00:00:18.220At least if you're up here in the North with us.0.96
00:00:23.400Welcome, Silly Returning, to our bodies.0.97
00:00:27.320if like me you've been in a strange underworld journey fugue state maybe you're pushing back0.95
00:00:33.980up through the earth and welcome to our guest I'm super excited to get to talk about your work
00:00:45.360because it's so interesting to me I mean one there's a lot of really practical magic in both
00:00:53.540books, that's really juicy and fun to get your hands on and play with and learn your perspective
00:01:00.720on. And two, I wasn't so familiar with your background, and I would love to hear more.
00:01:07.420I want to hear first about you have a PhD in philosophy. I want to start there.
00:01:11.880Yes, I do have a PhD in philosophy. My PhD in philosophy is not remotely magical. I worked on
00:01:18.760the history of philosophy. I did my research on a guy named Immanuel Kant, who was a German
00:01:26.080metaphysician and ethicist writing in the 1700s. And my doctoral research was on, without going
00:01:34.620too much into the weeds, because no one, like there are three people on the planet who care
00:01:39.120about this. But broadly speaking, Kant was working at this really interesting juncture in the history
00:01:45.640of philosophy where some really significant advancements had been made in the natural
00:01:50.140sciences. He's writing about a generation after Isaac Newton comes forward with the theory of
00:01:55.340gravity and things like that. He's writing at this period where these really interesting
00:01:59.640developments have happened in natural science. And he is sort of taking a step back and looking
00:02:05.340at what the implications of that are for philosophy, for metaphysics and theoretical
00:02:12.320philosophy, as well as for Christian theology and ethics. So that's what I did my PhD on.
00:02:18.360And I loved it. People sometimes ask me, to what extent does that influence your magic? How does
00:02:24.280that relate? The honest truth is that it really doesn't. Kant was not fond of magic. He was not
00:02:33.000fond of mysticism. He had a book that he wrote in 1776, where he really denounced mysticism,
00:02:41.060magic and spiritualism it was wonderful working on Kant I really loved that project but there was
00:02:46.920nothing in Kant that I found operational or usable for my magic because his philosophy is just so
00:02:53.300opposed to the idea of magic it's funny my collaborator Amy Tora does a lot of these
00:03:01.680interviews she talks sometimes about how you can learn about what math to do like from bad parents
00:03:07.400and stuff. You learn a lot about parenting from shitty parents. I kind of am interpreting what0.99
00:03:13.280you're saying a little bit about Kant, taking that into, because you're clearly a really magical
00:03:18.340person. I like to think so. I think the big thing for me is that a lot of Kant's philosophy boils
00:03:26.820down to this idea that there are things that can be proved. There are things that can't be proved.
00:03:33.200and the things that can't be proved may exist, in some cases probably exist, right?
00:03:39.060So like Kant believes in the Christian God, but we kind of just have to shut up about it
00:03:43.820because we can't prove ourselves one way or the other.
00:03:46.940In that sense, it has helped me to be very quiet in some cases about my magic
00:03:55.320because I don't feel like I have something I need to prove to anybody.
00:03:58.000If someone else isn't into magic, I don't need to convince them.
00:04:01.880But I think there is also an element of so much of what we do in magic is about, did it feel right? Did it feel like the power was there? Did the result we were looking for happen?
00:04:15.180Magic itself is very much in that category of things that can't be proved. It doesn't belong to the domain of science. But within magical communities, we still have this ability to talk about it, even though it's not in the domain of the provable. That's where I really diverge from Kant.
00:04:31.880yeah my kiddo was telling me that this kid in our class always tells her about monsters but then she
00:04:38.540told him that she was a witch and her mom was a witch and he told her that witches didn't exist
00:04:43.340and she was like what do I say you know I was like oh I kind of like to just sort of be like
00:04:51.500oh you might be right and then give him a wink she spent a while practicing her winks oh yeah
00:04:57.760it's an important skill right yeah I like the idea of maintaining a little bit of
00:05:03.780mystery and an open space but I'm interested also in this idea and you talk about it in your
00:05:09.140books which are now united as one in my head as I tried to process them both before this interview
00:05:15.300tarot for the magically inclined and remind me the full title of the book on the Kabbalah
00:05:22.020So my first book was called Kabbalah for Wiccans.
