Ok, ok. That pun is such a stretch, but we are taking pride (ok, I’ll stop) in our May/June read which is a look back on the Spectrum Gate Mysteries witchcraft tradition and more broadly creating queer systems of witchcraft and paganism when you need to escape the binary that exists in many popular systems.
In May and June, we are reading Casting a Queer Circle by Thista Minai, a book rescued from our long list of books that didn’t win the book club book vote over the last 3 and a half years (wow).
“Many people come to traditional Wicca or Witchcraft seeking the benefits of shared ritual, spiritual community, and formalized training, but the inherent sex and gender binaries that permeate modern Wicca can make anyone who exists outside of that polarity feel unimportant or excluded. Even people who identify within a gender binary but want their spiritual or religious practice to reflect a spectrum of life experiences can feel stifled and smothered in the biases of Wicca-based Paganism.”
Gays, theys, and queer friends, this might just be our hot girl summer read.
i know there was a lot of controversy when that aesthetically beautiful but essentially pop-culturey and trans-exclusive book “WITCH” by Lisa Lister came out. you know the one. the black matte cover, crescent moon C. throughly instagrammable, but full of hot garbage. i’m not bothering to post a photo because honestly i dont think it deserves that kind of free press.
BUT If you’re anything like me, you were innocently carousing the bookstore with no idea of what kind of mess you were in store for when you purchased it and were greatly disappointed by its pages.
For those of you with the same experience, I offer to you this alternative:
“Becoming Dangerous” is a book edited by Katie West and Jasmine Elliot of Fiction & Feeling, and offers deeply personal, empowering essays about magic and ritual by trans witches, nonbinary witches, disabled witches, and more!
I haven’t gotten through the whole thing yet, so I can’t vouch for it in its entirety, but I’ve read through the first couple essays and so far it seems like a great alternative.
It doesn’t have “how-to’s” or spells per se, but you get a deep and intimate look into other people’s personal crafts and worldviews. And there’a a lot to be learned from that honestly.
Something I’ve been curious about is with so many things in witchcraft having male/female correspondences, are there also things the community/parts of it consider to have other gender correspondences? Nonbinary, agender, trans, etc?
Good question! The gender correspondences for herbs, crystals, planets, and so forth are rooted in old ideas about the intersections between magic, medicine, and astrology. When these ideas originated, there was no real division between science and the supernatural, and the idea of nonbinary gender presentation as socially acceptable or commonplace was not something that was generally present in the popular consciousness of Western Europe.
Generally speaking, it’s not likely that you’ll find a gender classification apart from stock male/female or masculine/feminine in most witchcraft-related literature that includes these correspondences. While individuals who do not conform to or identify with binary genders have always existed, the inclusion of these concepts in discussions on magic is a very recent development and is something we’re still working on being more conscious of as a community. (e.g. Not automatically referring to unnamed witches as “she,” changing attitudes toward gender roles and presentation during certain rituals, wider acceptance and inclusion of practitioners who identify as other than their assigned-at-birth gender, etc.)
The good news is that the designation is pretty much arbitrary and there is no need to gender anything or subscribe to those ideas in your practice unless you want to. And if you feel like a particular plant or stone or what have you resonates as nonbinary, agender, trans, or otherwise? You go right ahead and call it that.
