Is the modern witch movement leading us down the garden path?
Thoughts on magic, mysticism, and the strength of the human will
Have you noticed that it’s cool to be a witch right now? Instagram and TikTok are full of witchy women teaching their followers how to devise full-moon rituals or cast spells to manifest their desires. I’ve even called myself a witch, at times.
Even so, I’m wary of this trend towards witchiness and magic more generally. And as I delve deeper into my study of the female mystics, it becomes ever clearer to me why these mystic women called out to me from history to engage with them more deeply, right now. To get precise, in these days of rampant and fashionable witchiness, about the critical distinctions between witches and mystics, and why we need mysticism so very badly, while witchiness might lead us down the garden path.
So what is a witch, and what is a mystic? Ultimately, the distinction comes down to a question of will. Meaning, bluntly: witches, magicians, and mystics agree that there is something beyond the phenomenal world—the world of matter and what can be perceived by the senses—and that in that “something beyond” lies enormous power.
So far, so good. That seems, to me, to be the fundamental truth of the world.
Where the magicians and the mystics diverge is on the nature of that power, that realm, and how to approach it. As Evelyn Underhill writes in Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness:
Magic is merely a system whereby the self tries to assuage its transcendental curiosity by extending the activities of the will beyond their usual limits.
Later, she adds:
The will, says the occultist, is king, not only of the House of Life, but of the universe outside the gates of sense.
In other words: witches and magicians seek to transcend material phenomena in order to harness the power of the greater-than-human, in service of their own ends or some more collective ambition, be it benevolent or malevolent. The mystic, meanwhile, approaches the infinite in an attitude not of grasping but of submission. The mystic doesn’t aim for control or for an increase in personal power, but rather for complete union with the source of all being. In Underhill’s definition:
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.
Critically, for Underhill, the magician (often a witch, in today’s fashions), cannot in fact fully experience or apprehend the full extent of Reality, meaning the immaterial world to which mystic and witch alike are oriented. Because the moment you approach that Reality with your own agenda, you project yourself onto it, and thus manipulate it, twist it, force its deeper mysteries to hide from you.
By contrast, the path of the mystic must begin with ego death, to get you as close as possible to the nature of things as they truly are, unfiltered by your own agenda.
So why do I care about this distinction so much, and why in particular do I think it’s so important right now? Mostly because I so deeply empathize with the impulse to turn to magic right now, and because that deep empathy shows me the magnitude of the potential problem.
I understand in every bone of my body why people are turning to occult and witchy practices today. As our institutions crumble and our governments stand derelict in their duty on just about every imaginable front, it’s incredibly seductive to think you can chant or weave a spell and regain some semblance of control, influence some degree of fate—your own if not the wider world’s.
Incredibly seductive, and true. You can influence the working of the world that way. That’s the problem. Because: should you?
I don’t know about you, but personally, I have rarely known what would be good for me. I’m a person who has repeatedly done things like buying a one-way airline ticket to another continent because I was a little bit bored of my life, or moving onto a trailer though I’d never lived on the road before and had no plan for how to do it, or marrying someone I’d known for six weeks.
And sure, my decisions have been more idiotic than most. But if you get very real with yourself, have you always known what would be good for you? Really? In the long term? How about what would be best for not just you but those around you and the wider world more broadly? Do you have a flawless record? Does anyone? How could we, when most of us are traumatized and dissociated to some degree or other, witnessing a genocide and ecosystem collapse while desperately trying to pay our bills and satisfy our jonesing for the dopamine hit of social-media likes?
Are these really the right circumstances to prepare us to wield divine power?
Or should we be focusing on living as responsibly as we can with our human power, while trying with all our being to welcome in and allow to work through us something wiser, something larger, something truer than we can even conceive of?
It’s human-scale thinking and wilfulness, fear and grasping that got us into this mess. And if a greater wisdom is trying to come through right now—which I believe it is—we might be thwarting a greater healing with all our small-scale, human-focused dabbling with the infinite.
This is a fine line to walk, and an infinitely rich seam to investigate. I hope to write more on all this as I delve deeper into the mystics. For now, I hope these early and just-forming thoughts might spark something for some for you.
Love,
x Ellie
all great points, although i'm not sure if the distinction between "magic" and "mysticism" is helpful beyond a certain point. many people would probably say that distinction already exists within magic itself, between theurgy and thaumaturgy.
ultimately, i think a lot of the discomfort comes from not fully reckoning with the extent to which our thinking (in the English-speaking world) has been colored by Christianity's unique brand of ontological dualism. from a non-dualist perspective—if we are the embodiment of Divinity, then we are co-creating the cosmos. there is no Supreme Will to thwart or subvert. we aren't full-fledged gods ourselves, and shouldn't act like it, but we also shouldn't shy away from using the powers we have to shape and explore the world in which we find ourselves. maybe "magic" is just the same force applied with a little more agency, in certain circumstances, applied to our subjective experience of reality—but then we can also switch into a higher awareness and let the larger force of Divinity work through us, instead of us doing the working. both/and, not either/or, depending on circumstances here in the present world, which is up to us as embodied beings—the ones with our feet on the ground—to interpret and respond to.
Thank you Ellie. This is a rich seam for you. Of course I can not comment on the Witchy element, but Shakespeare is clear about the Magician in The Tempest with Prospero and those final lines of his about the need for prayer that ‘assaults Mercy itself’. These, the last words Shakespeare wrote for the stage! There seems from my experience that the work to still the mind is important and then the heart opens. The ego is a tricky thing and the Sanskrit Ahankara a more subtle definition. Once the heart is open the divine then seems to enter the being and a sense of an individual self dissolves which moves to a non-dual experience. Impossible to describe. But I don’t think we can control anything, we then become like that Yezidi who draws a magic circle around itself and controls all in that tight circle but can not step out into a larger reality.