The Daily: 21 January 2025

I have been on Starhawk’s Earth Activism weblist for, I think, as long as she’s had it. I’ve followed her writings for my entire adult life. The Spiral Dance, her influential first book (and, to my mind, still her best) was published in 1979, not far from 50 years ago. (How’s that for making you feel old?) I was 14 when I read it, which was not a good year for me… the year of the forced end of childhood experienced by so many women it is not even as painful as it should be. So I was very open to her message of empowerment and healing and love. I didn’t sell my soul. Even then I was not convinced that I had one to sell, and I was pretty sure that if I did, no entity was in the market to buy it. But I did give my heart and mind and body to the Goddess. It took me a long time to understand that Starhawk’s message has very little to do with historical witchcraft or paganism or other Earth-centered orientations. Her book, The Earth Path, addressed that, but it was a case of too little, too late. Also… she still focuses on the introspective and esoteric — even in her Earth activism. Which makes a practical witch like me ask, what part of this is active?

(I ask the same of most activism, the dominant and loudest forms of which tend to be highly ritualized and demonstrative — theatre acting — and rather light on work — actual acting.)

Last time Trump was elected, Starhawk and her Left Coast crowd were riled up like a beehive facing down a hungry bear. I believe that was when the activism part of her work was formalized, though she was always more of a social activist than a spiritual teacher. In 2017, they were all knitting pussy caps and sending energy to the oppressed and debating the merits of cursing. (I think that was ruled out… maybe…) This time, they seem much more subdued. (Maybe they did try the cursing and found it didn’t work…) They are no less opposed to a second Trump administration, but this time they are less shouty and more about ritual and pathwork. A key element is the online ritual, which is mostly a COVID thing and is what you might expect — a Zoom circle of guided meditations and drumming and letting the emotions loose. I’m pretty sure there have been anti-Trump rituals every week since November.

I don’t have much to do with all that. That is not my path, for one thing, but I also don’t feel that ritual, especially remote ritual, is an effective way to engage with this mess. I’m more of a practical nature. I might endorse the cursing if I was at all inclined toward causing harm… but my coping methods tend more toward baking bread and washing the dishes and taking long walks, along with a lot of muttering. I understand the value of ritual. Effective ritual can energize every participating body, changing how each senses and makes sense of the world forever. It is a tool humans have been using for as long as we’ve been humans. Probably longer, given that other apes have highly ritualized cultures — from grooming which is not grooming to the formalized management of intergroup aggressions in which there is little aggression but quite a lot of chest beating and teeth baring and noise, after which everybody quietly goes home… for more grooming.

I also understand the value of meditation, both the Eastern empty-mind variety and the Western contemplative variety. (I confess I have little experience with the globally more common shamanic traveling. The few times I have tried it, I just got a headache.) Guided meditation falls more on the Western end and involves considerable facility with visualization (which took me a long time to understand was not strictly visual… should be called sensualization for those of us who don’t lean heavily on sight for perception). In theory, both kinds of meditation are supposed to open the mind to the wider world. In practice, both are all in your head. (I am not as sure that traveling is all in the head… that is some weird shit…) Whatever insights you find in meditation were already there, percolating in your non-verbal subconscious waiting for you to notice them. Meditation does give you that opportunity, shutting out the minute-by-minute monologue of daily existence long enough to let other things rise to the surface. And sometimes it really feels like a revelation, coming from so far out in left field that you don’t believe you ever could have harbored such ideas. But… it is all your ideas… it is all there. Because we are ever so much more complicated than we know…

A further complication is that I don’t quite accept that there is a mind. There is a body. There is a set of physical actions and states that give rise to thought. But I don’t think there is a little thinker in my head. For one thing, ideas come from the whole organism, which is not even all human. Many instances of ideation — perhaps, we are learning, most — do not originate in the brain, or not only in the brain. Memories also, the ideas that we have stored away in our bodies for future use, are not stored in the brain but are relational and distributed and rely heavily on sense triggers, especially those of our oldest and most constant sense, touch. Our skin carries more memory than our brain. Mind might be distributed throughout the whole body also and may exist as some non-material energetic state that we don’t understand. (Because, thus far, we don’t know about any non-material energetic states.) But mind is not independent of the body and its physical existence. Mind is not independent of being a living being. Mind is certainly not an entity that does its own thing and comes up with ideas. Again, I will not rule out the weird shit, unknowns both known and not… There may be emergent mind, even collective mind… but that’s not what is happening when you think, not even in deep contemplation or empty-mind breath-work… which, it should be noted, are both body-centered — as are emergence and collectivity.

