Pop Culture and Craft
Witches, get over yourselves: not everything in your Craft needs to be ancient or mysterious
So, if you've been here more than a minute, you might have noticed that I like to sprinkle my esoterica and occultism with a lot of pop culture references. Whether it's drawing life lessons from Food Network and Travel Channel stars, or using a classic Talking Heads song as part of a Sabbat celebration ritual, I find myself drawing off of lots of things that are decidedly NOT of the occult.
Sometimes I do this and I think, that's not terribly witchy of me, is it?
After all, what makes the occult so interesting to people is the idea of secret knowledge, that other people see a pile of rocks or a bunch of dried plants or a bunch of weird symbols, and you see the building blocks of how you're going to change the world. Also, pop culture is not exactly enlightened when it comes to supporting nature and so probably isn't a great way to nurture "earth-centered spirituality." It's certainly not serious and scholarly like those Hermetic magician types who pore over those medieval texts and who do their complicated rituals that must be performed EXACTLY RIGHT or else.
Pop culture isn't serious. It isn't enlightened. It's rude and common and ubiquitous. The Craft of the Wise, on the other hand, is supposed to be mysterious. Secrecy and hiddenness is supposed to aid our power. We're supposed to be keeping "the old ways," knowledge and practices that have been passed down through generations. Our lore is supposed to ring with ancient and mysterious power, and that is supposed to lend us a certain gravitas as witches. People aren't supposed to want to mess with us, and we relish that air of baddass-ery.
Witches, we need to get over ourselves.
Look, I love fancy tools and the delicious mysteriousness of a well-designed ritual that draws from ancient influences and evokes deep traditions. Shit, that’s why I practice in an oathbound Wicca-adjacent tradition that celebrates Celtic and Norse deities. While I have a healthy skepticism when people are too wrapped up in secrecy, I also understand how it can empower a working.
But all that stuff is not what makes you a witch.
A witch is tuned in to the spirits, elements and forces that energize the world, and uses their understanding of the ways that those forces can be deployed to make change in the world. And what makes a witch someone to be respected is the fact that their Craft works, and they work it for the good of the community. That’s precisely the reason it is called the Craft.
A craft is defined in Webster’s as “an occupation, trade or activity requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill.” When you are engaging in a craft of any type, it is about your skill and your actions. “It is a poor craftsman that blames his tools,” goes the adage, and that too is instructive as to what distinguishes what witches do as craft. As I am fond of saying in my Witchcraft 101 classes, “a tool is only ever as good as the witch who wields it.” The point of both sayings is the same — a witch’s abilities are not about a fancy athame or a super special blend of herbs.
Think about those episodes of cooking competition shows where they limit the chefs in some important way, by taking away access to fancy ingredients or to state-of-the art kitchen appliances. The point of those kinds of challenges is to truly test their craft as a chef — what they can do when they don’t have the best of everything at the ready, an endless amount of time, and an entire kitchen staff to help them. While sure, some dishes might end up awful, but a really good chef can take stuff purchased from a convenience store, or cook using nothing but the kinds of equipment you might find in a dorm room, and make something that feels like it belongs in a restaurant. That’s the excellence of craft on display.
So it is with the Craft of the Wise. We are often led to believe that the best witchcraft involves a dark candlelit hall perfumed with incense and an altar with candles and a cauldron, where witches chant and perform detailed rites invoking ancient gods. The truth is, the Craft is an everyday, use what you have around you proposition. Why do the old ways include tools like brooms and herbs and sticks turned into wands? Because that is what they had available. Every home had a broom in it. Every kitchen had herbs. An athame was just a rather special knife, and nearly every kitchen had a cauldron of some kind. They weren’t creating a special set of tools, they were using what they had ready at hand. These were popular items in any household, ordinary items. If you’re doing this whole witchcraft thing right, you can create a magnificent and powerful spell around a campfire on Saturday night using a bandanna and a sippy cup and lines from a Van Halen song.
Your life, as you live it, right now, is a legitimate source of Craft. The things you use on the daily can be given magical purpose if you have need of it. If you have a favorite pop song that to you evokes the lazy, hazy days of midsummer, then singing it at a Sabbat celebration on Litha makes sense. There is no reason why your ritual garb can’t be a fancy tracksuit. And there is nothing that says you can’t use your favorite logo from your favorite product as a sigil in a spell if it makes sense to do so in the context of what you are doing. And if you would prefer to do your spellcasting using a hip hop beat instead of some kind of more traditional chant, if that makes sense with how you do your spellwork, (and you can do so in a way that is respectful of hip hop’s heritage and roots in Black culture) there’s no reason not to.
If those of us who teach the Craft really mean it when we say, “the magic is in the witch, not the tool,” then we need to be open to the idea that while certain tools may have a traditional provenance in the Craft, that doesn’t mean that nearly anything at hand couldn’t be used as a tool. The fact that a witch wants to use non-traditional and even somewhat silly-looking objects as part of their spell craft and ritual doesn’t mean their Craft is lacking in power or that they are not serious about it.
As we develop our sense of who we are and who we want to be as witches, we can and (dare I say it) should draw learning from wherever learning may be had, including from pop culture icons. The story of how Persephone descends to the Underworld and returns was well known to people, just as the story of Luke Skywalker redeeming his father Annakin is well known to people today. Could one build a ritual around the Star Wars saga's plot line and use it to celebrate a Sabbat? I've never done it, but I'm not ready to say that there's no circumstance under which that might be okay.
The fact that something has always been done a certain way, all by itself, is not a justification for why it can never change. And the fact that a tool or a ritual or a spell has a storied provenance does not mean it is automatically better than one that you made up on the fly. That said, it's not like tradition and provenance are meaningless. The great thing about a ritual that has been done over and over again is that you know it WORKS. And things that are repeated over and over again can build up an energy of their own that you can tap into. Tools and words with provenance carry that energy within them, and that energy becomes part of the work you do with them. We learn things from the past and by incorporating them into our present work, we save time and energy because we don't have to "reinvent the wheel."
The point here isn't to stick your middle finger in the air at everything from the past so that you can, using trial and error, design an entire magical tradition around the works of Dua Lipa. While you're welcome to do that if it's truly your jam, it's a legitimate question whether that's truly the best or most efficient way to go about developing your talents as a witch. The point is that the Craft is not about making a commitment to some moribund practice of "the old ways." It's about being a witch using all the tools and knowledge at your disposal. And some of that knowledge base comes from the here and now, from shows on Netflix, from pop songs and current events. And some of those tools will be household items that our forerunners never dreamed of -- like dustbusters and paperclips. And that can be a legitimate part of Craft -- every bit as much as an athame and the Charge of the Goddess.
You don't need anyone's permission to do witchcraft. And whether something is legitimately part of the Craft is less about its provenance, than about how the witch is using it. The field is far more open than you might think it is. It's not a complete free-for-all, of course. But I'm still going to mine pop culture to fuel my Craft. because I am a witch everywhere I go, and everything around me can be part of my Craft.