Queering Your Praxis:
Developing and Adapting
Magical Practices
Let’s say that you’re new to the whole world of esoteric spiritual practice. Perhaps you’re excited by what you’ve read and are eager to get started but also want to avoid getting invested in a form of spiritual practice weighted down with exactly the kind of gendered or sexual baggage you came here to get away from. Alternately, maybe you’ve been around the block a few times and have a solid grounding in a particular system. Perhaps your heart’s gone out of certain elements of it—the gendered metaphors, the conjure-and-command model, the cerebral nature of the whole thing—and you’re interested in working toward creating a practice that’s more in line with your values of consent and embodiment.
The Western esoteric community is made up of numerous traditions, paths, and practices, and the vast majority of them have their own built-in cosmologies that tend to include built-in assumptions about gender, sexuality, power dynamics, and consent. With the wealth of magical and devotional practices available to us within and outside the context of established traditions, one of the questions facing would-be practitioners of esoteric spirituality is what to do: should they modify the practices of existing traditions to suit their needs, assemble their own paths from publicly available bodies of lore and practices, or develop their own systems of practice? Each of these approaches has its own benefits and drawbacks that complicate the question even further. Let’s break into that and see if we can’t make some sense of things.
The Modified Traditionalist
The first approach is to adapt an existing tradition to your needs, what I call the Modified Traditionalist model. The primary benefit of this approach is that there are fewer time costs up front. If you start with a practice whose underlying structure and symbolic language work for you, it won’t be necessary for you to reinvent the wheel. You can modify the language to be gender-neutral, you can tweak the sexual or gendered metaphors, you can adjust the practices to be a little more holistic and grounded (or less all up in your own head), and so on.
For many people, this is easy. It gets you on the road quicker, certainly, and can give you access to a wealth of magical lore and techniques for working with power. You can develop deeply meaningful relationships with gods, spirits, and fellow practitioners, some that may last a lifetime or longer.
The primary drawback is that you’re working with a system that already has its own identity: its own personality, if you will, made up in part of a history, a symbolic language, and a current of power that have been in operation for longer than you’ve been around … in some cases, much longer. Such traditions can be highly resistant to change, which is both a strength which keeps them vital and a hindrance for anyone whose lived experiences don’t mesh with their cosmology, theology, or psychology. As an example from my personal history, my early training experiences within British Traditional Wicca were hugely influential on my practice as a Witch and sorcerer. I learned techniques for working magic, divinatory methods, and devotional practices that still serve me in good stead, and I have the utmost respect for the gods and the tradition. However, as I came to a deeper understanding of my own gender and sexuality, I came to realize that I couldn’t express my own lived experiences using the symbolic language at the heart of Wicca’s cosmology, and my practice no longer comfortably fit within the binary gender polarity model wired into the model of the traditional Craft as I learned it.
The happy news is that many living traditions today are considerably more open to including and embracing all genders and sexual orientations than they were even twenty years ago, and even within traditions which are less so, there are individual practitioners and groups which are actively working to effect positive change from within. If you’re called to that kind of work, you may experience pushback from the more hardline traditionalists, but you also won’t be alone in doing it.
The Magpie
The eclectic, dim sum approach of assembling your own system of practice from whatever parts you find work for you, which I think of as being a magpie, gives you the ability to choose and adapt practices that work for you rather than trying to work within the strictures of an established tradition. This approach allows you the freedom to work with those practices and beliefs which most strongly resonate with your lived experiences of gender, sexuality, and embodiment, and can grow organically from those lived experiences. It also allows you to avoid the pieces of a system that are factually outdated, culturally irrelevant, not effective or resonant for you, or simply not to your tastes. You can, in a sense, custom-build your own path to attain whatever goals you set for yourself and work with or serve whichever deities call to you.
As before, the Magpie approach has some drawbacks that bear some consideration. One problem is that for the most part, spiritual paths tend to evolve internally consistent symbolic languages in which everything is connected to everything else and interdependent. The cosmology, theology, ritual structure, practices, and techniques of a given tradition are grounded in its metaphysical assumptions, which is great when you’re working within the context of that tradition. However, if you’re attempting to utilize a piece of that tradition outside its context, you may find it doesn’t work in the way you expect, or at all. Perhaps its efficacy relies on having a connection to the culture in which the tradition is rooted, an initiatory link to the tradition, or a mediated relationship with certain gods and spirits. Living spiritual traditions are rather like ecosystems; removing something from its native habitat without considering the interconnections and impact tends not to end well.