00:05:52.020I think a lot of tarot books really focus on the Major Arcana to the detriment of the Minor Arcana, right?
00:05:59.380They'll have like 200 pages on the Major Arcana and then one chapter on all four of the Minor Suits.
00:06:07.320That's silly to me because they make up three quarters of the deck.
00:06:10.720They are, in many cases, the cards that are the most relevant to the kinds of day-to-day concerns that people want to read tarot about, right?
00:06:18.560Like, every now and then, you have someone who is on an initiatory journey of transformation, and you get a lot of those big major arcana cards popping up.
00:06:27.860But a lot of the time, it's just, am I going to get the job? Does he like me back? You know, things like that.
00:10:51.320But there's a little bit of history in this book, and it's a lot of exploring who the
00:10:55.840people were that helped bring goddess worship into the modern world.
00:11:01.680They were in conversation with ancient paganism, but as paganism was rebooting in the 20th
00:11:07.700century, what are the ideas, what are the influences, how are people talking about the
00:11:12.780goddess? And how do we see all of that in the way that we worship the goddess today? So that was
00:11:18.120this book. I'm so proud of this one. It's currently out of print, but hopefully at some point in the
00:11:23.440not too distant future, I'll get a second edition out. Okay, so before we get into the two other
00:11:29.680books in more detail, can you give us a little bit more of that story of how you become a Wiccan,
00:11:38.760how you become a goddess worshiper, how you become a high priest of Gardnerian. You seem like a
00:11:44.440white American dude. How did it happen? I am a white American dude. Very perceptive of you.
00:11:52.500Yeah, you know, this story changes a little bit every time I tell it. And not because I'm being
00:11:57.000deceptive or anything, but just because there are so many things that go into this story.
00:12:03.020Of course. Yeah. I was raised in a pretty firmly atheistic household. My father was raised Catholic. He was angry about that until the day he died. My mother, not particularly religious or a-religious in either direction. It's just not a big part of her life.
00:12:22.360But I grew up in a house where there was this default assumption that if you were a smart person, if you were capable of critical thinking, then you weren't interested in spirituality.
00:12:33.520And that spirituality was something sort of for uneducated people who didn't understand science.
00:12:39.520That kind of just turned out not to be true.
00:12:41.820I think that fundamentally you could put people under a microscope and there are two kinds of people.
00:12:46.580There are people who get something out of spirituality and there are people who don't.
00:12:51.000Around the time I left for college, I started to realize, much to my chagrin, that I was the former. I was the sort of person who really got something out of, in particular, like, myth and symbolism and ritual, right? And I wanted something ecstatic. I didn't want, like, sitting in pews in a church listening to someone talk, you know. I wanted dancing naked under the full moon.
00:13:15.380I had been reading tarot since I was a kid.
00:13:18.120I got really into tarot starting at age 11.
00:13:21.560Through tarot, I started exploring spirituality with the resources that were available to me,
00:13:27.100which ended up being a lot of public domain texts available for free online.
00:13:35.120Things like texts from the Golden Dawn, which is how I got into a lot of Kabbalistic magic.
00:13:41.140And then from there, I was experimenting with things.
00:13:44.180I was doing things largely on my own for a couple of years.
00:14:09.240Going back to, we were talking about Kant at the start of the conversation.
00:14:12.900and this idea of things that are provable and things that are unprovable, and that there's
00:14:19.660still value in engaging with those unprovable things. I think I grew up in a house that
00:14:26.140sort of said, well, if it can't be proved, then it doesn't exist and it doesn't matter.
00:14:30.340The journey for me was really coming to realize that these are things that I'm interested in.