In any case none of that is what being a witch is all about. Actual witches would have sneered at this stuff. Even those who were on the shaman path. Because actual witches were… actual, active… they did the work.

I’m going to make a long explain-y detour here. Skip ahead if you know this stuff. I hate, hate, hate being explained to. (I’ve even had the extreme irritation of having my own words explained to me…) So I tend to err on the side of not explaining, just assuming my audience knows what I am talking about. But I think that is not the case, in a lot of cases. So…

Our modern interpretation of the life-paths that we name “witchcraft” or “paganism” or “druidism” is just that, our modern interpretation. Most of the definitions and practices and beliefs are very recent inventions and all are near complete fabrications of Modernity. There may be a few family or place-based traditions that harken back to a time before Modernity. Probably none precede Christianity.

This does not mean we don’t know what those life-paths entailed. There is much other evidence. It just is not what the Modern magicians were looking for when they created these new ideas. Where do we look? Well, if you want to know about land-based and place-based wisdom traditions, look to the places, look to the common people. In the case of Europe, look to the places that escaped empire and its ideas of domination from the center. For the most part that means looking at the margins and marginalized. That is where you find wisdom of the land. That is also where you will find the strongest and oldest strains of opposition and activism.

Celtic Catholicism is a protest faith; it is more protestant than many forms of church-mediated Protestantism like the Anglican Church or the Lutherans. Celtic Catholicism is largely an individualized relationship to deity, mostly unmediated by a priest caste, and owes as much to native traditions of animism and druidry as it does to the Eastern Mediterranean narrative. Celtic Catholicism is also old, pre-Roman Catholic. It was adopted before Romans dominated the faith and turned it into something completely different from most of the teachings of Jesus. You have to remember that Christianity itself was originally a protest faith, anti-statist and vehemently anti-Roman (for good reason), despite the “render unto Caesar” language that was probably inserted into the official story much later when that became… prudent.

The Celts were very early adopters of this faith system, probably specifically because it was anti-Roman, for two reasons. First, the Roman state had violently exterminated the entire priestly class among the Celts. Some probably escaped that fate by living in Ireland beyond Roman reach, but the system of transmission, teaching and learning, was decimated. These were a people who largely had no spiritual leadership, and Celts are highly spiritual people, very much involved with the unseen world. This was a devastating loss. So, at the time of the apostles, the Irish and the British were open to a new way of seeing the world — and this was Rome’s fault. If Rome had let the druids be, there would have been no need for Christianity. (And perhaps there would have been no Christian era… one of those, oh if only’s…)

They were open to anything, but the second reason they so readily switched faiths to Christianity specifically was that it was a philosophy that was expressly antagonistic to Rome and all it stood for. Here was a belief in a powerful deity that opposed the very monster that had wiped out their own culture. So when the first hints of this movement filtered north, the northern Celts eagerly latched on.

Of course, Rome followed. It had effectively internalized the British Catholics as early as the Council of Arles in 313, though Rome’s departure from Britain shortly thereafter did allow a bit of creative local interpretation for several centuries. This was most true of the Catholics on the margins of the former Roman colonies. Wales and Cornwall were rather less Romanized than Canterbury, and the Irish were converted by these marginal Catholics.

Ireland was never Romanized. It was also never fully Anglicized. It has been its own way of being for thousands of years, with peoples moving in and out of the island but somehow becoming Irish with each wave of settlement. (There is undoubtedly something in the water.) Ireland was not conquered until the end of the first millennium. There was not a colonial ruling caste in Ireland for most of its history. However, Ireland did experience a substantial loss of druidry because the main divinatory educational centers were not on Irish soil. So, as with the rest of the Celts, the Irish eagerly accepted Patrick and his clover-leaf. However, the difference was that there was no Romanization shortly thereafter.