This invokes the principle of Chesterton’s fence, an axiom against making changes to any part of an institution—like, say, a seemingly abandoned fence standing alone in a field—without first studying it carefully to determine what it does, why it was built, and what else might be changed by changing it: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”86 One way to avoid the Chesterton’s fence dilemma is doing the work to understand the practices you adopt in the way the people who created them understood them as best you can. Doing so will involve a lot of research and study, preferably with people who already understand the practices you’re adopting, or from sources created by the people with whom the practices originate. Without this work and respect, you’re all too likely to slip into spiritual tourism and theft, committing violence against the very traditions whose practices inspire you. This kind of cultural appropriation is especially common among white esoteric practitioners adopting the practices and spiritual lore of cultures of which they are not a part, especially marginalized and oppressed cultures. Don’t do this, okay? It’s a bad look.
Another thing to consider is that whether you’re talking about information science, mechanical engineering, social institutions, or spiritual traditions, the structures we build reflect the minds of their builders and have our perspectives and modes of thinking built into them. Present even in large-scale institutions, we tend to think this kind of built-in bias (e.g., the well-documented phenomenon of researcher bias) will ameliorate other types of bias and average out any individual prejudices to a happy medium. Built-in bias is especially, emphatically true of structures that are the product of a solitary intellect. What this means in practice is that building a system to fit your individual spiritual and emotional needs can also mean building a system that caters to your intellectual and emotional biases or, worse, one which coddles and reinforces your personal weaknesses. This personalized echo chamber can foster and magnify inherent blind spots in the practitioner, places where your own biases and weaknesses are wired into the practices and ignored or, worse, reinforced, leading to amplified prejudices, spiritual stagnation and morbidity, and other unhealthy states.
The best way I know to circumvent this tendency is to get outside perspectives on both the practices you use and the effects they have on you. Consulting with fellow practitioners, diligent journaling, working with a therapist, and talking with friends who know you well enough to be honest with you are all excellent hedges against the possibility of creating a spiritually regressive practice. Devotional spirit work, especially divination, can also help to guide your practice away from negative outcomes if—and this is key—you can be honest with yourself about the responses you get from your gods and spirit allies.
The Innovator
The straightforward method of creating your own spiritual path from scratch without using any outside material whatsoever is always available to you. This is the path of the Innovator, the solitary mystic who’s willing and able to develop useful spiritual practices based solely on their own needs, experiences, and perceptions. For those who can pursue this route, it can be the most uniquely transformative path to take; it can lead to insights and understandings no other path could provide.
Of course, this approach may also be the hardest of them all. In fact, most of us might find it impossible. After all, there’s nothing new under the sun. Virtually every form of spiritual practice humanity can devise—meditation, prayer, mysticism, and magic of all sorts—has already been created. Coming up with your own guided meditation visualization is pretty easy, but the meditative techniques on which it’s based have been around for thousands of years. As with the Magpie approach, carving your own spiritual path can lead to the same sort of built-in blind spots, without even the mitigating influence of outside traditions.
Another challenge the Innovator faces is the problem of communicating their experiences and insights to anyone who doesn’t understand their personal system. My magical and life partner illustrates this dilemma with a story told by theoretical physicist and all-around brilliant human Richard Feynman. While teaching himself advanced mathematics at the age of fifteen, Feynman decided that the established mathematical notation was insufficient to his needs, so he developed his own notation. All was well and good … until he had to discuss math with other people, including his instructors, who obviously didn’t understand his personal system. To his chagrin, Feynman had to go back and learn the traditional notation system in order to get through his classes.87 So it is with the spiritual trailblazer. Unless you intend to found your own religious tradition or live as hermit, the lack of a language and frame of reference shared with other people can be both frustrating and spiritually limiting. The workaround for this latter drawback is simply a willingness to compromise. Committed solitary mystics and magicians who still want to be able to hold a conversation with other practitioners may need to learn their language, purely out of necessity. They can still do incredible, innovative work within their own systems, of course, but it’s nice to be able to chat with like-minded folks over the beverages of your choice from time to time.
Bringing It All Together
What’s the best approach? The answer, my friend, depends entirely on you. Ultimately, the best approach is the one which helps you fulfill your spiritual and psychological needs. If you’re someone who craves structure and educated verification of your experiences, the Modified Traditionalist approach may be best. If you resonate with established practices but are averse to outside influences on your own experience of the numinous, you may be more suited for the Magpie approach. If you find any externally derived impositions on your magical or spiritual life to be a hindrance, the Innovator approach might be your thing.
