Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism - Sarah Lyons 2019
The Pathways of Power
Whew! After the psychedelic chapter we just had, it’s time to come crashing back to earth. It’s all well and good to learn the secrets of the universe and fly to other dimensions, but if you don’t bring that knowledge home and use it in this world, what’s the point?
Back in chapter 1 (see here) I said magic is about recognizing the paths power takes in all beings and things and working with that power to change the world. In the last chapter, I gave you a way to dive into that current of power and experience it firsthand. Now, we’re going to look at ways to practically map and direct that power in the material plane.
INTRODUCTION TO POWER MAPPING
When activists encounter a problem they want to fix, we’ll often use a thing called “power mapping” to figure out the ways that problem is manifesting, who has the power to fix it, and what power we have to use to accomplish our goals.
As we look at this, it’s important to remember that really, really evil shit in the world is often confusing on purpose. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this book, it’s that there are reasons behind everything, even stuff that looks dumb on the outside. Laws, tax codes, social dynamics, and policies are often constructed and written in ways that make them purposefully hard for the average person to grasp and then get mad about. Power mapping helps break these obfuscating walls down and reveals the hidden pathways through which power is shaping and manifesting the world around you. Most importantly, the tools you’ll learn give you a diagram to change them.
I should also say that you can use the technique of power mapping to figure out what kind of magic you need to do, especially if you like really complicated magic where, all jokes aside, you basically have to be a lawyer in order to talk to demons.
THE THREE FACES OF POWER
Power, like I said, is in everything and in many ways is everything. You can seriously spend a lifetime meditating on and studying exactly what power is. Just look at the thousands of years of theological texts the Catholics alone have churned out.
For our purposes, we are going to look at just a few ways power tends to manifest politically. They are called the three faces of power (shout-out to my girl Hekate) and they are:
1. Immediate: Who is actually doing the thing? Is there a person using their power for better or worse? Where is the bad thing happening, and what can you do right now to stop it?
2. Law: How is this power working legally? How is the law upholding this power or preventing this power from manifesting?
3. Culture: What’s the popular consensus on this power? What do people generally think when you bring an issue up with them?
You are probably going to choose one face of power to work with as an activist to try to get something changed, but ideally, you’d want to use all three.
Let’s look at an example of power to see how this all operates: the patriarchy. Okay, that’s a big one, and it’s a power that encompasses a lot. So let’s break the faces of its power down:
1. Who is actually performing the actions of the patriarchy? Who are the flesh and blood humans holding it up or tearing it down? Where is the patriarchy immediately being felt?
2. How does the patriarchy manifest through the law? What laws has it created in order to protect itself and gain more power? What laws work against it?
3. What do people think about the patriarchy? Sexism? Transphobia? Homophobia? How do these things manifest in culture?
See that? We’re still dealing with a big scary thing, but now we’ve broken it down into more manageable ideas and components, and by looking at how it functions, we can see that the patriarchy can, in fact, be overcome. Power works in part because we don’t think about it and, more importantly, because we don’t name its manifestations. Remember, in magic, naming something gives you control of it (see here). So let’s map out power, name the power in our world, and take it back like Rage Against The Machine told us to.
THE SPECTRUM OF ALLIES
In activism and magic we talk a lot about allies: beings and people who actively want to help us succeed in our goals. We also talk about enemies: those who actively want to see us fail.
Most people and spirits though, fall somewhere on a spectrum. The spectrum of allies is something to keep in mind when you are out trying to win those in either realm over to your side. Ideally you will be trying to move people into being active allies, but the farther right they start out on the diagram, the more power it will take to bring someone over to your side, and the more interest they will have in seeing your defeat. I leave it up to you to decide who is worth your time and effort to move on this spectrum. I personally know people who were far-right organizers and avowed neo-Nazis whose hearts were turned away from hate, but I also know people who, for many reasons, I’m pretty sure will never be swayed from their current political beliefs. I am an activist because I believe people can change for the better, but in any situation you have to make that call as to who is worth trying to sway, why they are worthy of your energy, and how much power it will take to make them your ally.
POWER MAPPING 101
Now that we’ve gone over the conceptual framework of power mapping, let’s dig deeper into the steps you’ll take to execute it yourself.
Identify Goal
1. List long-term goals. Go back to the dreaming chapter. This fight can’t just be about one thing, or you’ll end up fighting little battles all over the place and losing a lot of them. So think bigger! This is the fun part of power mapping. What is your absolute biggest, most ridiculous dream for the world? What does your utopia look like? Sit down and think about this, and let yourself dream big.
2. List intermediate goals. Okay, now that you have where you ideally want to end up, how do you get there? List out all the little goals that you think would lead to your big goal.
