Lights of the Hearth

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.

She is attested by various names: the tribal name Epalea, the founder of her temple Aleos, and the name of the festival Aleaia. In the Classical period, a transition can be seen in literature and cult from Alea, to Alea Athena, to Athena Alea. Xenophon calls her Alea, while Herodotus, Menander, and Strabo, among others, call her Alea Athena. But the transition is not instantaneous, as Athena Alea, used by Pausanias, is attested before Alea Athena disappears.⁴

The earliest known cultic activity at Tegea is in the late tenth century. Pottery, animal bones, both burnt and unburnt, and terracotta figures & wreaths were found in the sacred pit (bothros).⁵

In the Geometric period, activity expanded: architectural evidence of 2 apsidal temples and a metal workshop was found. There was also an increase of votives found at the site, such as animal & human figures, jewelry, and shields.

Figure 1. Bronze votive pins from the sanctuary of Athena Alea (Kladouri and Orfanou 4)

The Archaic temple, most likely built around 625-600 BCE, became the first monumental building at Tegea, and stood until it burnt down. An abundance of votives were found once again: bronze & lead jewelry, statuettes, terracotta figurines, and miniature vessels. We don't know when Alea and Athena became equated, but a 6th century votive figurine of an armed Athena could be seen as a representation of this syncretism.⁵

Figure 2. An archaic bronze figurine of an armed Athena (Dugas 359)

When the Archaic temple burnt down, the famous marble temple, whose remains can still be seen today, was built.

In the temple, there was a statue of Athena Alea. Originally an ivory statue stood, but it was carried away to Rome by Augustus. A new statue was made and later flanked by a statue of Asklepios and a statue of Hygeia on either side. Pausanias writes that the statue was originally surnamed Hippeia, but the locals continued to call her Alea.⁶

There were also representations of the Calydonian boar hunt, as Atalanta was Arkadian, and another local hero, Telephos, fighting Achilles. The tusks of the boar were said to be present in the temple until Augustus removed them. Present still in the temple in the days of Pausanias was the rotted hide of the Calydonian Boar.⁷ He also lists other votives: a couch dedicated to the goddess and a portrait of Auge, a priestess of her's.

Also in the sanctuary were representations of Rheia, local nymphai, the mousai, and Mnemosyne.⁸

Figure 3. The remains of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea (Hagedorn)

We don't know a lot about Alea herself. She was clearly a goddess of refuge, granting safety to various people. She also seemed to have a martial aspect even before she became associated with Athena, which explains why she was syncretized with Athena to begin with. A connection could be made both to horses, via Hippeia, and boars/pigs, via the Calydonian Boar.

Pausanias also describes a peplos woven for the goddess as an offering, so weaving could also be an attribute of her's.⁹ Though, of course, these can all be argued as just examples of the syncretism with Athena. The metal workshop could attest to a connection with smithery.

Erik Øtsby suggests that she is a fertility goddess with a connection to water in some way, citing Madeleine Jost, who also discusses a possible solar aspect.¹⁰ Her sanctuary was located near a natural spring, and in the early periods was located within a loop of a river.

So, all in all: Alea was a goddess of protection and refuge, a fertility goddess with a connection to water and a martial aspect even prior to her association with Athena. She was often offered jewelry, attesting to a large female cult. These were likely dedications related to puberty and/or marriage. The tusks and hide of the Calydonian Boar were held in her sanctuary, and like a lot of Arkadian deities she was associated with nymphai.

I think she's a very interesting study of how Panhellenic deities absorbed local deities and took on new characteristics.

Yes I spent 3 hours writing this for about ~7 people to see. No I don't regret it.

Sources:

[1] Homer, Iliad 2.607-609

[2] Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.9.6; 8.23.1; 8.4.8

[3] Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.5.6

[4] Madeleine Jost, 2007, “The Religious System in Arkadia” in A Companion to Greek Religion

[5] Mary E. Voyatzis, The Cult of Athena Alea at Tegea and its transformation over time

[6] Pausanias 8.41.1

[7] Pausanias 8.47.2

[8] Pausanias 8. 45. 4-47. 4

[9] Pausanias 8.5.3

Open and Closed Practices: Oops! All Performative!

