Witchcraft, alchemy and politics

Dissonance

When it comes to alternative ways of spirituality, and by alternatives I refer to everything outside the well-established monotheistic institutions that lead with their number of devotees, we often find ourselves at a crossroads; we either feel comfortable accepting the dark side within us (as it’s shown in traditions like witchcraft, ceremonial magic, Palo and other ways of esotericism), or we try to liberate ourselves from it or suppress it (as is prevalent in Buddhistic, Reiki or other new-age practices) since the latter manifests a particular discouragement to embracing human aspects like attachment or the ego. It’s not my intention to indicate in this blog entry that one path is better than another but I do have a clear awareness of the path I choose for myself.

However, there is a clear dissonance in the way I present myself publicly, considering my clear and unapologetic role as a witch, and the format I use to present my therapies. One would feel more compelled to generate a darker preconceived idea of my persona, and yet the format and aesthetic I present on my website and therapies are anything but. There are some obvious and not-so-obvious reasons why I’ve chosen this dissonance to be present and the following article is going to try to break them out for you.

Ground reasons

First, let's go with the pragmatical one and therefore the easiest to explain. At some point, while I was living in Giardini-Naxos in Sicily, I ran out of money and I was able to maintain myself by giving yoga classes in the hostel I was staying in in exchange for cleaning, and going to the beach and offering tarot readings to tourists. I didn’t earn a huge amount of money and I honestly believe I wouldn’t have been able to move to another city if it wasn’t because during my last month I got a job in a pasticceria and get a train ticket to Palermo. But never the less I enjoyed offering tarot reading and even if the language was somewhat of a barrier (my Italian is not that advanced), the way my consultant felt accompanied, comforted and grateful for my services made me regain a particular feeling that I missed a lot: the overwhelming connection with the Cosmos that comes with fulfilment.

I missed this feeling so much that when I was finally able to move to London (a city in which the language provided somewhat more significant communicational freedom), I decided that I wanted to work reading tarot, and the first option that I tried was applying for psychic phone lines. I was accepted at 2 and even if the money was relatively acceptable (according to my estimations I was able to live with it by working 8 hours a day), I didn’t last a week. You see, the type of consultant that calls these lines (generally) is more interested in a very dark but not therapeutic approach to their life issues. They wanted to know if their sister in law hated them, if their partners were cheating on them, or who their cats liked more, them or their partners (I’m not making this up). So it took me a couple of days to realize my skills were completely lost on this job and that I had to be more selective on the kind of consultants I wanted to work with.

So part of the new-age lightful aesthetic of this website is about making the vibration I can provide as an alternative therapist very clear. I’m dark and light, just like anybody else, but I’m not interested in making my practices an enabler or an exploitation tool of neurotic behaviours but to provide a safe space to confront our darkness and shadows to increment the awareness and creative capabilities within ourselves.

At this point, one could ask, and very fairly so: “well, if you don’t want your consultant to be attached to very dark stuck dynamics as a way of living, why do you insist on presenting yourself as a witch when there is a clear image of this archetype that evokes these ideas? Wouldn’t be easier to present yourself as a healer?”

The answer has layers, the first one is: because I’m a witch and it’s part of my individuation process to learn to honour who I am. The second is because it’s through my magickal journey that I’ve learned to develop all the tools and therapies that I offer and so if a consultant doesn’t have a magickal mindset we won’t be able to work together. And the third and more interesting one, in my opinion, is because it’s a political statement that creates an impact on the collective.

Not evolutive but healing and progressive

I have enough anthropologist friends to have learned by now that talking about evolution in human-related subjects puts you in a delicate position, especially considering the dangers that our not-so-far-away past with social Darwinism brought humanity. I even run into a French “spiritual” person a few years ago who, to my appalled surprise, said that if his soul was reincarnated in Europe was because he had earned (through his past lives) the right to be in an older and more prosperous continent than the souls incarnated in Latin America. So no, I’m not going to use the word ‘evolution’ to describe the process of any of my spiritual practices but I won't deny I aim for a sense of progression or healing.

If someone leaves a session feeling exactly the same as when they got in I’m failing to see the point of what I’m doing, and if by the end of a series of sessions, a consultant (or as I like to call them, ‘lumofinder’) doesn’t perceive an improvement in their general wellbeing than I wouldn’t be able to feel really proud of the contention that I offer.

And just like I mentioned before, my therapies don’t have the aim of exploiting someone's neurosis or pain to maintain a “regular clientele” but I’m actually particularly focused on helping my lumofinders to learn and develop the tools that I use so that by the end of some moths they can apply my techniques by themselves.

Arriving at autonomy is a big goal in my practice, which leads me to my next point.

Fractal spirituality

This could be accused of social Darwinism but I promise you that it’s not my intention and since I’m not applying this observation to certain groups of society but to the collective at large I hope this doesn’t offend anybody.