The reality is that very few people subscribe solely to a single approach, especially over the course of their lives. Some practitioners begin as Innovators, possibly with a touch of the Magpie, then bring their unique insights and experiences into the context of extant traditions to revitalize or, in rare cases, redefine those traditions. Similarly, some Traditionalists use their early training as the base from which they launch into Innovation, or modify their tradition with practices adopted, Magpie-like, from other spiritual paths. It’s worth noting that most of the luminaries of the Western esoteric world, from Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley to Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente, utilized all three approaches in their own spiritual practices, and in creating the traditions they passed on to us.
Many of you reading this will already have a spiritual practice in which you’re working, but for those of you who don’t, I humbly offer the following ritual as a starting point for getting a practice going, for either solo or group work.
— Exercise —
An Invocation of Aradia as Tutelary Goddess
For this exercise, you’ll need the following:
• A quiet, undisturbed place to work
• A bowl of warm water
• A small dish of salt
• A small dish of anointing oil
• About an hour of undisturbed time
This ritual follows a framework which probably accounts for more than 90 percent of the ritual work done in modern Western esotericism: the creation of a sacred microcosm in which to work, the magical or devotional working proper, and the opening of the microcosm and return to everyday reality. Being the somewhat irreverent creature I am, I refer to these three components by the less-than-awe-inspiring names of Setting the Space, Doing the Thing, and Releasing the Space.
Now, I’ll tell you a little secret: I’ve actually hidden most of the pieces of this ritual throughout the book. If you’ve read all the previous chapters, you’ve already encountered most of them, and if you’ve done the exercises and rituals included in those chapters, you’ve already done many of the practices that make up this ritual. In the ritual script below, you’ll find page references for the practices we’ve already covered, in case you’d like to revisit them.
As discussed previously in Chapter 6, a key factor in the success of your ritual work is knowing what you’re actually trying to accomplish with your ritual. While this ritual is intended to be a framework in which you can fit any working you desire, I’ve included an actual working in the Doing the Thing section of the script, to give you one example of the kind of devotional and magical praxis you can pursue with these practices. In this case, I’ve included an invocation of the powers of embodied material existence (represented as the four classical elements of air, fire, water, and earth), as well as the celestial and chthonic powers above and below us, as the setting for the central work of this rite: an invocation of and communion with a deity for the explicit purpose of asking for their aid and guidance. The figure at the heart of the ritual as written is the witch-goddess Aradia, a deity dear to my own heart, in her aspect as a tutelary spirit. I’ve found her to be a sympathetic guide to working in queer-inclusive spaces, as well as a gentle introduction to working with gods generally, for those who are unfamiliar with the practice. Before working this invocation, I encourage you to reread “Diana of the Woods, Aradia of the Witches” (p. 136) and to familiarize yourself with C. G. Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches as a preliminary introduction to the goddess.
This ritual really is intended to be a frame for your own work, though, and I encourage you to experiment with it and adapt it for your own purposes. If you already have a relationship with a deity and would rather work with them, or you don’t feel any particular draw to Aradia and would prefer to approach another deity, feel free to do so! If you’re interested in exploring other queer divinities, read over “Queer Divinities, Queering Divinity“ in Chapter 5 and explore their myths. Do some outside research into the cultures and the places where those gods’ worship arose; see if any of them call to you. If so, consider writing your own invocation to that deity and incorporating it into this framework.
Setting the Space
This can be done by whatever means you feel appropriate. I recommend starting by grounding and centering oneself (p. 68). Once you’ve done this, consecrate the water with salt (p. 125), then lightly sprinkle the consecrated water around your working space, holding in your mind the idea of banishing or driving away any undue outside influences. After you’ve done this, use this same water to sprinkle yourself, again with the intent of removing any unwanted external influences. Then, take up the dish of oil and charge it, then use that oil to anoint your body in whatever places you feel are significant to the work you’re doing. For general ritual purposes, I usually anoint in the following places: forehead, lips, nape of throat, insides of wrists, and ankles. (If I’m nude while doing ritual, I’ll also anoint over my heart and above my pubic bone.) This anointing is a way of sealing yourself to yourself after the cleansing, and a callback to “The Mirror of Reclaiming“ in Chapter 5 in which the ritualist anoints their own body as an act of self-possession.
