Joanne Fitzpatrick (University of Lancaster): 5th Dimension Librarian: New Sources of Knowledge in Scholarly Occult Practice
Joanne Fitzpatrick is an academic librarian, working as Research Data Manager at Lancaster University, and is a High Priestess with experience in the Western Esoteric practices of Wicca, Chaos Magick and Discordianism. Holding an MSc in Information Science, her interests are at the intersection of the occult and library and information science, and as a practitioner she is interested in elevating and empowering women and re-creating witchcrafts to make structures suitable for the future.
Abstract:
Politically charged information and magical practices are part of everyday life as an academic librarian and High Priestess. Using an information behaviour model published in a recent research article (https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.22512), as well as structural plans for a new coven of occult practitioners, that will have begun meetings at the date of the symposium, this paper will detail how politics appear within modern magical praxis.
The growing body of scholarly content that maps western esotericism is reaching a critical mass, and there is a need for librarian support in self directed learning in modern traditions based on witchcraft and the occult. Important to consider here, in order to encourage practitioner engagement with this material, is non-rational forms of knowing and how they intersect with information seeking behaviour, and how practitioners seek to do what they do best: to re-enchant everything before them, including scholarly research. We cannot escape the political landscapes present in this type of work, and key here are the unique methods of establishing authority in magical communities, among other issues detailed in the information behaviour model developed.
Neither magic or libraries are neutral, and the coven framework in part allows for social justice magic, and practitioners of it, to progress, as well as looking at other alternative purposes for magical training beyond just preserving traditions or manifesting personal gains. Speaking from a viewpoint of politics in magic (rather than magic in politics), this paper will specify a project comprising of four work currents, roughly, equality, openness, monetisation and fiction/satire, and can speak to how they present themselves within witchcraft communities in detail. Ambitious plans for the coven aim to find a way to be guided by divinity and gnosis in order to inform developments and interventions in those areas.
Bethan Juliet Oake (University of Leeds): Attitudes Towards Potential Harmful Magical Practices in Contemporary Paganism
Bethan Juliet Oake a first year PhD student in Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Leeds and also a practicing witch.
Abstract:
In 2016, a group of witches organised a mass online hex against Brock Turner, the “Stanford Rapist,” in disgust toward his crime and unjust punishment. Responses to this event demonstrate the enormous diversity in Pagan’s opinions regarding the use of hexes, curses, or other forms of potentially “harmful” magic. The research outlined in this article consists of a qualitative survey which sought to identify these differences in opinion and the reasoning behind them. Results demonstrated that Pagans’ attitudes towards potentially harmful uses of magic fell into four distinct categories. It appears that fears of misjudgement and discrimination are very present amongst many within the community, which has led to some individuals attempting to conceal any practices that may be deemed harmful, or “evil,” by outsiders. Additionally, some choose to abstain from using harmful magic due to fears of harm returning to them. However, a significant proportion of Pagans today are in fact open to engaging with potentially harmful magical practices, as long as they can in some way be channelled to provide an outcome that can be deemed positive and/or healing.
Helen Cornish (Goldsmiths): Reimagining Political Activism and Magical-Religious Witchcraft
Helen Cornish is an anthropologist (Goldsmiths) and havsbeen researching how modern UK witches have navigated history and the past since the early 2000s. Helen is interested in how realist histories are incorporated and constructed alongside more imaginative and magical ways of thinking about the past through expanded historicities.
Abstract:
This paper considers changing perspectives on what counts as political activism in modern magical-religious movements in the United Kingdom. In the 1980s some practitioners were inspired by the US reclaiming movement to combine spirituality and political activism (Feraro 2020). However, by the turn of the twenty-first century political action amongst witches was primarily concerned with building a presence in the public sphere. For example 2001 saw a campaign for paganism to be included on the census count, and a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Repeal of the Witchcraft Act Attention. These social markers included outreach work to incorporate witchcraft and paganism in school religious education, training chaplains in hospitals and prisons. All these active markers urged recognition of modern witchcraft as legitimate on multi-faith platforms. Today, these campaigns remain relevant, but the scope of political engagement has shifted away from magical-religious visibility, towards magical activism. While this can be viewed through the lens of ‘occulture’, an enchanted sense of modernity, as an active social movement, other contributing factors can be found in the historiography and historicity of modern witchcraft itself. Responses to demands in the 1990s to align mythic orthodoxies with expert histories created spaces for expanded approaches to the past, such as through magical consciousness rather than empirical realism. In this paper I trace how changing ideas about witchcraft histories also generated spaces to reimagine political activism.