The latter of those aforementioned binaries, the concept of there being "closed" and "open" practices, is a very new development within internet politics that is practically unique to the spiritual sphere. And for good reason: it's bullshit. "What?!" I know, I'm sorry, I realize this is the axiom of wokeness around which many of us have built our conduct within the community - me too, when I first joined. But there's a reason that this doesn't exist anywhere outside of our community. It was made up in an attempt to radically simplify avoiding appropriation, but in the process has instead done severe damage by being deeply reductive, and even xenophobic! 

Like we discussed in the last post, a core feature of white supremacy is the reduction of all culture into a binary of "white culture" and "not white culture." This idea is often unintentionally perpetuated by the open/closed dichotomy. Any culture that is associated with white people or whiteness is considered "open," which goes on to then imply that any culture associated with not-whiteness is closed. This is the definition of racialization, and engaging in it primes your mind to apply the same principle in other contexts as well. It makes non-whiteness register to the beholder as foreign.

This turns into xenophobia quickly, and goes on to do further harm. The severity with which we now treat the concept of a "closed practice" has resulted in the severe othering of its practitioners, to the point where they often feel silenced and dismissed, rather than respected. Out of fear of doing something wrong or being accused of appropriation or being complicit in it, "closed practices" have become deeply taboo. Not to be spoken of or posted about except in the context of condemning their appropriation. When there is a space for practitioners of closed practices to speak or post, it's often a single channel locked behind a special role, or some such. The practitioners and their practices are treated as one monolith with no nuance, and hidden away in a small section where they cannot share with the rest of the community, as though just hearing about a practice one can't engage in is dangerous. The way we treat closed practices in the community does not uplift its practitioners nor represent them, it others and excludes them in the name of protection that nobody asked for. 

Further, the entire principle operates on an assumption of entitlement, or a right to ownership. There is an implied dividing line, somewhere in this linear narrative, where you cross from "this I can have," into "this I can't have." Or alternatively, "this I can use," into "this I can't use." But in reality, like we covered in part one, culture is not a matter of ownership or consumption. It's a matter of identity, experience and interaction. Cultures are not linear, nor static, nor do they exist in isolation. They are always changing, along an infinite number of axes, and so are their relationships to other cultures and systems in the world. It is easy and comfortable to condense your world down into binaries, but it teaches you nothing about culture as a concept nor about individual cultures, and that is a problem in a community oriented around engaging with intangible cultural heritage (religions and their praxes).

And there lies another glaring problem with the closed/open dichotomy. It doesn't teach you what appropriation is, because our treatment of appropriation is oriented around convenience over commitment. Rather than learning how your behavior perpetuates harm, rather than deconstructing the mindsets you came up in, you're provided with easy outs. The open/closed dichotomy gives you an opportunity to perform cultural competence without actually learning it. The truth is that if you aren't able to recognize appropriation on your own, you are not sufficiently equipped to engage with cultural heritage. If you need to ask somebody else "is it appropriation to..." the answer is, definitionally, yes. Because you are demonstrating a desire to consume something before gaining the cultural competency needed to understand your relationship with it.

These labels can't accurately represent the cultural dynamics around appropriation, already having resulted in terms like "semi-closed" to try to bridge the gap. Because, realistically, who wants their culture, the thing that makes them and their people who they are, deemed "open" for anybody to do with what they will irregardless of familiarity and respect? And on the other hand, who wants their culture completely shunned?

