Who Believes in Magic?
Day 17 of 31
TRANSIT TO TRACK Saturn conjunct moon 2 Pisces
I’ve been struggling with what to write. I’ve got plenty of multi-page drafts with thoughts too long for a post at this tempo but too interesting for me to want to spit something smaller out. If you follow my twitter, then you’ve no doubt seen plenty of threads on those half-baked topics. If you enjoy the gooey lava cake energy, my twitter is a must-follow. For the Workshop, however, I’d like things to be a bit more composed. To that end, it’s about time for a check-in. We’re officially into the 13 darkest nights of the year, the Long Nights. From the 15th to 27th, we’ll get as little sunlight as we get in the Northern Hemisphere. This is when the magic really starts to ramp up in the ritual: we’ve laid the course and ‘shot our shot’ by this point. If you haven’t started to see the road before you, you should expect it soon.
For myself, I’d expected some mixture of an introspective “Good” and a more outward one. The outward one has been the more obviously successful. At least, it’s been far more pleasant. After many failed attempts to show up at an event, I finally made it to the Gays 4 Good event last weekend. Handing out bikes and meeting some other community-minded queers was quite a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed that the group was a lot of older people. While it sure would be lovely to meet a nice guy, I will always take some intergenerational connections. I’m signed up for some more events in the future, met one of the heads of a queer sports league I’ll join come spring, and was reminded my oddness is truly an asset amongst the right company.
On the introspective level, things are less pleasant. Some ugly consequences from ignoring matters has forced my hand: disabilities are indeed disabling. I will be fine in the end but it has required a lot of bitter pills to be swallowed. There will be more, no doubt. I’ve finally found a therapist I think will fit with my needs and am tackling some of what it means for me to be autistic, how I want to reconfigure my relationship to the All, and what parts of myself I am unwilling to surrender in that process. When I was really young, I was a boy who wanted to be a girl, to be anything other than someone destined to become a monster like men. Later I became a homosexual who wanted to be anything but seen, to become a pariah like so many before me. Then it was mentally ill and the litany of reasons why I was so deeply wounded, the certainty of knowing there would never be justice for any of them. If not this, then something else: to be outside and apart is my Fate. As disappointing as that revelation is, accepting that additions to the One and not simply adaptations for the All are necessary to my success is a big step.
Today will be a day to listen and respond, to ready yourself for what awaits us in the second half of this magic. In lieu of any particularly helpful instruction or direction, here’s the headlines of the research I’ve been reading around who practices, believes, and consumes magic:
THE BIG PICTURE ON “BELIEF”
My greatest focus over the last few years is trying to understand the occult landscape. I know how the multiverse is structured and have little confusion about the mystical world, but as far as the actual practitioners are concerned? There are plenty of blanks. Prevailing scholarship from religious studies or the social sciences are concerned with the institutional relationship of individuals and their beliefs. There are some studies on personal belief but the broader scholarship struggles to conceptualize the mystical and belief in it apart from religiosity and its trappings. The term “spiritual but not religious” has come to be a placeholder and while it does tell us a lot, it also fails to capture the audience I’m most interested in. Magicians – and practitioners of magic – are often very religious and the religions play an important role in their magical working. Many people also don’t consider “magic” as broadly as I do: whether it’s the Christian insisting prayer isn’t magic or the new age psychic talking to Atlantians through crystals, they’re all part of the people I want to reach.
Fortunately, there are some useful insights in the available consumer research. Consumer/market researchers are primarily concerned with behaviors as they relate to value points and attitudes. Essentially, what feelings and values cause you to take action (usually buying something) and so the research rarely delves into the qualitative associations between these elements (which would be what we see in religious studies/ethnographic social sciences) instead focusing heavily on quantitative data. The studies are hard to compare 1:1 but the picture is fairly consistent across studies. As fate would have it, the company I work for fielded a study that included some data on supernatural content consumption and what audiences really love, everything from a good ghost story to a cryptid hunter show!