00:14:35.840These are things that I care about, and I get a lot out of doing magic. I get a lot out of
00:14:41.300the particular brand of paganism that I'm involved in and that it doesn't matter whether
00:14:48.420that's provable because what matters in doing that is what it does for me I think that's so
00:14:55.660beautiful and I'm glad you found some people you could dance naked under the moon with me too
00:15:01.660dancing under the moon is my favorite thing it's so rad we have a really diverse coven we're like
00:15:08.940400 people from around the world going all the time, a lot of them not Wiccans. It seems to me
00:15:14.420like Kabbalah really makes sense from a Wiccan perspective in a way. It's kind of right there
00:15:20.760in some of the origin, as you say. But can you talk about, well, one, like maybe let's do an
00:15:27.620intro to the kind of Kabbalah you're talking about for people who are hesitant about engaging
00:15:31.980with a close practice. And then where do we see it in our lives? How do I, as someone who's not
00:15:38.800Jewish, not a Golden Dawn secret society member, not Wiccan, but I love trees and the tree of life
00:15:46.260is in my soul. Talk to me, Jack. Yeah. So I'll do my very quick version of the history of Kabbalah.
00:15:55.920As you noted, Kabbalah comes out of Judaism. It coalesces in the medieval period around the 10th
00:16:02.780century, you get a strand of Jewish mysticism that is incorporating a lot of esoteric and
00:16:12.780philosophical currents present in the Mediterranean at the time. You have alchemy, astrology,
00:16:19.240Neoplatonism, and all of these things coming together with a Jewish community. And
00:16:25.720they're sort of being incorporated into the mysticism that that Jewish community is
00:16:36.100practicing. Jewish mysticism itself goes back further than what we can reasonably pinpoint as
00:16:41.940Kabbalah. But Kabbalah is a type of Jewish mysticism that emerges in the 10th century.
00:16:49.200And it is a body of received wisdom that connects the Jewish people with their God.
00:16:54.860The word Kabbalah is derived from a Hebrew root, meaning to receive. And the idea of Kabbalah is
00:17:01.960that it is received wisdom. It is direct mystical revelation that you receive. Jewish Kabbalah
00:17:09.880still exists today. It emerges in the 10th century. It survives for the next 1100 years.
00:17:16.800It's still practiced today. You will still find people doing Jewish Kabbalah. That is not the
00:17:22.160kind of Kabbalah that I'm talking about. That's not the kind of Kabbalah that I wrote a book
00:17:25.100about. I have no authority to talk about that kind of Kabbalah. The thing that happens pretty
00:17:31.800much as soon as Jewish Kabbalah comes on the scene is that a whole bunch of Christians in0.99
00:17:36.740Southern Europe go, oh, that looks fun. That's mine now. Christianity develops a form of mysticism0.98
00:17:45.240that is rooted in an appropriation of Jewish Kabbalah. And Christianity sort of attempts to
00:17:50.800absorb Kabbalah and claim it for its own. This was also concurrent with extreme anti-Semitism.
00:17:58.600There were pogroms happening all over Europe at the time. There was a lot of anti-Semitic
00:18:02.960violence happening. And this was all part of a project of cultural erasure to try to get rid
00:18:09.620of Judaism by banning the parts that were too different from Christianity, by subsuming the0.89
00:18:16.240parts that were similar enough to Christianity, so that Christianity would be the only thing0.61
00:18:20.980around. That is bad, just, you know. But this happens very quickly after Kabbalah comes on the
00:18:29.500scene. And that Christianized form of Kabbalah very quickly works its way into Christian magic,0.92
00:18:36.980Christian esotericism, and it works its way across the European continent. Eventually,0.85
00:18:41.240it reaches a point where it becomes divorced from Christianity entirely. And it becomes a0.93
00:18:47.860significant part of magic in Europe. The religious language, either Christian or Jewish, has almost
00:18:56.460entirely been stripped from it. The religious context has been stripped from it. And it is just
00:19:01.360a sort of magical system that underlies a lot of esoteric conversations happening in Hermeticism
00:19:09.840and elsewhere across the European continent. By the late 19th century, Kabbalah is the gold
00:19:18.060standard of European magic and mysticism. You get some secret societies, in particular a secret
00:19:26.020society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, that try to use Kabbalah as a grand unifying
00:19:32.880system of magic. Kabbalah, the kind of that makes its way into European magic,
00:19:40.280is largely structured around a symbol called the Tree of Life. And let's see if I can find an image
00:19:48.000of it. I realize this is a podcast and people who are listening at home aren't going to be able to
00:19:51.760see the image. But since you and I are talking, we'll just pull up that image here. Can you
00:19:56.620describe it for folks who like just sort of gently, not in full? The Tree of Life is a
00:20:02.260two-dimensional image that is understood to be a map of different types of magical energy.
