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  People have been practicing magic in the British Isles ever since they took up permanent residence there fourteen thousand years ago. Ancient Britain was inhabited by the Picts and the Britons and the Celts, and its magical practices were shamanic celebrations of nature, the animals, and the seasons, and were passed down orally, through songs and dances, folk tales, and symbols painted on the walls of caves. When the Romans colonized the island in 43 CE, they named it Britannia after Brigid (Brigantia), the tutelary deity they found there, goddess of fire and of poets, keeper of the sacred flame and guardian of the wells. The Romans brought with them their own gods and magical practices. They built temples to the lion-headed god Mithras, born from a rock, and Minerva, virgin goddess of wisdom and war. They even built a temple to Isis in London, the Egyptian goddess of magic and wit, Queen of the Underworld, whom the Romans had fallen in love with on their sojourns to northern Africa and then adopted as their own.

  When the Romans withdrew four hundred years after they arrived, the Roman Empire had already converted to Christianity. They’d imposed their Christ cult on the Celts and the Picts, but the people of Britannia quickly cast the new religion aside. Instead, they favored the magical practices of the Germanic tribes who’d given them the language of Old English and their god Woden, god of the storm and one-eyed master of the runes; now they had Freyja, goddess of love and magic, and the goddess Eostre, bringer of the spring.

  Even before the Vikings, before even the time of the druids, there were cunning women, known as hags, or runans, leodrunes, or wicces (pronounced “witches”), all words for sorceresses of various types. They practiced divination with runes, knew the secrets of the medicinal plants, and served as priestesses to their people. England didn’t become Christian until the seventh century CE, when missionaries from Rome insinuated themselves back into the political structure of the feuding lords, eventually ending the pagan reign.

  Around that same time, the word witch began to take on a negative connotation, the other words for magical women disappearing from usage entirely. With the Inquisitions of medieval Europe, magic went underground. It would reappear sporadically over the next millennia, via the practices of John Dee for instance, court magician to Queen Elizabeth. A mathematician and wizard, he and his co-conspirators channeled an elaborate system called Enochian magic, which allowed the diligent practitioner to talk to angels.

  Whereas the magical practices of the pagans were folk traditions, involving medicines for the people, love charms, and midwifery, the magical practices of John Dee were informed by the values of his time. The Enochian magic for which he’s most remembered entails an elaborate system of calls and invocations rivaling calculus in its complexity. The purpose of this magic was to call angels and demons to do your bidding. You had to know their names, Azazel and Focalor and Ashtaroth, and understand exactly what office they held in the legions of demons if you wanted to command them. The magic of John Dee reproduced the hierarchies and systems of domination so common to feudal England. Though Dee was interested in asking the angels about the universal language of creation, which was supposed to bring about world peace, most of the time, Dee toiled for Queen Elizabeth in poverty. Even in Tudor England, spells for money were second in popularity only to spells for love. John Dee wanted to focus on unraveling the mysteries of the universe, but he had many mouths to feed in his large household. Much to the annoyance of the angels he worked with, he spent a lot of contact time asking them for money, even just to borrow a little.

  Our magic today is not immune from similar requests, and like John Dee, our practices reflect the time and place we’re living in. Today our magic is uneasily multicultural, anxious (rightly) over cultural appropriation, often delivered in bite-sized platitudes for expression on social media. The modern witch can also be, like our culture, oriented toward objects of consumption like crystals and candles, essential oils and magical jewelry, rather than on achieving justice and the restoration of the natural world. As is true of all humans, the contemporary witch is fallible, and I am certainly no exception.

  Even though John Dee was exiled for a time and died in poverty, magical practice in England was never completely destroyed. It would return again and again. In another example, most witches today include some practices drawn from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group that emerged from the Freemasons in fin de siècle London and included many prominent people of the period, like the poet William Butler Yeats. Its members traveled through ancient cities and the catacombs of the British Museum to unearth magical papyri inscribed with spells in ancient Greek. Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn drew their magical techniques from a synchrony of sources: spiritualism, the magical papyri, Roman antiquity, Celtic and Germanic lore, Arthurian legend, psychoanalysis, and of course, the magical practices of their forefather John Dee. They had secret rites of initiation and practiced tarot and the Hermetic Qabalah, astrology and astral projection, visiting the planets in our solar system through their visions.

