Traditional Wicca in the American South
Happy Yule, friends! I spent yesterday tending house, mulling wine, and preparing for holiday travels and visiting with family. Here are some thoughts on the turning wheel, the beginning of the year, setting intentions for a new year, and my next book.
Look! After almost ten years I finally learned how to make video thumbnails. Good for me. I get lots of comments on Instagram with folks asking about my the leather journal I’m using right now. It seemed to make the most sense to just make a video! You can find the link to the shop where I got it in the video description.
It’s out! It’s out!
Some of you, no doubt, could hear me screaming all the way from Charlotte, but for everyone else, Traditional Wicca is now available for purchase from all major booksellers, your local witch stores, independent booksellers, and directly from myself.
I reread the book yesterday, nervous. The fact is I wrote this two years ago. How would I feel about it now, after such a long production? I’m thrilled to be able to say that I’m still immensely proud of this book. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.
The early weeks of a book’s life are critical, so please pick up your copy early! If you’ve already finished reading it, please leave a review on Amazon, even if you purchased elsewhere. Amazon reviews critically impact how books are ranked and promoted (or not). The key is more reviews, not necessarily perfect reviews, so please don’t feel like you can’t be honest! I appreciate constructive feedback of all kinds, and you’ll be doing a lot to help other people find me and my work, which means I can afford to keep writing and traveling to Pagan and magical events for workshops.
Buy an autographed copy from me here!
You can also buy directly from Llewellyn!
Also check back at http://www.thornthewitch.com for my new events page, where I’ll post upcoming book talks, workshops, and other appearances as I tour for the book over the next few months.
There’s this thing I do that I’m trying to get a handle on. It’s like it’s some inherent part of my personality that I just can’t shake, and it gets me in trouble: I take the things I’m passionate about and I turn them into work.
There’s this maxim that’s been floating around forever that if turn your passion into your job, you’ll never work a day in your life. Near as I can tell, this person (who, according to the Internet, was either Confucius or Marc Anthony, so what does that tell you) probably had someone else’s income and health insurance to supplement those passions. Good for them.
There are lots of people in Pagan and witch communities working to turn their traditions and magical skills into sources of income. Instagram is full of “Boss Witches,” and half of my YouTube friends ask for support on Patreon. I myself have a book about to drop, and am plotting out several others. I’ve sold candles and zines and all manner of other things over the years. We build tarot websites and open up witchy Etsy stores and leverage our social media followings into patrons rather than friends. Many of us can barely try out new recipes for oils and incenses without thinking, almost involuntarily, “Hey, I could sell this.”
On the one hand, it’s kind of awesome that there’s a market for these kinds of things. It means many people don’t have to work jobs they hate, at least in part. Witches have always worked for a price, and I’m no naysayer in that regard. There are many witches and Pagans out there who I’m very happy to throw my own money at because their work is amazeballs.
But there’s a thing I personally can’t seem to get around: when something becomes my job, it starts to drain me. I stop enjoying the thing, and it stops feeling like passion.
I don’t necessarily mean “job” as in “thing I do for income,” either. I mean “job” as in task, obligation, duty, or work.
Those of you—myself included—who are involved in any kind of planner community, even casually, should immediately think of the people who turn every mundane, automatic thing into a bullet journal checklist, just because it feels so good to check the box that says we finished something. Drinking water and recording the weather becomes a job. What started out as a fun, creative hobby that has the side-effect of making us more focused now makes us feel shitty when we can’t decorate an elaborate weekly spread that includes fancy Japanese animal tabs marking every stupid thing we watched on Netflix or every type of booze we drank that week. Where once we were happy, now we feel confined. Obligated.
I can barely read fiction because it feels unproductive. And when I do, I have to productify it by keeping track of HOW MANY BOOKS I CAN READ IN ONE YEAR or some such. It works for a while, but I find that the joy eventually drains out.
I’ve watched as this has happened to my witchcraft, my practice of tarot, my writing, my art, my practice of HEMA, and even my relationships (I’M GOING TO CALL ONE PERSON EVERY DAY TO SAY HELLO SO I CAN BE A BETTER FRIEND). I fall in love with a thing, I throw myself into it, I turn it into an obligation, and then I stop giving a shit because WORK.
It’s no good.
In the simplest terms, I’m not great at living from moment to moment. Everything I do I treat like a step within a larger project, and it sucks out the joy. It’s true that discipline is valuable, and it’s true that the disciplined usually reap the rewards. If you want to be a well-known professional writer, you need to write on a schedule, practice, produce, and make sacrifices where the rest of your time is concerned. If you want to look like a swimsuit model, you need to strictly track your diet and workout vigorously. There are no cheat days.
The difference between mediocrity and greatness is sacrifice, one of my music professors used to say.