00:20:10.380It's a way of diagramming magic and how different magical energies interact with each other.
00:20:16.180It's also a veiled allegory for the creation of the universe. It talks about the structure of
00:20:22.080the human soul. There are all kinds of things you can do with the Tree of Life, but it has a set of
00:20:26.70010 sort of circular loci, which are usually called the spheres. In Hebrew, the word is
00:20:34.420spherot, or the singular of that would be sephira. And these 10 spheres are connected by 22 lines
00:20:44.560that make 22 paths on the tree of life. And so the spheres themselves are different kinds of
00:20:50.880pools of magical energy. You have a magical energy that deals with intuition and psychism.
00:20:57.680You have a magical energy that deals with harshness and severity and so on. And then there
00:21:05.060are paths connecting them that show the different ways that energy can flow between those different
00:21:10.660sort of magical pools. And this became a model for how to do magic, for how to understand the
00:21:18.300different types of magical energy that are out there, and for how to understand what you can do
00:21:23.680with them. If we look at Kabbalah today, there is still Jewish Kabbalah, and it looks very different
00:21:31.700from the kind of magical Kabbalah that was used by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.0.79
00:21:37.440Jewish Kabbalah is Jewish, right? It involves a lot of biblical exegesis, engagement with Jewish
00:21:44.900religious rituals and so on. And in the magical Kabbalah of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
00:21:51.600you see some things that are holdovers from that initial appropriation of Jewish Kabbalah that
00:21:57.900happened a thousand years ago. You see some Hebrew words in it, but it's really absent a religious
00:22:04.820context. It also has a lot of magical components that you don't see in Jewish Kabbalah. One of the
00:22:11.760big ones is there are 22 paths on the tree of life. Those 22 paths correspond to the 22 cards
00:22:18.360of the major arcana in tarot. So if you are looking at trying to understand how to connect
00:22:24.620two types of magical energy, or how to balance between them, you can look at the archetype or
00:22:31.360the symbol of a particular tarot card, and that will help you to work magically with those energies.
00:22:37.120Just as an example, there are two spheres near the top of the tree of life. Keter sits at the very top. That is the energy of absolute divine unity. It's pure oneness. It's undifferentiated. It's absolute potential. And then Chokhmah is the next sphere down. And that is the one that deals with energy bursting forth, change, dynamism, driving force.
00:23:02.100and if you want to understand how to bridge between those two very different kinds of magical energy0.94
00:23:10.220you look at the tarot card that connects them and in this case that tarot card is the fool
00:23:15.400which is all about this sort of potential to be anything right that divine oneness0.99
00:23:20.800can go anywhere hasn't done anything yet but the big thing about the fool is that the fool is0.99
00:23:27.140starting their journey. The fool is beginning to move forward. And so we have that leap from1.00
00:23:32.760stasis and oneness into this kind of radical, overwhelming, divine, chaotic change that we
00:23:40.260don't know where it's going to take us. There's a lot of magical stuff going on in the kind of
00:23:47.700Kabbalah that the Golden Dawn used. One of the things you said was, how do we use this? What
00:23:53.520good is it to us as witches, as magical practitioners? How do we make sense of this?
00:24:00.680And I think a lot of it comes down to Kabbalah is a framing device. Kabbalah is a way to help you
00:24:08.940structure and organize the magic that you're already doing. So I think a lot of people,
00:24:15.560especially witches, see Kabbalah and they sort of go, oh, that's ceremonial magic. I don't want
00:24:20.320to do that. That's scary. And they feel like it's going to, Kabbalah is going to involve
00:24:25.860wearing fancy colored robes, doing things on planetary hours, and you have to get a belt
00:24:32.120made out of lion skin, all of this ridiculous overwrought stuff that is very much at odds with
00:24:37.280the way that a lot of witches like to do our magic. And I don't think that's what it entails.
