A polemic on not letting the magickal community become a Nazi Bar. Written, as always, without authority.
Dearly Beloved,
I am not sure I understand what is meant by “community” in the occult/pagan scene anymore. As far as I can tell, most of what it actually means to actual people in the actual community is “prospective customers/audience for my stuff” and “prospective people with which to have sexy time”. When it comes to supporting vulnerable people who are supposed to be members of the community, most of the time we are on our own. Queer and BIPOC pagans are supporting queer and BIPOC pagans right now, but a lot of the others are throwing us under the bus, even respected elders.
For example, Oberon Zell threw us all under the bus recently in the name of standing together against the Christian Nationalists and it has the pagan world all abuzz. Thankfully I caught the screenshots of his polemic because the original poster has taken it down, I assume due to the extremely poor reaction it got.
Yup. That’s right. OZ equated Odinists to African diaspora traditions. He equated Reclaiming and our commitment to inclusion and equality to Z. Budapest and her proud and well-known transphobia. Why not, it’s all just paganism, right? Why would we ever expect ethics to matter in a spiritual community? How silly of me. For those keeping score, he also equated abandoning all ethical standards and letting paganism turn into a Nazi bar to the signing of the Declaration Of Independence at the end there.
My heart hurts.
My whole life has been spent as part of this world. My mom gave me my first book on magick at age 12. My first “real” job was as manager at 13: Real Magick at age 21. The first piece of writing I got paid for was an article on breaking curses for the newsletter 13: Real Magick put out. I taught my first beginner class at age 22 and opened the Sacred Grove with my polycule at 23. I’m 48 now and still working the mission. My dad spent his life serving this community. My wife and I both serve this community as priestesses. She is a teacher of witchcraft and I primarily write about magick, mysticism, and living the spiritual life and run Magie Sans Frontières, a magickal organization that provides protection, healing, and prosperity magick for those threatened by the forces of authoritarianism, bigotry, and colonialism. Magick has been my life and my world. Mages have been my people.
But I don’t know what my life has been anymore, and I don’t recognize some of these people.
I grew up reading “Green Egg”. Like I was an actual child of 12 or 13 when I started reading it. I remember reading an entire issue standing in front of a magazine rack in a Hastings bookstore as a kid because I couldn’t afford to buy it (I grew up pretty poor). It was the only connection to a larger magickal community the tiny occult scene in Victoria, Texas had. This was before the internet was really a thing. It technically existed, but most people weren’t on it yet. My best friend Butch would buy the new issue and we would all pass it around and discuss it.
I’m not perfect. Far from it. I can be coldly logical when a situation calls for a caring heart. I can be cruel to the point of sadism once I have been given an excuse by exigency or wrongdoing. I can be careless with people’s feelings, including my own. When I was in my 20s, I had very problematic attitudes and beliefs about romance and sex and acted on some of them. I was sexually aggressive and sexist in ways that seemed normal at the time in that community, but were actually toxic and unethical as hell. I’m very sorry. I have spent many years since studying ethics and working, in my fumbling way, to change my attitudes and behaviors for the better. When it has been possible and appropriate, I have apologized to the people involved and tried to engage in repair without centering myself. I have tried to seek and serve the Good, and I will continue to do so.
But I don’t see that from some of our community, especially our elders. I see Oberon Zell more worried that we may lose some pagan soldiers than he is that those soldiers might commit war crimes or turn against their own people. And I see a lot of people who are ready to allow harm to the most vulnerable members of our community so they can avoid having to hold themselves or other members of this community accountable for shitty behavior.
And while I am calling out Oberon Zell in particular for his misguided call for a toxic solidarity that throws the most vulnerable of us under the bus to share a big tent (big circle?) with proud bigots, it is not just OZ or even just the witchcraft side of my life I am calling out.
I am active to various degrees in various occult communities, and one of them is chaos magick. I have been a member (a zee) of the Z(Cluster) since 2000 and, while I don’t consider myself a chaote in any thoroughgoing sense, my overall theory of magick is compatible with much of chaos magick’s basic metaphysics and I still talk with a few other Z(Cluster) people occasionally.
