Revolutionary Witchcraft

CHAPTER 1

A Witch’s Place Is in
THE STRUGGLE

So why witchcraft and activism? Why not just magic more broadly or a Necronomicon-style book that will summon the Old Ones to reclaim the world? A few reasons.

1. I know witchcraft best. 2. The second option would drive you insane. And 3. Out of all the flavors, traditions, and schools of the occult, I think witchcraft is set up particularly well to take on the problems we face in the world right now. Here is a short, sweet, and incomplete list of why I believe that is:

DEFINING MAGIC, POLITICS, AND WITCHCRAFT

Before we go any further into the relationship between activism and the occult, it might be good to stop and define just what it is that I’m talking about when I say magic, politics, and witchcraft.

Magic

Let’s start with magic. There are about a billion ways to describe what magic is. Find two people who have been practicing for years, ask them what they think magic is, and there’s a good chance that you’ll get two very different answers.

I don’t love everything he wrote, but I do like this concise definition of magic from the famous occultist Aleister Crowley: “The art and science of causing change in accordance with the Will.” In Crowley’s practice, the Will means something akin to concepts like dharma or fate, but his description works pretty well for magic as a whole, no matter the specific practice.

Magic is about realizing that we can change the world, often with just our thoughts. Even trippier than that, magic is about realizing we actually change reality all the time, every day, without noticing it. It’s also about recognizing that just as the material world has an effect on us, we in turn have an effect on the material world. Another occult phrase you’ll often hear used to describe this concept is “As Above, So Below, As Within, So Without.” Essentially, both spiritual beings and things in the material world, like gods, spirits, and the stars, shape us, but we simultaneously shape the world around us through mastery of our inner worlds.

You might be thinking, “But that’s too simple. I’ve already done that!” Yes, you have. We all do magic all the time without realizing it. That’s what makes it so cool! When you saw this book, you had a vision of yourself reading it. You may have seen yourself getting pleasure or knowledge from it; maybe you even imagined reading it in the very place you are reading it now. So, to make that vision in your head reality, you bought (or stole, or borrowed) this book. Now you are reading it, in accordance with your vision. See how simple that is?

To recomplicate things, yes, magic is made up of the simple, everyday acts of manifestation we engage in, but it also involves reorganizing your material world to better suit the reality you see in your head. Really good magic essentially hacks the part of your brain that creates and absorbs reality and makes it work for you. Something like the placebo effect is often brought up to dismiss “magical thinking.” Basically, it’s been proven that if you believe something has power, or that interacting with it will have a specific effect on you, then that result is statistically likely to happen, whether or not it was “supposed” to. “Aha!” the skeptics say, “this proves magic is just all in your head!” Well… no, that’s actually what we’ve been saying all along. If anything, things like the placebo effect don’t disprove the effectiveness of what we call “magical thinking”; they prove it. What you’ll be doing in magic is, in many ways, leveraging the placebo effect on yourself to create the life and circumstances that you want. The power of belief is the power of magic.

This is a hard concept for many people to understand at first. You might think, “Sure, my thoughts have an impact on me, but they can’t possibly have much impact on the material world around me.” That’s an easy trap to fall into, but if you stop and reframe things, chances are you’ll realize that you’re already living in the reality others have magically constructed around you. So let’s go through some examples.

I’m going to ask you to do a very hard thing and think of Donald Trump right now. Have you ever noticed how he says fake things, pretty much all the time, but people believe him? And, much more importantly for our purposes, even the people who don’t believe him end up living in his constructed reality whether they want to or not. Trump probably isn’t a billionaire, but he acts like he is, so people treat him like he is. He also isn’t fit to be president of the United States, but he pretended he was capable of holding the position, until one day he really was president. This, my friend, is magic.