00:24:43.540I think that fundamentally the magical Kabbalah that I write about in this book is a way of
00:24:51.120organizing and perceiving the magic that you already do to make it easier for yourself to
00:24:58.460keep doing that magic and to go further with it. One of the great things about the Tree of Life
00:25:03.760is that it groups things together by likeness, by similarity. So there is a particular kind of
00:25:11.040energy that is associated with love, romance, pleasure, artistic beauty, all of those sorts
00:25:18.040of things. It's also associated with social connection, the bonds that we feel with other
00:25:22.440people. And once you have that framework for that kind of magic, anytime you are doing a spell or a
00:25:31.460ritual that connects to that energy, you can come back to the tree of life, to Kabbalah. You have a
00:25:38.240whole range of potential symbols that you can incorporate into your magic. You have a whole
00:25:43.340range of magical ingredients that you can use, you know, crystals and incenses and herbs and so on
00:25:51.040that all sort of connect in and correspond to this particular kind of magical energy.
00:25:56.380So I like to describe Kabbalah as a sort of magical filing cabinet. That's not the word
00:26:04.360that I'm looking for, but like an index card system, card catalog. There we go. That's the
00:26:09.880phrase I'm looking for. It's like a magical card catalog. You look up the reference for the thing
00:26:14.740that you're working on. And then all of a sudden you have this wealth of other stuff that's available
00:26:20.020to you that you can incorporate into your magic in order to take the things that you're already
00:26:25.400doing and just add an extra layer of depth to them. It's interesting and chiming with me
00:26:34.020differently to hear you talk about it than when I read the book to hear you talk about it as
00:26:39.820different types of magical energies rather than divinities or faces of divinity or aspects of
00:26:46.080divinity right it is also that yeah yeah so the tree of life is a lot of things at once it's a
00:26:54.740way of taking any magical religious spiritual thing and breaking it down into component parts
00:27:03.320so that you can look at it and understand it and see how it interacts with itself.
00:27:09.780And in talking just now, I focused a lot on magical energy
00:27:13.680because not everyone who's a witch has a religious practice,
00:27:17.340has a devotional practice with gods.0.56
00:27:20.100But also, yeah, if you are pagan, if you're worshiping deities,
00:27:23.940the deities that you worship, you can engage with through that Kabbalistic lens.
00:27:29.640You can say, okay, here's a solar deity who has myths associated with X, Y, and Z. I can find those myths. I can find things that are reminiscent of that deity in Kabbalah. Working through that lens gives me new ways to approach this deity and to go about worshiping them.
00:27:49.860I think I have a story in the book about a Slavic god that I was working with at the time, and I built a shrine to him using Kabbalistic symbolism, in part because this is a deity who we don't have a ton of historical information about.
00:28:05.460So the historical record of exactly how he was worshipped, it's a little threadbare. And in order to make that more robust and give myself something I could really work with, I pulled in some Kabbalistic symbolism that was familiar to me.
00:28:21.100The idea was sort of like, okay, these are the things I know about you. Based on these things I know about you, here are other things I think you would like. Here are other things that I think you would connect with. Because if I go to my Tree of Life, if I look at Kabbalah, other deities who share these features with you are also often associated with X, Y, and Z.