Patrick’s faith was nominally Roman Catholic, not purely Celtic, but for many centuries it was free to mix with indigenous ideas and grow into something almost entirely separate from the Roman Church. Ireland had its own saints, its own holidays, and, up until English colonization, its own way of organizing and transmitting the faith. It was also the first place in Europe to record the Christian faith. Many of the earliest surviving texts of Christianity are written by Irish Catholics — and they include some highly fanciful illustrations and a good deal of clerical snark in the margins. They also reveal that at least a remnant of the druid caste had survived in Ireland, and that many of the clerics were probably trained in this tradition. Or at least there was a distinct blurring of the faith systems.

(Druids, notably, did not write, did not trust recording of any kind… however, the mnemonic systems they developed are in evidence in early Christian texts, particularly in the words ascribed to Patrick and the other early evangelists. The choice of a triad clover to stand for divinity and the insistence that divinity is triune were probably druidic influences. Remember, the Trinity was not even accepted by the Roman Catholic Church until after the Council of Constantinople of 381. Patrick is supposed to have come to Ireland in 423… news didn’t travel that fast in Late Rome…)

So here are the things to note in this little story. Christianity was adopted by the Celts as much for social protest reasons as for its faith system. Then, while the rest of the Celtic island world was being Romanized and then Germanized, the western coasts of Britain and all of Ireland retained their Celtic nature, including their Celtic Christian faith. Ireland was not conquered or even much influenced by outsiders until the second millennium, allowing native traditions to flourish, including its own variety of Christianity which was neatly blended into being Irish (like everything else that enters that island… again, water… I mean, even the invasive Anglo-Norman families like the Fitzpatricks went thoroughly native in just a couple generations).

Now, one more element… Because the Modern English went about things entirely wrong, guaranteeing Irish animosity and resentment against Anglos for all eternity, once Ireland was finally and fully conquered it retained is surly empire-protesting nature and stubbornly held on to its traditions, including Irish Catholicism with all its pagan influences. And there you see the point, no? If you want to know what it is to have been a pagan or a druid, look at Irish Catholics. (Of which my grandmother was a one…) 

I guess I haven’t said how witches come into this. Nor actual pagans. That latter I have defined already, so I’ll just recap here. These are the people who live in the boondocks, the rednecks, the uncivilized slaves and serfs and peasants. The word is a slur that literally means “people of the land”. Pagans are the matrix of Europe. Paganism is the normative tradition of European commoners. Before Christianity, when the word was first applied to the country folk, pagan practices were place-based and mostly concerned with producing well-being, of which food and shelter and procreation are the main things. After Christianity… well, the converted just renamed the wells and rivers and turned the associated deities into saints, and most of the practices, such as calendar keeping and community celebrations, continued on as before. And because these were never esoteric or philosophical nor even especially spiritual traditions, it doesn’t much matter what religion claimed these peoples. They are still pagans, people of the land.

Paganism is therefore fairly easy to see if you look at popular culture even under Christianity. Witchcraft is a bit harder because it was a bit more exclusive. And the wrong gender.

You know, I have tried for decades to use inclusive language regarding the witch narrative, but it’s just ahistorical and sort of negates the key features of the story when you talk about male witches. That was not a thing in Europe. (I believe that is not quite the case in African cultures, for a counterexample.) Truthfully, there weren’t women witches either. Nobody named themselves “witch”. It too is a derogatory word applied to people who, because they had specialized knowledge, had a certain degree of autonomy that allowed them to ignore the rules. A witch was a bad person because of this self-sovereign rule-flaunting, but not because they were, necessarily, anti-Christian. Witchcraft was also not originally magic. A witch did not do magic, back in the time when there were people who did the actual craft (though they were not yet labeled witches). Witchcraft was the remnants of the native wisdom traditions of Europe. It was not particularly oriented toward spiritualism or faith. It was a craft, a practice, work.