With your body and your space made clean and consecrated, enclose your working space within a circle of power, either by using the circle-scribing method from Chapter 6 or some other method of your choosing. After sealing your circle, you can move on to the actual magical and devotional working part of the ritual.
Doing the Thing
Facing the east, use your fingers or a magical tool (such as a wand or athame) to draw a point-up triangle with a line across it at the periphery of your circle and say, “From the east I call to you, powers of Air, and ask that you guide me with your discernment and clarity of thought.”
Turning to the south, draw a hollow point-up triangle at the periphery of the circle and say, “From the south I call to you, powers of Fire, and ask that you warm me with your passion and strength of will.”
Turning to the west, draw a hollow point-down triangle at the periphery of the circle and say, “From the west I call to you, powers of Water, and ask that you embrace me with your fluidity and depth of feeling.”
Turning to the north, draw a point-down triangle with a line across it at the periphery of the circle and say, “From the north I call to you, powers of Earth, and ask that you support me with your stability and fortitude.”
Move to the center of the circle. Lift one hand to the heavens, point the other to the center of the earth, and say, “I call to the stars above me and the fire beneath me: let me hold the space where your twin flames entwine, and be the bridge between.” Bring your hands together and clasp them, saying, “As above, so below.”
Turn to face the north, and assume whatever bodily position bespeaks reverence for you: standing, kneeling, or sitting, with your hands clasped or lifted. Close your eyes and, with your mind’s eye, envision the goddess Aradia. Remember that Aradia is the divine daughter of Diana and Lucifer and also had a mortal life as a witch-priestess in Tuscany; envision her as a young woman from that region. If you want a visual cue to work from, picture her with olive skin flushed with youth, long black hair cascading past her shoulders, eyes filled with the light of a thousand stars dancing like fireflies. See her as wearing a simple, sleeveless Greek-style tunic dress that falls to her feet, and a diadem of stars in her hair, mirroring the stars in her eyes.
When you have her image formed in your mind, speak the following invocation or one from your heart:
Aradia, Scion of Diana.
Aradia, Daughter of the Moon.
Aradia, Queen of the Fireflies.
Aradia, Saviour of the Witches.
Aradia, comforter of the lost and dispossessed.
Aradia, teacher of the hidden ways.
This, and only this, do I pray of you,
Most holy Aradia,
If it be your will:
Lend me your favor, Secret Queen,
and guide me through the days ahead.
Teach me your cunning arts,
and help me find my own way:
Alone or accompanied,
In broadest daylight,
Shadowed in twilight,
Or mantled in night.
With my own voice do I sing
your praises, most holy Aradia,
And through my own will do I pray
you grant my petition and prayer.
May it be so.
May it be so.
May it be so.
You may feel moved to repeat your invocation multiple times, or you may find that a single iteration is enough. When you’ve finished, remain in silence and listen for any response you may receive from the goddess. This may come as an audible or internal voice, or a series of images, or a sense of presence. If you aren’t having any of those experiences after performing your invocation, once or multiple times, there are a few possibilities in play. The ritual may not be working, at least in the way you hoped; after all, gods have agency too, and the deity you’re invoking may simply not want to answer your call. Alternately, your ritual may be working just fine, but you might not be on the deity’s wavelength yet. It’s also possible that the deity isn’t planning to speak to you during the ritual but will visit you later: perhaps in your dreams, or less conveniently, while you’re stuck in traffic.
If and when they do respond, however, pay attention. Listen and observe. If they enter into a dialogue with you, respond with respect, but don’t plead or grovel. Own your power, be honest, and remember the recommended principles for working with deities (see Chapter 8).
Releasing the Space
Once your ritual work is complete, you’re free to just hang out in the sacred space you’ve created, but eventually we all have to get back to the business of daily living. In some traditions, a circle isn’t formally dispelled or banished, but is instead left either to dissipate on its own or, if the work is being done in a dedicated ritual space, to infuse and reinforce the previous dedications of that space. As time goes on, you’ll figure out what works best for you, but to begin, I would recommend actually dispelling the circle. If you used the circle-scribing method in Chapter 6, you’ll find its companion circle-opening method there as well.
After you’ve released the ritual space, take some time to write about your experiences in your journal. Make particular note of your interactions with the deity you invoked as well as any messages or guidance you received from them if you feel it appropriate. Also make note of your emotional responses to the rite, including any thoughts, images, or memories that may have surfaced.