Seeking the Source
Why witches need to know how to history
Not every witch is a history geek, but it sure does help.
By now, hopefully you have learned that most of the stuff that has traditionally been taught in school about Christopher Columbus is wildly inaccurate. It's hard to say you "discovered" an entire continent when there are millions of human beings already living there. Saying you were even the first European is difficult considering that Viking explorers likely made landfall a thousand or so miles north some 400 or more years before you. And the whole continent becomes a hard claim considering you didn't make it past the Caribbean until nearly six years later.
It's not an unfair thing to claim that I was lied to by my grade school history books and teachers. They weren't bad people, really. They just accepted what they'd been told by white, eurocentric scholars and incurious curriculum designers who simply didn't want to disrupt a convenient narrative to acknowledge a much more difficult truth.
We live in an age of mistrust, where things we previously took as truths are being questioned, and in an age of reckoning, where we are being encouraged to look at the past with a more expansive lens. Millions of white Americans who watched the first episode of HBO's "The Watchmen" were in complete disbelief about the idea that an entire neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street" had been burnt to the ground and its inhabitants killed by white rioters (some of whom were deputized and armed by city officials for this purpose) in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921. They took to Google, and were shocked to discover that it was all true. A riot that massacred hundreds of Black men and women and children, and destroyed almost 40 city blocks, and they'd never heard of it? How could that be?
It shouldn't come as surprise that more nefarious people in the age of disbelief are using mistrust to build conspiracy theories that have become an entire lifestyle for some people. It is not hard to believe that a former President might leverage that mistrust to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, and create an angry mob that will help him seize power on the basis of a lie about a stolen election.
We like to think that we are too smart to fall into that trap. As witches we are "in tune with spirit" and we should be able to tell when someone is lying, right? Nope. The research shows that being more intelligent or more accomplished does not mean that you are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, there are some aspects of conspiratorial thinking that actually appeal to a smart or accomplished person's sense of superiority. Even supposedly “logical” or “scientific” professions are not immune. Lawyers, doctors, journalists, and other people who like to tout themselves as “trained to be objective” are just as likely to fall under the influence of misinformation. Because you are "special" in some way, you believe you are more are able to discern that the truth isn't really as you've been told, and the "real" deal is that [insert bullshit conspiracy theory of choice here.] Your “objectivity” will be bypassed by the need to feed your ego.
And let's just face the fact that as witches, we already are very prepared to live our lives based on understandings that lie outside of mainstream thinking. We LIKE the woo-woo shit and we are practitioners of magic. According to a good many people, that automatically means we've bought into something that is not unlike believing that vaccines give a child autism. (They don't. The scientist that first posited this was shown to have provably fabricated his "results" and has publicly recanted his claims. So y'all can shut up about that now.) So, maybe it's a good idea to not be so convinced that you are a paragon of rational thinking, immune from misinformation and disinformation.
Every person needs to have a solid understanding about how something becomes a historical fact, an accepted part of our social canon of things we know happened. But that need is even stronger for witches, because so much of our practice comes from so many different places and cultures, and so many of our teachers, whether they are the owner of the local witch shop or a famous witch with a podcast and a slew of books they authored, are dealing in word of mouth.
The best teachers, of course, do their homework. They may not have a Ph.d., but they do research. They know their history. If you want to be that witch that grabs all her craft from TikTok videos, you can certainly do that. And you might even enjoy a little bit of success with your work here and there. But let's be super real here -- the most powerful witches seek the fullest understanding they can get of the provenance of their Craft. They know the history and the science, and their first instinct upon encountering new magic is to ask lots of questions, and to be very curious about where it came from and how it got there.
When I teach a Witchcraft 101 series of classes, My very first class includes a discussion of the history of Wiccan practice. My second class discusses other historical influences on the Craft more generally. A lot of students who were expecting some Harry Potter inspired fever dream where they would trace patterns in the air with a wand and shout incantations end up disappointed. They want to cast spells! They want to know all the secret advanced shit that no one seems to want to teach them! Why, oh why, am I learning about the origins of Gardnerian versus Alexandrian Wicca, they ask in a whiny tone.
