Hi! I am a möbius snakeperson, partially-wired ^_^

b. Chhotanagpur Plateau. currently based in Birmingham Plateau & South Pennines.

he/him/it/its

Dilan Dagaz is an unsettling witch and queer mystic who practises magic at the intersection of land, body, technology, and otherworlds with the intention to unsettle settler* realities. With PhD summa cum laude in Legal Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin (2022), Dilan understands magic as a supra-legal form that negotiates and maintains relationships between the natural, technological, human, and supernatural realms. Concerned by the deepening hold of modern settler* magic that exploits the connection of these realms to create a reality of empires, accumulation and totalising control, Dilan deploys unsettling witchcrafts as a practical strategy to unsettle deep-seated settler* concepts of reality-building. Such unsettling practice involves witchcrafts that help reconnect the rational and the irrational of the body, mind, land, and spirit through techniques of trance, spellwork, divination, landwork, lore, wandcrafts, and touch.

Since 2019, Dilan has offered séances and magical consultations in 1:1 sessions and led multiple collective divination and witchcrafts events online (Speculative Machine Learning, Real ML 2020; I am AI, Mozfest 2022) and in Germany (Bewitching Futures, In*Vision Festival 2021; Tales of a Tilismi City, Berlin 2021) and UK (Wolfland, London 2023; Unsettling Rituals, Bidston 2022). He has also pioneered the development of divinatory play, an unsettling witchcrafts tactic explored through ESRC-funded research on magic, law, technology, and land (2024-25). Working in collaboration with international partners, it led to the development of projects that combines elements of gaming with magical techniques of cartomancy (Bewitching Technologies, 2024) and runic divination (Posthuman Art Wars, 2025). Dilan is the founder of #WitchcraftIsPolitical, a left-leaning, queer-friendly gathering at the intersection of witchcrafts and political practices that is interested in exploring the political dimension of magic and spirituality. With #WitchcraftIsPolitical, he has led the drafting of “What do we want? Land Justice! When do we want it? Now!”: An Open Letter from witches, magical, and pagan communities in solidarity with Congo, Palestine, Sudan, to spark discussion and self-reflection in pagan and witchy communities.

Previously, Dilan served as Lecturer at the University of Exeter, where he taught, mentored, and supervised postgraduate and doctoral projects on topics of law, technology, queerness, media, and land. Dilan holds extensive international research, consultancy, public advocacy and facilitation experience through work with civil society, academia, and grassroots organising in India, Germany, and UK. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2025), graduating with dual Bachelor in Humanities and Law from NLIU Bhopal (2013) and Master summa cum laude in European Studies from University of Hamburg (2017). To develop his unsettling witchcrafts approach, Dilan has further trained professionally in fascial bodywork, massage, tarot-based coaching, embodied activism, trancework, and is studying permaculture design.

Alongside his witchcrafts practice, Dilan remains involved with writing and research. His first book, Unsettling Data (2025), is a political-philosophical exploration of representationalism as a settler legal form in the context of data governance. Moving away from settler cultures of academia, which separate intellectual knowledge from knowings of the body, land, and spirit, Dilan is keen on promoting magical education and is committed to experiencing and sharing magic, love, and the nature of reality in unsettling ways.

* Throughout this website, ‘settler‘ refers to cultures that objectify land(s), which includes air, water, soil, minerals, plants, fungi, animals etc., by denying its multi-agential sentient intelligence and treating it as resource or property. Settler cultures also see humans are separate from the land, resulting in an orientation whereby it is possible for humans to ‘settle’ or ‘settle on’ the land; instead of being a part of it. This separation is needed because settler cultures treat land(s) as an object to accumulate, conquer, exploit and establish empires. As a result of this , the objectification and colonisation of their/our bodies, minds, and spirits is incessant and inevitable.
Even as some modern Western settler cultures deny the reality of magic, settler cultures as a whole promote and deploy magic as control; magic as control is settler magic. Settler languages also lack vocabularies to express concepts or worldviews outside of settler cultures, making settler realities appear natural, normal or unproblematic due to the prevalence of settler laws and languages. Simultaneously, settler societies harbour great sickness and isolation, injustice and exploitation, but all this is treated as unrelated to their primary relationship of objectification of the land.
These patterns of settler cultures are noted all over the planet today, not limited to Australia and the Americas; and include Europe and Asia, exhibiting acute consolidation within Western Europe, where settler cultures are rampant.