Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so essential and insightful you actually resent it just a little for not having been there for you at an earlier point in your development. Outside the Charmed Circle is such a book—at least for me.
As I read to prepare my contribution, I found myself repeatedly stopping to copy down whole paragraphs because they resonated so deeply. It was actually pretty hard to get traction on the foreword, not because I wasn’t into the material, but because the exact opposite was true: I wanted to share the book with my magickal students in House Kheperu. With my wife. With everyone who follows me on Twitter. I wanted to shout to the hills with a wild mix of frustration and elation, “SOMEONE GETS IT!!!”
Frustration, because where was this book when I was twenty and sitting in awkward silence during a Goddess meditation and all I could feel was how very Not A Woman I was?!? Elated because I live in this time where many of our communities are finally having these conversations about sex, identity, and gender; where, as an intersex person, I can have a wife and be legally married; where I can lead ritual at a public event as neither God nor Goddess but as a rightful representative of that which is betwixt and between—and I’m not the only one who’s felt a little disenfranchised by the supposedly open-minded modern magickal community because accepting that role is a relatively recent thing.
Finally, readers. Finally.
Maybe that’s a lot to unpack, and maybe you are from a more recent generation where it is only a matter of politesse to ask someone their preferred pronouns. But I came of age magickally in the late ’80s and early ’90s when “every woman is a witch” and all the covens I stumbled on spent at least one sabbat enjoining me to get in touch with my “female power”—except, as an intersex person, none of that felt like it applied. At all.
I was coming from Catholicism, which I’d left due in large part because they wouldn’t let me be a priest. This was, of course, on the grounds that I wasn’t male (I wasn’t female, either, although I had no confirmation of this at the time. Intersex people were very rarely told of their condition and often deliberately misled about the real reasons behind everything from genital surgeries to infertility). Naïvely, I had expected a religion on the fringe like Wicca to be super open-minded about variations in identity and belief (also sexuality), and wow, did I have a comeuppance.
Every coven and circle that I found in the ten years I bothered searching were all aggressively gender-specific. Women were Priestesses. Men were Priests. The Great Rite was about the sexual union of the God and the Goddess. I could not, under any circumstance, perform the duties of the Priest. If I didn’t want to draw down the Goddess, I was out of luck—and generally treated as if there was something wrong with me because I didn’t really connect with the gendered facet of deity they felt appropriate to my assigned-at-birth sex.
Needless to say, I dumped Wicca just like I’d broken up with Catholicism. I never stopped practicing magick, however. That was such an integral part of my identity, I’d been doing it before I could fully explain what magick was—but I refused the label witch. Actively rebelled against it. The word had been indelibly painted in a color of gendered ink not suited to the likes of me.
To some extent, there’s a happy ending to my early disenfranchisement with witchcraft. Unhappy with what I found, I wandered off and started my own thing, building from an archetype that was more suitably androgyne, way less focused on sex as a reproductive act, and inherently transgressive by its very nature: the vampire. If you recognize my name (and you’re not really into ghost-hunting shows), chances are it’s in connection with that community. And for the longest time, I was pretty sure only the vampire community really grokked how magick, sex, and neo-Paganism were about more than a gender binary. Over the past few decades, when I engaged with the Pagan or witchcraft communities at all, it was only on the fringe which, as a someone for whom liminality is writ not merely into their magick but into their very genetic structure, seemed entirely fitting.
I share this not to make this foreword all about me, but to give you context for why Outside the Charmed Circle is so electrifying on a profound and personal level. The book and all the concepts Misha Magdalene explains within it are a bridge. That bridge works to span the gap that has separated practitioners like myself (and pretty obviously the author themselves) from feeling both fully engaged with and fully accepted by the modern magickal subculture, particularly those aspects influenced by Wicca and witchcraft.
When I first heard the title, I assumed the “charmed circle” would turn out to be the very circle of witchcraft, a boundary set by the gender essentialists which those of us who are gender nonconforming are (and have been) obligated to navigate. Spoiler: that’s not where the term comes from. To some extent, the “charmed circle” does apply to the modern magickal community, but it applies only insomuch as that community has existed in the past. Things are changing, and Misha Magdalene has some really fantastic ideas about how we all can facilitate those changes. A great deal of that work involves transforming ourselves—the best and most potent of all magicks (at least in my informed opinion).
Ostensibly, Outside the Charmed Circle is a treatise on queering sex magick, but to pigeon-hole it on the shelves as a sex magick book would be to overlook everything else it has packed between its pages. First and foremost, the work you hold in your hands is a Master Class on gender studies as they apply to the modern magickal movement. Misha Magdalene brings their considerable scholarship to bear on our entrenched assumptions about Gods and Goddesses, the Great Rite, and why, in a practice inherently liminal in nature, so many of us still labor under the binary distinctions dictated by our woefully intransigent mainstream Western culture.
But even that does not fully cover what you will find in this book. Outside the Charmed Circle is a know-thyself workbook, a much-needed discussion about consent, a frank and sometimes scathing assessment of the failings in our communities regarding the same, and an open dialogue with the reader that encourages questions, reflection, and honest wrestling with sometimes emotionally challenging material—and all of this presented with mindfulness, empathy, and gentle humor that I’ve come to think of as Misha’s signature style.
This book has a lot to unpack, and I won’t lie—it is not an easy book, either for brain or for heart. This book challenges you at every page: to ask yourself hard questions; to deconstruct your assumptions; to confront your ingrained biases; to love your body exactly how it is. The language at times is dense and Misha Magdalene makes no apologies for their scholarly background, tossing around terms like hermeneutics and praxis with the kind of blithe familiarity that only comes of being thoroughly steeped in academia. But don’t let this intimidate you. Around the next corner will be a frank confessional of coming to magick through Dungeons & Dragons, some delicately worded distaste for Aleister Crowley, ruminations on the cultural meaning of the Matrix, and a peppering of Babylon 5 references (which certainly won my heart).
Any good book is a conversation between author and reader, and Misha makes use of this in a conscious and active way. Throughout the text, there are key moments where the reader is encouraged to pause and digest. Helpful questions are offered to get you to engage with the material so you may better internalize complex concepts—particularly how they apply to you. If you are not a journaler by nature, for this book, you will want to be. As Misha states repeatedly throughout the book, their ideas and theories are not prescriptive, and only you will be able to make the final determination about how or if any of the material is something you can work into your personal practice. Your best guidebook will be the journal that grows out of your process, and with the carefully inclusive way the exercises have been written, even if you do not identify on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, there are revelations in this book that can deepen your experience with your magick, with your practice, and with yourself.
At the beginning of this foreword, I bemoaned not having this book at an earlier point in my life, but the truth is, this book could only have come into existence in this moment, now: here in this time of cultural upheaval and (hopefully) cultural shift, where the “grab ’em by the pussy” mentality is openly challenged by initiatives like the #MeToo movement, where the gendered roles ingrained in our very language have come into question, where young people can choose a dress or a suit or none of the above and still have parents who love and accept them.
As a sometimes embittered Gen Xer, I can resent the fact that we didn’t have books like Outside the Charmed Circle when I was coming of age, or I can rejoice that this book exists in this moment for those who need it now.
I choose joy.
Michelle Belanger
Walpurgisnacht, 2019