Objectivity and the Burden of Education

Another notable flaw of the current popular understanding of appropriation is the delusion of objectivity. 'Objectivity' has infiltrated the western mind on a very large scale, and nowadays many people live their lives under the assumption that there is an objective truth contained within the world, largely as a result of flawed education and misconceptions about science. But science does not presume itself objective, and 'objectivity' as a concept itself is entirely subjective. Paradoxical, I know, but here's the important thing to remember: cultural appropriation is not a matter of fact and falsity. There is no objectively correct, final answer on what is or is not appropriation - ever. 

That includes an attempted final answer from an individual from the culture itself that you have selected to answer this question. The value of cultural consensus cannot be overstated, and it is unequivocally true that the final authority on a culture is that culture itself. There is nothing morally wrong with asking the opinion of people within a given culture to inform your opinion, in fact it is highly respectable and something we should all do in the pursuit of decentering whiteness. That said, there is a persistent habit within the community of using single individuals who associate with a given culture as the final authority on that culture - and all questions about what is and is not permissible are directed at that person.

This isn't always nonconsensual: some people willingly take on this role in their community. But culture is not contained within a single person, and there are significant risks associated with this method. For one, making one person the final authority on their culture is tokenizing them and their culture. It diminishes the variable, experiential and interpersonal nature of culture, disregards the fact that it is something far bigger than one person by nature, and chooses one person to represent all of it for the sake of convenience. Whether or not the person you are directing your questions or desire for education at is taking up that role willingly, it is definitionally reductive. Further, this method of seeking answers places a burden upon the broader culture where members of it cannot afford to be uneducated about these ethics or unprepared to answer these questions, lest one person's lack of education or preparation becomes the source of further harm to the greater group. 

This presents in other ways, too, like the "(BI)POC friend" who is treated as the supreme arbiter of what is and is not racist by a group of their white friends. Again, sometimes consensual, sometimes not, but in either case: racist and reductive. In the case of delegating all of your educational needs to 'POC' at large, there is another, larger issue too. Aside from the laziness displayed in this behavior - putting the burden of education and social justice on those already suffering under these systems for convenience's sake, without ever doing one's own research or actively criticizing one's own patterns - there is the matter of stereotyping. While it is certainly true that POC and indigenous people generally know far more about systemic oppression than white(-passing) people, it is still racist to place the burden of educating you on people other than yourself purely based on their skin color. Assigning a trait, positive or negative, to somebody based on their race, is engaging in racism. In assuming a 'POC' has these traits to benefit you - educatedness, the ability and/or desire to pass on that education, 'correctness' in general - you are assigning traits to somebody based on their (perceived) race with no room for nuance.

Of course, people who take it upon themselves to educate others on their culture deserve our utmost gratitude, and to be taken seriously. You must continue seeking out the experiences and opinions of those more heavily affected than you, and strive to most amplify their voices. But there should always be an acknowledgment on the part of any speaker that their experience is not representative of everyone's, and conversely, the people questioning them should not use that person as a one-stop-shop for all their answers on racism and appropriation purely because of their skin color.

Instead, you should view cultural appropriation as an ongoing conversation. Cultural dynamics and boundaries are constantly changing, and as a result, so does the way we can interact with culture. What is and is not helpful is always changing, and independently of that, so is what is and is not seen as acceptable. Further, the general movement towards liberation for all is always changing its approach based on the most recent research or education. I feel very confident in saying that how the movement is currently organized will be subject to extreme criticism in the future, possibly the near future - and that's a good thing! It means we are improving. But it also means that liberation and decolonization don't end. It goes on forever, and so does the process of learning. Not just for white people, but for everyone dedicated to improving the world.

But, when accepting that there is no objectivity in ethics, it can be tempting to then disregard the notion of appropriation altogether, to devalue the opinions of people more affected than you, or conversely, it can make it a lot more difficult to argue against appropriation and culture theft because you cannot make claims of objective correctness. How do you educate people, yourself included, about appropriation and coloniality when you can't make claims of objective moral superiority? A big part of answering that question is understanding why culture and identity is important to begin with.

