Outsourcing your magic
“Magical expertise is not shown by the number of badges you can wear on your sleeve, the number of ‘initiations’ into a variety of groups, lodges, covens or whatever, but by your personal power, your ability to cope in trying situations and your genuine humanity to other people” – Marian Green, ‘The Gentle Arts of Natural Magic’, Thoth Books, 1987.
I’ve been around the pagan community for…a long time now, and in that time have been part of various groups, groves, Orders, colleges, training courses and suchlike. And each one of them has taught me various lessons in different ways of doing pagan stuff – but the singular lesson they all converge on, albeit unintentionally, for me is this:
Don’t outsource your magic.
There are always people and groups who’ll tell you that you have to do things a specific way, or have a special initiation ceremony, or take a particular study programme (all of which they’re very happy to sell you, of course) in order to be a “proper” witch/pagan/druid whatever.
The appeal of this is obvious – there’s validation in groups, and you have a shared experience, which is not inherently a bad thing, but when it becomes a box to tick or a thing you can point to to say “look, I’m a real witch because I trained in this tradition and was initiated by High Priestess so-and-so” it becomes troubling, to me at least.
It’s troubling because magic is personal. It is your connection to the world, and the great magical web that connects all things that I like to think of as the Weave (yes, like in D&D, there’s a lot of wisdom in fiction – if you’re a Star Wars fan you can think of it as the Force).
Your connection to this great Weave is your own, and so it will look different from that of someone else. This is why I see magic as more of an art than a science, because so much of it relies on your creative expression.
And it is yours.
When you cede authority to a teacher, guru, group, Archdruid, High Priest, whatever, you lose that personal connection to your magic. You let yourself be directed in the way someone else wants. This is reinforced by the phenomenon of groupthink if you’re working closely with others in an intense and often emotional setting.
There’s nothing wrong with learning from people with more experience and wisdom, this is a good thing and how all knowledge progresses. But make sure the person you’re learning from actually knows their shit and isn’t just full of shit.
And the moment someone says their way is the right way or the only way, walk away. This goes double if money is changing hands, because sweetie, that ain’t a coven, that’s a grift.
Truth is, there is no one way, and nobody has authority over your path but you. Nobody – including the gods, by the way. They’re part of the Weave just like we are.
And look, there are so many reasons someone somewhere might dismiss me as not being a real witch by their standards. I’m not Wiccan, I haven’t been initiated, I’m not part of a coven, and oh yeah, I’m trans (because let’s not pretend paganism doesn’t have a TERF problem).
For the longest time, I would have cared about that. I guess my background in academia meant I had some need to prove my qualifications, but none of it matters.
You’ll learn more about magic from watching a tree through the year – blossom to leaf to fall – than from any book, any course, any teacher. And you’ll learn about spellwork by doing spells, seeing what works and what doesn’t, creating your own magic.
All of this is to say that I’m kinda done with “the pagan community” as I work to simplify and re-balance my life.
I’m off to figure out my own path.