Magic for the Resistance Page 2
Also, ask yourself why people question the ethics of magic for effecting change when they’re okay with marches, demonstrations, email campaigns, or direct action. What makes magic resistance somehow morally questionable when mundane means are acceptable? The answer is that people are uneasy about magic because they don’t understand how it works. But as activists, we are concerned with results, and if magic works, there’s no reason we shouldn’t use it.
But don’t you have to be experienced to do
magic effectively?
We live in a magical universe, and we are instinctively magical creatures. If you play lucky lottery numbers, pray for someone’s health, leave flowers at a loved one’s grave, or take notice of signs and omens, you’re practicing magic. Humans have worked magic since we could paint on the walls of caves or draw a circle in the mud with a pointed stick. Magic is, and has always been, a practice of the people, despite thousands of years of priests and religious leaders attempting to take it away. Those who say you need to be trained in specific techniques by their order or coven before you can work magic are just pushing their brand of dogma and probably trying to sell you courses.
The only way to learn about magic is to do it. The only way to get better at it is to keep doing it.
Is it okay to mix politics and spirituality?
Some of the greatest social movements have been driven by spiritual energy: the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements were in large part led by Christians and Jews, for example, and Mohandas Gandhi, a devoted Hindu, helped drive Colonial Britain from India through nonviolent resistance. Witches and Pagans have long been at the forefront of environmental activism, religious freedom, and feminism. And as you’ll discover in the following chapters, magic has been worked against political opponents throughout history, including kings, slaveholders, invading armies, and the Nazis in World War II.
But isn’t this just slacktivism? Shouldn’t we focus our energy on practical activities, like demonstrating, calling Congress, and sending money to organizations fighting for good causes?
You should be working on all levels for causes you care about. This book addresses the magical path, but spiritual activism is useless without engagement in the everyday world of elections, organizing, canvassing, protests, and other forms of on-the-ground action. Many have found that incorporating rituals, spells, and group magic workings into their social and political activism adds extra energy and motivation and brings better results. Hence this book.
Why this book, and why now?
A number of trends have ignited resistance movements around the world: the global rise of authoritarian and nativist political movements; religious and ideological terrorism; regressive policies harming women, minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community; ongoing wealth concentration in the hands of the one percent; cuts to basic health care and social services; and the accelerating impact of devastating climate change. We have reached a perilous moment in our history—and the decisions we make now may decide the very fate of our species.
With the exploding interest in witchcraft and alternative religious practices has come a realization that the political realm is not divorced from spirituality but requires it. The growing magic resistance movement has shown the powerful desire to reunify spiritual beliefs with down-to-earth social and political activism.
So let’s get started!
[contents]
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1. Amanda Yates Garcia (@oracleofla), “So great is the threat to our world now that we must all become initiates,” Instagram photo, February 19, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/p/BfYvkb8HhSP/.
2. Peter J. Carroll, personal correspondence with the author, April 2, 2018.
Chapter Two
Witches and Occultists
versus Kings and Nazis
The history of magic being used against oppressive authorities and regimes could fill a series of books, so we will only be able to skim the surface and look at some of the more notable examples. It may be useful to first ask why marginalized and dispossessed people turn to magical means to resist their oppressors.
Magic has always been inherently transgressive—socially, sexually, spiritually, and ideologically—making witches, Druids, magicians, and cunning folk the bane of, and an easy target for, political and religious authoritarians. Magic in the hands of peasants subverts the rule of church and state, and witches and shamans living on the outskirts of villages occupy the borderlands between the comforts of “civilization” and raw nature. Magic is anarchic, wild, and antistructural. It is no wonder it has always terrified those in power, and easy to see why it has so often been employed by the powerless against the dominator culture.
But whether it’s the sixteenth-century Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie cursing her landlord, enslaved Africans using Vodou and Hoodoo to fuel their uprisings in Haiti and the United States, Gerald Gardner and his coven raising a cone of power to keep the Nazis from invading England, the acid-fueled Yippies exorcising and levitating the Pentagon in the late 1960s, or feminist witches staging an occupation against a nuclear power plant, magic has always been a tool of resistance.
Let us now gaze into our scrying mirror and relive some of the more intriguing instances of resistance magic through the ages.
Witches versus Kings
968, Scotland
According to George Sinclair, a group of witches were caught reciting malefic spells while roasting a wax effigy of Scottish King Duffus on a wooden spit and basting it with poisonous liquid.3 The king had fallen ill and had been unable to sleep. When the effigy was destroyed the king recovered, and the witches, as might be expected, were burned at the stake.
1558–1602, England
Queen Elizabeth I, according to Francis Young in his superb Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, was “perhaps the most magically attacked monarch … in English history.” 4 The crafting of effigies and poppets and predicting her downfall by horoscopes were the most common accusations. Catholics were often suspect because it was widely believed that masses could be held for magical purposes.