She was right, but here’s the rub: those aren’t the only two options. It’s okay to choose something in the middle.
I’m going to try doing what feels good for a while, and not forcing myself into a set schedule on things that I love, just because some part of me thinks that I need a task list in order to be good at anything. As a high priestess, circle with my coven became a drag when I turned it into a chore and started neglecting other parts of my Craft life. Writing became a drag when I instituted unmanageable daily word counts. Fencing became a drag when I let the outcome of tournaments define the value of the thing itself. And my bullet journal is for fun, not for punishing myself when I ignore it for days on end.
It’s cool to make money writing and doing witch stuff, but when I have to, I eventually stop loving what I’m doing. On those days, I’m grateful for my meaningless paycheck-driven job that I can leave at the door every day. It turns out, at least for me, it’s not always a good thing to turn our passions into our jobs. Especially when we’re already not great at finding that balance between work and not-work.
Sorry, Marc Anthony.
I’ve been pretty quiet on the Internet lately. I haven’t blogged, haven’t posted to Facebook, and have just generally been keeping to myself these days. The Internet is pretty amazing a lot of the time, but I think sometimes we use it as a replacement for actually getting out and doing things. I find that I get online to check something or look something up, and suddenly I get sucked into some rabbit hole and lose whole hours. I needed a break.
I’m up to a lot these days. Traditional Wicca: A Seeker’s Guide is up on Amazon, and I just can’t get over it. A friend pointed out just this weekend that I now have an author profile on Llewellyn’s website. It’s incredible to me that I grew up in the Craft (and in general) reading Llewellyn authors, and now I’m one of them. This process has been wild. It’s slow, too. I wrote the bulk of Traditional Wicca almost two years ago, and in between I’ve worked full time and gone back to school. I get so busy with daily life that I actually forget about it sometimes, and then I get an email from my editor asking for me to look at something, and I go through the shock all over again. Holy crap I wrote a book.
Check out what Ray Buckland wrote about my work:
“Thorn writes with obvious sincerity, with feeling, and from experience. Her book covers everything from defining Witchcraft, through the workings of a coven, to actual initiation and beyond. She warns that Wicca is not for everyone and–I am personally delighted to see–includes a chapter on recognizing ‘red flags’ when first contacting others . . . especially those who might claim to be more than they actually are. This book is the quintessential guide for the true, sincere seeker.”―Raymond Buckland, author of Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft
I was literally screaming when I first read this.
The best part is that now that I’ve done it once, I know it’s doable. I’ve got other projects in the works, and writing no longer feels quite as daunting. Currently, my focus is on the young adult novel I’ve always wanted to write. When I was a teenager, I loved Isobel Bird’s series Circle of Three and Cate Tiernan’s Sweep. I still love them. When I’m feeling shitty and need a pick-me-up or just want to feel that inkling of falling in love with witchcraft again, I reread the first books in these series. For a long time, I’ve wanted to take those same tropes and revisit them through my own experiences as a young witch (and can you believe those books are now as old as they are? First published in 2001, some of them you can’t even find in print anymore). The world needs more realistic teen witch stories.
Non-fiction is in the works, too, but I’m getting a kick out of shifting gears these days.
Changes are afoot in my online life more broadly. I’m doing some consolidating. I’m in the process of moving my tarot content to my main website, as well as some of my old Patheos articles. Just for the sake of keeping track of things and not feeling like I’m being spread so thin. I anticipate writing more on all fronts in 2018. I’ll be setting up a mailing list this upcoming year, too, so keep your eyes peeled.
It’s the start of a new school year and I’m back in my classroom getting my space ready for students. I’m also bracing myself emotionally. Last year was really, really hard, and I had a rough summer punctuated by some astoundingly alienating professional development seminars that made me seriously question whether I wouldn’t be better off looking for another job. Teachers are just so…extroverted. My coworkers are constantly talking about their “passion for teaching” and putting their “heart and soul” into their work. They spend their paychecks on classroom decorations and school supplies, and every one of them seems perfectly happy to sacrifice evenings and weekends to lesson planning, researching new strategies, and socializing at student events.
I am not that teacher. I’m a good ten years older than most of my coworkers, and I’ve worked other jobs in my life. I care about my students, but I’m not particularly sentimental on the whole. I don’t believe that careers are inherently supposed to have anything to do with callings, and I know that being a classroom teacher isn’t mine anyway (being a priestess is, but that doesn’t come with healthcare). I’m very introverted and guard my personal time fiercely. I don’t use platitudes, play trust games, or abuse exclamation points in my emails.
This makes my job challenging, as you can imagine. I’m good with students, my kids perform well, and I don’t mind the long schedule most of the time. I just feel like I’m constantly being asked to pretend to be someone I’m not.