The vast majority of people who said they believed in witchcraft or supernatural powers are women under 45. The drop-off in terms of belief as we get older seems to be slowing but it’s hard to say much on that without more longitudinal data. The divide on belief in magic – “witchcraft and spells” in the study I’m referencing from Statista – wasn’t as significant on gender as it was on class and race. The wealthier and whiter you are, the less likely you are to believe in magic. A very important caveat here: this is data from the U.S. America's relationship with magic and mysticism is very complicated. As a highly religious, highly spiritual society, American history is filled with intense religious and ideological movements. It’s only been the last 70 years or so that we’ve attempted to purge that impulse from ourselves in the name of modernity and self-perfection.
The last major witch hunt in the United States took place in the 1980s under the guise of the Satanic Panic. Christians lined up behind liars claiming to have raped and murdered thousands, conjured fireballs like Harry Potter characters, commanded legions of demons, and most importantly, led hundreds of thousands of occult practitioners across the world in dark rituals. Utter fucking nonsense that was debunked by the few Christians concerned with truth, the consequences of these bullshit artists and the need of Evangelical Christians to inflict violence still ring out today. News stories about the Pennsylvania practitioner getting in trouble over a fortunetelling law and preachers insisting there are witches amongst his congregation to be purged will continue to come. Despite the very open secret nature of many occult/esoteric practices among the elite, popular opinion in the U.S. insists on a very protestant/evangelical view of the world: anything magical is terrible.
European protestant and Catholic states are on the whole more athiestic than the U.S. and WAY less spiritual. There are exceptions of course, but when we talk about Western Europe and other English-speaking countries across the world in specific, there seems to be a slightly higher level of belief in supernatural phenomena (ghosts/ufos/psychic abilities) but less belief in witchcraft/spells/magic itself. The base level is still higher though: about 20% of Americans believe while it's closer to 30%-40% depending on the country and particular belief. Belief in psychics is much higher than belief in magic: presumably because psychic abilities seem within the realm of possibility to a naturalistic worldview. There is a feasible explanation for how the brain could perhaps affect reality without necessarily having to drop a materialistic, natural explanation for the cause and effect relationship therein. Belief in witchcraft or astrology – which never gets over 20% in the countries sampled – requires a suspension of belief in naturalistic explanations as the sole means through which truth is determined. There are some spiritualists who sell their bullshit through a “scientific” explanation of magic, but just like L. Ron to whom they owe everything, they’re bullshitting.
All of this being a very long way to say, among the general public, there is a fairly low level of belief and the more mystical something is, the less people believe. Men are much more likely to believe in UFOs or cryptids than they are psychic abilities, ghosts, or magic. That isn’t particularly surprising either: men are overall socialized to reject the mystical and emotional as a basis for truth-making. Women didn’t reject the more male-dominated subjects, but their response rates were more in line with the baseline “woo woo” belief level (20%) in modern English-speaking countries. Younger women and more educated people of all genders strongly reject the UFO/cryptid phenomena while being far more open to the magical experience comparatively. I feel like there’s a much more interesting sociological argument to be made about that, but I suspect the cultural space in which those beliefs developed plays a big role. Sexism and racism are written into pretty much all occultism at some point but it’s at the core of many UFO/ancient aliens/secret cabal worldviews.
THE DIVERSITY WHITESPACE
Returning to an older study I discussed before, we know that Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans are far more likely to believe in the supernatural than their white counterparts. This is true on everything except for UFOs/cryptids which are overwhelmingly the domain of white men. Further research confirms some of my theories about why: white people view ghosts and the idea of curses/magic as something exciting whereas the other racial cohorts view it as something frightening or negative. The notion of actively approaching the entities, inviting contact with the Other, and worst of all, antagonizing them is antithetical to the worldview in which their belief originates. White people’s sense of magic (esp. in the US where the movement ended) is directly imported from the spiritualist movement in which contact with spirits and the manifestation of phenomena was the explicit goal. Spirits are objects to be controlled, properties of Nature which must be subjugated to our Adamic Mandate. In polytheistic cultures, spirits are more like equal participants within nature and entities with agency. Where the white ghost hunter sees a chance to chase the storm, the Asian ghost hunter sees a hurricane on the horizon and battens down the hatches.