In the last few weeks I have watched both Peter J. Carroll and Gordon White eulogized. Not just acknowledged when they died, as I did, but celebrated as luminaries. Sometimes their right wing bullshit was mentioned, sometimes it wasn’t, but in both cases the praise was big and foregrounded while the bigotry (excuse me, “culturalism”) and frightening accelerationist philosophy were in the background (if mentioned at all) and quickly waved aside. The clear message is that the famous pragmatism of the chaotes extends to ethics: Carroll and White both wrote good stuff on magick that works pretty well for a lot of mages, so it doesn’t really matter that they were ethically blameworthy in other ways that specifically went after vulnerable minorities that are already disproportionately victims of violent crime and political scapegoating.
And there is a part of me, the cold part that cares only for the mission and a well-optimized algorithm for accomplishing it, the part that is my grandfather’s creation rather than my father’s child or Tony’s student (yes, my father and my primary teacher had the same first name…ain’t magick a kick in the pants?), that sees the value in that approach. Do we care whether Newton was a good person? Do we dig deeply into the ethics of Turing or Maxwell before benefiting from their work or teaching their methods? Why should we treat the scholars of magick any differently than we do those of science?
But the reality is that magick is different. Even if you insist that there is no such thing as “spirit” for there to be a “spiritual life” about, magick has a character that is intrinsically ethical, that is about character and relationship just as much as it is about power and control. My teacher taught me to seek and serve the Good and to take the Ethical seriously much more than he taught me rituals or even mystical techniques. He taught me to be a playground supervisor before he taught me to be an adept. He knew that there were hundreds of books that I would spend my life studying that would teach me all the techniques and methods I would ever need. He was interested instead in formation, in a lived and shared practice, and in devotion, and he passed those values on to me.
But while I am eulogizing him, I want to also make clear that Tony was not perfect, either, and we were at odds a great deal in the years before his death. He was manipulative and controlling. He thought he knew what was best for his magickal children and he let us know about it regularly, eloquently, and with great determination. He was nothing if not doggedly consistent, a trait I admired even when it frustrated me. And he would interfere in our lives, orchestrating convoluted “lessons” involving third parties and our personal and professional lives that were ostensibly intended to help us grow. It drove us all away from him. One of us left town entirely and neither my remaining magickal brother or I had much to say to Tony (or each other, really) after a certain point. But he tried. Every day he tried to start over and seek and serve the Good anew. Some days he failed and some days he succeeded, but he always tried. I try to do the same. And that is all I am asking any other mage in this community to do. I am not demanding goodness of you. Goodness is too much to demand of anyone. It is too great a weight to bear on mortal shoulders for very long. In decades of trying I have only grazed the edge of actual goodness. I am just asking that you try.
Pete Carroll and Gordon White are dead. They can’t repair the harm they caused or take responsibility for their actions. But Oberon Zell can. I can. You can.
So many vulnerable people—especially young women, queer people, and BIPOC people—who were just seeking a connection to the magickal world have been harmed in our community. We can be better than this, surely. We are capable. We are mages, after all. We can hold ourselves and each other accountable and we can commit, as both individuals and as a community, to protect and support the most vulnerable among us. And that requires, at the barest minimum, not letting our community turn into a Nazi bar for the sake of some false notion of polytheistic unity.
OZ ended his polemic with a quote, so I shall do the same:
“People who want to end polarization by listening to both sides say they are doing so because they recognize the debate is a complex one, but listening to only two sides is kids’ stuff. It’s a product of shallow understanding and an immature spirit. Truly open-minded people don’t have time for that. Open-minded people are listening to too many other sides, and aren’t interested in leaving any of those sides out. Open-minded people understand that learning to accommodate all the sides isn’t weak, but strong; not closed, but open. Which is why—if you want unity—you mustn’t treat everyone working together toward the goal of a just and equitable world as an equal ‘side’ to the people who are being active intentional obstacles to that goal. This is what makes people who accept ‘both sides’ framing in the name of ‘unity’ so toxic.” -A.R. Moxon, “Very Fine People”, (2024)
Despite it all, I remain…
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: Odilon Redon, “Angel In Chains”, (1875)
Alice Adora Spurlock, also known as Soror Alice, Xenē, and Despoina, is a professional witch and ceremonial magician with 30 years of experience. She is available for hire to help you accomplish your goals. Learn more here. Book a session now (Tarot reading included!).