  Many modern witches draw from the Golden Dawn’s ceremonial magic, not by choice, but rather from necessity. Over time, the folk magic of the ancient Celtic cunning folk was lost. It was forbidden to speak of it, and the rare fragments that were written down were mainly destroyed. Colonizers and enslavers though the Romans were, they were excellent historians. Most ritual and magic that survives from the ancient west comes from them, because they wrote everything down, and their practices were well-preserved by comparison to the Nordic and Celtic oral traditions, and have thus been picked up by occult practitioners today.

  By the time John Dee was practicing his “High Ceremonial Magic” in Elizabethan England, witchcraft, considered by the politically powerful to be a form of “low magic,” had already been persecuted in Europe and England for hundreds of years. In Caliban and the Witch, feminist historian Silvia Federici argues that the persecution of witches was based less upon a religious or moral hysteria over pagan magical practices, and more upon the rise of capitalism. The rising capitalist class needed to control the workforce. The capitalist need for a steady supply of labor power meant that women who controlled their own reproductive capacity through herbs and midwives (many of whom were witches) needed to be brought into submission. Further, capitalism required a division of labor into two camps: workers and reproducers of the workforce (i.e., the women who birthed and cared for babies and tended to the sick and the elderly). The former being paid labor, the second being devalued almost entirely. In other words, the work of women lost its value, women’s subordination to men had become an economic requirement, and the witch hunts were used strategically to make women accept their new role.

  Further, women should have no access to money. Anyone with access to money had access to political power. Because prostitutes had access to money, which wives who had sex for pleasure or obligation did not, prostitutes also became vilified as witches. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Federici argues that hidden unpaid labor, such as the work of women, indentured servants, and slaves, is a requirement of capitalism. Every bit of wealth accumulated in the United States, for instance, is only possible because of the land. No land, no industry, no business, no buildings, no resources to exploit, no products to sell. Most of the accumulation of surplus wealth that gave rise to the American empire was only possible because it took place on land stolen from indigenous people, cultivated through the unpaid labor of the enslaved. Even though capitalism pretends to base its economy on the free and rational exchange of labor for wages, most of the accumulation of wealth under capitalism requires an underclass forced to work for free, or at least under debt. Once women were completely subjugated in Europe, the capitalist raptor turned its eye toward the rest of the world, enslaving and pillaging in the name of the “free” market. People who practiced magic were considered primitive, and fair game for enslavement by the colonizing capitalist regime. Magical practices were always part of colonized peoples’ tactics of resistance. In the “New World,” for exam
ple, the syncretic folk magic practice of Hoo Doo was one resistance tactic of enslaved Afro-Caribbeans who were prevented from gathering their own resources and wealth by rule of law.

  During the medieval period, when witches were being interrogated and burned, a lot of the time money was actually the root source of the problem. The witch’s prosecutors often wanted a widow’s land, or to prevent the old women of the village from reminding everyone that there once was a time when land was commonly owned, and everyone could graze their herds for free. Witches were accused of causing blights to grain, or killing cattle (living symbols of the capitalists’ wealth). The practices of the witchcraft can never be separated from the economic conditions in which they exist.

  Now that I am a full-time witch, a good third of my clients come to me for financial reasons. Most of them have other things besides money that they’d prefer to focus on: family or creativity, or activism or their life’s purpose, but the fear of being poor dangles over our heads like a sword. Yet, when I was in London, I didn’t do spells for money or wealth, because I was conflicted about it. Deep down, I resented money, hated it, and also fundamentally just didn’t believe it could come to me any other way but through men. Before I was old enough to reason, the belief that my sexuality was the only thing I had of value was enforced both physically and in the culture at large.

