What's in a name?

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”

-William Shakespeare

Hello, Wiccurious and Witchynauts! I write these lines because many things have happened in my life in recent years (as in any person who is alive in this world), but in my case, the events that took place have implied a shift in fundamental questions about my identity and the configuration of my spiritual practices.

I have left the coven in which I was initiated in 2022 for political reasons, and my activism has reached new forms of consolidation in the light of what is happening collectively in the world and my beloved Argentina regarding the advance of the extreme right and anti-minority social movements (such as the transphobic movement, support for the Israeli occupation in Gaza and anti-feminist and anti-abortion organisations).

When I started this Wiccan path my view of the world was quite naive and perhaps a little ignorant. My spiritual quest consisted mainly of wanting to feel and honour Nature and the intrinsic divinity in it; and in that search, I found Wicca as the most appropriate way to approach this calling. It was immediately easy for me to find a name in this community to introduce myself and identify with. I wanted a name that evoked the Earth, but also that had a Celtic sound since this was the pantheon when I first started. Having been a philosophy buff for many years, taking the Greek name Gaia seemed appropriate to evoke Mother Earth and “wyn” simply added to the Celtic-sounding mystique I wanted to inspire. Ergo Gaiawyn became my witchy name.

However, far from me, today is the innocent witch who simply wanted to unite with the magic of the world. On this path I achieved many things, I participated in 2 covens, one in Italy and the other in England, I created 2 podcasts about magic and esotericism and I deepened my divination abilities and connected with new Deities. I also learned that magic is real, that reality is full of good and bad intentions, that not everything that glitters is gold but not everything that is gold shines either, and that magic that only aims for individual good is only half magical.

People generally tend to resort to magic for the following 3 reasons: health, money and love, and generally we also resort to it when the dialogues, will or vision of possible success through mundane means are exhausted, but we do little to sit down to reflect on why so often these worldly options are exhausted. It has become evident to me that we are in a time of saturation; saturated by impatience, saturated by lack of empathy, saturated by misunderstanding, saturated by misinformation and saturated by a system in decline. It is not surprising then how in recent decades the rise of magic as an everyday resource and problem solver has gained so much strength; and while I very much appreciate that we are heading towards a world in which magic is also cultural, it is important to pay attention to the fact that most of our health, money or love problems would not be such if we lived in a more just and equal world.

Being human has never consisted solely and strictly of being an individual, the essence of our species has an individual aspect, for sure, but it also has a collective one, and I have a deep conviction that magic was not created to be used as a response for only individual needs. For me, magic arises from the Divine and the Divine, in its purest form, is found in our Nature, in that which we carry within us but also that which surrounds us on this planet, and in the construction that as a species we make with each one of our actions. Therefore, in this vast magical path that I had the privilege to partake in, the need to focus and expand my magical practices to activist, political and collective objectives has become undeniable within me.

Due to the impactful personal and collective events that I mentioned in the first paragraph, I can no longer look at the entire spectrum of reality without a political eye, and in that political sight, my identity has also been refunded. Although my identity will always remain a witch, because it is who I am, for some time now my name, Gaiawyn, has not identified me, mainly because the name refers to 2 cultures that do not relate to my Latin American identity. I felt I needed to create a name that had a connotation that would identify me today as the activist witch that I am and that name is Gualicha.

Gualicha comes from the Mapuche term “Gualicho” which was the name of an evil spirit in that culture. That same term was later coined by the Tehuelche community and little by little it came to have the meaning of curse or spell in Argentine culture. And although through the popular view, the word gualicho does not invoke entirely positive interpretations or beautiful sensations, that is exactly why I chose this name.

I do not consider that activism has to be socially comfortable, in fact, I would dare to say that activism that is comfortable is not activism at all. I also don't think magic should be comfortable or functional to an unjust system. The magic that works as an escape is in my opinion the most dangerous of all. For a long time we witches sought to be accepted, we sought to try to destigmatize ourselves from a social perspective that historically was not fair to us either. But in the search for that acceptance, we lost something essential to being witches: we lost our ferocity. We try to say “Don't persecute us, don't hate us, don't kill us, we are good”, “We are white witches, we don't deal with the devil, we don't do black magic, we are good” (I will leave the conversation about the racism contained in that term, black magic, for another day); as if asking for permission to exist, to not be ostracized, so that instead of fear, we find in the eyes of otherness something of the love that was denied to us for so long. And that is the best of cases, the worst is when we decide to trivialize the meaning of the word witch to turn it into an element of entertainment. In any case, we ended up taming our presence so that it adapted to something comfortable, and that's why I don't want my magical name to be comfortable.

Centuries have passed since those women in tribes and villages were persecuted, tortured and murdered for christians or patriarchal ambitions, and yet the wounds remain open. But modernity presented new ways of building community, and then we found that witches are not isolated individuals who need to keep their practices to themselves in order to survive. With joy in my heart today I can say that no witch is alone if they don't want to be, that we exist openly and that we can identify ourselves, and that changes everything, because while before they were successful in hunting us one by one, now we can defend each other; and that union opens a door for us that should never have been closed, a door to recover our ferocity.

But ferocity for what? No one understands better than a witch how injustice feels and then our cause is not only that of witches but that of all those who suffer from this same inequality. Witchcraft will be intersectional or it will not be at all. Our magical gifts are power and therefore a privilege. We have the privilege of being touched by the Gods, Mother Earth and the Moon to create where consciousness does not reach, where the unconscious lives, where the will falters, where everything is lost, and if this privilege is not put at the service of those who do not possess it, is an empty privilege, not unlike that of any person who misuses their power.

If there is one thing we have to learn from the right-wing, it is that they have an amazing conviction, even when we know they are wrong. The right is wrong because its policies are always hateful and against others when we always fight to expand rights that we well know do not take away space from anyone else and improve the quality of life in the long run for everyone, and that is in itself an act of love. Love does not always win over hate, but love is not neutral in the face of injustice, love fights against it or it is not love. When we understand that we need to win if we want to have any chance of surviving as a species, then love will have that unbreakable conviction that needs to win. But that fight should not be painted with naivety.

In light of this pride month (I started writing this article in June) and also honouring my queer identity, I want to remember that the actions that originally gave rise to this beautiful global march that happens annually, were not a group of LGBTQAI+ people who one day they decided to hug with love the police officers who came to repress them and thus changed people's hearts; what gave rise to the march was a community fed up with being persecuted, a community that decided to rise, sometimes not peacefully, against the forces that were going to repress them until they achieved victory. As witches, we have a lot to learn from this community, much more than we think. The LGBTQAI+ community only wanted and still wants to be recognized as having the right to love and desire whoever they want without losing their legal status as citizens. But to defend the right to love, they had to fight and even hit back, we witches should do the same because unfortunately, the right-wing will never respect the rights we deserve unless we force them to respect them.

I am not a good or white witch, nor am I a bad or black witch, I am a witch who puts her power at the service of something bigger than herself, something that does have a loving goal but that is not always peaceful in defending it. From now on all my networks, podcasts and websites are going to change to my new name, Gualicha, and I would thank everyone who participates in the community if from now on that is the name you use to refer to me. I honestly hope that this change is not too cumbersome for you and I understand if some of you feel uncomfortable with it, but in any case this change is still irreversible.

Shakespeare was wrong, names do have power, the power to instil fear, to instil attention and to create change. This is the name of this new rose that is not white like José Martí's, but light blue like my Mother Country. This is the aroma of a necessary change.