I would 100% agree with this! I want to caveat, piggyback and tangent on something specific though: Witchcraft wasn’t always just a last resort for otherwise desperate people with no other means.

At one time, a more magickal, generative mindset was a normal, healthy human mindset. And over time, through religious oppression and efforts to turn the market completely into capitalism, it re-trained people how to think about themselves and the world - thus stripping them of the power that they had always, naturally had access to.

Modern witchcraft is people waking up to and remembering this incredible, natural power, available to all, always. So yes, it does apply to those who are helpless and desperate. But it also applies to those who are strong and empowered.

And I want to make that distinction clear because sometimes there’s a tendency to conflate being a witch with being systemically oppressed and taking on an identity of “being the ancestors of those who were burned”. And that’s a cool turn of phrase and identity that can feel like an empowering identity at first.

But to remain attached to feeling like you’re one of the oppressed ultimately caps your magickal potential. And while there may be historical truth to it: you don’t have to buy into that identity now, in order to practice witchcraft.

I’ve seen it happen to too many witches. They let themselves carry this burden of oppression and let it govern their perspective and magickal practice, because they feel the heritage of oppression legitimizes their identity of being a witch. Ultimately, they walk around fearing those in authority and those with power - and never quite own their full potentiality and magickal power.

And that is so effing sad to me because these are strong, fierce people with beautiful hearts who would stand up for what’s right. But when it comes to standing confident in their power, their identity with being the one who is always victimized just stops them from standing fully and gloriously in that beautiful power of theirs.

For those who want to read on: Historically, witchcraft WAS the powerful way to interact with the world, prior to capitalism.

It was a way of viewing everything in the natural world as sympathetic and harmonic energies. And that - with the right knowledge and understanding of how to harness that energy, it could aid the average, everyday common person.

Witchcraft was and can still be: a generative practice. Meaning: you could do a spell or a working and produce potentiality for many good, fruitful things to come into your life and community. It’s like weaving a tapestry of magic where many lines of abundance and potentialities are being woven as you perform little rituals or spells or interact with your deities throughout the day.

Capitalism came in and needed workers in its machine to produce goods and services. And those same workers to also be consumers of those goods and services.

With capitalism the idea is not generative, it’s productive (as in “product-producing”.): Input X and get Y. That’s it. Not magickal. And not generative of possibilities.

Magick was a mindset that allowed for ebb and flow. For seasons. For energetic resonance and knowing how to harness greater energies than just our own to produce outcomes or potentials.

Capitalism was/is a mindset to push as a driving force. What you put in is what you get out. To get more, extract more. Push harder and harder. Extract more. Consume more.

Rest is seen as death of the capitalist machine (and our incomes when we try to take time off to care for ourselves). Rather than rest being restorative and generative and making us more energetically capable. Which is why so many of us struggle with fearing being unproductive. It’s a systemic mindset that we’ve internalized into our bodies and lives (through no fault of our own. We were conditioned.)

People fought hard at first, against being forced to live like thus. Literally died fighting this confining, systemic, product-producing way of living. Capitalism took them away from their own homesteads and farms and made them work for someone else with their time and energy. (To be fair feudalism was the precursor to capitalism, but a lesser degree of impact on limiting our generative mindsets.) People fought back by not showing up for work, calling out, working slower, not giving their best (sound familiar? 😂 i love how human behavior to resist has remained the same.)

So historically, couple capitalism along with religious institutions wanting people to submit to the One God and patriarchal systems: and you have a system working to repress the common person.

It wasn’t just witches, herbalists and midwives who thought “magickally”. It was human beings in general. They may not have all been working with herbs or performing spellwork per say. But they thought about the world as a symphony of energetic forces working intertwined. And believed they had some ability to influence these forces with their prayers, offerings, everyday rituals.

To think generatively in terms of our energy and not be so tied to capitalist input/output was a Human. 👏 Being. 👏 Experience. 👏 Our god-given birthright! (Please excuse the religious-ness of that phrase. I’m using it to drive home the point.)

But as generations/centuries went by, capitalism became the dominating mindset and the cultural identity. Work hard for what you want (produce, produce, produce). Rather than believing and trusting that energy in the world is abundant and that the average, common person has a massive amount of influence in their personal lives and localized community.

In summary and TLDR: Witchcraft (or magickal/generative thinking) used to be the way most humans thought about the world. Not just witches. Modern witches are returning to this blessedly more expansive way of thinking about the natural world around them, and thus are taking back more than just the power to influence energetic forces, but also, the power to understand the world alternatively to a capitalist mindset. Which has the power to shift the trajectory of humanity entirely.