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The Witch Within: A Guide to Modern Magic and Spirituality

The Witch Within: A Guide to Modern Magic and Spirituality

Last updated on: October 28, 2024 at 9:39 am by Tom Rapsas

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The Witch Within: A Guide to Modern Magic and Spirituality 2024-10-28T09:39:10-06:00 Tom Rapsas

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Is modern magic just another spiritual practice? Photo via Almos Bechtold & Unsplash.

Witches get a bad rap. Sure, everyone loves witches around Halloween but by Thanksgiving they’ve worn out their welcome—and are again seen by many as inherently evil. They are people (or more specifically, women) to be feared. It’s a stereotype that’s rooted in centuries of misinformation, superstition, and just plain stupidity.

The truth: For centuries, “witches” were often viewed as healers within their communities. As Google Gemini explains, “Witches were often women who possessed knowledge of herbal remedies, midwifery, and other practices that challenged patriarchal norms. These skills were feared and misunderstood, leading to accusations of witchcraft and subsequent persecution.”

Meet today’s witch: still challenging the social norms.

Today, the term “witch” actually refers to a varied group of women whose beliefs and practices may differ. But as a rule, witches (and the related Wiccan religion) emphasize positive aspects like spirituality, nature worship, and personal empowerment. And there may be no better witch to explain it all than Michelle Tea whose new book is Modern Magic: Stories, Rituals, and Spells for Contemporary Witches.

A self-described “DIY witch and professional tarot reader,” Tea is now in her 50s and has been practicing witchcraft for decades. Raised a Catholic, she began dabbling in magic as a goth kid in high school. Like many of us raised in the church, she couldn’t find the spiritual satisfaction she needed there. She wanted to connect with “some unknown energy larger than myself … something larger and beyond us.”

Tea still credits the Catholic church for getting her started on her spiritual journey. She points out, “Catholicism is the tradition where I discovered the goddess and learned to pray. And praying is simply spellcasting, without the bells and whistles.” Tea also reminds us that there’s no connection between most brands of witchcraft and Satanism, an idea first propagated by the church.

Witchcraft: more than just a trendy spiritual practice.

Tea’s thinking is shaped by various spiritual teachings, including Buddhism. I couldn’t help but notice that many of her beliefs connect with what many of us on our individual spiritual paths believe. They include:

A belief in the unknown and the idea there is more to the world than meets our eyes. (This includes a belief that the dead may still be with us.)
A belief there is “energy” all around us and that when we tap into it, it can better our lives and the lives of others.
A belief that it’s possible to know the unknowable, through intuition or psychic ability.
The belief that we all have equal access to the divine, with no authority figure needed for better access.

Tea engages in magic as a spiritual practice for the same reasons we all engage in practice. It helps our state of mind, makes us more positive, and helps feed our souls. And although Tea is a regular practitioner of witchcraft, the efforts of her spiritual journey sound remarkably like the rest of us:

There is a cumulative, if annoyingly glacial, positive effect on my personality, my ability to snag happiness or serenity, and a more frequent glimpse of the bigger picture. These flashes tend to come and go in a moment but leave me bolstered with the notion that this world—the body I’m in and the plain I exist upon—is not all there is.

Michelle Tea. Photo by Hadley Rosenbaum.

In case you’re wondering: Modern Magic does include “spells.” There’s a spell for good luck, a spell for love, even the humorous “Fu*k it” spell. They’re sort of like recipes with a bunch of ingredients involved, and you can choose to substitute or subtract things as you want. Check out the book if you want to learn how to cast spells; instead, I thought I’d feature a few observations I made, topics that grabbed my attention.

Observation 1: Conscious breathing is a part of her practice.

Many of the practices Tea uses in witchcraft can also be found in other spiritual practices and possibly your own. One is conscious breathing. Tea writes:

Breathing is actually a magic practice that is right under our nose … and can be a way for us to deepen our connection with the divine, both inside and outside of our selves.

For this practice, Tea advises us to follow these simple instructions:

Inhale through the nose into the body
Move the breath up into the chest
Exhale through the mouth
Without pausing, go back to 1, keeping your breathing “full, deep, and constant.”

Think of each breath as connected to the next, “a track of breath running like a train from your nostrils to your core and back through your mouth.”

Observation 2: To be a true witch, you need an altar.

In her case, Tea has a small alter in her office on the top of a bookshelf. It includes items like crystals and stones, bird feathers, many candles, and a little cauldron where she burns herbs. My cousin, who also identifies as a witch, has a small alter in her kitchen. Her items include a small bowl of rosemary for protection and an incense burner where she burns Palo Santo wood as a calming influence.

Observation #3: There’s a Buddhist influence in Tea’s writings.

It may be from the time she spent studying at a Zen center in San Francisco. Tea says that her “purpose in this life is to experience what it is to be a particular shard of the whole.” The words below are hers, pulled from a few different sections, and edited into a short narrative:

The Universe is a great and terrible pace, where everything that can exist, does.

I like to ask myself: What if everything was exactly as it is meant to be.

I don’t need to understand. It’s quite beyond me. I only have to accept.

A final compelling thought from Modern Magic:

Our glorified monkey brains are only equipped to fathom so much. While I’m here, this little piece of the Universe made flesh, I will seek as much as I am able to, until I pass back over into oneness, where just maybe all my questions won’t be answered so much as known.

Pagan

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