In 1568 a worker found three wax effigies in a pile of horse dung near a stable outside of London. They were covered in magical symbols and stuck with pig bristles, and one of the figurines had Elizabeth written on its forehead and a pin stuck in its breast. The queen summoned a council, including renowned magician John Dee, to study the effigies. Dee did a form of countermagic to nullify the effigy magic.
After several people were tried, convicted, and executed for magical treason, it was discovered the effigies weren’t aimed at the queen at all, but had been created by a cunning man as part of a love spell for two unrelated people. One very lucky magician and alchemist, John Prestall, who had been awaiting execution, had his death sentence overturned.
Accusations of treasonous magic, however, continued throughout the queen’s reign.
1588, England
Sir Francis Drake, long rumored to have had dealings with the devil, was alleged to have met with a coven of witches at Devil’s Point at Plymouth Sound. Together, Drake and the witches Conjured up diabolical storms that drove away the invading Spanish Armada. Even today, when the fog rolls in, some people say you can still hear the chants of the sea witches.
Although its historicity is in doubt, the story inspired another well-known tale of witches and resistance—as you will read shortly.
1590, Scotland, Halloween Night
Francis Stewart, the fifth Earl of Bothwell and a man said to have a deep interest in the occult, allegedly met with a coven of sixty witches led by highborn women in a churchyard on the coast of the North Sea.5 Their goal was to conjure a storm to sink the ship carrying the new bride of King James VI, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland using black toad venom, an oyster shell, and a piece of the king’s clothing. Three storms drove her back before she finally succeeding in meeting
her husband.
Stewart was interrogated and tried for treason and conspiracy to kill the king but was acquitted, allegedly because the townspeople were afraid of him. The king eventually led an interrogation that led to the torture and murder of a number of women for witchcraft, but Stewart fled to France and then Naples, where he was said to have continued to dabble in the occult.
King James later wrote a book about witchcraft, Daemonologie, which is believed to have served as source material for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The book also fueled later witch hunters, such as the infamous mass murderer Matthew Hopkins, who tried and executed an estimated three hundred women for witchcraft. You probably know King James better for his other book, though—that famous translation of the Bible.
Circa 1662, Scotland
Isobel Gowdie freely confessed to becoming a witch and mistress of the devil after meeting him in the guise of a tall, hairy, cold-skinned man. As well as admitting to other malefic magic, including destroying crops and shooting people with deadly elf arrows, she is thought to have taken revenge on her landlord, the Laird Hay of Lochloy and Park, and the local witch-fearing minister, Harry Forbes.
With the aid of her coven, Gowdie made a poppet (doll) out of clay and baked it in an oven to curse the laird’s children and leave his estate heirless.6
It is considered likely, but not recorded, that she was murdered for her confessions of witchcraft.
Against the Enslavers
The horrors of the slave era, in which millions of Africans were captured by Europeans and shipped to labor on plantations in the Americas, gave rise to some of the most gripping stories of magic resistance in the modern world. African magical and religious practices powered revolutions and uprisings, even as those traditions merged with European Christianity into the hybrid traditions of Vodou in Haiti and Hoodoo, Conjure, and Rootwork in the continental United States.
The life of an enslaved African in Haiti (then known as Hispaniola) was short, with most slaves dying within a few years of their arrival. According to Mambo Chita Tann in Haitian Vodou, by 1789 there were eight to ten Africans for every free man in the French-controlled western third of the island, known as Saint-Domingue.7 Some slaves managed to escape, hiding in the mountains and leading regular attacks on the white and mixed-race landowners.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, groups of slaves began meeting to coordinate an uprising. In Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Woods), a mambo (Vodou priestess) named Mayanèt and Boukman, a Jamaican former slave and houngan (Vodou priest), held a ceremony for the spirits in which they sacrificed a pig and drank its blood. Vodou, a syncretic magical tradition that mixed indigenous Taino beliefs, African religion, traces of Muslim practices, the Catholicism of the Europeans, and even elements of Freemasonry, had become the glue holding together the enslaved revolutionaries. That powerful new spiritual awakening fired their desire for freedom.
Within days, violent revolts erupted and began to spread, with slaves killing thousands of their enslavers and burning hundreds of plantations. As the uprising spread, the French, Spanish, and British—who each owned a chunk of the country—began to panic. For the next decade, squabbles and battles between the European countries resulted in the deaths of over fifty thousand French soldiers and over a hundred thousand African slaves. In 1804, after Napoleon was forced to give up his claim to the island nation, the enslaved Africans finally won. Haiti—united by Vodou, its homegrown spiritual practice—became the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
Throughout its tumultuous and often bloody history, Haitian leaders, the Vatican, and Protestants have all tried to criminalize and eradicate Vodou. All have failed. Vodou is part of life for the majority of Haitians and has spread around the world in our globalized age, as have other syncretic African American magical traditions, such as Santería, Lukumí, Ifá, Palo Mayombe, Quimbanda, Candomblé, and so on.
