Missing Witches - August 14, 2023


＂New Moon Magic＂ Audio Book Excerpt - INTRODUCTION

Topics
praxis and activism alchemizing death systems missing witches project
WF Theresa Reed AKA The Tarot Lady： Wreck Your Deck ＂New Moon Magic＂ Audio Book Excerpt - Chapter 7 New Moon In Libra： Geometry

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

144.18

Word count

1,629

Sentence count

98

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, find out how at missingwitches.com
00:00:05.340 or order our new book, New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools of Resistance and Re-enchantment. 1.00
00:00:13.200 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:19.740 You must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:22.180 In the lead up to an all new season of the Missing Witches podcast
00:00:26.300 and the release of our new book, New Moon Magic,
00:00:30.000 We're sharing with you, our coven, our listeners, snippets from the audiobook version of New
00:00:35.980 Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment, by Risa Dickens and Amy
00:00:42.520 Torek. Enjoy. New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment, by Risa
00:00:53.920 Dickens and Amy Torek. Narrated by the authors. Published by North Atlantic Books.
00:01:02.660 This is a book for all those hatching their own individual relationships to a new kind of praxis.
00:01:09.120 Praxis as in the actions by which a philosophy or theory is embodied. Praxis as in the craft.
00:01:15.780 How we do what we believe. How we make our beliefs manifest. How step by step we are
00:01:22.720 bringing our ideas into our bodies and the world. As the owner of House Witch Shop in Salem,
00:01:28.680 Massachusetts, Erica Feldman told us, quote, like witchcraft, anti-capitalism is a practice,
00:01:35.400 end quote. Here, we weave these practices together. Small causes have large effects.
00:01:41.780 As lesbian activist, academic, and poet Judy Grain, with 82 years of experience behind her
00:01:47.480 when we spoke said, quote, the steps will feel small, but they add up. And she told us,
00:01:54.120 our bonding is what makes a revolution happen, end quote. Step by step, we affirm our interdependence
00:02:01.600 and co-craft the revolution with collaboration. Use these tools to put a spanner in the works
00:02:07.340 of late-stage capitalism. Because for us, witchcraft isn't just a trend. It's a praxis
00:02:13.600 for the pre-utopia. It's a word we find useful to describe the meeting point of our politics,
00:02:20.300 spirituality, and art. A discursive space, a way of both imagining and creating a world of
00:02:27.140 post-traumatic growth flourishing in the cracks, and charting a path beyond the violence of
00:02:33.060 capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In our wildest dreams, you find this book in
00:02:39.660 a local library and use it to help disrupt the machine. Pick up these stories and use them to
00:02:45.160 release your astonishing power and to join forces with all those who are undertaking this wild,
00:02:50.560 enchanting, collective work of claiming common spaces and weaving flourishing communities.
00:02:58.100 Because no matter how often we are demonized and turned against each other by liars using
00:03:03.220 sleight of hand to rob us. The truth is, we are in this together. Quote, we are at stake to each
00:03:10.860 other. End quote. As Donna Haraway writes in Staying with the Trouble, end quote, our job is to make the
00:03:17.500 Anthropocene as short, thin as possible, and to cultivate with each other, in every way imaginable,
00:03:25.100 epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Here, in the midst of destruction, in the heart of the
00:03:32.140 trouble. Our job is to replenish refuge. In a poem called For George Floyd, Fire,
00:03:39.760 Adrienne Marie Brown writes, quote, we will never be convinced to be expendable.
00:03:45.000 Alchemize every death system. Liberate our divine lives, end quote. We are at stake to each other.
00:03:53.740 We dedicate all our work, words, and tools to alchemizing every death system, alchemizing the
00:04:00.140 death cults of white supremacy and late-stage capitalism into our divine lives, singing out
00:04:06.240 with every divine life that we are not expendable. Audre Lorde taught us that, quote, the master's
00:04:12.240 tools will never dismantle the master's house, end quote. So we craft and carve new tools out of
00:04:19.320 these old boards and beams to find the vein of magic in ourselves, in our loves and communities,
00:04:26.100 to conjure forth our power to resist and re-enchant. With this book, we send out into
00:04:33.580 the circle stories of women, people of marginalized and expansive genders and sexualities, witches,
00:04:39.500 and all those who have been persecuted for a spiritual philosophy that resisted the destruction
00:04:45.140 of the natural world and our connection to it. People who have forged their bonds in the fire.
00:04:52.300 because the stories of people whose knowledge was occulted hold power. We share stories of
00:04:58.620 the tools these ancestors used to amplify and extend their power so that you might amplify
00:05:05.400 and extend your own. After writing Missing Witches, Recovering True Histories of Feminist 0.59
00:05:11.100 Magic, Tracing the Immutable Wheel of the Year, we were left with a feeling that what came next
00:05:16.700 was to look for things we could control, to look through the lives of missing witches for stories