These were the people who attended to the emotionally charged and messy labors of birth and death and tending to infirm bodies — human, animal and vegetable. They were a community’s psychological and sociological counselors and often the match-makers. They were weather watchers and time keepers, knowing when it was safe to plant and when it was time to reap. They were the teachers and information transmitters, remembering lore and fables through the generations. They were brewers and fermenters and pharmacists and dealers in other interactions with the unseen more-than-human world, which sort of bordered on magic, but was not. It was just craft, something they worked at until they became so proficient, it seemed like magic. In any case, these people served their communities. They were public servants and they took their service jobs very seriously. They also were women — because men just didn’t do this work. (Especially the birth and death bits…)

In Celtic lands, these women inherited quite a lot of the practical wisdom of the druidic tradition. They certainly preserved the more practical aspects of pagan wisdom, being that they were common pagan women. They even seem to have preserved even older knowledge systems, such as the Etruscan and the Basque and that of the potentially pre-IndoEuropean Carpathian-region peoples, what anthropologist Marija Gimbutas named Old Europe. Women are highly conservative (because change is damn annoying and messes up The Plan). Witches were the women who most stubbornly held on to their practical skills and the experiential wisdom of their mothers — because that stuff worked. Mostly. In any case, it was not faith-based, it was solidly and determinately real. It was also developed and retained in place and was not mediated by any outside expertise or rule. Finally, where it included ideas of deity at all, there was far more focus on the feminine divine than the domineering father — for good reason, these being care workers. And all of these aspects were in direct conflict with officialdom, which for most of European history, was Rome, either the Empire or the Church.  

Rome did not like gainsayers, hence it killed all the druids. However, for most of its existence it also did not believe that women were a threat, or even… human. So, the village wise-woman was completely disregarded for most of European history. The official take on witches was that they were delusional idiots, not dangerous subversives (never mind actually intelligent public servants), and more than one petitioner from the hinterlands, trying to get Rome to aid them in bringing these harridans under control, was laughed at and sent back home with an admonishment to have more faith.

Now, remember these women were involved in the most emotionally charged aspects of village life — birth, death and illness. And they were human, not magic, so sometimes they failed. Or sometimes success, in the sense of returning a situation to its former state, was not possible. Old people die. Infants die. Sheep want to die. Also these women were mostly unmarried (because… men…) and what life they managed to make for themselves was self-directed and self-owned. They did not restrict themselves to being childless or property-less though, which was the fate of all other unmarried women. Because they were unmarried and idiosyncratic, they usually lived on the edges of society, often literally on the edge of town, if not well outside its limits (because… men…), which made them outsiders and unknown and, as time went on, inherently suspect. And they had these vital and specialized skills. Most villagers were deeply indebted to them. This is all a recipe for deep and abiding intergenerational grudge-holding. Even before the Church decided that witches might exist, local leaders (men) were hunting down wise women and burning them under any pretext. Once they had witchcraft accusations in their toolkit, the bonfires leapt to the skies.

Meanwhile, Rome was losing its grip. The bonfires are sort of evidence of this actually. Rome would never have bothered with women. However, rulers elsewhere were more influenced by their vassals. In the case of England, kings were subject to the landed-elites, and the landed-elites had had enough of unconstrained women. (Also the landed-elites wanted the lands that these women owned…) Moreover, with the final fall of the powerful center, the rise of city folk and the merchant class was creating a new breed of independent thinking. This did not extend to extending independence to women, nor the peasantry, but urban men with bits of wealth and power were experimenting with new ideas for gaining more of it. Which meant largely turning away from Rome. This was the beginning of Modernity. And it is a bit less rational and enlightened than we have been led to believe.

Now, some early natural philosophers were actually pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Some were even focused on experiential evidence rather than faith. However, most, including most of the names we now revere, were in the service of profit-taking, and most did not limit their science to physical reality. Many, in fact, were looking to esoteric texts from distant lands and ancient times for tips on how to tilt fate in their favor. Quite a few took up with Judeo-Christian occult traditions such as the Tarot and Kabbalah and actual demonology. The goal was not to work with the world, seen and unseen, for public good; it was to dominate it and force it to follow a man’s will for private gain.