3. What does victory look like? In magic, you are going to get better results if you have a pretty clear picture of what you want. So what, exactly, do you want? What is victory going to look like in your little battle as opposed to the big fight? Dream about the feeling of victory, so you remember it when you get there.
List Resources
1. What can you as an individual do or bring into action to advance the goal? Can you protest? Donate money? Take time on the weekends to do work? We all have different skills and resources. List out yours!
2. What can your organization do? If you can, I really recommend getting involved in an organization if you plan on doing activist work. Unless you alone have some very incriminating video of a certain politician, there is honestly only so much one person can accomplish, and I don’t want you to burn yourself out. You don’t need to agree with the organization that you partner with 100 percent, but, as with magic, raising power is easier with many people working together. What resources does your group have?
Identify Active & Passive Allies
1. Whose problem is this? Go back to the spectrum of allies. You are trying to get people on your side. Who is affected by this problem? How do you make them see that this is their problem?
2. What do they gain if they win? You need to give people a reason to fight and a tangible thing that will be better when they win. What is it?
3. What power do they have over the target? We all have power as individuals, but our power and magic become stronger in groups What power do your allies have to make your target’s life difficult until they give you what you want? Can they protest? Strike? Make calls? Engage in routine group rituals?
Identify Active & Passive Enemies
1. What will your victory cost them? If you win, what do your enemies lose? Money? Power? Influence? How much is winning this battle worth to them?
2. What will they do to oppose you? The bigger the stakes, the more your enemies will do to shut you down. This can be anything from just ignoring you and going around you to sending dogs and drones to attack you. Be prepared, but not paranoid.
3. How strong are they? List what resources your enemies have. Are we talking some bitter people on a community board or the governor here?
4. How are they organized? Organize yourself better than your enemy. Is this a small group of people or a large corporation? Are they based in one city or town, or are they global? Is their organization horizontally or vertically organized?
Identify Targets
A target is always a person, never an institution or system (unless we’re talking about purely magical workings). When you do a spell, you will always be using a target, either yourself or someone else. To figure out an appropriate target, go back to the faces of power. Yes, you can protest racism, but how is the power of racism being made manifest in this world? Is a senator about to sign a racist law? Is a CEO about to build a corporate office that displaces low-income people of color? Is a TV show depicting a particular group in a demeaning way? Targets are the people with the power to stop one particular manifestation of something negative. Be careful when choosing your target that you consider the spectrum of allies. Some people you just can’t win over. A real estate developer isn’t going to not develop real estate—it’s what they do—but a politician who doesn’t know if they’ll win reelection might be more open to hearing what you have to say (like how much you want them to stop that real estate developer through legislation). This is the idea behind electing someone on “your side” and then pressuring them into doing what you want. You elect them because, hopefully, you know they can be moved in a way that a politician on “the other side” couldn’t be.
Primary Targets
1. Who has the power to give you what you want? Remember the spectrum of allies. You aren’t going to change the essential nature of power that certain positions give people, so who can help you?
2. What power do you have over them? Is your target up for reelection? Are they looking to improve their public image? Are they likely to cave to sustained protests or actions?
Secondary Targets
1. Who has the power over the people with the power to give you what you want? Who are this person’s supporters? Donors? Fans? Constituents? Customers? Can they be changed?
2. What power do you have over them? Are they aware there is a problem with your target or that you want them to take action? Are they your coworkers or neighbors? What is the power relationship between you and the people who uphold your target?
Tactics
So you have your problem, goal, and target all mapped out—now you’re going to do something about it! Tactics are how you go about actually demanding and creating change. Maybe you want to keep it purely magical through public ritual or group sigil work (more on that in a sec, or check out here), or maybe you want to be more traditional and stick to protests and letter writing. You and your allies are probably going to use what’s called a “diversity of tactics.” That means you may be working on getting someone elected, while your friend works on creating an urban farm. These strategies may seem totally different, but just like in magic, different spells can be used to create the same outcome. If you do your work while dreaming the same dream as others, you are both working toward the same goal.
There are some important things to keep in mind when choosing your tactics. Make sure they are:
In context. Perhaps a Black Lives Matter protest isn’t the place to show up with a “Save the Whales” sign. Keep in mind the thing you are fighting for and the conditions you are fighting under.
Flexible. Remember that conditions change! If the place where you were going to protest gets shut down, what then? What if your candidate loses the election? If you can’t get the projector to work or the banner to drop, is your whole action ruined? Always have a plan B.
