The Daily: 28 October 2025

Odds are few of you are as involved in the pagan community as I am. Though this is the fastest growing spiritual path, both in the world and in my own country, it is still a very small community. Moreover, even within this small community, I am in the minority in thinking that it might be good for the planet if more people embraced a pagan ethos of one variety or another. Mostly because those varietals don’t like each other very much and can’t come to a reasonable compromise on what a pagan ethos might entail (ecumenical differences suck all the air out of a conversation). But also because most prefer being outsiders in this culture, not mainstream.

I get that. I don’t want to be mainstream within this culture either. I want more people to leave the culture and find a path that does not result in daily wanton destruction of our home planet. I think a spiritual system that centers material reality on this Earth in this universe is more likely to foster care and connection than any one of several that claims humans are really eternal incorporeal beings that spend a brief time here, housed in a temporal body — often as masters and sometimes destroyers of inert material existence — before shuffling off to some changeless eternity. (Which is, by the by, as close to a description of my personal hell as can be contrived…) So I wish more people were Pagan. However, I too sometimes wonder if that is possible without making paganism a meaningless title, much like Christianity has become.

This is maybe a function of the path that led me into paganism. I came to being pagan through witchcraft, or maybe folkcraft is a better word for it. I’ve never practiced magic, nor even read much of the literature on what counts as “high magic”, ceremonial magic. But my path came from the earthier forms of the Irish Catholic faith and traveled through extensive study in comparative myth and folklore and folk practices like herbal healing and community rituals. I probably also need to point out that I am female, so very few contemporary versions of world religions spoke to me. At best, I was allowed to be a helpful servant or half a being, searching the world for completion from a male soulmate. A path that normally leads through multiple lives… (Again, hell…) The more common view of femininity is that we are soulless parasites, set on Earth to entrap the righteous — but also, paradoxically, to birth more of those righteous.

All this naturally led me to what used to be pejoratively labeled witchcraft, and specifically the form practiced by village women. It is not really a faith system. Most of history’s truest witches were Christian and would have bridled if you called them witch. Not least because that was an accusation that in the early Enlightenment would have earned you an indescribably horrible death. But also because they didn’t practice magic. They did not have special powers that made life easy. They worked hard at what they did. They practiced folk medicine and counseling and practical mediation between the village and the land. They served their communities with care work. They cultivated and preserved and passed on deep knowledge. They were civil servants.

Conversely, a witch, throughout most cultures and throughout most of human time, was a person who stood outside the community and caused havoc for the community — and this is still mostly true.

But the second wave of feminism in my country created a new definition for witchcraft. These historical village wise women, the modern feminists said, were practicing folk magic, hedge-craft, witchcraft. They were witches. Unfortunately, another small group of people had reclaimed the name (though not so much the practice) just before the feminists came around, and the feminists thought they’d found the true religion in Wicca and its various offshoots (none of whom talk to each other…). While most women quickly soured on Wicca as it was originally handed down from British witches, those on the West Coast set about refashioning it to better fit within their feminist ethos. They were Reclaiming this name as a word of power, a position of feminine strength. Which is a rather rich irony because witch was never a label applied to the powerful or strong. Some of the feminists knew this…

What was created in this odd melding of Wicca and feminism was a bewildering hodge-podge of belief and very little praxis. For decades, there wasn’t much of a process of interrogation or engagement with actual history or the living cultures that still practiced folk craft. Ceremonial magic, much of which is based on Judeo-Christian esoterica, was tossed together with Indigenous herb lore and no one batted an eye. Nor was it considered odd to have Tarot cards covered in pictures of white people or smudge sticks and abalone shells paired on the altar to an Egyptian deity. Early Wicca is a cringe-inducing mélange of cultural appropriation, and that went nuclear when it met white suburban women in a desperate search for meaning and a sense of self-efficacy.

I was a kid in northern California when all this was happening. I found my way to this place through the strange misty effluvia that wafted off the West Coast witches and clothed the Witch in sparkling mystery. This was mostly found in adolescent popular culture. Adolescent, in that the culture hadn’t managed to reach maturity and in that it was aimed at actual kids — though most of the feminist witches were far into middle age by then.

Like much of the culture of the 1960s, witchcraft had devolved into a celebration of the self. In practice, this made it obsessed with body image and eternal youth and securing wealth and [mostly] heterosexual love. But from the outside, on the surface, the images were of young women with power and occult knowledge. Fabulously beautiful women of power, that is… of course, a teenager would be attracted to that. Especially a teenager with a penchant for 19^th century literature and the art of the Romantics and a strong sense of disconnection from and betrayal by what was deemed normalcy.

All this is to say that I was drawn by a possible version of my teenaged self that was not doomed to the sad life that awaits most women. This was a me that already wielded power and radiated confidence (something that I’d wager no young woman ever feels). A version of me that could be wise and, if not strictly happy, then content, unbothered, living life by my own terms. A version of me that escaped this culture and lived out a weird fairy tale in the forested edge spaces, in a cottage on chicken legs that scared the bejesus out of the adolescent male. I did not want to be popular. I did not want witchcraft to be popular. I wanted to transcend the usual stupid concerns of adolescence… which, of course, is one of the main usual stupid concerns of adolescence… and, not unrelatedly, the main selling point of feminist witchcraft.

I suspect many if not most witches remained in that place of calcified stupid adolescent concerns. But once I had left adolescence, and especially once I became a parent, that sparkly teen witch no longer met any needs of mine. Moreover, I was increasingly concerned at how the image-obsessed self-absorption of the counter-culture had gone mainstream — and male — with devastating effects on women and kids and every other powerless living being.