And this is where witchcraft as we now know it comes into the story. It is not a protest movement. It is not activist. It is not healing or beneficent or kind. It is most particularly not land-based. It is the misunderstood and often intentionally twisted esoterica of mystic monotheism used in the pursuit of wealth and power. By people who already had the wealth and power to use these tools, mind you — because the ability to read, the leisure to experiment, and the exemption from punishment for doing this reading and experimenting were all the sole purview of privilege. Not of witches. Nor of pagans… though in that case there was some extrusion.

At this time we begin to see the rise of the village cunning man. He was the poor country cousin of the urban natural philosophers, or more often, he was an urban natural philosopher down on his luck, out to pull a fast one on the gullible rubes. He practiced his craft in the village, but he was an outsider and he worked for hire and he used the tools of the new science, especially texts (which he often couldn’t quite read, if you judge by the garbled gibberish of old charms and curses… but then nobody else could read at all, so nobody knew the difference). He also employed a bit of theatre to direct attention away from his methods and mistakes. Still, he was not a total fraud. He often trained under a village wise woman and he did have many skills. But he was not a servant of society and he never stayed long in one place. He also had very different goals in his work, mostly his own gain, but also power for power’s sake. And he did not let much stand in the way of his goals.

When we talk about male witches, this is the guy we are talking about. But even then… he did not name himself a witch and would have been enraged if you called him such. Witches were stupid, toothless old women. (Who were, nevertheless, so feared that they were hunted and burned.) He might have called himself a wizard, which was a nouveau word, probably invented by the people who were inventing modern magic as a label for themselves. It means “wise man” and first shows up in the late Middle English of the 1500s. (Arrogant much?)

(Digression: Witch does not equivalently mean “wise woman” or “wise person”. It is the phonetic transliteration of the Old English word wicce, which meant a “female person who practices witchcraft”. It, too, first shows up around the start of Modernity. In other words, it has always been an insult and accusation applied to women, and exclusively women, who were thought to be using malevolent magic, mostly against men, and it did not even exist as a word until the phenomenon of demonic magic was invented — by men… of “science”.)

OK then… history, you know? Oof… 

What has all this got to do with Starhawk and activism and being a witch in the 21st century? One final chapter and then I’ll stop.

In the 19th century, there was a rise in affluence that enlarged the class of people who did not do much of anything. In fact, doing was sneered at. Only nasty commoners did actual work-ish things. This had many effects on society. One is the association of manual work with misery and suffering: it is something to rise above and a comment on your merits if you can’t. Another is the disassociation of the valued forms of work with affect, with actual things done. Manual labor is disparaged. Mind labor is valued, though mind labor does no actual thing. This is where we start to see the rise of the hobbyist, the dilettante, the person who is very busy doing things that do no thing. This is also, not unrelatedly, when we start to see the activist and protester. It never fails to amaze me that in all the writings on the social ills of Victorian London, not one of them ever advocated just giving the dispossessed and hungry food and shelter. (And we still largely don’t…) There were soup kitchens, there were even more work houses, but not one case of wealth transfer that might have permanently alleviated poverty. (Which is also still true…) The point is that this is what we think of when we think of activism. It is not action by the body for the body. It is thought and words and symbolic theatre.

Another thing that came about with this spread in the non-doing class was a whole lot of boredom. And among other ways to alleviate that boredom, many rich folks turned to spiritualism. Originally, this was mostly focused on past lives and talking to the dead and searching for fabulous bloodlines and origin stories like Atlantis and Arcadia. Through time it came to mean more a generalized belief in the spirit, though it was still restricted to humans and maybe a few other large mammals. (And of course only some humans…) Spiritualists, seeking out ways to interact with the non-material, revived the largely abandoned nonsense of early modern magic. Here were abstruse texts (texts, mind you, not practices) that purportedly preserved hidden knowledge of the hidden realms. There were even supposedly guides to raising the dead and mastering demonic powers — and increasing wealth and sex appeal into the bargain. Quite the heady mix. Now, what is important about all this is that all these Victorian fascinations (and chauvinisms) were the main vehicle of information transfer between the early modern magicians and the creators of Wicca. Wicca was founded on Victorian spiritualism which was stacked on early modern magic which was a bastardization of ancient Eastern Mediterranean mystic monotheism, heavy on the invented bastard-ism, rather lighter on the mysticism. None of which had anything to do with the Earth. Or reality. Or activity. Definitely not work.