I believe that the individual aspect and the collective are indivisible in a human being and that its manifestation is fractal. I believe that the collective will show different characteristics that resemble the human stages of development (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, etcetera) depending on how we relate with each other, and that “salvation” or “destiny” (however you prefer referring to it) is never individual.

In a non-globalized world, it was natural that communities would have different attributes depending on the environment, their history and the knowledge they’ve gathered over the years, but when we look at this globalized world some patterns inevitably begin to emerge worldwide, it doesn't matter what country you live in, and those patterns are the questioning of authority, the over fixation with sexuality, the need to find our authenticity and individuality, and the need for autonomy (among others that I’m sure I’m missing).

If we look at all these attributes and try to place them in a particular stage of life in a human being, this would fit perfectly with adolescence. Here is when my anthropologist friends tell me “trying to place humanity in a stage of life is implying that communities like the indigenous tribes that live in the Amazonia are “less evolved” and is also social Darwinism, not everything that you see in globalization is everything there is”, and also this is the time when I’d explain that referring to a collective vibration is not the same as considering someone more or less “evolved” according to the technology in their community or governmental organization. A collective calling is somewhat of an archetype that can take many forms that exceed specific materialistic manifestations. Even the indigenous communities are rebelling against how unfairly they’ve been treated by the country authorities where their land is, so here you have an example.

Destiny is not individual, at least not only individual. It’s true that we can only be responsible for our actions, and talking about how preponderant is the collective for all of our destinies might open the door for a lot of people who need to escape their fear of mortality to use prepotency to create a society they think we need and that’s never a good idea, but I’m telling you that believing that destiny is only individual will lead us to fall on a forest where nobody can hear us. Even those, whose lives broke with what humanity at large was immersed in, had an immense impact on history and the collective.

Due to this analysis is that the aim of my therapy is in fact to break with the idea that we need a figure of authority that guides us perpetually in our self-discovery process. I aim to provide the tools for my lumofinders to become spiritual adults who can find the answers within themselves because I strongly believe this is the next collective stage we need to achieve as humanity.

I always say that the problem with becoming adults in this current world is that we think we need to leave the child behind when in fact I know in my heart that we become adults to use our increased power of manifestation to make the dreams of our child real.

Expanding our eroticism

When it comes to sexuality, there is also an article in Spanish I published a few years ago that I might rewrite in English with the inevitable modifications that the passing of time and experience brings. The article in Medium is called “Expanding our eroticism” (but in Spanish) and in it, I explore the idea that eroticism is broader than sexuality and how the tabu that we have around the latter creates a fixation that keeps us from fully seeing and experiencing the first.

We can also tell that erotism is in a pre-adulthood state because generally, it’s self-centred and narcissistic, and, as the pornographic industry has shown us, it’s more attached to fantasy than to reality, and has obvious resistance to opening itself to another person in true intimacy because this is not possible without vulnerability.

To reach adulthood in eroticism is also to be ready to care for and protect others beyond selfish interests and feel true joy by doing it so. As in adolescence caring is something we think exposes us to being taken for fools and makes us feel more concerned about what people think of us and how proud or humiliated that can make us feel than actually what we truly feel for someone (here is where the fantasy has a predominant role too).

We are not mature enough to really understand what sex and love are and the power they held, but for sure, it’s not something we are going to learn alone.

Soul Alchemy

A few days ago, after I set my unconscious open to receive channelization for this article; I was washing my teeth when I had a realization.

I was wondering why animals didn’t require to wash their teeth to keep a healthy mouth and how fragile our specie is. And suddenly, as a rapture of inspiration, I considered something I had never thought of before, but in order to explain it, I need to tell you about an old obsession of mine.

In alchemy, there is something known as “kingdoms”. To sum up, the basics of the theory state that in the “As above, so below” there is a correlation between the ethereal realm of ideas, abstractions and immaterial manifestations like the soul, the mind, the spirit and the psyche (is they are all not the same), and the material manifestations in all their forms, which are categorized in the following: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human kingdoms.

To understand the difference between the kingdoms we can think that the vegetable kingdom contains the mineral with something else (that something else is unknown, or at least we haven’t been able to determine what it is). Following that logic, the animal kingdom contains the mineral, the vegetable and something else (maybe the same X as before or maybe another, it’s uncertain). And to finalize, the human kingdom contains the mineral, the vegetable and the animal, and… (you guessed it) something else.

If we think about this theory it makes complete sense. Plants as much as us, need and are made of minerals. Plants have circulation; animals and humans have circulation too. Plants have some kind of vertical mobility through growth. Animals take that mobility a little further but it’s us that really challenges it. Also, animals seem to understand some logical premises and express feelings, but it’s humans that can make math with that logic and poems with that sensibility.