Directed at specific targets. “We want X to do/stop doing Y, and we won’t stop causing a ruckus until it happens” is much clearer to onlookers than a sign that says “I’m mad.” You may laugh, but I have seen this sign at real protests. Think of taking protest action like physics—if you scatter your power, you can’t apply the pressure you need to move forward. If you throw all your power at one target, you have a much higher chance of pushing them where you want them to go.
Reasonable to those performing the tactics. People doing the ritual, action, or protest should know why they are doing it, the meaning behind their actions, and what they hope to achieve with them. We live in an era where anyone can get on Facebook and make a protest, but we’ve also seen that those don’t tend to work because the clarity of the dream and goal isn’t there.
Backed up by a specific form of power. One person screaming outside the White House isn’t going to do much. If they are famous, maybe it does a bit more. If there are thousands of people, it might do even more, and if those thousands of people threaten to use their power, it might just work. Here are some examples of tactics that are backed by political embodiments of power:
Media events
Public hearings
Strikes
Lawsuits
Elections
Protests
Direct action
Voting
That last one is super-important. If there’s one thing from this chapter I want to yell in your face, tattoo on your chest, call you three times a day about, or stand outside your window with a boom box playing on repeat to help you remember, it’s this: Voting is a tactic, not a strategy. Once more in case you’re speed-reading: Voting is a tactic, not a strategy. Voting is lighting a candle, not doing candle magic. Voting is reciting words, not doing a spell. You must put the correct meaning on it and connect voting to a larger narrative to be effective. If you do decide to vote, always make sure it’s one tactic you are using in a larger strategy of transformation, but there’s a reason why movements or ideas that rely solely on voting usually fail—because the people who put that candidate in office confused tactics and strategies. Their enemies, I assure you, did not.
REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY 
The Battle in Seattle
The 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests, otherwise known as “The Seattle Protests” but also known by the much cooler name “The Battle in Seattle,”* were some of the most—and least—successful actions you’ve never heard of. Activists were able to achieve a great short-term goal—halting the WTO’s final meeting of the millennium, while showcasing and elevating the fears and anger people all over the world had about the new organization and the spread of globalization. It also changed how large-scale mobilizations would be undertaken by activists and how they would be handled by the state. It’s a great example of the power-mapping technique you just learned and why you need the kind of vision that magic can give you to make it all work.
But first, let’s have some context!
The World Trade Organization was created in 1994, with the goal of managing trade globally. What does that mean? It means that the WTO can override the labor or environmental protections set up by a country if it thinks those laws interfere with another country’s ability to buy and trade stuff with others. Under the rules of the WTO, countries can’t block what companies can or can’t come into their countries or how the factories those companies set up are always run. The WTO’s system frees up the movement of money, but not people, which means you might live in a country that loses a lot of cash to another country because of globalization, but you can’t necessarily move to follow that money. Not surprisingly, this sort of system often ends up benefiting countries with lots of money, which want to buy things cheaply and sell them for a profit, while paying people little to no money to make them, and hurts countries that want to protect their workers and, say, rain forests. The people making the decisions in the WTO aren’t elected by people in the countries they represent.
I hope you understand that I don’t really have enough space to line out all the complex nonsense of 1990s trade deals (remember, this book is being written by a witch who had to repeat math, twice), but given even that tiny bit of information, you can probably see why at the time people weren’t big fans of this new kid on the block. Workers were afraid wages would drop or jobs would get taken away altogether; environmentalists feared further destruction of the planet; and civil rights groups worried this would further disempower women and people of color all over the world. Activists knew that the WTO was going to have its final meeting of the millennium in Seattle on November 30, 1999, and they decided this was the place to make themselves heard.
So activists came up with an immediate goal to shut down the WTO meetings. They spent months ahead of time listing out their resources, like how many people they could get there, what those people were willing to do, and what power each group had. The spectrum of allies shifted during the protests in incredible ways, when people and groups that at best didn’t think they had anything in common, and at worst thought they were enemies, started fighting alongside each other. The best example of this was when one large group of activists was arrested and kept from seeing a lawyer, the Seattle unions shut down the ports until they were released. Likewise, who people thought were their enemies shifted as a result of the protest. When cops started using pepper spray not just on peaceful protestors, but on holiday shoppers and your average Joe, the protests grew larger as outrage increased in Seattle in general. The tactics people used were diverse and flexible, encompassing everything from protesting to getting arrested to shutting down whole streets and neighborhoods to concerts and dance parties.
The result of all this was, in the short term, success. Over five days protesters refused to back off despite pepper spray, tear gas, and baton beatings, and the WTO meeting was shut down. The world was suddenly aware that this organization existed at all, when almost no one had given it a second thought before.
