Star Made Witch: The Future of Traditional Witchcraft

Last updated on: September 28, 2015 at 4:00 pm by Spiritscraft

Star Made Witch: The Future of Traditional Witchcraft 2015-09-28T11:46:34+00:00 Spiritscraft

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The Children of Lir in Dublin / Photo by Spiritscraft

I see in the future of traditional witchcraft a very personal relationship within the spiritual landscape. Witches will connect to the land spirits and will together be dealing with the current state of human habitat destruction. Witches allied with the spirit-side of our environment are going to matter. Visionary thinkers like Peter Gray are promoting the rewilding response to the mainstream myth of everything will be okay if we keep up business as usual. Over the short time since his book, Apocolyptic Witchcraft, came out, the blogosphere has already put interpretive essays about rewilding before a wider audience. Rewilding is standing strong in why we do what we do as witches versus seeking out rebellion for the sake of rebellion or conformity for the sake of mainstreaming. We do what we do as a corrective to a sick society. Rewilding is to slice out the infection and stitch up the wound–hoping the scar isn’t too bad.

The hopeful future of traditional witchcraft is curbing some of the elitism new members of the practice spout off with and reminding them they don’t know everything the day they find their first site or book and go all dark, purple and full of conviction. We do what we do not merely because it upsets the order, but because the order needs to be upset for very good reasons.

The future of traditional witchcraft is professing ethical codes of conduct with a careful eye to the consequences of our actions. No more are we served by platitudes and universal maxims that disregard reality and others’ agency. Everything is not permitted, but many things are permitted. Everything is not possible for everyone, but many things are possible for many people. In other words a reaffirmed and not assumed understanding of values, ethics and boundaries. That is based on freedoms practiced with discernment and honor.

Tree roots, grass roots and ancestral roots / Photo by Spiritscraft

The future of traditional witchcraft is developing currently with a variety of thoughtful and wise authors who have gone beyond basic binary thinking and creating a cultural literacy that allows for exchange versus theft. For example credit should be given where credit is due instead of stripping our traditions of every custom not ‘ours’ to conveniently make them pure of having been taken from somewhere else. We can desist with the very modern essentializing of gender and stop shoehorning every object and concept into man or woman, dark or light, and good or bad. So many historical magical traditions did not even address gender and we don’t always need it to navigate folk magic. A mind open to multiplicities will find them in abundance.

Traditional witchcraft’s future is realizing that we don’t have a single tree root lineage back to ancient polytheist times. Rhizomatic polyvalent thinking will prevail over binary thinking and we will revel in the intersections and meetings of our histories. Witchcraft is and was not a unified religion, it’s a weed or volunteer you might say that resurfaces in waste spaces and in between and shows that spirit can still grow there.

The future of traditional witchcraft is in the paradoxical understanding both that tradition is dead and that we partake in living tradition. Long dead seeds re-root and bloom again. I see us coming to magic with innocence and experience to shape destiny for the better.

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