Dilan ᛞ (it/he) is a witch, psychic medium, and researcher who is committed to the craft of materialspiritual recovery. As an unsettling witch, Dilan’s core work unravels the precise meaning of responsibility in tandem with the land as well as technological contexts by co-creating experiential knowing with human and unhuman others. Its practice is informed by decolonial queerfeminist, anticaste, and Indigenous values. It is also the founder of The Unsettling Witch, an initiative that employs divinatory tools to intuitively read signs and channel unhuman guidance for individual and community healing as well as to reclaim a lovingly political use of personal spiritual practices.

WHO AM I?

Hi! I am Dilan, a witch who comes through many places primarily of hills, plateaus, rivers, and forests (specifically, but in no particular order: Champaran Terai, Chhotanagpur, northern Aravalli, Garhwal, Malwa, and Mysore plateau in Asia and northern Teltow, southern Jutland, and Cumbrian Fells in Europe). Currently, I am based in south-west England.

Politically, I believe in and try my best to practise decolonial queerfeminism, anticaste, and anti-ableism. I was brought up in a brown settler society that inculcated a lot of oppressive ideas and practices about politics, magic and witchcraft tainted by patriarchy, caste, and white supremacy. Now I believe my responsibility is to undo or unsettle what I learnt from my settler upbringing to create a different unsettling path for descendants. So, I call myself an ‘un’settler witch. I also find myself drawn to learning from and supporting Adibasi and Indigenous Peoples’ struggles all over the world in whatever way I can.

WHAT DO I MEAN BY WITCHCRAFT(S)?

I understand witchcraft as the subversive use of magic.

Magic itself may be understood as a material-spiritual practice that works with unhuman and more-than-human beings (commonly approached as ‘spirits,’ ‘goddesses and gods,’ ‘angels’ or ‘energies’ but which are actually at the same time very materially embodied in trees, rocks, rivers, hills, seas, birds, animals and so on…) to create changes in our world.

As the subversive use of magic, witchcrafts are skills of knowing-being that enable us to appreciate, engage, and care for the mundane as spiritual and the spiritual as earthy. Witchcrafts are placetime-specific rooted in the seamlessness of the mind-body. With witchcrafts, we work with our emotions and body, matter and energy. As a witch, we understand that we live in “more-than-human” or magical societies and that responsible practice of witchcrafts means developing reciprocal relationships of care with unhuman beings around us: land, sea, rivers, trees, animals, insects, grass, spirits, moon, sun, planets, to name a few. In doing so, we co-create with (instead of manipulating) them.

WHY DO I SAY THAT WITCHCRAFT IS POLITICAL?

Because witchcraft and its superset, magic is a way of knowing-being, it is an onto-epistemic system (onto≈to be, episteme≈to know). And like any other onto-epistemic system like religion or science or ableism or capitalism or patriarchy, it creates and negotiates power relations. Because it deals in relations of power, it is naturally political. The question remains how is this power distributed in more-than-human societies, and how do we use this power in responsible ways that empower rather than disempower others? In other words, how can we practise witchcraft responsibly? And how can we use witchcrafts to subvert oppressive power?

In history and in presents in different parts of the world, the words ‘witchcraft’ and ‘witch’ may have acquired negative connotations. We believe this is because of oppressive politics perpetuated by colonialism, caste, and patriarchy, and seek to reclaim the term to initiate a responseable magical era where we engage and invest in reciprocal relations of care with more-than-human societies. As peoples and lands suffer through loops of greed, addiction, depression, malnourishment, overwork and unrest, the time to challenge and subvert the tenets of oppressive magic is now. Will you join us?

TESTIMONIALS