Why the Why Matters in Learning Witchcraft: Or, Why I Hate Most Witchy 101 Books
First published on my now defunct private Patreon community on March 17, 2019. I now continue regular musings in my private email newsletter. Interested in signing up? Click here.
As I’m sure most of you are aware, I’m currently working on a pitch for a witchy 101 style of book. Don’t get too excited – publishing is slow, so this probably won’t come out for a good few years now!
Whenever I’m working through a new book or new work, I like to do a little bit of research and see what’s currently being published.
This involves taking a big long creep around newly released witchcraft books, in order to make sure that what I want to say isn’t already being said (and to be honest, I find that it never is – phew), and to see what the state of the cutting edge is in publishing on witchcraft.
It seems a bit to me like the same book just keeps getting published over and over again, with slight tweaks. One thing I notice in a lot of these books is the heavy reliance on recipes, spell instructions, and long lists of ingredients and correspondences. None of this is new, obviously; witchy books have been like this for ages.
I do intend to write my own book of spells and rituals at some point, so I’m not writing off the form entirely! However, I think spell books and collections of ritual do serve a purpose, and can be useful as a comparative study in material use and ritual structure when we are filling our brain with information while we learn techniques and mechanics of magic.
However, when a book is sold as a 101 guidebook, the last thing it should be is a collection of ritual and spell work, with absolutely no explanation as to why certain materials are chosen and why others are not.
What’s being taught is regurgitation and repetition, not actual theory or technique.
When I see that this is the current state of a lot of magical publishing (don’t get me wrong, I know there’s good books out there), it’s no wonder to me why I often encounter witches whose practice seems half-baked and ineffective.
When learning magic, the why is incredibly important.
When practitioners flounder and don’t know how to step outside the 101 spell books, it’s because they don’t know or understand the why of anything that is suggested.
I see so many magic books containing endless rituals upon rituals upon rituals, endless recipes – all without deconstructing them or explaining them.
We can learn deconstruction on our own, of course – when we consume enough sample rituals, certain patterns can be noticed, and intentions inferred.
However, for brand new folks, having an explanation of why certain choices were made is a much bigger contributor to learning than a list of actions that to the newbie may seem meaningless.
And, as an experienced practitioner, some of it does seem random, shallow, or thoughtless to me too!
There’s no problem with including little bits of our own flair when we share spells and rituals we write – sometimes we may just do things intuitively, and that’s great! It can become an issue, however, when those little intuitive tweaks we use in our own work become calcified in a witchy 101 book, and then we have loads of new people imitating our actions without knowing why, or treating something somewhat incidental to us as gospel.
As a side note, I was told by some with first-hand connections that this is actually a little part of the story of how the eight Wiccan holidays (and now commonly accepted holidays for most generic neopagans; personally I do not celebrate them, other than the equinoxes and solstices) came to be so rigorously defended in North America.
This contact told me that there were originally four holidays, and the group decided to add four more simply because they just liked to party and have a good time!
Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a completely legitimate reason to create tradition!
In a lot of North American practice, I’ve observed the forgetting of these often humble, playful, and joyful origins of why certain things are done.
I see many elements of witchcraft and magical practice framed as something to be followed with a religious attention to detail due to a desire to hold up tradition while completely ignoring that a lot of this stuff emerged somewhat recently and in a way that was deeply responsive and alive, relevant to the needs of the practitioners in these groups when and where they started.
Context matters!
The original groups had connections to the why, and it can be as simple as ‘hey, it’s fun!’
All the while, valuing tradition that has become isolated and disconnected from its roots over intuition and innovation has become common in North America.
Here, often more value is attributed to that which is perceived to be more ‘traditional’, often without thinking about it, or rooting in the why.
Something else that seems worth mentioning is that most often the rituals that are included in these books are not listed as samples for demonstrative purposes, but as the definitive ritual, rather than a ritual – there is a distinction, as well, between ‘the ritual’ and ‘a ritual’ – one is multiplicitous, another claims singularity, an essence or embodiment of a form.
This positioning of ritual as ‘the’ and not ‘a’ can create anxiety in the fresh practitioner, and contribute to a mental environment of fear to mess up or to not get something ‘right.’
I’ve also noticed the essentialization of certain ingredients as contributing the essence of one word, such as – for the sake of example – the incredibly generic ‘protection.’ I would argue that different magical ingredients can protect differently; a cleanse with cedar is very different than a cleanse with dragon’s blood. Their energies are incredibly different, and as a result the mechanics of what happens are very different. The differentiation of magical ingredients is incredibly important; this stuff ain’t random.
As magical practitioners it’s crucial to learn the subtleties and distinctions between a variety of similar tools.
It’s like learning a vocabulary, a grammar, a language.
I will use cedar for very different things than I’ll use dragon’s blood for, there really isn’t much overlap, though in many magic 101 books I’ll see them listed as having quite similar correspondences.
There’s a danger in presenting potential magical ingredients and collaborators as endlessly interchangeable; their ‘correspondences’ vague and generic.
A recent book I read listed ‘home’ goddesses from a variety of different cultures, and though I don’t know an extensive amount about each entity, I know enough to say that all of them were vastly and offensively oversimplified, removed from their complex roles in each religious and cultural framework. But of course, it’s okay, because we have a little paragraph explaining that appropriation is bad, but appreciation is alright.
Eyeroll.
Materials aren’t interchangeable. Deities aren’t interchangeable, spirits aren’t interchangeable.
Herbs aren’t interchangeable. I don’t really work much with stones and crystals, but neither are they.
Every being is unique, every magical collaborator is unique and offers us some qualities when they consent to collaborate and work with us, and withhold others because it may not be natural to their form.
Are you interchangeable with your friend? Are all of the lovers you’ve had interchangeable? No.
We all have different things we bring with us, as well as things we don’t.
The same can be said for any ritual, any spell, any stone, herb, or candle.
In many of these books, I see rose listed frequently in ritual instructions. Sometimes rose hip is listed, sometimes fresh rose, sometimes just dried rose, but often it just says ‘rose’ without specifying the form. If I were new, I would ask: Why rose? In what form? Why rosehip instead of rose? How does a dried rose have different contributions to ritual than a fresh rose? Why? When might it be best to use fresh herbs, and when are dried preferable? What factors should I consider when deciding upon what form of a plant to work with?
These questions are almost never answered, let alone considered in the first place.
Over time, and with steady and constant practice, these are secrets the material bodies we collaborate with can teach us themselves, should we choose to show up, put in the time, and listen deeply with our flesh and with our minds.
However, an acknowledgement of these specificities and emergences of practice is not something I really see in 101 books, and it’s certainly not in any of the recently published ones I’ve read in my research for my book pitch.
Sometimes I wonder if the lack of explaining ‘why’ in these books is because the writers don’t know why, or have forgotten.
I wonder if they’ve simply memorized lists of correspondence, like how rose quartz is ‘good for self love’ or something, and how ‘lavender is good for calmness’ - or if they’re just copying all the other correspondence books on their bookshelves. This is often so broad as if to be meaningless, as well as ontologically insulting in the constant distillation of an entire being to a sequence of one or two words.
I wonder if this happens because writers don’t actually have connections to the entities they write about in their own practice, past seeing them as objects with ‘use value.’
In one of the books I read to get the current lay of the witchy publishing land, the writer, in a section about working with spirits, said that she ‘uses Archangel Michael’ in her work. Uses? Uses! I would never think to talk about or conceive of my relationship with the spirits I work with as a ‘user/used’ type of relationship. ‘Use’ does not occur to me, because I don’t perceive beings that way. I don’t use Santisima Muerte or Saint Lucy, I work with them, we collaborate.
They are not a tool for me to achieve the ends I wish to achieve.
I ask them to work together with me when I petition them and pray to them.
This is not, to me, about ‘use.’
I think viewing magical collaborators like this is extractive, dangerous, and unethical.
Aside from the oversight of ethical ontological frameworks, there’s also the problem of efficient and kind pedagogy. You know how that saying goes – teach someone to fish, and they’ll never go to bed hungry.
The same can be true of magic.
If you give a new student a magical recipe, a ready-made spell, and say, Okay, go do this working – that’s one thing, but if you’ve got an entire book of it all with absolutely no explanation as to the whys of the hows, I feel that leads to a populace of magical practitioners who are pretty good at following instructions, but who don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They might know that something works, but they won’t know why, they won’t know why something failed, they won’t know how the decision was made to suggest certain ingredients or materials over others.
Their practice becomes calcified, fossilized, the original life force that left the shape lost to time and memory.
Magic doesn’t need to be mysterious.
Not knowing why certain ingredients were chosen doesn’t make magic work better!
An instruction or an ingredient being obscure or confusing doesn’t actually lend more power to a working.
If you’re hiring someone to do something for you, it’s true that you don’t really need to know what all they’re doing and what tools they’re using – that’s not the point. You’re paying someone so that you don’t have to worry about it.
However, if you’ve written a book whose purpose is to teach newer folks, who is really served in leaving out the most crucial information – which is, the reasoning, the why? Who is really taught? And: what is taught? Are new readers being taught simply to follow instructions uncritically, because ‘it has always been done that way’ (it hasn’t).
Whose positioning as an expert is solidified and unquestioned?
Why?
Who is being asked to simply swallow information without much critical thought?
Who doesn’t have to explain or rationalize their thought process or their choices? Who stays at the ‘newbie’ level, despite just having read a book for new folks full of boring lists and instructions and correspondences? What is gained from creeping a correspondence list? What is the need to reproduce these lists upon lists, what is that about? Especially when they are plentiful, when it seems like every new book that comes out has its own list of correspondences?
I feel that there’s a lot at stake here.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that in witchy community – as elsewhere – many writers and leaders are power hungry. They desire to keep all of the information for themselves, to control who has access to what information, and when. They don’t share the why.
They say, just do it. Just trust me. The why doesn’t matter, just do the thing.
This has the effect of consolidating themselves as gurus, as the sole origin of trustworthy information shrouded in mystery and secrets.
When we teach newbies and don’t teach them the why, we disempower them.
Instead of giving them new tools and languages to learn and notice and work with, we remove their ability to maneuver magically, we rob them of agency and confidence.
I hate that.
I always want you to ask me why I do things. (Just a note: I know not all traditions or lineages function this way: I’m talking about British inflected contemporary witchcraft, the spheres I myself am in.)
If I post a ritual or a suggestion, ask why. I will tell you. Sometimes I might just say, Hey, it’s very personal to me and works for me - I don’t want to share more details on it, but if it doesn’t resonate with you, don’t do it. Sometimes it’s as simple as, It felt right, or Last time I did it the results were out of control, or The spirits told me; sometimes it’ll be a long list of magical experiences peppered with reference book citations.
If you’re learning magic, and someone doesn’t tell you why (even if it’s a private why), take a step back.
I hate that our communities are so full of power politics, so full of the tendency to use knowledge like a weapon - as well as a refusal to admit our own ignorance. It’s ok not to know. Just say so.