This is probably why the content consumption around these topics doesn’t reflect actual belief in them. “Supernatural” for our purposes here is nonfictional representations of magic, ghosts, UFOs, or pretty much anything not overtly scientific. Across the population as a whole, only 18% of people like this kind of content. They are overwhelmingly white and poor, with a heavy skew toward women and less educated people. They also express frustration, boredom, lethargy, and anxiety at much higher rates than the general population. Their belief in the supernatural is escapism, as I would argue it is for many of the content creators they watch excitedly. They go on “adventures'' and play scary music over flash cuts of Ouiji Boards. When we consider the wants/beliefs of the majority who are actually interested in the subject, these values/imagery choices are utterly terrible!
The good news is that there are a ton of potential areas of growth. I would never say that we should cut back on the amount of white-focused content out there. While I despise a lot of it, I am also very much a part of that. I love the more academic, clinical approach to magic. I might mock spiritualists, but I also use a lot of the frameworks and language they developed to translate archaic magical concepts into more digestible ones. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with the Western/English-speaking worldview on magic. The issue is that 1) actual magical practice is rarely, if ever, involved with this content and 2) the content doesn’t appeal to people within that worldview. Certainly there are PoC who love “Ghost Adventures” and psychic shows, but they also express a deep desire for more “authentic” representations of it in the supernatural genre!
There’s a lot of other data I want to discuss, but this is already plenty long. Suffice to say, if you are a content creator, approaching the subject how everyone has for the last 40 years will put in you into a massive field of competition. I also wouldn’t recommend trying to do the “Black girl does Agrippa!” lens as a core angle either. While it will certainly appeal to a specific audience and could get you funding for a show, it won’t hit that “authenticity” element that marginalized audiences are looking for in magic. I suspect – in part based on the reaction to Alice SparklyKat’s Postcolonial Astrology – that appealing to those audiences will require alienating much of the traditional base. Not all of it – I’d like to believe more of my fellows are excited by the intercutlraulization of the occult rather than threatened by it – but the book’s success among PoC and young audiences and general absence from the authoritative canon is indicative of the same trends we see in other diversity-focused content efforts. You appeal to the majority and sacrifice the authenticity or you present the worldview as it is and let the audience do as they will.
For a good example of how to do this kind of content well, the voodoo/hoodoo folks are a great place to start. The working is unabashedly Black and so the language, imagery, and people involved must authentically express the various elements of Blackness present. Even the division of Hoodoo and Voodoo itself expresses that diversity: the two practices are undeniably similar, share an origin, and yet are interpreted and defined by the diaspora of Africans across the Americas. To understand these magics, you must understand Blackness, the experience of being without place and present – and perhaps most critical to its survival up until now, that content has remained intentionally opaque. If you are an outsider, even if you watch a ritual or read their writings, you will lack the context to interpret it.
Some practitioners are working to make it more accessible – as someone doing the same for his own tradition, I recognize the hypocrisy in my reservations. On one hand, there are many practitioners who use that accessibility as a way to communicate the authentic cultural elements around the subject: the education sort of folks. Then you’ve got people who are outside the tradition but aware of its practices enough to call themselves practitioners, people selling gris-gris and rootwork for insane amounts, and the bullshit artists grifting on the documentary circuit – the performance folks. I am neither an initiate of the traditions nor Black so my thoughts on the matter are pretty moot, but I do think accessibility as an objective is quite shallow. It just makes you vulnerable and witches of every color and by every name have been burned just the same. I may not have Authority over their workings, but they are my sisters no less. We would all be wise to keep our traditions from becoming hollow in our efforts to make them accessible.
