Witch Crafting: A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic

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These 4 or 5-star reviews represent the opinions of the individuals who posted them and do not reflect the views of Etsy. but this was not a book that would help you much if you want something really serious about medieval witchcraft. Their folk religion combined reverence for nature with spell work to improve individual lives and the agricultural welfare of whole communities.

These religions have had to fight for legitimacy and to resist racist projections of primitivism as well as cultural appropriation by white spiritual seekers.In contexts where Witch identity is valued, continuing to insist that the label is inappropriate for BIPOC folks sours from allyship into whitewashing. Not only is it a matter of empirical fact that there are BIPOC individuals who identify as Witches and who understand their ancestral traditions as forms of Witchcraft religions, but the shift is also political. Personalised advertising may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have a right to opt out. It has defined and used a distinction between religion and magic in the service of colonial assumptions, but it has also served as a repository of practical examples for contemporary magic-using communities in the West, from the nineteenth century through the present.

Although Gardner remained unconscious, at least in his public statements, of having used anthropology to shape his religious practice, his explicit use of The Golden Bough to legitimate his movement served as precedent for other Pagans to use anthropological material as spiritually inspirational. This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Murray based her own theory on Frazer’s idea of a universal fertility cult in The Golden Bough and then applied it to creative readings of English witch trial transcripts. Yet many contemporary subcultures now reclaim Witch as a desirable identity, precisely because of its colonial history. She argued that those persecuted as witches were not vicious, satanic heretics, but instead salt of the earth practitioners of the Old Religion.

Ivory is Black, transfemme, and embraces through her mother and grandmother lineage in the Trinidadian-Yoruba tradition of Ifá.

At a moment when sexism, racism, and poverty were being analyzed as produced by social systems, institutional religion once again rose to public consciousness as at least partly responsible for those inequalities, and activist communities encouraged each other to stop supporting oppressive religions.

Given the continuing relevance of diabolical witch fears, making a clear distinction between victims of witchcraft accusations and religiously self-identified Witches is not just a thought experiment. As movements for women’s suffrage, abolition, colonial independence, and workers’ rights drew attention to ways that traditional structures perpetuated multiple injustices, popular interest in alternatives to traditional religious institutions also grew. Place lemon, chamomile, jasmine, rose buds, dandelion, cinnamon, charged water and lavender oil into the tub. The witch seems to have a few good spells thrown on to her list, but ultimately nothing really catches my eye that would greatly help make my idea for my witch great. As Pagan studies burgeoned in the early 2000s, associated scholars, including many of my mentors, were clear that Witchcraft was only an appropriate label for white-dominated Wicca and other Paganisms explicitly associated with European pre-Christian folk traditions.

In practical terms, this means that religious leaders and ritual practices from Witchcraft and other Paganisms are often welcome in community spaces in ways that representatives of more officially established religions, especially mainline churches, may not be. Some chose instead to champion magic over and against religion, and perhaps in collaboration with science, as a practical alternative for overcoming the disempowerments of the modern, industrial world. The empty chair sticker is so apt, as tarot has been implying that there is an empty chair coming up that I am meant to fill. To enable personalized advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies.As Western ethnographers spread out across the globe trying to make sense of the practices of other people, they unconsciously carried with them ethnocentric assumptions about magic and religion. Ivory’s experience and expertise emphasize that words like magic and witchcraft change moral meaning as they move across social contexts. Contemporary Paganism is a new religious movement that champions magic as both group worship and personal empowerment. To enable personalised advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies.