Magic without Boundaries
On Freeing Witchcraft from Religion
Feeling like a badass bride preparing for a secret ceremony, I fussed with myself in the mirror. I wore a silky handmade robe and my henna dyed hair was braided back in a style I’d revisit for my actual wedding a few years later. Think Sansa Stark.
I was in the bathroom of Charleston, West Virginia’s cozy little Unitarian Universalist church, waiting for my formal Wiccan initiation to begin. Barefoot in the dark, I was a bundle of delicious eustress magic — the whitewater of endorphins that rushes in between anxiety and giddiness.
We were the subversive of the subversives, with our queer initiation — The traditional rite instructs a male priest to bring women into the fold, and vice heteronormative versa. But modernizing the tradition didn’t take from the weight of it.
In the shadowy little chapel, my High Priestess brandished a sword as silver as her hair. She intoned the liturgical call and response before I entered the circle. It is better, she told me, to rush upon the blade and suffer death than to enter with fear in my heart. So how did I enter?
‘In Perfect Love and Perfect Trust,’ the same as thousands of like souls connected to me as I crossed into that sacred space.
I’d been studying and practicing aspects of the craft for a decade when I took the course, my second group study in Wicca. I’d asked her about a few of us doing the initiation ceremony. I craved the rote and rhythm of ritual back then, having grown up without what I think of as the textures of religion — The smell of incense, the sound of hymns.
I wanted a sense-experience of religion.
I was a solitary witch. (I don’t much like that phrase now; it’s so modern and Wiccan.) I’d stumbled onto witchcraft and paganism as a teenager. I’d graduated from devouring my mom’s Linda Goodman books and tarot cards to buying books and doing self-guided study about actual worship.
The spark was learning there was an actual religion to practice.
That little ember took flame during a high school English lesson. It was my junior year, and my favorite teacher was covering poetry. Mr. Booten brought in records and we analyzed Simon & Garfunkel lyrics and wrote our own sonnets. I read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 for the first time and I was mindblown by an Elizabethan opening a poem with such a cutting line and then grounding it in a shockingly modern sentiment.
Then he lectured on Romantic poetry. I was already a fan, with a huge literary crush on William Blake. I scribbled notes about Wordsworth and little snatches of great lines, how these hearstick goth kids rejected the milieu of the Enlightenment. Then he mentioned their ‘pagan love of nature.’
That phrasing stopped me dead. The lyricality of it! The word pagan had until then been a sterile thing from a history text explaining the spread of Christendom and the assimilation of heathen practices. It never had this poetic, luscious connotation.
A pagan love of nature.
That expression wriggled under my skin and stayed there. I needed to research the pagans. I wanted to know them. Not just the Egyptian pantheon and Olympian myths, but the people. The maenads going wine-mad and dancing delirious in the forests. The priests of Demeter with soil crusted palms holding ears of corn that were like the Eucharist I’d never touched before. I started reading and I found a wondrous rabbit hole: There were still actual-real-live-breathing pagans.
Digging into it, I kept finding ways that reconstructed paganism slotted into my mind like a perfectly fitted key. I was always a mythology nerd, and here was a whole belief system built over that framework. But the deep, serious draw was another group of words that lit up my synapses: The divine feminine.
I’ve been a fiery feminist since I was in Wonder Woman Underoos. It’s one of the reasons I’d resisted the religions familiar to me then. In religious witchcraft, the emphasis on the Goddess, capital fucking riot grrl Geurilla Girls G, was a clarion call. I was home.
In college I painted and sculpted goddesses and nymphs and wrote and read folklore and myth and gender studies and outside of school, I was doing those Wicca courses.
Then, when my mom died, I made clay sculptures about the Persephone and Demeter myth cycle. It was enormously healing for me. I had scattered her ashes to the wildflowers in Kanawha State Forest here at home and traveled with them to Hatteras Island in North Carolina where she lived for a while was my quiet burial ritual alone with her.
I sat on the beach and watched the sun rise, blush and gold over the ‘wine dark sea.’ I emptied the little jar of her remains and marvelled that ash with tiny flecks of bone is indistinguishable from sand and crushed shell.
Tears are seawater; it’s all the same thing.
That moment was laden with meaning but I no longer believed in anything beyond the sand that I took home to remind me it was the same as ashes.
I’m not sure if I ever believed in the pantheons of real deities, or if many pagans really do. My most devout friend believes the way a lot of witches do, that they’re all faces that a singular divine Something shows to us. Ultimately it’s still a higher, aspirational power.
I always experienced divinity as a fleshy, earthy pantheism. Transcendence and god-as-above always stank to me. Goddess as within is my groove.
After I grew up and out, I needed some time to wander through my spirituality.
Now my witchcraft is more wildflower than garden.
I still ascribe a magical status to the trees and the stars and this buck in my friend’s neighborhood who just poses for photos like, ‘tag me on Insta.’
But this pantheism of mine is a feral thing. I don’t believe literally in the gods or goddesses, or gender-fluid, shape-shifting godx tricksters. I really believe in their stories, though.
I was meandering my way through describing this to some friends at that same Unitarian Universalist building a while back. One of my devout buddy’s friends suggested I look up ‘Jungian polytheism.’ I always drag Carl Jung into the conversation, because as much as I have problems with some his thinking, he’s really a way in.
I’ve been pointing people to ‘What the Heck is Jungian Polytheism?’ ever since. It’s an awesome resource and nails my approach to who the godx are.
But all this is all intellectual — pantheons and rituals and me with my Wicca courses. “Witch” didn’t have anything to do with that until some rich white guy imagined it did. As my kid says, Gerald Gardner who?
I’m interested in the roots of the idea of witches. Hedge-shadowed women tending to ailments and creepy, haunted-eyed soothsayers. I’m into reading my tarot cards and kitchen witchin’ and being the scary old bitch who tends her plants and hexes the Southern Baptists who have no idea how right they are calling me a witch when I volunteer at the abortion clinic.
I’m sinking my bare feet into the mud of the real history of witches. The powerful, frightening women. They were the ones outside the boundaries of religion. That’s the draw of magic for me now, working free of stricture and dogma.
I have dirt and ink under my fingernails. That’s my witchcraft.
