Towards American Witchcraft, Pt 1

[sabinetzin]

So what happened was:

I was becoming increasingly discontent with the kind of paganism I was practicing. I'd set out specifically to find an authentic path, and I hadn't. So I decided to devote this year (it ended up being calendar year, because everybody was in a state on Samhain) to researching what exactly witchcraft in America (particularly the Southeast) looked like. With that understanding, my goal is to recreate my practice in a way that befits the actual practices of my area of the world.

I should say off the bat that there's a lot here to be discussed about what America is, how race enters into this, et cetera. I have a longer post about that for a later date. The short version is that, because I am making a practice for myself, I am not bringing in anything that is primarily based in African, Latinx, or American Indian traditions. I don't have a right to those things. It would be deeply inappropriate for me to include them in my study, when the point of my study is to create tools for me, a white.

So that's what I'm doing presently, and I'm making notes in a bigass book about it. I have a stack of things to get through, but I have a few initial findings that I am working under/testing:

-American witchcraft is agnostic. It is not atheistic, but generally speaking, it is not necessary to worship a specific god, or any god, in order to practice AW. In fact, most of it was originally understood to be specifically Christian, though other spiritual powers have always been at play. In the world of AW there is something out there, understood in various forms. But you can do any of it without the Goddess or the Horned Man or the Christian God.

-American witchcraft is old; American paganism is not. We have to reject false narratives like the paganization of Salem. No pagans or witches died at Salem; they were god-fearing people who would be mortified to see what happened to their good names in death. Many of them absolutely did what we would recognize now as magic, but that didn't make them witches, within the beliefs of the time. To mislabel our ancestors like that is to disrespect them.

-American witchcraft is pragmatic. The righthand and lefthand paths are not philosophies that have existed historically in America. There are evil forces in AW, and curses and hexes can bounce, but the threefold rule is not part of AW. These attempts to force magic into dichotomy are not reflections of what the record says and what practitioners of the old folk traditions believe. People who did witchcraft in America were doing it because it worked, and AW is essentially a gray magical practice. If you can't defend yourself with your skills, there's no point in learning them.

-American witchcraft is piecemeal. Since the beginning, witchcraft in America has been constructed from bits; different magical traditions from Europe melded and picked up elements of indigenous and African belief. As folk traditions arose, they became systems of belief made out of pieces into something coherent. This is the history of all post-contact religion in the New World. But AW practitioners have always been scavengers, picking up new tools for their kit, whether that means learning by receiving pieces of knowledge over time from the same tradition or incorporating novel elements.
 

So that's where I am presently. I have a lot of reading to get done, but I wanted to kind of formalize those thoughts while I had them.