case in point when it comes to homogenization. It viciously appropriated from various European (and non-European) cultures, misrepresenting them and stripping them of their identity, to create a false narrative of universal European indigeneity for people to subscribe to. It popularized this idea that European pagan religions are all more or less the same, that you can mix and match deities from various cultures and countries and worship them all the same according to a basic religious framework. It strips these cultures of their identity, their differences, their own inherent ethnicity - instead turning them into an easily commodified identity label. It thus turns the wheel of the cycle: Wicca itself became just another 'white people thing', a bland, mainstream piece of white culture that lacked seasoning and interest. We are seeing the effects currently: Wicca has fallen out of fashion, nobody is willing to self-identify as a Wiccan anymore, instead opting for such things as 'eclectic pagan' which in everything but name is the same thing.

The same thing will eventually happen to eclectic paganism, to witchcraft, to 'paganism' in general, and on and on it will go. The snake will continue to slowly devour its way up its tail for as long as we allow it to. Until we start cracking down on real, actual appropriation and homogenization hard, including when it happens to cultures you deem less ethnic, these "white" cultures will continue to phase out of the limelight as they lose their flavoring and are assimilated into mainstream, white supremacist culture - necessitating replacements, necessitating absorbing more cultures into the mainstream. Anything so the consumption at mach speed can continue.

Knowing that exoticism and the desire to participate in it is often a driving factor in people's unconscious motivation when it comes to magic and spirituality, explains why people keep unintentionally finding new ways to appropriate. Understanding that commodification is how this habit is perpetuated, explains why we want to simplify matters of appropriation down to false dichotomies like "closed" and "open" practices. It's all about how to maintain the appearance of cultural sensitivity, while taking the path of absolute least resistance. Symbolic change is easier than real ones. Staring at a list is easier than considering your personal motives.

Per bell hooks again:

Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.

False Hopes and Good Intentions

I certainly appreciate and acknowledge that people in the community have the very best of intentions. They truly believe, in most cases, that the approach they are taking by heeding lists of "closed practices" and policing other people is how they help, and that accidentally appropriating is all but par for the course when it comes to practicing magic. But we are not fighting an invisible enemy. Like many marginalized communities whose cultures are frequently appropriated have been saying for at least a decade now: "I didn't know" doesn't cut it anymore.

Our community is built on appropriation. Indeed it could be said that our entire community is fundamentally appropriative. Our founding fathers, as well as the very foundations our basic principles and common beliefs rest on, exist because of the appropriation of suffering that was never ours to claim, and cultures that we could not possibly belong to - either because they never existed, or because they did... only a thousand or more years ago. Our community is not about expressing a kind of spirituality that those who join already felt prior to their discovery of the community. If that were the case, theology, cosmology, philosophy and actual real life practice would take center stage. Magic is a trend, religion a token for identity politics. It is for that reason that people struggle to maintain a practice, that people fight for their lives to feel a connection to their supposed beliefs, that people spend more money on books by other practitioners than minutes considering the beliefs of those whose cultures they are invading into. And, indeed, it is for that reason that we simply can't help ourselves when it comes to appropriation.

We are constantly drawn to that which looks exotic to us, because all sense of novelty and individualism has been stripped from "white" cultures. To actually practice paganism, rather than a hyper-individualistic appropriation of it, you have to read archaeology books, historic accounts of folklore, ethnobotany. But nobody does that - including those who write the infotainment books geared toward practitioners. Instead, we appropriate from cultures we perceive as exotic, and when caught, we reframe our appropriations. They're not "chakras," they're energy centers. It's not "smudging," it's saining. Nevermind that "energy" as a modern concept is borrowed from Theosophy, which has its own racist and appropriative roots, and saining is a culturally distinct practice unique to Scotland - but that doesn't matter, because they're white people things. Or to take the example of masked appropriation even further: we may have started mocking the "we are the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn" nonsense, but the victim complex never left our midst: the "broom closet" as a way to co-opt the suffering of queer people who get no choice in their identity, when the physical expression of individualistic spirituality is absolutely a choice; the undying lie that pagans and witches are a monolith severely oppressed under Christianity, when in reality pagans and witches everywhere are not just free from systemic oppression, but actively contributing to it.

Some grow so hopeless with the entire notion of needing to respect culture that they reject culture altogether, or at least they think they do. Some take the route of trying to create their own traditions altogether, with no pre-established framework to operate off of. They are not free from the draw toward exoticism, quite the contrary: they are more likely to end up appropriating by cherrypicking features of spirituality they see others practice or from their foggy memory. Others attempt to combat appropriation by engaging in homogenization and sanitization. They strip their practice of words that have meaning altogether, thinking that just because they call it a "smoke cleanse" or "deity work" it cannot be cultural and thus cannot be appropriation. They live their lives woefully unaware of the fact that everything people do exists within the sphere of culture.

The point of all of these examples being: good intentions aren't good enough. We may not be able to undo the damage done by the commodification of ancient and indigenous spirituality, but we can shift the tides of social expectation and accountability. It is time to stop mistaking tolerance for progress, and by that token, it is time to stop tolerating the commodification of spirituality. It may have become one, but it should not be a trend. It should not be a way to soothe one's white guilt.

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In the next chapters in this series, I aim to discuss more ways the community perpetuates appropriation, cultural imperialism and racism, such as the closed/open culture dichotomy and other disinformation, as well as how to decolonize your own practice and motivations, how to recognize appropriation and combat it, and the value and role of culture in our lives and our community. When those parts are completed, they will be linked here, as well as in each individual chapter, and eventually a masterpost. I hope to see you in the next one.

Further Reading:

Climenhaga, L. (2012). Imagining the Witch: A Comparison between Fifteenth-Century Witches within Medieval Christian Thought and the Persecution of Jews and Heretics in the Middle Ages.

“The Dehumanization and Demonization of the Medieval Jews.” Medieval Antisemitism?, by François Soyer, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, 2019, pp. 45–66.

Simpson, Jacqueline (1994). Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why? Folklore, 105:1-2: 89-96.

Heselton, Philip (2003). Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: An Investigation Into the Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft. Capall Bann.

“From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualisation of Cultural Appropriation”. Communication Theory. Richard A. Rogers.