It seems like there is an evident increment in complexity as the kingdoms progress. Nevertheless, I always felt that what we gain in something, we must be losing in something else. I never felt these kingdoms moved linearly but in a circle where, as described in The Kybalion, “...like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled”. I couldn't shake the feeling that my human arrogance was getting in the way of understanding what we relinquished in the process; that was until I washed my teeth the other day.

A crystal… (first of all let me share the completely unnecessary opinion that for me crystals are the purest and most beautiful form of consciousness that exists, period. Too new age? Sorry, not sorry), a crystal can be cut into a million parts and it’s still a crystal, his capability to represent its collective can’t be put to question. A plant can have a brunch cut and it can regrow it, and its belonging to its collective (species) is never questioned. But if an animal or a human being loses a limb or has some kind of behaviour that differentiates too much from the group or tribe, it tends to be attacked or exiled. What we lose in the progression we lose in a sense of integrity, that exceeds circumstances.

When a child is born doesn’t see people as more or less worthy, or some being more deserving than others. There is a sense of belonging to the collective that gets lost the more complex and experience our psyche becomes. Our sense of unity becomes weaker with complexity and therefore we become weaker.

A decision to make

I was unsure of whether I should add the immediately previous section to this article because I didn’t want to encourage readers to go “whatever then, we are inevitably destined to lose our collective sense so why even try” or to say “I’m not willing to sacrifice my complexity for the collective”, because it’s not what I’m asking, by the way. I believe we need to try to regain the collective integrity because the loss is on us if we don’t and because we are not going in a line but a circle (witchy wink) and going back to integrity is our destiny not by annulling ourselves but by being more ourselves than ever.

There is another important concept in alchemy called “transmutation”. Transmutation is the ability to change one state into another, but in alchemy, it’s said it’s the act of transforming any regular metal into gold. I believe in material alchemy (it wouldn’t make a lot of sense not believing in it but believing in magick), but what interests me the most is soul alchemy which is the ability to turn regular experiences (regular metal) into something valuable that contribute to our destiny (gold).

I recently had my cellphone stolen in a park while I was taking a picture. For a few days (until the insurance company approved my claim I was worried that I was not getting a replacement for a device that I was still paying). But those days without my cellphone gave me the possibility of regaining my focus and love for creativity by redesigning my entire website, and I’m happy to say I’m very proud of the results. This is what transmutation looks like, it looks like learning to turn any experience into gold by letting go of what you can’t control and by doing enough shadow work that you can pass the nebula of your doubts to immerse in your more exalted sense of purpose.

There is something in common between a witch, an alchemist, an artist, a therapist and a politician, and that is that we are not contempt being mere spectators of reality, we need to be actors, we need to modify reality, we need to be co-creators and we need to provide some kind of transmutation, sublimation, proposal, or healing to conflict. And I know it requires a great effort to contain our cynicism when it comes to politics, but my point exactly.

Another sign of this current generalized adolescence is believing we are “too cool for school” when it comes to real, collective governmental construction. We think we are smarter than politicians by not engaging in any political process when by doing so we guarantee we’ll never work together enough to change what needs to be changed.

How do we expect to have a better political reality or even better politicians if the collective consensus is that caring is for idiots? With what entitlement do we demand someone to care for us? And our relationship with our political figures is not different from the way adolescents react to their parents, we either blame them for everything wrong in our reality or we rebel against them by ignoring them altogether.

There is a considerable attachment to fantasies more than action when it comes to idealism, and that is exactly one of the reasons why making a better reality fails over and over again. We content ourselves with being arm-chair idealists. We need to understand that the “as above so below” doesn’t happen besides us but with us and that the journey back to integrity is a journey through awareness. We need to learn to transmute the above and the below to make them match collective divine will.

Creating a stronger circle

I strongly believe that the repression of women as social actors in humanity is one of the main contributing factors to the difficult situation we are immersed in as a global community.

Ever wonder why in the already mentioned monotheistic religions there are no roles of social leadership for women? Even more so, how many Buddhist spiritual leaders have been women? Whether we like to admit it or not, historically women don’t have space as spiritual figures that can contribute to the collective, and even if these observations might sound resentful and ambitious according to privileged people, underestimating the need for representativity and consideration is an entitlement that only cis white men can afford.

There is extraordinary value in the figure of a witch, historically and presently. The witch, which in Wicca is also a priestess, not only is a direct channel of communication between her appendices and the Gods (in rituals like drawing down the Moon) but is also a representation of spiritual wisdom and that is rarely allowed in women unless we are subjected to roles designed by men to keep us where is comfortable for them, like nuns in Christianity.

I’m not going to dedicate a lot of lines describing what brave, strong and magnanimous creatures we are, I think there are enough social media dedicated to motivating and flattering witches’ empowerment and for some reason, it feels vain to do it here, but I will tell you that it’s no coincidence that in a state of the collective where we’re ready to question the powers at being and we’re starting to understand destiny is not individual, the figure of the witch is stronger than ever.