Having taken a quiet moment to consider, I have decided, after all, not to be a witch, but a Catholic instead. Now, I know, witchery is in vogue. The election season was a veritable season of the stuff, with TikTok hexes and covens for cursing Trump getting ample airtime from journalists whose motivating principle seemed to be, “Hey, what's weird today?”
Admittedly, the green touch of envy colors my critique: Women get to be witches and it’s all very edgy and personally fulfilling and even a little bit sexy. Male warlocks, for their part, remain big nerds. Witches get to sell jewelry and hand-lotion at music festivals. Try selling mystical potpourri as a wizard — you’ll get laughed out of Coachella.
It will be said, of course, that the occult is kosher for womyn and cringe for myn because being a witch is a protest against the patriarchy, understood, in this context, as the historical domination and subjugation of women to Male Power: “We’re the grand-daughters of the witches you didn’t burn,” as the rather genealogically hopeful phrase has it. This effort to reduce witchcraft to an occult version of the rote feminism that everyone already believes (namely, that women should not be oppressed) is rather good evidence of the absolute victory Christianity has won over all witchcraft. Even being a witch, that anti-Christian horror, takes its justification from the fundamental difference that Christianity, with its worship of Christ, the Innocent Victim, has introduced into the world — that the defense of the innocent victim is the only licit moral stance; that all other cultural forms are of the devil, to be condemned.
Contemporary witches are Christian witches. They only get to be who they are on the presumption that the historical narrative is false; that witches were, in fact, misunderstood saints; that witchcraft is an esoteric defense of the oppressed and the marginalized; that, were all the world a witch, peace would reign, and culture would no longer be established in the sacrifice of some “other” who is cast out of the community, but in common knowledge of herbal tinctures and liberated sex. Indeed, the true victory of Puritanism over the witch is the desperation with which every contemporary occultist must explain how their magic is, in fact, busy building up a Kingdom of Justice. I quote, without sniggering, from a Wired article entitled TikTok Witches Are Hexing This Election:
They will call on the spirits of the elements and their ancestors to “raise a mighty blue wave … to wash away the corruption and injustice and wickedness of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in a peaceful transition of power.”
A wave of compassion for victims motivates them, as one magician, Michael Hughes, argues:
Young people are moving away from traditional religion and toward being more open and compassionate and inclusive of marginalized communities.
Witchcraft, in fact, is simply a way of being a good, active, American citizen:
“They’re actively involved in voter registration, postcard writing campaigns, canvassing for Democratic candidates, and donating to Democratic and anti-racist causes.” Hughes thinks of magic rituals as fueling the tanks of more conventional, earthly political resistance—a spiritual companion to calling one’s senator, not a replacement for it.
This is all a rather simple explanation of why the occult has become the proud province of women, while male participation in sorcery, while it no doubt occurs, feels lame. Precisely insofar as the curse is cast by the victim and the charm is placed by the powerless — witchcraft is tolerable. The moment witchcraft smacks of being the exercise of the victimizer, it loses the corrupting influence of Christianity, and stands revealed as a power-grab over and against the weak — just as pagan as it pleases. This is why we cheer the lesbian who rejects the repression of her Jewish family and sits in the circle of candles while we boo the California CEO who does the same. Poor-person witchcraft is a protest; rich-person witchcraft is a cabal. Female magic feels empowering; male magic feels like a masturbatory enjoyment of power by the already powerful. Witchcraft has been subordinated to the teaching of the Catholic Church, which orients all power towards the service of the weakest. Now, and forever onward, it can only justify itself by claiming to continue her work. As such, it seems wiser to me to simply be Catholic, taking on the self-sacrificial life of being-for-others which Christ has introduced into the world — and skipping out on the witchery.
The reason for ditching the allures of witching is simply that witches have the unfortunate effect of causing witch-hunts, and I believe witch-hunts to be unconscionably bad. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that magic is unlawful “because the means it employs for acquiring knowledge have not in themselves the power to cause science, consisting as they do in gazing at certain shapes, and muttering certain strange words, and so forth.” In short, the evil of magic consists in its separation of effects from their causes. It seems harmless enough: I employ a means for assuring financial success which has not in itself the power for assuring financial success — say, boiling a frog. But let’s take another historical example of separating cause and effect: The mob employs a means for determining the guilt of a woman which has not in itself the power to determine the guilt of that woman — by dunking her in water. Here, we recoil. The evil of witchcraft is recognized in the witch-hunt and denied in the case of the particular witch — but the practice of the particular witch is simply the habitual preparation necessary for joining in a witch-hunt.
To say the same thing, in another way: Magic is a habit that prepares the human heart to disdain justice for innocent victims. By seeking to achieve effects which do not arise from their causes, it predisposes the heart to that injustice which would declare that a person really is the cause of an evil effect — even when the connection between the two is tenuous. We think it is an obvious scapegoating tactic to blame an unpopular woman for the death of an infant when all she did was look at him; at the same time, we believe it is liberating and good for a woman to believe that she can predict the future by reading a card. We refuse to recognize that the same logic is at play in both cases, for “this art does not make use of these things as causes, but as signs; not however as signs instituted by God, as are the sacramental signs. It follows, therefore, that they are empty signs...”