On the other hand, everyone has moments where they look back and realize they should have done something differently. The Battle in Seattle was this kind of moment on a global scale—a potential turning point in the fight against the Disenchanted World that went slightly awry. The activists who shut down the WTO meeting had a great understanding of power in the short term and great foresight for the future, so what went wrong?
Let’s go back and look at the weak spots in the spell these activists were trying to weave. Because remember, all protests are spells. If you look at the power map for the WTO protests, you’ll see a couple of things missing.
One is that it’s really hard to create a massive paradigm shift or challenge consensus reality (for a refresher, see here) if you can’t name where the power that is holding up that reality emanates from. Remember how Isis was only able to draw the poison out of Ra once she learned his true name? You must name the power you are opposing and you and your allies must use the same name, or else your magic will fail.
The other hole that stands out in the Battle in Seattle’s power map is the lack of a clear end goal. What did final victory look like to those protesting? I’m sure specific groups had ideas, but while there was cooperation on the ground, activists never seemed to unite their dreams.
The next exercise will cover this in a bit more depth, but for now just remember that in magic, it is important to have a clearly defined goal that you are working toward. The WTO protests themselves had this, but the movement didn’t. People weren’t dreaming the same dream.
There were a lot of things people wanted from the Seattle protests, and just one they didn’t want. The list of yeses goes on and on, but the list of noes was short: no WTO. Specifically, the protesters didn’t want that WTO meeting in Seattle to happen. But what then? Where was the big “yes” to come about after? Some wanted to put pressure on elected officials to curtail the power of the WTO, while others wanted it gone altogether. Other groups wanted nothing to do with politicians and wanted to end not just the WTO, but capitalism and the state as well. Some of these ideas can go together, but I’m sure you can see how others simply can’t.
The protesters successfully disrupted the WTO meeting they were united against, but could not follow up with a big-picture win because they hadn’t come together on what that would look like. I think the name “The Battle in Seattle” is pretty apt here, since a battle implies one fight in a series of fights that make up a war that, ideally, you win. What should have been one siege in a bigger campaign became a war all on its own, so any long-term goals or dreams were bound to fail.
One of the best techniques I’ve found in magic is to always see your work as part of a bigger story. In politics, we might say that this is you being guided by an ideology, while in magic we might call this fitting your work into a paradigm. Whatever you decide to call it, making your mind think this way is going to keep you from feeling like you are fighting random battles and putting out fires all over the place and will instead make you believe that you are actually working toward something as inevitable as the final chapter of a book.
MAGIC IN ACTION 
MAKING YOUR OWN SIGILS
I get that this chapter may come across as less “magical” than the others, but that’s only because we aren’t used to looking at reality as something fundamentally magical. Reality is malleable, like the code in a computer. It’s both highly structured and highly able to be fucked with. Once you start to see the pathways of power in your life and how easily they can be rerouted or transformed, you can start to use this to effect political change.
If you’re still a little unsure of how to blend these lines of thought together, don’t worry: It can take a little bit of time to rewire your brain. And one thing I’ve found that really helps in getting all this to click together is actually seeing it work. Our minds have this incredible power to shape reality, and we should use that power for good. That all sounds great, but unless you’ve actually felt magic having an impact in the world, it maybe sounds more like a cool idea and less like an awesome reality.
Sigils are one of my favorite ways to introduce someone to magic because they are easy to make, highly customizable, and so effective they can easily become a cornerstone of your practice. Seriously, you get so much bang for your buck with sigils it almost feels like cheating.
Some background before we get started: The idea of sigils can be traced far into history. The ancient Norse used to combine runes together to create spells and magical symbols, and in the nineteenth century an occultist and artist named Austin Osman Spare* coined the word sigil as a thoughtform, or a spell condensed into a symbol. Sigils are one of the main tools of chaos magic(k), which due to its individualistic and customizable attitude, I like to think of as the little brother of witchcraft.
Symbols have a ton of power. Think about a stoplight for a moment. It’s a magical symbol! You see it turn red, and you stop (most of the time); you see it turn green, and you go. You’ve probably even done this when you’ve been alone and you knew there weren’t any cops or traffic cameras around. It’s not just force of habit that makes you behave like this—that symbol is actually compelling you on a subconscious level to act a certain way and think certain things. It has cultural and legal powers backing it up, but the actual thing that gives it power is belief, aka magic.
With sigils, you are making your own symbol that represents the reality you want to see around you. They are a way of hacking that part of your brain that makes reality, by getting into your subconscious and making your intentions just as real as the power of that stoplight. We’re going to use sigils to help you with the power mapping we’ve already gone over, now in the service of achieving your activist goals.
