In a world where the incessant violence of oppressive structures feels total, what does it even mean to believe in magick, be magickal, be a witch? Sure, there is something here about conjuring openings where none seemed possible, transversal movements, peripheral visions, split seconds, building community. Some tie the idea of magick to hope. We are less sure about that. Less sure about the hope-hopelessness spectrum altogether. We doubt sustaining a magickal existence gives us any hope whatsoever. We don’t think there’s a particularly pointed point to all this. It’s just that to become aware of and sustain magick is the only thing to do if we are alive now.
You may sense a heaviness in this written word. But why shouldn’t we be heavy…and why shouldn’t you be heavy? A global pandemic comes and persists, several global pandemics have come and persisted, more than 5 million birds fall out of the skies, dead, far-right mobs carry fire torches with impunity chanting litanies of death, eugenics is (re-)celebrated as new saviour technologies of heterosexual ancestry, gene-mapping, and climate change, unending wars glorified as peace, refugees hounded as threat, borders paraded as security, transgendered people and communities under constant attack…and all everyone does is to carry on as if all is normal (well, not “everyone”, but you know)… And this all just from our current location in the world which is but a tiny island! We are not gonna lie to you. It is grim. We are not gonna shame ourselves for feeling and expressing our heaviness. Something must be said. For it is burdensome. None of this may be your immediate concern, but energetically it will and does seep into you.
So we look to magick. For answers. For unfathomable openings. But magick is not a magic solution.
For all our faith, and perhaps because of all our faith in the reality of magick, we believe it is a mistake to presume that magick offers an easy answer. Too often the idea of magick is constructed as the erasure of work. In our modern world, this has parallels with the idea of technology. Technology is equated to magick…a way to freedom by alleviating routine tasks of maintenance. So magick, like technology, is presented as the disappearance of work that requires relational investment…work needed to maintain care-full relationships with the land, and everything which is made of these lands…your food, the house you live in, the chairs and desks you sit on, the computer, phones and screens you read this with, your mindbody, other humans…all of this literally is the land…non-existent without these living, desiring, animate Earths. Yet the idea that magick removes the work needed to maintain, repair, and show up in reciprocal ways in our human-more-than-human relationships persists!
We do not stand for this vacuous practice of magick and never will. We find this practice is magick politically irresponsible, and even violent. We grieve for a world whose relationship to magick (and by extension, to technology) becomes a relation of instrumentalisation. We grieve those who claim the foundations of witchcrafts from this oppressive orientation of magick.
For grieving is important. To honour our experiences. To validate them. But also to let go of what has come so far. Amidst rituals of grieving, now may be a good time to think about what magick means to you.
