Other People’s Magic
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Diana Rajchel, author of several books, including Urban Magick and the new Hex Twisting.
Somewhere, somehow, early in my practice, I got the idea that practicing magic was rare. Perhaps, where I lived, that was true. All the books I read focused exclusively on a specific type of Pagan witchcraft, European-centered in values, concerns, and privilege. Things like cursing, based on what those authors said, didn’t happen.
In the 25 years that followed all this knowledge absorption, here’s what I unlearned:
- Magic is rare. It;s not. It’s everywhere, in every culture, between the codes of every religion, in people that don’t even realize what they do. Witchcraft exists in every culture.
- That, to practice magic, everyone must abide by the same moral code. If not, their magic won’t work, or at least won’t work for long. Not only is this not true, but it also lacks humility and empathy. Different practitioners have different needs based on privilege, class, race, gender, and more—those practitioners are often held to greater consequences for lesser actions. They need all their tools on a desperately uneven playing field.
- That moral soundness is in any way a factor in whether magic works. While witches are admonished to know ourselves and do our shadow work, magic itself remains neutral. Some people have fragile egos. They get petty. Those of weak ego use their skills to reinforce to the world how they want to see themselves, sometimes while chest-pounding a morality that they don’t live. Some happen to know how to use magic to enact this abuse.
- Curses, for the most part, don’t happen. After decades of exposure to minorities within the United States and people that deal with curses and witchcraft as a daily, exoteric reality in their own cultures, I can say that curses are anything but rare on a global scale. But, again, the issue comes back to the distribution of privilege. People turn to magic to meet needs when their neighbors abuse power in order to interfere with those needs.
If you pay any attention at all to the constant global strife and war-torn lands around us, you see why people need magic, without judgement for good or bad. That need runs deeper than what positive attitudes can resolve. For example, try to tell someone to alter their attitude when invaders have conscripted their children for war. There is no greater good in that, and to try to say there is speaks poorly of the person that would say such a thing.People in these situations turn to magic just as much as those living under less dire circumstances. Some of what they turn to is by necessity negative. Whether their egos are weak or strong, they fight with what they have on hand, including their wrath.
Unlearning these precepts took a lot of deep shadow work for me. But as my global empathy grew, my ability to buy into these prior beliefs became increasingly untenable. Ultimately, I learned that the world is big, and the world of magic somehow is somehow even larger than the globe itself. Once I unbelieved, then I at last had the real power to reverse, unhex, untie, and undo.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”—, Hamlet
Our thanks to Diana for her guest post! For more from Diana Rajchel, read her article “How to Screen Scammers for Cursing Cons.”