For this, you will need:
A piece of paper
A pen
Really, you can use any art supplies to make a sigil. Paint them on your nails before painting them over, draw them on the walls of your apartment before covering them up with pictures or paint, spray-paint them somewhere. There are even programs online that will generate them for you. (And we’ll go over why you cover them up in just a moment.)
We’re going to keep it simple for now, but feel free to mix it up however you want once you get it down.
Before you make your first sigil, think about what you want. Actually, scratch that, think about how you think about the things you want. Do your wants and desires feel like some far-off thing that you’ll never attain? Do they feel like things other people get to have, but that you somehow don’t deserve? The first step is to stop thinking this way, especially when making sigils. You are programming a thoughtform right now, making your own reality even as you read this book. You don’t want your reality to be stuck in the wanting phase forever. Sigils are going to give you exactly what you ask for—so how you ask really matters.
In magic in general, it’s the best practice to act like the reality you want has already come to pass when doing a spell. So, instead of saying “I want to be famous,” you would say “I am famous.” Dress your candles for the life you want, not the one you have.
Try this for a week: Pay attention, without judgment, to how you want things. When you’re getting ready for your day, driving in your car, or walking down the street and have nothing but you and your thoughts, how do you think?
Do you say:
This week is going to suck.
Instead of:
This week will be hard, but I can face its challenges.
Or:
I’m sick.
Instead of:
I’m getting better, or I’ve got health problems, but I’m taking care of my body and addressing its needs.
Or:
This city/country/world sucks.
Instead of:
This place does suck, but my friends and I have the power to make it better and we will.
Notice, I’m not telling you to live in a fantasy and act like you don’t have problems. I’m asking you to think more positively and actively about how those problems will be faced and overcome, as if those positive outcomes are just as inevitable as the current crappy situation. We are using magic to fix the wrongs of the world, not act like they don’t exist.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of asking for what you want and thinking along better lines, look back at the power map you’ve created. At every step ask yourself and your friends: What do we want? What are we asking for? What challenges are we facing? Once you have those boiled down to your essential desire, it’s time to make your sigil.
After you’ve dreamed big about the world you want to live in, decide on a step that you and your friends can take toward that world. For this, let’s imagine you want to open a community farm and garden. It will be a place for people in your community to grow their own food, for kids to learn about plants and nature, and for people to hang out and meet up without having to pay.
Great! Let’s break that down into a simple statement of intent:
We want a farm that will serve our community and uplift the people in it.
Now, take out the wanting:
We will build a farm that will serve our community and uplift the people in it.
You can even take out the “will” and place it in the present tense if you want:
This land is now a farm that will serve our community and uplift the people in it.
Here’s the most common way to make a sigil from this:
Take out your pen and paper and write your statement down.
Take out all the repeating letters and the vowels.
So for this statement, you should have something that looks like this:
T H S L N D W F R M V C Y*P
Now put those letters together in different combinations until you’ve come up with a symbol that you like. By the end it will probably look way more like a cool magic symbol than a bunch of letters smashed together. Here’s an example of how I made a sigil out of the letters above:
This is the method developed by occultist and comic book author Grant Morrison, but it’s not the only way to get the letters you need. If you want to use the first letter in every word or keep some vowels that really do it for you (I love the letter A and normally don’t take it out when I do sigil work), you should do it! This is about hacking your brain and your reality, so feel free to personalize it.
Once you have your sigil, it’s time to charge it! I’m using charge in its chaos magic and witchcraft meaning. By that I am saying you want to charge it, like a battery, to give it power and a life of its own, but you also want to give it a charge, or a direction of what to do. In this case, your direction will probably be something like “I charge you to make X a reality.”
You can charge a sigil using anything. Literally—anything. I’ve charged sigils through Instagram, house parties, and candles. I’ve heard of people doing it through music, theater, and interpretive dance. What you’re trying to do is raise and release power while keeping your desired outcome in mind. Remember, sigils are a creative form of magic. If you want to charge your sigil by making it part of your music, dance, or artistic craft, by all means go for it.
Then once you have your sigil made, you want to forget about it—or at least forget about its meaning. Remember the stoplight? Part of the power of that symbol is that you notice it without noticing it; it’s so normal and bland that you don’t think about the huge power it has over you.
So once you’ve charged your sigil, take it and put it somewhere where you’ll see it often—or at least know it’s there—but the exact meaning can be forgotten over time. That’s where covering it up comes in. Or you can also place it someplace where you will only notice it peripherally. Put it on your mirror, hang it by your door, throw it under the rug, bury it in the garden, or paint it on a protest sign. You want to absorb it into your very being so that the magic starts to work without you “doing” anything.