Have you ever walked into a party full of people, all of whom know each other but none of them know you, and more importantly, you don't know them? They have conversations about shared experiences, people they know, stuff that happened, and you don't understand what they are talking about and you feel like an idiot for asking them to bring you up to speed. And while it's not always true that they are all sitting there, silently judging you for your ignorance of their ways and their shared history, it sure can feel that way. Especially since you are already probably nervous and out of your comfort zone.
Welcome to what it can feel like to walk into your first community gathering as a new witch. Or your first visit to an occult bookstore. Or your first time checking in at a con or a festival.
I teach the history and influencers for two reasons. The first one is to give a new witch some context. Where did this practice come from? Who have been the biggest influences on it? What sorts of things have already happened? What conflicts and concepts have already arisen and how has this community responded to them? What the fuck kind of party is this that you have just walked into? I want my students to know enough about these sorts of things so that they don't feel totally lost when they go to that meeting, or that bookstore, or that festival.
The second reason I teach the history is because they will need to have the skills to determine the provenance of their practice. And it's only by teaching history that you can really teach people how to research history. Somewhere in those first two classes, my students and I will have a sit down where we will discuss proper historical research and source material.
There are always a few folks who are already familiar with it (usually they are either former history majors or historical reenactors). But it's always a bit of a shock to me how many people stare blankly at me when I ask if they understand the difference between types of historical source materials. If you're reading this and you're confused, you're not the first person to be.
It's an oversimplification of course, but historical sources can be divided into three basic categories: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
A primary source, first person account is an account by someone describing an event that they themselves have experienced, or an artifact that is actually FROM the time and place being studied. For example, a letter from Charles Darwin describing his trip to Galapagos while he is on the boat in the middle of his trip is a primary source for historians. It is usually both in first person and contemporaneous, meaning created at the time. A film created by the filmographer that accompanied the voyage of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance as a tool to verify activities the crew did on the voyage that appear in the film is a primary source. The actual cards from the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck that are in the collection at the Morgan Library are a primary source for what the tarot deck looked like.
A primary source also includes something that is contemporaneously created that describes an event or a person, but these are not first person accounts. A news article about the return of Shackleton's expedition, for example. A journal entry by an Italian nobleman who played tarocchi with the Visconti Sforza deck describing the cards would be in this category.
A secondary source is usually a history or some other account of a time or place or event or person, often compiled from primary source material. A book about Shackleton's expedition that tells the story based on the films and the journal entries of Shackleton and his crew and the news articles from the period is a secondary source. A magazine article or a lecture about the Visconti Sforza tarot deck based on literature and references to the deck throughout history is another example.
A tertiary source is an account that derives its facts exclusively from secondary sources. An article that surveys what different historians have to say about a tarot deck would be a tertiary source.
Generally speaking, the closer you are to primary, first person sources, the closer you are to a true understanding of what happened. Just like a game of telephone, history gets warped the further away you get from the events. The contemporaneous accounts pegged Christopher Columbus as an opportunist and a bully, whose governance of the colony he was put in control of was so cruel and awful that his financial backers in Europe dumped him like a hot rock. And yet, that image of the avaricious, cruel adventurer out to make a buck and get some power is NOT what gets taught in sixth grade history to small children. Somewhere along the line, as the stories were filtered through the lenses of historians and educators with agendas, the real Columbus disappeared and was replaced with this much more palatable story about the brave genius adventurer who gamely sailed to discover America.
So.....primary sources are the best because they are the most contemporaneous and closest to the action. EXCEPT that sometimes primary sources may be unreliable or inconclusive. One has to make room for the fact that humans are going to human. When Helena Brataslavsky writes to her friend that she had an experience with a certain type of spirit, it shows that Brataslavsky told that story to a friend. Does it show that the incident happened? Not conculsively. Does it even shoe that Brataslavsky believed it happened? Maybe. But she could also be lying to bolster her reputation. THis is why historians don't just accept a single source as the full truth. They look for a range of sources, and take them together to see what kind of picture emerges.
