Recently, modern witchcraft has been on the rise. I am interested to hear some discussion and discourse from your perspective, on any aspect of modern witchcraft. Myself, I try to be respectful of most religions. That said, I have always been a little annoyed by anyone who believes they can, for example, control the weather or read peoples minds, which seems to be the case in this article, and in several witchcraft-related memes and stuff I've seen floating around. In addition, I think the whole idea of witchcraft as an opposition to the status quo is very much a bourgeois/liberal mindset. Instead of using affirmative action to actually work for change, it's turning to faith and a belief in the occult in order to solve your issues. It seems to me to be almost entirely composed of young, upper-middle class white women that have not needed to struggle or known the struggle of other classes. In essence, a liberal reaction to the people in power. Any thoughts? Willing to change my mind.
Okay so disregard your preconceptions about who and why they're into magic.
Capitalism has been and is pretty much replacing traditional organized religions. Corporate religion is a real cottage industry and it's only going to get worse.
Believers in new sincerity may find unironic participation in religion (or something religion-adjacent) to be comforting and fulfilling.
People striving to shrug off irony poisoning and reclaim traditional beliefs may engage in religion or magical practices. That is okay.
Culturally, a lot of magical practices are dying. Folk magic is dying out. Magic has been part of the culture of lower classes and indigenous peoples forever. It's okay to engage in these practices in the interest of preserving them.
The witches vs patriarchy thing is not the whole of mysticism, occult, or whatever you want to call it.
Engaging in the practice of magic doesn't hinder one's activism any more than going to church or prayer. If you're cool with religious socialists, you should be cool with witch/magician socialists too.
We can make as much of an argument about being chronically online hindering leftist activism as we can about some people meeting up to howl at the moon
A lot of contemporary magic isn't people who think they're literally doing Harry Potter magic. They either are just observing traditional, folk, ritual magic or they're into this jungian thing where magic is just a way of communicating with your own subconscious and magic is just a self-help method. Are there people who think magic is real? Sure. There are people who think gods are real.
As always, decline in material conditions will precipitate a movement towards religion/spiritualism. Better to have a foot in the door on that than rejecting it while trying to build a working class movement.
It's a cool and okay thing to study/practice magic as a form of spiritualism/religion while being a leftist.
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This, a lot of the people out there claiming to be witches are just doing it for the aesthetic, those of us who are leftist witches are very quiet and secretive because of the bad associations with neoliberal attempts to co-opt the movement.
god i love when people talk about new sincerity 🥰