------

In the next part of this series I'll aim to illustrate why culture is important and should have a right to exist, and attempt to describe a potential balance between objectivism and relativity in the moral side of this issue. After that I hope to then move on to elaborately cover what appropriation is and can be, and how to eliminate and combat it. My goal will not be to prescribe people views so much as to dismantle ones that are already widely held, as it has been, and offer potential replacements or handlebars for their own deconstructive process.

Further reading:

Looking Through Whiteness: Objectivity, Racism, Method, and Responsibility - Philip Mack

Moral Anti-Realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive

Racism is a Moral Issue - Tim Soutphommasane

Race and Moral Psychology - Robin Zheng in the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology

Racism, Moralism, and Social Criticism - Tommie Shelby

The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought - Juan F. Perea

Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary - Linda Martín Alcoff

Xenophobia and Racism - David Haekwon Kim and Ronald R. Sundstrom

Cultural Tariffing: Appropriation and the Right to Cross Cultural Boundaries - Abraham Oshotse et al.

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field - Clayton Childress et al.

Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism - Matthias Gardell

These aren't all equally relevant to the exact point I am making here, presumably because there isn't much literature on this specific intersection to begin with. I'm extremely open (begging, one might say) to suggestions and submissions, but these are still very worthwhile and relevant reads.

I say “academic language” in quotes, because it’s this idea that formal codified language can only be obtained through participation in academia that I want to reject. It is, in every sense, not true. These are skills that can and should be self-taught if you are someone with an interest in debate, philosophy and communication-based activism. Everyone has the capacity to expand their vocabulary, to google words they’ve never seen before, to fact check the words they’re already using against institutionalized definitions to make sure that other people who are reading them will take away what they actually intended to say. But, simultaneously, our relationship with academia needs to become less polarized. Interest in the actual mechanisms of academic discussion – developing rhetorical skills, learning to recognize common logic errors, understand statistical information in context, and so on – is, while not necessary for every given person, hugely beneficial if you intend to try to debate and educate.

A common argument I see, on top of the idea that this language and logic use is locked behind class boundaries, is that academic language and discussion techniques should be rejected solely on the grounds of the bias often held in these fields. But everything contains bias. Every source, every language choice, every argument contains bias. It’s self-destructive and unhelpful to throw out a very useful toolkit wholesale on the grounds that the history of that toolkit is heavily problematic. Of course it is. Language is not a wholly neutral force. But literacy, communication and rhetoric will always be a key cornerstone of organization and progress, as it always has been. To deny yourself competency in those fields is, however unintentionally it may be, to feed into systems that do not want us to be able to communicate productively.

In order to be in actual organization with one another and be able to have good faith discussions that further intracommunity ideals we need to broadly be using precise, codified language in agreed-upon manners.

In order to critique systems, we need to call them as they call themselves, use their words, and engage with their ideas head on – not our colloquialized approximations of them.

To preserve the import, context, severity and integrity of our discussions about certain kinds of suffering, we need to maintain the specificity of those words and not engage in semantic broadening that promotes the weakening and generalization of them.  

If you want to push back against fascism, emphasizing collective literacy is the answer. Setting aside the desire to call highly specific language pretentious, is the answer. No longer implying that one must physically go through the process of academia to have access to the tools codified by it is the answer.

Because, and this is really the crux of my point, you too can utilize precise and ‘academic’ language and rhetoric.

It, like everything else in life, is just a skill that can be learned. It’s a skill that can be self-taught, which I will always recommend as something incredibly empowering in the most literal sense to do, but it’s also something we can teach each other – both passively and actively.

You can read academic journals and understand them. You can learn to navigate databases. You can look up and search out precise words to convey the points you’re trying to make. You can learn and internalize the intended definitions of existing words, and push back against the colloquial desire to broaden them when engaging in serious discussion.

It isn’t pretentious, it is no longer locked behind boundaries of economics in the digital age, and it isn’t something we’re incapable of engaging in and learning from each other.