By the early 21^st century, bohemian was a design style and witchcraft was a consumer industry, yet another way to buy your way to salvation from mundane mediocrity. As a kid, I didn’t question that most of the books on my chosen path of empowered women (with great taste…) were written by men. Because everything was written by men. But as I aged, I began to understand that this was not a story that men could tell — because they had no experience with it. It was telling that books written by men on witchcraft and magic were considered serious and important, even though they had little to do with practical life and nothing at all to do with actual folk craft. (And very little basis in reality, to be honest.) In contrast, women wrote on the fluffy subjects of hearth magic and herb lore, and even these tended to avoid words like religion or care or work. Actual folkcraft was deemed soft and irrelevant. As it always has been. Because it comes from the edge spaces, those places that do not have publishing contracts or the leisure of a life in pursuit of self-actualization.

So I wandered away from paganism for a while, thinking that maybe there wasn’t a religion for me. Maybe Marx was right, though for the wrong reasons. Religion doesn’t keep the masses in an opium fog. Religion is the path, the daily practice, the embodiment of your value system. Religion is a verb. It is belief in fairy tales and eternities and salvation that creates a passive proletariat, and that belief doesn’t have much to do with religion — though it has everything to do with self-actualization. Still… maybe, I thought, there isn’t a real religion, only this belief nonsense.

But I am a gardener and a mother and a geologist and a bookseller… and I just kept bumping up against the wisdom of my ancestors, those who practiced a path, who pursued knowledge, yes, but applied it to the betterment of life in their communities. These people who did not call themselves witches, but more surely embodied that label than any who reclaimed it from history, were examples of how to live in community, with other humans and with the wider world. And I noticed that they did not shy away from naming it work. And care. And they probably would have clawed your eyes out if you even intimated that this work was fluffy and irrelevant and soft… Though they never called it a religion.

Yet, it was. It was exactly a religion in the truest definition of the term. These were the ways of being that bound the community together. These were rules to follow by heart, traditions and customs that served as mnemonics, reminders of the deeper meanings of daily life. There may or may not have been gods, but that was not the point. The point was to serve life by living well. 

This!, I thought. This is what this world needs! This is what I was searching for even when I was drawn to the sparkly witches. A way to live well, a way for everyone to live well. A way to escape the culture that elevated one group of humans over all the universe. A way to be empowered and self-assured because you know you are living exactly as you are meant to live. And that you are meant to live! You are part of the purpose — as long as you follow this path of connection and whole living.

This is not a path that will fit within this culture. It can never be mainstream because it is completely at odds with mainstream, a whole different river, one that will drain the mainstream. But, unlike the mainstream, it is a path that will fit in this world. That fit is how and why folkcraft exists as a wisdom tradition. It works. It makes sense. It fits in the world. It fits us into the world. And that is magic!

So what is this path? It is not in popular books on witchcraft, though that does seem to be changing. There is a strain that is growing in the edge spaces, or should I say, hedge spaces. These [mostly] younger women writers have reclaimed not just the label, but the actual craft. The shouldering of responsibility toward the world and the doing that follows that ethical decision. There has been a calling out of self-absorption and a call to engage in actual work, hard work. Planting. Cleaning. Daylighting streams. Regenerating ecosystems. Pushing for local political action and regulation. Or deregulation, in the cases of zoning and such like. Running for office and serving all the needs of the community. Creating networks to care for children and elders and those who have been harmed by this culture. Creating groups to celebrate the beauty in this world with art and ritual (which is really just performance art). Fostering tolerance and nonviolence. Making space, financially and physically as well as emotionally, for healing and restitution. And asking forgiveness.

And they do this with folk wisdom. Some of it may sound corny. For example, moon gardening seems pure silliness… until you realize that these are the rhythms of time — the time of planting, the time of reaping, the time of resting and renewal. These rhythms are the revolutionary ways we fit ourselves into the annual cycles, and this wisdom has been all but obliterated by artificial clock time (which is really wage time). We need this real biophysical rhythm of waxing and waning in our lives. We are evolved to thrive in a world of cycles and do not function well on the clock. We need moon gardening. To reclaim moon gardening is to reclaim time.

Now, there has been some ludicrous baggage attached to these folkways, but the baggage becomes obvious as soon as you put these ways to work. The baggage — the baroque ceremonial nonsense which is more about posing and status than any actual reality — does not work. It falls off quickly and usually without much fuss or notice. Because it’s just appended baggage and it doesn’t mean anything. And because once you start this work, you’re too busy living it to pay any mind to the meaningless drivel.

And this is why I think witchcraft will eventually become mainstream and mundane. Because it works. And because once you begin down this path, you are too absorbed by all the work that needs doing to pay attention to meaningless drivel. Our culture will not survive the witch. She will turn away (perhaps a tad haughtily and melodramatically because she’s earned it). She will roll up her sleeves. She will get busy. And she will get things done. Which will prove a highly infectious way of being in the world. Soon, she will be doing things everywhere, and this culture will shrivel to nothing for lack of her attention.

I don’t want to say it is inevitable, because it’s not. It’s not magic mind over matter. It’s going to take a lot of actual physical work. But I think this is where most of people, most communities, will land. Because it works. And it doesn’t take any leap of faith whatsoever. Just a willingness to care and to do the work of care.

And that is exactly what I was looking for as a kid, perhaps what most people are looking for — a version of us that can be wise and, if not strictly happy, because there is such a lot of hurt to remedy, then content, unbothered, all of us living a full and meaningful life on our own terms.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025