Because let's face it, two people can be part of the same chain of events and have a completely different experience. The account of the Tulsa massacre will look vastly different if you look at the letter from the white law enforcement officer to his uncle than it will if you read the audio recording of a Black survivor of the massacre who fled north to his cousins in Chicago. Neither one alone is the whole story. Deciding which accounts to focus on, which accounts are reliable and why, is why being a historian is not necessarily a matter of reciting "facts."
Why does a witch need to know this?
Because when you get offered a new bit of Craft, it helps to know the context. Where did it come from? Who developed it and why? While there are times when it can be appropriate to just drink the bossy little potion bottle that says "drink me" on it, living your entire life that way doesn't make you adventurous, it makes you dangerous. While certainly you don't need to know everything there is to know about a bit of magic before you use it, the more you know about the magic you are using the better you are going to be at using it. If the goal is to be the most effective witch you can possibly be, knowing why you're doing what you're doing, where it came from, and what others' experiences with it have been is plain good sense.
And when you go out and look for the provenance of your Craft practice, you are going to find a lot of source material. Some of it will be great. Some of it will be utter bullshit. The more tools you have to sift through and figure out which is which, the better witch you will be.
One of my favorite examples of this is "Tibetan singing bowls." Go into any witchy or New Age shop and you will see these brass bowls, usually decorated with symbols in a Southeast Asian language or a lotus or Buddha, along with some kind of wooden tool that you're supposed to use to make the bowl sing. You can't do a yoga class anymore where the teacher isn't using one of these. Ask what they are and you'll get some rap about how monks in Tibet have used them for centuries to provide sound to encourage meditative states.
Only no one in Tibet knows where they came from. I won't go through the whole thing, (you can read that here) but the tl;dr version is this: these instruments didn't originate in Tibet, and their use in "eastern spiritual practices" seems to date to a pair of American musicians in the 1970's, who used the bowls as musical instruments on an album called "Tibetan Bells." While Tibetan monks generally have never really used the bowls as part of any ancient practice, there is a sound making bowl in Japanese culture called a "rin," that may be what the Americans stumbled upon and used. Apparently the lore that these bowls were used by Tibetan monks was never really publicly questioned until recently. So the lie about their origin perpetuated itself until it became a truth no one thought to question for decades. And there are a shit ton of souvenir sellers in Tibet who make an awful lot of money selling these bowls to tourists who are fully invested in the lie.
How does knowing these bowls are not Tibetan in origin help you be a better witch? Well, it means that when you decide to use one in your practice, to add a bit of sound, you don't have to come at it bringing all this baggage of its invented provenance. It is not a centuries old tool layered with lore that you need to know and respect. It's a bowl, and if you rub it the right way it makes a pretty and useful sound. On the flipside, when something does have a provable associated lore that you've studied and become familiar with, you can tap into that magically and greatly enhance the working you are doing. Or, if the lore and history suggests its a closed or proprietary thing that you are not entitled to, it allows you be respectful of that history and choose to not use it at all.
In an age of dis-information, where people are all too ready to tell you a made up story to make themselves, their Craft or their wares (because they are almost always selling something when they do this) more attractive, it helps to know a little bit about how to find out more about whatever is on offer. This is why I teach 101 classes. It's not that my Craft is so much better or I know so much more. There are lots of witches who know more than me. But those new to the Craft need credible information from experienced people who are willing to stand behind their words, who they can ask questions to, and who will deliver a solid base, so that whatever comes next, the witch feels confident taking that next step.
Knowing HOW to determine whether something is historical fact or historical fiction is critical to knowing what you're dealing with. It will give you a better window into your tools, your practices, your forerunners in the Craft. And that will always make you a better witch.