Ok so I know how you mentioned you don’t particularly like new age practices once. I’m just curious what IS new age exactly and how does it differ from your practice?
I basically see new age as style without substance or critical thinking at best. At worst it’s grabby hands stealing spiritual practices from other cultures, taking them out of context, and claiming them as their own (aka cultural appropriation) at worst. It’s buying a crystal from a bin based on some correspondence list somewhere or because the little tag in a shop says it’s good for “protection” without consideration of why or where it came from and under what conditions it was mined.
Most witchy type shops I’ve been to were more new age than actual witchcraft shops.They sell statues of faeries or angels portrayed as “love and light” without thought to the actual complicated and not always “love and light” lore attached to both angels and faeries. They sell white sage as “smudge sticks” never explaining that smudging is part of indigenous ritual and not just randomly waving some twigs on fire.
New age feel like spiritual consumerism in a capitalist sense to buy things and also in an icky sense where the historical and spiritual practices of cultures are a buffet for colonialists to pick and choose what parts of a culture “feels good” to take without dealing with the very realÂ
These shops seem strangely stuck in the 90s with books on auras, chakras, and Celtic knots covering everything, and spirituality packaged as self help. New age is about making you feel good rather than ever examining your shadow or the shadow western culture casts on history and spirituality. New age, to me, seems like a hippie clung to capitalism instead of adapting when met with a new world and new information. Occasionally new age intersects with witchcraft and it’s often the most respectability politics forms of Wicca, which is only portrayed as love-and-light-do-no-harm at best and at worst the only kind of acceptable kind of witchcraft that must be religions or it’s not witchcraft at all.
I don’t touch stuff from closed cultures. I have studied other cultures and religions, formally in college and informally for my own curiosity, but I don’t take those concepts out of context and try to make them my own. If something bad happens to you I’m not going to say it must be karma, because that’s not how karma works and would be taking it completely out of the original framework.
I don’t really consider what I do a spiritual practice. I’m a witch. It’s just what and who I am. I think that part of being a witch is seeing the world differently, maybe a bit more malleable and subject to change if you want to change it. There’s power and strength in that. I find value in reading other accounts of witchcraft practices and see how it relates to my own experiences. I draw from my own ethos in punk and DIY and philosophy and apply that to my perspective. I call it a practice because it is always growing and changing and evolving when met with new information.
