Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism - Sarah Lyons 2019

Introduction

Being an activist means, in part, being actively engaged with the world around you. It’s like making a pact between yourself and the spirit of the earth, that you’re going to continue fighting for it, and looking at the bad parts of it, even when that’s deeply uncomfortable. Once you realize how messed up the world is, it’s hard to let that go—and man oh man are things messed up right now!

As an activist myself, I’ve been all over the place the last few years, taking stock of what’s been going on and advocating for change. I’ve marched, organized, and agitated; slept in tents on the path of pipelines with snipers in the distant hills; been arrested for civil disobedience on one of the largest bridges in New York City; and seen tanks rolling down more than one street—under two different presidential administrations. It’s all given me so many reasons for despair, but also for hope.

Why hope? Because it’s been incredibly heartening to see more and more people get enraged and engaged over the last few years. There’s a building sense, around the world and especially in the United States, that things just can’t go on the way they have been for much longer. Young people, from my generation and the ones below, seem to have an especially keen sense of what’s happening and what needs to change. People in general are more politically engaged than they have been in years.

Now, it’s been said that there is no such thing as a coincidence. In fact, I’m saying that, right now. (Give me a second while I get my first foot up on this soapbox right here.)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that witchcraft and the occult are seeing a revival at the same time there are great shifts in our politics. In my humblest opinion, understanding and doing witchcraft the right way mean acknowledging its political dimension. Politics, after all, is about way more than just elections. Politics is about the movement, wielding, and embodiment of power in our world. That may not seem immediately tied to witchcraft, but try replacing the word power in that sentence with energy and you’ll start to get a sense of how much the political is tied in with the magical.

Witchcraft in particular is having a bit of a moment—a fact that is still a little weird to me, since up until very recently being into the occult was a bit like the goth version of being a Revolutionary War reenactor (but hey, I’m not complaining!).

We could go into all sorts of fancy sociological reasons for the revival of witchcraft. I could run the data, pop out some cool charts, and delve into some boring statistics about markets and demographics and on and on. At the end of all that, we might have some good reasons behind why kids these days love the occult so much, but what good would that be for us? Witchcraft is about what you do with it, and I say that while there are many reasons, scientific, economic, and spiritual, for the rise of witchcraft, what really matters is what we do with the power of the witch.

And powerful witches are getting involved! Witchcraft is in many ways the earth’s immune system kicking in at the last moment and, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the earth is kind of in trouble right now. Like Peter Grey writes in his Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft: “If the land is poisoned, then witchcraft must respond.” So how then do we respond? Welcome to the world of magical activism!

This is a book about magic, politics, and how we can change the world when we blend the two together. If you know lots about witchcraft, but nothing about politics outside a voting booth, this book is for you. If you know loads about politics, but your knowledge of witchcraft begins and ends with Harry Potter, this book is for you, too.

Maybe you bought this book for a cool kid in your family, and you decided to flip through it. Maybe at a certain point you went “By science, this woman’s crazy!” It’s all good, I get that this much “woo-woo” in a book about activism can make some people uncomfortable, and for good reason! Religion and spirituality combined with politics have hurt a lot of people, and so some just choose to say no thank you to the whole thing. I actually don’t mind if you’re one of those people who is side-eyeing this book right now, but I will make a utilitarian plea to you, just once, before you put it down and walk out of the store to post something angry on social media: Magic, or at least a belief in magic, has been around for pretty much ever, at least if the oldest artifacts of humanity are to be believed. And the way I see it, we can either make a home for these beliefs or face the consequences of leaving all this power and history for our political adversaries.

Or maybe you are that cool kid and got really excited when you saw this book! Maybe you’ve read a bunch about witchcraft, and you know it has something to do with feminism, which means it could possibly have something to do with activism. You know something is wrong with the world, but dang, you just don’t know how to make the pieces fit! Well don’t worry, this book will hopefully be just the metaphysical duct tape you were looking for to pull it all together for you.

This book is about ways to bring your witchcraft into the revolution against what I’m going to call “The Disenchanted World.” To help fight against this great evil, I’ll be going through different concepts and ideas pulled from magic, grounding them in political history, and giving you exercises to bring it all into the mix. I’ve tried to keep these rituals and exercises pretty loosey-goosey, since I think you should be able to add your own pizzazz once you’ve gotten the hang of them. Having said that, I do expect you to, at some point, really sit down and work through the practices in this book. There’s a weird, but common, misconception that witchcraft is radical because it “gets you something for nothing” or doesn’t require work. Oh honey, if only! I’ve been at this game for over a decade, and I’ve still got work to do. Now, don’t let that scare you—these exercises are pretty 101. I’m just saying that even Hogwarts assigns homework.

Now, let’s get started.