Manon Hedenborg White (Malmö University): "The Unknown Direction": Why Magic Matters for Contemporary Political Activism
Manon Hedenborg White is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Malmö University (Sweden). She holds a PhD in the History of Religions from Uppsala University. Her first monograph The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. She is co-director (with Christine Ferguson) of the ESSWE Network on Esotericism, Gender, and Sexuality, and Review Editor of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions (IJSNR). Her main research focus is Western esotericism, New Religious Movements, and contemporary spirituality, and she is especially interested in issues of gender, sexuality, authority, and women’s roles and leadership.
Abstract:
My presentation will touch on a few examples of the intersection between magic and activism from my own research while seeking to provide a preliminary, explanatory framework for why magic and occulture appear to be playing an increasing role in the landscape of contemporary politics and activism. I will consider the link between historical definitions of magic and marginalized groups (e.g., women, people of color, the working class, gender/sexual minorities) and how the embracing of knowledges and practices historically labelled ”deviant” or dangerous can be understood in the context of present-day politics.
Rebecca Tamás (York St John University): Q&A WITCH and Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry
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Rebecca Tamás is an editor, with Sarah Shin, of the 2018 anthology 'Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century.' Her collection of poetry, 'WITCH', came out from Penned in the Margins in 2019, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a Paris Review Staff Pick. She is the winner of the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize, and a Fenton Arts Trust Fellow. Her essay collection 'Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman,' was published by Makina Books in October 2020, and was longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University.
About WITCH
WITCH is a strange, visceral and darkly witty debut by a startling new voice in British poetry.
Rebecca Tamás reckons with blood and earth, mysticism and the devil, witch trials and the suffragettes, gender and sexuality. At turns lyrical, philosophical and obscene, WITCH evokes the intimate, sensual power of nature and merges it with the revolutionary potential of women’s voices. These are poems as spells — spells against suppression, silence and obedience; hexes that cling to your body like sweat, full of a messy, violent joy, ‘a small, bright, filthy song’.
Feminist, ecological and occult, WITCH grabs history and shakes it, demanding: ‘Wake me up when it really gets started’.
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About Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century
Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems take us into a place where the right words can influence the universe. Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry brings together 30 contemporary voices exploring the territory between the occult and the subversion of patriarchy. Occult poetics is a method of self-determination and transformation through a summoning of the world, through remaking reality. Capable of holding the contradictions of identity and trauma, poetry as magical language is talismanic, offering a sacred space away from everyday experiences of oppression. Spells honours the world of feeling, the world of the unconscious, the world of the body: desires and practices that are messy and diverse, as well as joyful, fun and celebratory. Contains new work by: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Emily Berry, Khairani Bharokka, A.K. Blakemore, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, C.A. Conrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Marianne MacRae, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Dolly Turing & Jane Yeh.
Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather: Q&A These Lancashire Women are Witches in Politics
Anna FC Smith is a multimedia artist exploring history and communal traditions through sculpture, performance, and socially engaged activity. Through research, crowdsourcing knowledge and collaborating on archival research, her work covers politics, and performative space; the places where people commune and enact daily or ritualistic activity. She is drawn to the irreverent as well as the pomp of societal structures. Her work also explores the role history can play in interpreting the present.
Helen Mather is a multimedia artist and workshop facilitator. She works as a technician in fashion and textiles at Manchester School of Art where she is also studying MA Textile Practice. She is interested in the language of materials, how they can speak to things that verbal language cannot, and the tacit knowledge gained from working with materials. Taking social and political history as a starting point, she seeks connections with contemporary lives, exploring these through materiality. Her practice involves community engagement, with communal making, discussion, and collaboration at the centre.
About These Lancashire Women are Witches in Politics
Beastly embroidered banners, medals of ritual magic and ceramic odes to mythology meet in the twilight of an imagined woodland haunt. Charged with the enchanted currents of Leigh’s radical history, these symbols of conspiracy and creative action have materialised through These Lancashire Women are Witches in Politics, a project by Leigh-born artists Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather. The artists have conspired with local communities to explore portrayals of Leigh women from 19th century Reform Societies as witches and beasts. This mythical imagery has been repurposed to harness power in a contemporary social and political context.