The ideas that we label witchcraft and druidism and paganism are all Modern. The very words are probably all Modern. And these are all just ideas. Not practice. Not tradition. Not land-based. Not evidential or experiential. They are also not at all the same thing as the pre-Modern paths that we think of as witches, pagans and druids. Neo-Paganism and Wicca have their roots in the esoterica of the early natural philosophers, which found their tips and tricks in the ancient and mostly mistranslated mystic traditions of monotheism. That is, modern pagans have nothing to do with land and reality but follow a path of mysticism laid down by early desert Christians and the Palestinian Merkava branch of Judaism. These are faith systems that are highly dualist, to the point that Christians don’t even believe they are native to this Earth, that this body is a corrupted shell housing a soul that will be raised to perfection in some changeless eternity beyond the world. How do you find an Earth-based path in that?

In my experience, you don’t. Most of what is being called Earth-centered religion is just cunning man mumbo-jumbo. At best it is a vehicle for self-improvement — which is what Starhawk so effectively captured. There is also at its oldest core still that spark of social protest and anti-authority in both Christianity and Judaism, and that definitely carried over into Wicca and its offshoots. They just lack the practical tools. They are trying to address social ills with drumming circles and candles and cards. These are tools for introspection, interrogating the mind, molding the emotions (by which is meant controlling them, usually). These tools are practicably useless. They do nothing. 

In fact, the tools of most faith systems do nothing. What is meditation doing? What does ritual do? What is faith? It is involvement with that which can not, by definition, be experienced; it does not exist. It is not real. Therefore it can do nothing real. (Which might be another way to see that the mind is not real either…)

So what would a real witch do about Trump? Probably not curse him and his ilk… maybe… 

I tend to think a real witch, a village wise woman, would have completely ignored the stupid man at the center of the man-created empire. She might not have ever been aware of his existence and certainly wouldn’t have listened to anything that he said. A real witch would have been too busy doing the real work of caring for her community, mostly dealing with birth, death and illness, but also preserving the knowledge of place and acting in accordance with that knowledge. She probably would have loved Zoom for the ability to talk to others of her persuasion, but she very likely would not have had much time to spare on the outside world. And she probably devoted such spare moments as could be gathered together to being actually outside, watching the weather, talking with the birds and trees, tending her gardens and flocks, or just enjoying the wonder of all this beautiful world that provides for all our needs in such abundance.

Would she have been an activist? Not by our terms. But she would have been in constant action, doing the work to alleviate social ills. She would have been the one to take soup to the indigent and give clothes to growing village children. She would have gone to visit the old and really listen to their concerns, truly addressing their needs. She did take in children both as apprentices and as adopted daughters and sons. (She did not eat them…) She would have helped the weak find their strength; and, I suspect, she might have on occasion been provoked enough by violent injustice to use some of her more lethal talents, maybe not to kill but to cause severe gastrointestinal stress for long enough to change behavior. If you want to see what a real witch was, you might read Terry Pratchett. He seems to have the measure of history, right down to weekly house calls to trim an old man’s toenails because he could no longer reach them.

And what do I propose you do with this history lesson? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. If you want to follow the Earth path, then look to the Earth, not to books, not to mind, not to ideas. And the Earth path is work, now more than ever as we try to correct for all the ills of Modernity. It is not just taking care of a place; it is putting that place back together, healing its body, helping it to breathe again. Even with the death of the Roman Empire, the village witch lived in a largely functional system. There is nothing left of functionality now. The American Empire has not merely eaten itself, as all empires do, it has eaten most of the world. Today’s village witch has to deal with the compost and the shit and the gaping wounds, as well as a substantial bit of finding the antidotes to myriad poisons. The village wise woman also had a whole body of knowledge and tools to draw from. We don’t. We’re making this up as we go. She would have approved, but she would have felt very sorry for us. And then she would have rolled up her sleeves and gotten to work.

Which the real antidote to Trump. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. There is work to be done and you, my dear witch, whoever and wherever you are, are the only person who is going to do it.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025