This is the #OcculTea tag started by Ella Harrison, Joanna the Polish folk witch, and Leah the redheaded witch. I’m not terribly online and don’t inhabit a lot of the Internet spaces that this tag is largely focused on, so I come at it from a bit of a different perspective. I think a lot […]
Read more "Video: OcculTea – Algorithmic Social Media and Internet Witchcraft"Traditional Wicca is centered on coven-based practice, but a coven isn’t just a group of strangers who meet every full moon. It’s an intimate, tight-knit community. In this video, I talk through some of the implications of traditional Wicca’s emphasis on covens, ranging from initiating new members to the relationship a witch has with the […]
Read more "Video: Covens and Community"I’ve talked before about how I consider some form of necromancy integral to my experience of Wicca. Wicca centers on mysteries of death and rebirth, and part of what that means magically is that I am often engaging with the spirits of the dead. This sounds spooky, but really it looks pretty simple, especially when […]
Read more "Asking Dead People for Advice"Anton Mesmer was a weird dude in the late 18th century who put forward a (now thoroughly debunked) theory of “animal magnetism.” In this video, I talk through a little bit of what Mesmer thought and how I think it’s connected to the way early Wiccans understood their magic.
Read more "Video: Animal Magnetism and Wiccan Magic"Wicca—at least, Wicca as I understand it—is a deeply feminist religion. One of the core values upon which it’s founded is the creation of a religious community in which women are empowered. This feminist value works its way into Wiccan ritual and theology, but the resulting politico-theological narratives sometimes go unacknowledged as political. Here, I […]
Read more "Video: Wiccan Politico-Theology"Familiars are a defining element of folklore surrounding witches and witchcraft—but in Wicca, they’re often treated almost as an afterthought. Why is that? Here, I talk through a few thoughts about what familiars are, why we think of them the way we do, and a potential reason that they’re not considered central to Wicca.
Read more "Video: Familiars in Wicca"In a video last weekend, I talked about the rub that exists between philosophy, which seeks truth through reason, and mysticism, which seeks irrational ecstatic communion with the divine. As it turns out, I have more that I want to say on the matter. Specifically, I want to talk about the survival of the soul […]
Read more "Philosophy and Mysticism: Malkuth, Yesod, and the Underworld"I’m a philosopher, a mystic, and a magician–but those things don’t fit together as neatly as you might expect. In this video, I talk through a fundamental incompatibility between philosophy’s demands for rigorous reasoning and mysticism’s need to suspend reason in favor of direct ecstatic experience of the divine. And just to top it all […]
Read more "Video: Philosophy, Mysticism, and Magic"I’ve previously discussed novels about witchcraft on this channel–but what about novels specifically written about traditional Wicca? Here, I discuss five novels that take traditional (initiatory, lineaged, coven-based) Wicca as a setting for their characters and plots. Although I’m critical of them, I try to pull out the things I find significant in each book, […]
Read more "Video: Novels About Traditional Wicca"As a witch, I believe and do things that most people would consider ludicrous. From the outside, people generally don’t make much distinction between witchcraft and a range of other beliefs–including lots of things that I consider absolute nonsense. How, then, do I make the distinction between the beliefs I do and do not consider […]
Read more "Video: A Witch’s Guide to Spotting Nonsense"
Jack Chanek 