  Magic happens in a field, a system of energy. We can’t go outside that system to do our work. Magical practices always reflect the social values, anxieties, and hidden beliefs of the culture in which they are produced. If we want to be able to focus our magic on more beautiful things, like communing with Spirit or celebrating the earth or liberating all souls from servitude, we need to focus on changing the larger systems that manipulate and exploit us. To do that requires a group effort. The spell of one witch alone, or even a hundred witches, is not enough. We need thousands of witches, in every city, in every nation, to participate. The struggles we experience don’t happen just because we as individuals are failing. The fact that we are so often convinced that our misery is our own fault, and not the direct consequence of deliberate political and social oppression, is one of the greatest examples of mind control magic the world has ever seen.

  England is the home of traditional Wicca and Ceremonial magic, both of which I knew about but didn’t turn to for help. I mistrusted them. I was brought up a witch, but not Wiccan. Wicca is a new religion, invented in the 1950s by Englishman Gerald Gardner, drawing heavily from the Order of the Golden Dawn and other traditions. He claimed it had been taught to him by a crone, a keeper of the old ways in a remote rural village, and maybe some of it was. In his version of the Sabbat, the High Priest and High Priestess led their coven in rituals practiced sky clad (naked), sliding their ceremonial blades into chalices, and other more literal practices of hieros gamos (sacred marriage). My mother always resisted the idea of the High Priestess, High Priest, or High anything. She felt it was against the communal, egalitarian ethos of witchcraft. Furthermore, those dynamics of power, particularly in the company of mixed genders, were too open to abuse. Even though today I am inspired by many of the early Wiccans—like Janet Farrar, Doreen Valiente, or Maxine Sanders—during my stay in London, I found no group that I resonated with or could turn to.

  Traditional Wiccans have a procedure for everything. Raising their athames (ceremonial knives) as tools of discernment and clarity to call in the Guardians of the East, or their chalices to call in the Guardians of the West—Guardians of love and of emotion, elemental spirits of the imagination. Traditional Wiccans often have a hierarchical structure and exclusionary nature, very much informed by the ethos in midcentury England. But I was a seventh-generation Californian; I had a native mistrust of systems of authority. Furthermore, and I think this is still the case for many interested in the occult, many of the folks in the magical scenes I found felt like ungrounded wishful thinkers or worse. Male Chaos magicians trolling the aisles at Watkins Books, an occult bookstore that’s been there since the 1890s, who felt like low-level scavengers trying to get pussy with their sigil magick.

  The notorious Aleister Crowley was an outcast member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, who then went on to found his own occult organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis. He had a lot of influence on the magicians practicing in London when I lived there. Initially I was intrigued, as his work is brilliant and powerful, but whenever I investigated deeper, the feminist in me would rebel. Crowley created the text for the Thoth tarot deck, but Lady Frieda Harris painted and created the cards, and it was her idea that the deck be made in the first place. But she rarely gets the credit she deserves. Many of Crowley’s acolytes argue that he was an early feminist, but there’s ample evidence to the contrary throughout his works.

  Pamela Colman Smith, a London-born artist and occultist, painted the Rider Waite (now known by most witches as the Rider Waite Colman Smith) tarot deck, the most famous and popular tarot deck, upon the request of British occultist and Golden Dawn member Arthur Edward Waite, and she died penniless, not taken seriously by the organization. Though I felt magic all around me in England, I knew I would not be able to get at it along the traditional routes.

  Wandering through London’s underworlds alone, I gravitated toward anything that could shift me out of the ordinary world, the world of hierarchies and oppression, of subway gropers, empty consumerism, melting ice caps, and mass hypnosis. Starhawk, one of the leaders of the Reclaiming tradition I inherited from my mother, says that magic is a shift in perception. I wanted to live in the world of the sublime, the extraordinary. I could feel it bleeding into my life sometimes; when I practiced magic or entered a gallery, I could feel it pulsing.