A disposition to trust in empty signs is the necessary disposition to engage in an act of ritual scapegoating: Being black is not a cause of being violent any more than a certain star configuration is a cause of good fortune; having a hooked nose is not a cause of being greedy anymore than a pentacle is the cause of a certain energy; but the disposition to trust empty signs as genuinely causative is, in fact, a disposition to be misled — the very same disposition by which a mob or an individual is able to believe that, because he is ugly, he is responsible; because she is pretty, she is the cause of our problems. In a word, it is foolishness; openness to manipulation; it is essentially begging "real causes" to achieve real effects by offering them a mask (the unrelated, empty sign) as a means for them to cover themselves.
Now, it is the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church that the activity of demons waits upon this oh-so-human disorder; that only once the human person sets up an empty sign as a pseudo-cause can an actually efficacious demon act as a real cause: “The dispositive cause of idolatry was, on the part of man, a defect of nature, either through ignorance in his intellect, or disorder in his affections,” says Aquinas. Demons wait for this disordered, ignorant disposition in order to complete the act of idolatry: “The other cause of idolatry was completive, and this was on the part of the demons, who offered themselves to be worshipped by men, by giving answers in the idols, and doing things which to men seemed marvelous. Hence it is written (Ps 95:5): ‘All the gods of the Gentiles are devils.’” Demons require foolishness of men, who gaze upon things which do not in themselves have power, in order to “complete” this foolish longing, and act with real power in a manner that is, de facto, hidden by foolishness; masked by the empty signs that stupid people have already taken to be efficacious. Thus Aquinas takes the trust in empty signs as the pretext for what is actually going on: “a kind of agreement or covenant made with the demons for the purpose of consultation and of compact by tokens.”
Now it is no oddity that contemporary witches are skeptical about the existence of demons. They are not skeptical that there are spirits, energies, and powers that answer human invocation, but, as Christian witches, they are skeptical that these powers are bad powers; that they have not been given a rather bad rap by Christianity. (Even demon-worship can only justify itself under the Christian sign of sympathy, pity, and care for the wrongly victimized.) But even if demons do not exist, it is obvious that a disposition to believe in the causality of empty signs is a similar opportunity for real human power to act, while masking itself in those self-same signs.
And this is my aesthetic reason for not wanting to be a witch: it all seems a little played out. We already live in a world of witchcraft, if we take “witchcraft” to mean “trust in empty signs to achieve efficacious results without causing ‘science’ or knowledge in us.” This is simply what it means to live in a world in which all our capacities of communication, navigation, entertainment, reasoning, work, living and moving are rented from a few corporations through “observances [that] are devoid of reason and art” — that is, through clicks which involve no knowledge of the mechanisms that we operate and through feeble swiping gestures which give us no ownership over the actual causal power of our devices. My life is already, functionally speaking, a series of incantations; a structural foolishness which trusts and hopes for human power to act upon my performance of a designated sign. I am thankful, oh, so thankful, that the sign is a “click” rather than an inverted cross; that the power invoked is the mechanism of a man like Bezos rather than a demon like Beelzebub (or a Zuckerberg rather than a Ziminiar!). I am grateful — really, quite grateful — that the covenant and the “compact by tokens” which renders my tapping thumbs efficacious is a covenant of money rather than of Mammon; a trade of credit for service rather than a soul for the same. Still, such comfort is cold (even if not quite so cold as a witch’s tit!) when one realizes that the technocratic state in which we live and move is, structurally, a society of magic; one in which human causal powers have replaced the demonic; a world of people habituated into believing themselves to have efficacy when, in fact, their efficacy comes from their enslavement to the powers from whom they rent.
If the contemporary witch is the one who does not see her incantations as empty, but really efficacious, and is thereby foolish and blind to the real, causal action of demons who render those ineffective gestures efficacious, then the techno-barbarian is the one who forgets that his technical incantations are the mechanical activations of devices built and maintained by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and AT&T. Instead, he imagines that he owns his capacities, that he really does, by his own power, find out where the grocery store is, communicate with his mother, attain a state of sexual arousal, have fun, and stave off despair; that he really does know the information that he looks up; that he owns the memories Facebook saves for him; that he feels the emotions Apple expresses for him. This foolishness is the necessary “disordered affection” and disposition which assures a continued transfer of personal ownership and capacity out of the hands of the techno-barbarian and the witch and into the hands of the rulers of this world and spirits of the air, respectively. In fact, the techno-barbarian is so short a hop and a skip from the witch that it seems trite to make a big fuss about becoming the latter, when I am already cursed to wrestle with being the former. To become Catholic instead is to listen to St. Paul:
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more?