Lying to yourself and believing it make you delusional, while lying to others and them believing it form trickery—but doing both simultaneously is magic. Another example is the power (remember this word) that large companies possess. I’m almost certain that you have a Netflix account (or that you are borrowing your friend’s), but despite the company being so big and so ubiquitous as of the writing of this book, Netflix still hasn’t really made any money. Yes, technically they have ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars in profit at the end of the last few years. But after making that profit they need to spend the money, and borrow more, to spend billions of dollars making content. The same goes for Twitter and Amazon. Wait, what? But they’re so important! How can they have never actually made a cent? Because investors speculate they will make money someday—or, in other words, they are willing their profitability into being. Things and corporations and people have power because we believe they do.

Now think about borders for a second. They’re fake—literally. Borders are lines drawn on pieces of paper or screens, rather than fixed features on the globe. However, they govern everything about how society works the world over. Stand on one side of the invisible line, and you are a citizen, but step to the other side without the right talisman—or, as the nonmagical might call them, legal documents—and you are a criminal. Even if you move between two states or provinces within the same country, those invisible lines still determine a whole bunch of things you can or can’t do, and that’s only because we have chosen to believe that borders are real.

Finally, let’s go even bigger, conceptually, and think about money. Money is also fake, strictly speaking. I like to call money “belief points” because it’s something that only has power because we believe in it. More and more, our money isn’t even a physical object, but simply numbers on a screen—and those ones and zeros determine who lives and dies in this world. To really understand the gravity of this, think about how wild it is that you can be a totally good person, with a family and people who love you, and maybe even tons of practical skills, but if you don’t have enough numbers on a screen or pieces of colorful paper in your pocket, society determines you are worthless. It’s totally nuts! Even if you go back in time to when money was backed up by things like gold and silver, those metals don’t really have a ton of value beyond the imagined one we placed on them.

As I hope you can see by now, it’s true that your mind has incredible power—but it’s not the only thing that does. Something that steams my broccoli when I read books about magic or see new age lectures is how they will often shift all responsibility to the individual. Think of all of the circumstances that are truly outside of your control. Is it my fault that rising sea levels washed my home away? Or that the markets crashed and I lost my job? The truth is, you and your mind have incredible power, but it’s just one power among many, all fighting, existing, and supporting one another—which is exactly what politics is.

Politics

Pick up any almost any book on magic and you’ll read a lot about energy. Energy is the current flowing through all things, both in this world and others. It takes different forms; manifests in different fashions, moods, and flavors; and exists in unique ways in all of us. Lots of people have come up with words to describe this thing we call energy, like chi, prana, or, if you’re a big ole nerd like me, the Force.

I don’t like the word energy. I think it sounds wishy-washy, lame, and like a placeholder that’s waiting for the English language to come up with something better. The word I like to use instead is power.

Power has a bunch of negative associations surrounding it because we are so used to power being employed in horrible ways. If you have power, surely you must want to control, abuse, and mistreat those with less power than you. It doesn’t have to be that way though! Everything in the world has power, and although we may have different powers at different levels, that doesn’t mean we have to hurt one another. There is a difference between “power with” and “power over” others.

One of the biggest reasons I like to use the word power instead of energy, and the reason we’ll be using that word in this book, is because politics is about power. If you grew up like I did, you probably sat in class as a young person and took detailed notes as your teacher explained that politics is all about compromise.

Well kid, that teacher lied to you, although not maliciously, because they probably believed what they were saying. The thing is, politics has never been about compromise, and believing it is starts you at a disadvantage when the time for compromises actually does come.

Sure, compromises happen all the time in politics. They’re necessary at some points. But the important thing to keep in mind is that the people sitting at that compromise table got there through power, and one or more people are going to have their power taken away or redirected, at least somewhat, by the outcome of the compromise. Here’s an example: Every treaty the United States ever made with indigenous peoples was technically a compromise of sorts, but if you actually ask the people who got the short end of those compromises, they’ll tell you they were all about the use, abuse, and misuse of power. Similarly, history is full of times when people pooled their collective power to change things for the better. Just like in magic, politics is about feeling the flow of power, finding it in yourself, and combining it with other people’s to make something happen.