  I felt the magic, of course, when I danced. When through the rhythm and the drum, the ordinary world would fall away. In voodoo ceremonies, they say the initiates are mounted by the gods, ridden like horses by powerful deities who don’t care about the laws and rules of this world. When they appear, the air grows fragrant with plumeria; poverty and squalor cease to exist. The dirt parking lot of your life is turned up by the gods’ stampeding hooves.

  I could even feel the pulse of the divine when I was dancing at the Astral. Mounted by a wanton, fearless sex goddess, no rules to bind me, no scorn could reach me. But when I descended from the stage, the spirits would leave me. Nudity and eroticism were no big deal; it was talking to the customers that was the problem…and the management…and anyone in my “real life” who ever found out I was a stripper. Like Sartre says, hell is other people. It was other people’s judgments and their behavior toward me that made the sex industry hurt, far more than the work itself.

  And hurt it did. By the time I reached my final year of my BFA, I was in shreds. I got pregnant by the assistant manager of the Astral and had an abortion. I fainted in ballet class because I’d done too much coke the night before; then I got up and kept dancing. But I’d grown angry at dance. I saw dance like the jealous god in the Bible that commanded me to sacrifice the thing I held most sacred. If I wanted to dance, the Spirit of Dance seemed to be demanding that I sacrifice my body, the very thing that made dance possible, the very reason I existed. I knew that if I were to continue as I had been, I’d kill myself. I kept my suicide note with me, wrapped in plastic in case I ever jumped in the Thames, so my mother and my brothers would know it wasn’t their fault.

  Before a witch becomes a witch, she is abducted into the underworld labyrinth. At the center of every labyrinth is a minotaur, a monster. We each have our own monster; we each have our own underworld. In order to become a witch, the initiate must confront the monster, and then return to the upper world stronger and wiser. Neither hero nor heroine can escape the underworld without help. In fairy tales, when given an impossible task, the heroine turns to her allies: mice who sew her wedding gown, ants who sort her rice. But just as frequently, fairy-tale helpers are not to be trusted. You may eventually become a princess, but your helpers might want your firstborn child in return.

  I ne
ver knew who to trust while I was in the underworld. I had friends, some from school, some from work, but the time I’d spent in the underworld had made me mercurial and sharp, full of fury, desire, and need. Too much for most people to handle. The women I worked with at the clubs were a certain kind of witch: mysterious, hypnotic, hungry vultures at the carcass. Damaged and struggling, flinging our power in every direction, waking up in rooms filled with smoke and strange men, throwing ourselves at them relentlessly until they got scared and ran away. Our energy was chaotic and undisciplined. We were fire-starters, but not reliable allies to one another.

  There were men in my life who were just friends, whom I knew from around town, not the Astral. They knew my situation and wanted to help me. One of them, for example, wanted to help me pay for school by attempting to pimp me out to his rich brother (unsuccessfully, as I said no). Another said he would help me pay for school if I went with him to Paris for the weekend; neither his wife nor his mistress would ever need to know. Some of the men I knew were gentle, and to them I must have appeared monstrous: calculating, suspicious, defensive, even dangerous. If they were too nice to me, I’d sleep with their friend or disappear into the night. In the myths, it’s the heroes and princesses that get the allies, not the monsters. But monsters, too, have their goals. It’s just that the heroes have the gods to help them; the monsters have to figure out a way to survive on their own.

  Enter Medusa.

  Ovid tells the classical myth of Medusa thus: Medusa was a woman, beautiful and wise, a priestess of Athena, goddess of the arts, civilization, and just causes. One day Poseidon, the God of the sea, came ashore and raped Medusa on the floor of Athena’s temple. Outraged, Athena, a goddess frequently used as the mouthpiece of patriarchy, punished Medusa for her indiscretion. She should have been more careful, she shouldn’t have worn that dress, she shouldn’t have been drinking, she shouldn’t have smiled like that…Athena turned the priestess Medusa into a gorgon, a hideous monster with blazing red eyes, a gaping mouth, and hair writhing with venomous snakes. The gorgon retreated to an island in the Mediterranean to hide her hideous face in shame.