Self-transformation is hardly immediate. Anyone who has ever tried to create an exercise routine could tell you that. Finding and sticking to a new spiritual practice that best fits you is a similar process. It takes more than a few days.
That’s why I took some offense to Ceri Radford’s article, “I spent a week becoming a witch and the results were worrying” in The Independent. Radford was poorly informed and resorted to slinging insults instead of providing reasons for her conclusion that the New Age “trend” is dangerous.
It’s understandable to be cynical about witchcraft. A lot of the time, it makes little sense, that’s part of the point. Spirituality, in all its forms, depends on the faith of the believer. It isn’t an exact science, it’s a way of finding your place in the world and figuring out how to act within it. It isn’t a way of avoiding reality, it’s a way of understanding it.
Radford, like many others before her, made the mistake of placing scientific understanding and faith on opposite ends of a single spectrum. However, the two are not mutually exclusive. They exist in balance.
Take this scenario as an example: a child in a Christian family breaks their arm. The family will take the child to the hospital, but the family, friends and churchmates of the child may also pray that God will bring swift healing. Both actions make equal amounts of sense because they fulfill different needs.
The same scenario may play out similarly in a Pagan household: a child in the family breaks their arm. The family will take the child to the hospital, but the family may pray or make an offering to their deities in hopes of swift healing. The actions of the two different kinds of faithful people are not so different, are they?
Witchcraft — secular and otherwise — is simply a means to an end, a way to put energy into the universe to support actions that are already underway.
Radford mistook this for an anti-science, extremist ideology, comparing the practice to anti-vaccination activists and climate change deniers. There are certainly Pagans who are anti-science, but there are also anti-science Christians. But we don’t think of all Christians as opposed to modern medicine, do we?
Radford said, “however benign or even beneficial the rituals, it’s all built on a wobbling base of bat****. No matter how many spells we cast to ask the universe for help, the universe isn’t listening.”
This sounds less like a call to action against witchcraft, Paganism, New Age spirituality and the like than a strike against faith and spirituality in general. Radford states several times in the article that she is cynical and doesn’t believe any of this will work. The problem there is faith is dependent on belief. That’s what being faithful means.
Witchcraft may not have been the right fit for Radford. That’s fair, not every spiritual practice will fit everyone. This isn’t a one- size-fits-all kind of world. That does not mean, however, that she can take her one week of dipping her toes in the water of something new and claim that what she has found is a world of science-shunning “bat***.”
That would be the same as deciding to try out Christianity and a week later reporting that all Christians are against vaccination and crazy for believing in a centuries-old book. Sounds like a bit short-sighted and insecure.
The practice of witchcraft itself, like Radford admits at the end of her article, is harmless. Finding solace and understanding of the world around you is perfectly acceptable, regardless of the form it comes in. What is
not okay is making predisposed judgments of others, because you’re too cynical to understand the personal importance of their practice to them.
Lex Miller can be reached at [email protected]