00:28:46.460so why don't I try x y and z with you and see how that feels and did it work slash here's my real
00:28:54.520question will you tell us a story about a time magic worked to the degree that you were like0.68
00:29:00.900that fucking worked so my ultimate success story yeah is a time I tied up the wind0.85
00:29:10.460which is old folkloric magic you read about in books right but you don't think that anyone0.99
00:29:15.480actually does it. And this is several years ago at this point, I was hosting a Beltane ritual
00:29:20.660in my backyard. And it was so windy that day. There was a storm that had blown up from the
00:29:29.020south and it was just so unbelievably windy. It was forecast to be windy all through the next day
00:29:33.740that it would be impossible to do the ritual outside. And so I went into my backyard,
00:29:40.440I took a big piece of rope with me and I danced around my backyard and I had this rope with
00:29:49.280me and I'm twining the rope around myself and I talked to the spirit of the wind and
00:29:57.700sort of made a game out of it said you know we're going to play a really fun game it's
00:30:02.100called the quiet game I talked to the spirit of the wind and said hey I just need you to
00:30:07.880be still until after this ritual is done and then you can huff and puff and blow the house down
00:30:13.740and at the end of that I took my big piece of rope and tied a knot in it about an hour later
00:30:21.100the wind died down completely and stayed gone until the ritual was over I untied that knot
00:30:27.620and it picked right back up again anytime I doubt myself magically I always come back to
00:30:33.440that experience because it was such a vivid and direct, I did magic for this concrete practical
00:30:40.580purpose. And I got the thing that I did it for. I love hearing these touchstone experiences for
00:30:47.600people. It makes me think of this line you quote in your book that magic is just other people's
00:30:52.360religion. It's a way we have of categorizing other people's practices or lifting up our own
00:30:57.760versus other people's. I want to ask you this. The phrasing of it sort of sounds jokey. I ask
00:31:04.340this often because I am so electrified by magical people. I hope you'll know what I mean when I say
00:31:10.340this, but when I picture you dancing in your backyard or veering away from an atheist upbringing
00:31:18.060into something deeply magical, who or what gave you permission? Like, how do we give ourselves
00:31:25.100permission to be that powerful? How did you do that? The answer is I had a pen pal. This was
00:31:31.940the golden age of pagan YouTube. And I'd been watching a lot of pagan YouTube. I'd been reading0.92
00:31:37.940a lot of the things that were available to me for free online, but I was sort of holding it all at
00:31:42.320arm's length and not really sure if this is for me. And there was a YouTube channel that I followed
00:31:46.980very small. I don't think she has the channel up anymore. I really appreciated her perspectives.
00:31:53.140She was smart, thoughtful. She talked a lot about her background in atheism and how she came into paganism and why she came into paganism. I sent her a message and said, hey, I'm trying to figure out this whole paganism thing. Can we talk?
00:32:09.580We were pen pals for years, probably three years or something.
00:32:14.620There was a lot of back and forth with us talking about ritual, talking about theology,
00:32:19.740talking about how you hold on to that vision of yourself as a smart and critical person
00:32:26.500while still giving yourself permission to go dance in your backyard with a piece of rope
00:32:32.860as if that's going to change the weather.
00:32:35.200she was incredibly formative and incredibly influential on me we lost touch a long time
00:32:42.400ago gosh i haven't thought about her in years but there's your answer oh i love a youtube stranger
00:32:48.980i have a youtube stranger origin story too i'll tell you one day but it involves a youtube stranger
00:32:54.180sending me a ukulele i want to talk more about magic that works but i wonder if we could talk
00:32:59.920more about the new book tarot for the magically inclined i think you'll really so it's not just
00:33:06.860like how to read tarot how to do tarot for divination how to use tarot for introspection
00:33:12.420or creativity those are all really interesting and deep practices but this is a lot of stuff
00:33:17.340i hadn't thought about before for actually using tarot in shaping the universe to your will do you
00:33:25.080want to talk about some of that in particular? I find it so accessible and interesting. Do you
00:33:31.100want to talk about stacking the deck? Yeah, absolutely. This book is about the intersection
00:33:36.680between tarot and magic. And some of that is magical correspondences that can help you with
00:33:43.960reading tarot, right? Understanding the four elements, understanding astrology and how
00:33:49.080astrological correspondences show up in the deck. Those things can enrich your divination.
00:33:53.500But then the flip side of it is magic works through symbolism and tarot has so much symbolism
00:34:00.940already built into it. So using tarot for your magic is just the easiest and most natural thing.