But this is a new year, and I’ve decided to try to magic my way into not dying on the job. I’m going to woo my way into the skin of someone who Truly Cares, and I’m brainstorming ways to do it. It’s been funny, as I’ve been setting up my room I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Coyote and Fox, two spirits I’ve spent a fair bit of time with in the last two years or so. I’ve been hoarding white paper (a valuable commodity in the school system), making off with unguarded extra supplies, hiding food around my room, snagging copies of keys to rooms I’m not technically supposed to have, and anything else I can think to do to make this year more comfortable. I’m thinking about erecting a discrete shrine to Coyote and Fox in my classroom. (I’m just really into natural history. Yeah.)
There are also old standbys, like spelling the jewelry I wear, incorporating a glamour into my makeup routine (“I give soooo many fucks about today’s meetings. I am burning with passion about thinking maps. I totally understand all the acronyms. I loooove collecting inspiring quotes to hang.”), and placing magical items around the classroom (sigils behind posters sounds awesome). I’m also going to just generally try to be better about self-care (eating like a human being and not a starving coyote, running regularly, not waiting all day to pee, getting a massage so I don’t go legitimately insane because of touch deprivation). I also started a new bullet journal just for teaching. I’ve been bullet journaling for a year, but I’ve staunchly not incorporated my job stuff out of weirdly misplaced spite. I’m going to use teacher washi tape and everything in order to generate enthusiasm. Go me.
What am I missing? Are any of you witches classroom teachers? Send help.
It occurred to me in the middle of ritual, hitting me during libations:
I’m angry with the gods.
It’s not reasonable, and I shouldn’t be, and it’s depression and blah blah blah, but I’m pissed.
Fuck. I thought I was just sad again.
Wicca doesn’t really have the same kinds of moral codes and rules that lend themselves to having tons of expectations about the divine. Nobody tells us that if you behave well and toe the line, then you’ll live a good life. There’s no promise that if you make sacrifices and be extra committed, then the gods will bless you especially. Witches are their own agents of change. We can’t even settle on whether or not “worship” is a thing we really do. Most of us talk in terms of “partnership” with the spirits, or “honoring” the gods, or some such. We’re supposed to find magic wherever we are in the world, and cultivate beauty and change, and recognize the divine that’s inherently in us, and all that, and have-you-tried-keeping-a-gratitude-journal lalala…but fuck it. This is all really, really hard right now.
I do worship my gods. I’ve been Doing The Thing. I’ve worked for years, sacrificing a lot of the “normal” stuff that I’ve discovered in my adulthood that I really want and am secretly terrified that now I can never have. Beyond myself and my own practice, I serve.
Maybe the fact that I have expectations of my gods at all makes my religion necessarily shallow. “I am God” isn’t enough to earn my devotion. The Devil makes deals, and that’s what I expect, one way or another. But I’m still disturbed to discover that I have a bride price, and on top of that I feel cheated. When I choose to keep working (because I will, because that’s what I do), can I do so without the self-pity and this disgusting sense of martyrdom?
It’s gross, because I think religious people usually sound naïve and entitled when they talk this way. When people pray a whole lot and their loved one dies of cancer anyway, no one is really surprised. We’re sad for them, but we’re not surprised. We don’t really expect God to intervene. Even when we’re in the throes of something truly horrific, most of us still only hope. Maybe we bargain. We recount all of those past doings that should entitle us to one outcome versus another, retracing where we went wrong. We do everything we can think of that might tip things, even if it’s just because “it couldn’t hurt.”
Feeling angry means I had expectations I didn’t realize I had. I wasn’t just hoping. Here I am, surprised. And that makes me feel stupid.
It’s hard to model devotion in a coven when I feel angry at the gods (and when was the last time I heard another Wiccan talk about that kind of anger?). It’s hard to focus on the good things that happen when depression and anxiety won’t even let me take a full breath or get a full night of sleep.
Part of the reason I started keeping a blog was to humanize the experience of Craft. Most of what comes up in Google or in your Facebook feed is heavily filtered, designed to market things at you, or persuade you that a particular way of living is better than others. But sometimes it’s messy and horrible and you don’t know why you do what you do. Sometimes the gods tell you things you don’t want to hear or, probably a lot more often, they’re just infuriatingly silent. I also wanted to normalize depression, because so many of the conversations that take place in public Pagan spaces get things wrong. You can’t reason your way out of it or focus on the good stuff and trust it’ll go away on its own. It just is, and sometimes it has to be dealt with.
It used to make me irritated in grad school when professors would describe religion as a thing we do to make the world make sense, or to make the human experience easier. It doesn’t make anything easier. I don’t feel like things make sense. Devotion makes shit harder.
I’m okay. All of this is normal. All of it will pass. It just sucks to feel blindsided, and it sucks that I can’t just make answers or even comfort materialize, no matter how many libations I pour.