In North America, too, enslaved Africans who survived the horror of the Middle Passage found themselves in an alien country, cut off from their religious customs, magical practices, and their healing plants, animals, and stones. They were also indoctrinated by their captors into adopting (at least outwardly) Christianity and its rituals. Like their Haitian counterparts, they found similarities in the traditions of Christianity and incorporated them into the spiritual and magical practices they brought from Africa. The syncretic system of folk magic that emerged, variously called Hoodoo, Conjure, and Rootwork, was a mix of African polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, European folklore, Native American folkways and plant medicine, and later even Western occultism.
Enslaved Africans found a number of ways to continue magical practices, even under the brutal restrictions imposed upon them. The spiritual centers of their communities were known as praise houses, simple structures built away from prying eyes deep in plantation woods or swamps. Many slaveholders allowed the construction of praise houses to keep slaves from different plantations from mingling for worship (and slaves were rarely allowed in churches). This unknowingly gave their captives a place to not just practice their spiritual traditions but also to organize resistance. As Jason R. Young notes in Rituals of Resistance, “Every act of conjure from one slave to another represented a critical form of resistance, and … a blow against the system.” 8
In the praise houses the enslaved Africans found a place to dance the ring shout (an ecstatic, counterclockwise circular dance), sing, clap, drum, venerate their ancestors, and invite possession by African spirits. Those who died were often buried in cemeteries near the praise houses, enabling discreet ancestor communication and veneration. In these ritual spaces, the connections to their homeland, its spirits, and its magic were deepened and honored.
Those recognized with special healing or magical knowledge and abilities, often known as conjure doctors or root doctors, were accorded great power. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, noted that conjure doctors were “the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people.” 9
These powerful magical men and women, of course, were seen as a threat to the slaveholder class. Hoodoo was a constant reminder of the enslaved people’s links to Africa, hence the practice itself was considered dangerous. Because slaveholders didn’t understand it, they feared its magic (and rightfully so, as it was frequently used against them).
And it was, in fact, dangerous; Hoodoo and conjure doctors were forces behind a number of slave rebellions and uprisings.
The story of Denmark Vesey, a freed slave and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and enslaved rebel Gullah Jack illustrates the deep power and influence of conjure magic as a driver of resistance. Vesey was planning a massive uprising known as “the rising” and hired a renowned root doctor, Gullah Jack, to help him organize. Gullah Jack had managed to bring his conjure tools with him on the Middle Passage from Africa to South Carolina and was especially feared and respected. His amulets were highly prized and were said to make their wearers invulnerable, so they were distributed to the plotters.
Vesey planned to take over the city of Charleston, raid the armory, kill the white slaveholders, liberate thousands of slaves, and escape with his rebellious comrades to Haiti. While working undercover as a preacher, he organized secret meetings and managed to get the support of thousands of slaves and freed blacks. With such numbers, and Gullah Jack’s magic, they would be unstoppable.
Before he could begin the uprising, two men snitched, and the plot was foiled. A local militia swept through the city and surrounding plantations, and Vesey, Gullah Jack, and many of the other plotters were arrested.
At the trial, which was held in secret, Gullah Jack first played the fool. But as the trial progressed, his demeanor grew darker. He began to make magical motions and gestures with his hands
, which terrified many in the courtroom.
The presiding judge, when pronouncing the sentence of death, said, “Your boasted Charms have not preserved yourself, and of course could not protect others. Your Altars and your Gods have sunk together in the dust.” 10
Gullah Jack was hanged, along with Vesey and thirty-four other men, in 1822 but is now considered an inspiring resistance hero and martyr among the people of the Gullah/Geechee nation.
Hoodoo, Conjure, and Rootwork continued to be tools for healing, justice, empowerment, and resistance among enslaved Africans and their descendants through the Jim Crow era and into the present. The practices were even taken up by many white people who recognized the power and utility of the distinctly African American tradition. Many contemporary African American activists have adopted these folk magic ways to honor the struggles of their enslaved ancestors and to reject the continuing patriarchal, sexist, and racist elements commonly found in mainstream Christian churches.
If you find yourself drawn to Hoodoo, Conjure, Rootwork, and other African American folk magic, see the resources list in the appendix.
Mrs. Satan: The Revolutionary Feminist
Who Spoke to the Dead
The explosion of Spiritualism and mediumship in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the rise of the movement for women’s rights. In that era women were discouraged from speaking publicly, as it was considered impolite and dishonorable to their husbands. The majority of Spiritualist mediums were women, however, which gave many women a voice in society for the first time. Spirits of great historical figures were being channeled through otherwise silent Victorian women, so men listened.
One of the more compelling figures in Spiritualism was Victoria Woodhull, an exemplar of early feminism and resistance to patriarchy. As a child, she believed she could communicate with her two dead siblings and her former caretaker as well as heal people magnetically (Mesmerism was all the rage in those days). Her spiritual guide was the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, who advised her throughout her life and told her at an early age that she would be a powerful leader of her people (and the old Greek turned out to be right on the money).