00:34:09.060When I first started doing magic, much of the magic I did was structured around tarot because
00:34:15.680it was a symbolic language that I already spoke. And it was easy for me to take that symbolic
00:34:21.300language and apply it to expressing what I wanted to see happen magically. There are a couple of
00:34:28.740techniques that I talk through in the book. One of the ones that's near and dear to my heart is
00:34:33.740stacking the deck for a reading, which I should say, don't do that if someone asks you for a
00:34:40.240reading. Like if someone says, hey, I'm trying to decide whether I should do A or B, can you give me
00:34:44.580a reading? Don't stack the deck. That's immoral. I thought it was so interesting that you were like,
00:34:49.140don't even pull a clarifying card like if you see the answer you have to say the answer i am
00:34:56.340sometimes a little too harsh on clarifying cards i think there are circumstances in which they're
00:35:01.040appropriate but i find that for myself more often than not if i'm in a reading and i want to pull a
00:35:10.440clarifying card it's usually because i already got an answer and i didn't like the answer i got
00:35:16.740And I'm trying to sort of make it be something else. So I try really hard not to use clarifying cards, because I'm sort of trying to police myself, because I know that I'm naughty and underhanded. And if I can get away with it, I will try to avoid having a reading that has an answer I don't like.
00:35:38.980Yeah, I felt very called out by that part of the book.
00:35:43.400I definitely do that where I'm like, well, no, this is, I often just am reading for myself.
00:39:19.260but other people are going to come up with things that never even occurred to me and I hope that
00:39:25.120people feel excited and empowered and able to try those things because tarot lends itself so well
00:39:32.580to magical experimentation I want to open it up for questions so folks who are listening this is
00:39:38.680your cue if you have questions you can drop them in the chat or you can raise your hands and we
00:39:44.420would love to chat with you. I want to ask one more question first while folks are maybe sorting
00:39:49.400out whether that's going to be possible for them. What is your feeling or what are your practices
00:39:55.280on magic for not changing your own life, not going deeper, not changing your material reality,
00:40:05.440but magic we can do collectively to make the world more just, less terrifying.
00:40:14.420I wish that I were more optimistic about this than I am. I'll start by saying that. I think it helps to maintain perspective on the scale that magic operates at.
00:40:28.040if I, as one person, do a spell, it can accomplish things that I wouldn't accomplish
00:40:36.460by normal mundane means. But it can accomplish the same kinds of things that one person can
00:40:44.600accomplish. I, as one person, am not going to be able to cast a spell that ends world hunger.
00:40:51.740That is at a scale that I can't influence.
00:40:55.660Now, if I get together with my coven, I am no longer just one person, I'm a group of
00:41:02.360people, and we're all working together toward a concerted magical goal.
00:41:07.320But a coven is still only, depending on the type of group that you have, the size of your
00:41:13.620group, it's still only anywhere between, you know, five people to some online covens might
00:41:19.900have like a couple hundred, you're still only a couple hundred people. Now a couple hundred people
00:41:25.220can do a lot if they're working together, right? You think about the ways that petitions can affect
00:41:31.880local politics. You think about the ways that if a couple hundred people go and volunteer at the
00:41:38.040local food bank or soup kitchen, that can make a big difference, but it makes a difference at a
00:41:45.400certain scale. And I think with any magic, not just magic for activism, there's a real question
00:41:52.520of, am I targeting this magic at a scale that is appropriate to what I or this group are able to
00:42:02.540accomplish? The more careful and attentive we are about the scale we're operating at with our magic,
00:42:09.780the better our chances are. So I do political magic, especially because it's a really scary
00:42:17.240political time right now. But I do really local political magic. I do political magic to protect
00:42:26.280people in my city. I do political magic to affect ballot initiatives that I am voting in. Because
00:42:34.840those are the things where I feel like I, as an individual, have the ability to put my thumb on
00:42:40.760the scale. Now, I know a lot of people who do magic that is targeted at a much larger scale.