00:05:22.280 of their tools, tools that could be put to the work of feminist, anti-racist, decolonized and 1.00
00:05:28.820 unsettled utopian world building. We have no say in the turning of the wheel, but we can turn our 0.83
00:05:34.960 plowshares to the planting of new seeds. As Lane Redmond wrote, quote, cultural transformation begins
00:05:42.280 with individual transformation, end quote. The tools you'll find in this book might not be able
00:05:48.160 to change lead into gold, or water into wine, but they can transform the mundane into the sacred.
00:05:55.740 They can transform us, our lives, and with the rippling effect we know magic has, our culture
00:06:03.520 as a whole. As above, so below. As within, so without. This book is not about the conventional
00:06:12.720 tools you'll find in your local Wiccan shop, though a cauldron might appear in the potions
00:06:17.760 and poisons chapter, a wand in ritual and ceremony, an athame in needles and knives.
00:06:25.340 These specific objects are not the focus. We love the witch aesthetic, the pentagram etched
00:06:31.560 mortar and pestle, velvet cloaks, stacks of tarot cards and oracle decks. They bring us joy.
00:06:38.660 Supporting the makers who create them connects us to them,
00:06:41.380 and it feels like this heightens the magic that we bring from within ourselves.
00:06:45.560 But these accoutrements are not the magic.
00:06:48.820 You are the magic.
00:06:50.940 The tools you'll find in this book are those that you can access free or cheap at any time.
00:06:56.420 These are the tools that need not and often cannot be bought.
00:07:00.380 They are action items, modes of conversation between yourself and nature,
00:07:05.540 between all of us and the divine.
00:07:07.340 however you define or observe that. For us, sometimes the divine is our collective
00:07:14.080 interspecies ancestry. Sometimes the divine is an emergent property of the complex network that is
00:07:20.280 life and all its stories and archetypes. Sometimes it is a shared sense of self,
00:07:25.560 of awakeness. Sometimes it is the wind. Whatever you believe, the tools in this book contain power
00:07:33.080 for atheist practitioners and Gaia worshipers and Christian servants of the Loire alike.
00:07:38.760 These universal tools are gifts from the totality of human history that help us to process trauma,
00:07:45.120 pain, love, and joy and make meaning. They can connect us to an ancient, pulsing, web,
00:07:54.340 sanctified. Think of a hammer. It's a simple tool our ancestors would have made with stone.
00:08:00.200 you still could if you needed to. You can use a hammer to build a house, or you can use it as a
00:08:06.280 weapon of violence. It is up to each of us to inform our tools of their meaning and purpose,
00:08:12.640 and to use those tools to channel both rage and joy, to create and destroy, to sleep, dream,
00:08:21.800 imagine, and craft. You may have purchased, borrowed, or stolen this book, but it doesn't
00:08:28.260 come alive until you read it. In each chapter, you'll meet the historical and contemporary
00:08:33.660 witches we've found who act as role models for us on the usage of these tools, making world-changing
00:08:39.520 magic from pencils, dirt, and math. For our Missing Witches podcast, we've had the tremendous
00:08:45.840 mind-bending privilege to interview over a hundred people about their practices, research, art,
00:08:52.780 activism, craft, and magic. This book is woven like a magpie's nest, full of insights we've
00:09:00.540 gathered from those interviews, and from our own investigations into the lineage of witches past.
00:09:06.180 We are still looking for the witches we've been missing. In our first book, Missing Witches,
00:09:12.020 Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic, we wrote that missing witches for us doesn't just
00:09:16.720 mean missing, as in not there, but as in the French for missing, tu me manque, which translates
00:09:23.340 directly as, you are missing from me. You are a piece of myself that I lack. Over time, we've
00:09:31.220 realized that we are the missing witches, and the word missing in this context is a verb.
00:09:37.500 We are the ones who have been missing you. We come from a place of longing and lack. We are witches
00:09:45.040 driven by our sense that we are missing people, missing perspectives, stories, and possible
00:09:51.000 worlds. And so we see the Missing Witches project, including this book of new moon magic, as an act
00:09:57.040 of science fiction and speculative futurism. What will our world views and world look like
00:10:03.340 when we reintegrate marginalized, obscured, violated, missing wisdom? What kind of community
00:10:10.160 and identity can we find if we follow our own longing? We are searching always for a philosophy,
00:10:17.640 identity, and relationship with the natural world and with the universe. We have been longing for
00:10:23.660 kinship and a way of relating that speaks to a void in us. We have been missing you, all of you.
00:10:31.740 None are expendable. So we go looking. We offer these true stories of real witches to conjure
00:10:38.880 the magic of possibility, possible worlds, because sometimes the impossible is just waiting
00:10:45.080 for someone to be first. You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:10:58.660 You must be a witch. 1.00
00:11:04.820 If you want to support the Missing Witches Project, find out how at missingwitches.com 0.58
00:11:10.200 or order our new book, New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools of Resistance and Re-Enchantment.