00:42:47.620I don't mean to be dismissive of that kind of magic. I don't mean to say that people shouldn't
00:42:53.420try it. It's just that I think where I have landed is that I find my magic is more successful
00:42:59.500if I think really carefully about how big I am
00:43:06.780And I try to scale myself accordingly.
00:43:10.900That's super interesting and pragmatic and fair.
00:43:15.320It can feel like throwing pennies in the ocean sometimes,
00:43:18.240doing magic on great big world problems.
00:43:21.420Last thing I'll ask you before we open to questions,
00:43:25.220really excited for folks to get to chat with you
00:43:27.940If you have an extra 15 minutes, do you want to tell us where people can find you, how they can support you, how they can get involved in the work you're doing?
00:43:37.200Yeah, absolutely. I am not super present online anymore, just because a lot of social media has gone up in flames.
00:43:43.980I do have a YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is just my name, Jack Chanek.
00:43:48.460You can find me pretty easily if you search for me.
00:43:50.580I also have a tarot blog that I run intermittently.
00:43:54.260it's jack of wands w-a-n-d-s tarot dot wordpress dot com there's contact information on my blog
00:44:03.740which is how you initially reached out to me i'm not always great about responding but i do try
00:44:09.120um and yeah i'm i just try to be around so by all means uh if you're interested in talking to me
00:44:17.480connecting with me please do reach out i do try to respond and if i don't respond it's because i saw
00:44:23.280the email thought oh i should get back to this when i have time to write out a nice good response
00:44:28.860and then it just disappeared in my inbox what type of advice do you have for people who maybe
00:44:34.200do want to pursue finding a wicked coven to assess whether that's going to be a safe space
00:44:40.560for their identity for their ways of thinking about magic honestly i think there are dog whistles
00:44:48.120right if a coven says on their coven listing or on their coven website we welcome lgbtqia plus
00:44:55.500people that's generally a good sign now their version of welcoming may not they may think
00:45:02.400they're being welcoming and not actually you still need to suss them out but if they say we're pro
00:45:06.960queer that's a good sign there's a thing with gardenerian wicca in particular where there are
00:45:12.920transphobes. There are queerphobic people in Gardnerian Wicca. It's a community like any0.82
00:45:17.920other and it reflects the diversity of political beliefs that you encounter kind of across the
00:45:24.120spectrum of the US. So there are going to be very progressive, queer, inclusive, liberal-minded
00:45:32.400people. And there are also going to be people on the other end of the spectrum. There is a thing
00:45:37.220that has emerged in the past five years or so
00:45:41.740with the Gardnerian community specifically
00:45:44.800where a lot of the trans-exclusive groups,
00:45:50.600a lot of the groups that are really gender essentialist
00:45:52.700and then usually there's some homophobia mixed in as well1.00
00:45:55.200but trans people are really the ones0.97
00:47:54.540But I think that for any, and this is true of witches,
00:47:57.080but this is also true just in general.
00:47:58.500For anyone who no longer has the same religion or spirituality that they were raised with, there are positives and negatives, right?
00:48:09.500The positives are the things that you really liked about the religious attitude that you were raised with and that you find a way to incorporate into what you do.
00:48:18.780There are going to be things that you bring in, and that's good.
00:48:24.060And then it's not even a negative, but I think the challenge that everyone has to face is thinking about the assumptions that we were taught to make as children and unpacking those assumptions and unlearning them to make room for something else.
00:48:44.840Something that I see with a lot of people who are first coming into witchcraft, not just Wicca, any kind of witchcraft, is this fear that they're doing it wrong.
00:48:57.000There is a way that it has to be done, and someone is looking over my shoulder, someone is peering into my mind, not like telepathy, but you know, like the gods are peering into my mind, and if I'm thinking the wrong thing, then they're going to know.
00:49:11.960And that's an attitude that a lot of the time is a holdover from a previous religious upbringing, and that's something that we have to be attentive to, and it can take a lot of work to consciously let that go.
00:49:24.760And regardless of what someone's religious upbringing was, I think we all have that kind of baggage that we have to stop and interrogate and let go.0.70
00:49:33.160And that's true of the atheists just as much as it is of the Catholics.0.97