Digital Age Witchcraft

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Beyond Belief: What Faith Actually Looks Like in Magickal Practice

There is a conversation happening right now in witchcraft spaces about hexing MAGA. Should we hex the head directly? Should we bind? Should we throw everything we have at the target and trust in our collective power? These are not small questions. Before we can answer them well, we need to talk about something more fundamental. We need to talk about the difference between belief and faith, and why confusing the two is part of how we got into this mess in the first place.

This Is War Magick. Not Resistance Magick.

Let us be clear about what we are actually discussing. There is a spectrum to magical work.

Resistance magick works against oppressive systems and forces. It is meaningful, necessary work. War magick is something else entirely. It is coordinated, strategic, and potentially dangerous work directed against powerful, entrenched entities and egregores. It has its own rules, its own risks, and its own requirements for preparation, skill and experience.

What the hex MAGA conversation is calling for is war magick. Not resistance magick. Treating it as the latter is the first strategic error.

MAGA is not simply a political movement. It is an egregore, a thoughtform sustained by mass focused energy and ritual, fed by fear, anger and devotion. The egregore tied to it is younger, but it feeds from an older one, more than 120 years old, created and sustained by occult practitioners. You are not hexing a hashtag. You are engaging a formidable magical entity with deep roots and significant resources behind it.

Knowing that changes everything about how you approach the work.

The Problem With “Just Believe”

Here is where the conversation usually breaks down. Someone offers strategic counsel and immediately gets told: “Not with that attitude you can’t!” Or: “The more you believe it won’t work, the more likely it won’t.”

This framework sounds empowering. It feels good. It is attractive because it offers a sense of agency and hope in frightening times. It is also, at its root, not actually craft wisdom. It is prosperity gospel in a pentagram. It is the law of attraction with candles. It is The Secret repackaged for WitchTok.

The “just believe harder” framework is a very modern, very Abrahamic idea that got absorbed into popular witchcraft through the New Age movements of the 70s and 80s and turbocharged by social media. A tradition that often positions itself in contrast to Abrahamic religion has in many corners inherited one of its most problematic ideas. Faith is a mental attitude. Confidence determines outcome. If it doesn’t work, you didn’t believe hard enough.

That is not what faith is. Not in the older traditions.

There is something else worth naming here. The dismissal of experience and strategy in favor of emotional certainty and “positive belief” is exactly what we are fighting against politically. Trump has built his movement on the same principle. Experts get dismissed as elites. Strategic caution gets called weakness or disloyalty. Confidence substitutes for competence. Belief substitutes for knowledge. We have seen where that leads.

If the magical community responds to a crisis of anti-intellectualism with its own version of anti-intellectualism, that is simply replication.

Faith as Proof, Not Positivity

Within the Cochran Traditions, and within many of the older currents of craft, faith is not a starting point. It is something earned, forged through direct experience, through devotion, through showing up to the work again and again until something shows up back.

Roy Bowers (Robert Cochran) wrote that within the disciplines of faith, a practitioner may receive “certain knowledge” of the divine by participating in something of its perfected nature. Notice the word certain. Not hopeful. Not optimistic. Certain. That certainty does not come from deciding to believe. It comes from experience that leaves no room for doubt.

The proofs of faith are experiential. Poetic vision. The vision of memory. Magical vision. Religious vision. Mystical vision. These are things that happen to you through sustained devotion and practice. They are not manufactured by positive thinking. They are encountered. Once genuinely encountered, doubt becomes structurally impossible. The experience itself has answered it.

This is a radically different thing from deciding to feel confident before casting a spell.

When someone with years of practice, research and direct experience with these specific egregores offers strategic counsel, dismissing that as “just your personal belief” is not empowering. It is the same move that dismisses expertise everywhere else. It makes knowledge impossible and leaves only feelings.

Battle Ready Faith

There is a kind of faith forged specifically in difficult and dangerous work. I call it battle-ready faith. It is the faith of a priest walking into an exorcism. Not hopeful, optimistic or even particularly emotional. It is a deep, tested, unshakeable knowing, of your deities, of your own proven capability, of the work itself, stress tested under real pressure.

This kind of faith does not announce itself. It does not say “I know how powerful I am.” It simply does the work, because the work has been done before and it held, and before that, and before that.

It is built the slow way. Through years of practice. Through workings that succeeded and workings that failed. Through showing up to devotion when nothing seemed to be happening. Through being genuinely tested and not breaking.

You cannot shortcut your way to battle-ready faith. You cannot manufacture it by deciding to believe harder.

Work Like a Guerilla

Your instinct to do something is right. Do something. Work. Bring your energy and your intention and your growing skill to bear on what matters to you.

Work like a guerilla, not like a redcoat.

The Continental Army did not win the American Revolution by lining up in neat rows and absorbing volleys from a superior, entrenched, well-resourced force. They won through guerilla tactics. They attacked supply trains. They ambushed and targeted officers. They blew up ships carrying needed resources. They applied pressure at weak points, disappeared, and struck again. That is how you actually win against a superior force.

War magick works the same way. Find the cracks. ICE is demoralized, benefits and bonuses have been withheld, officers fear exposure. Work that. There are fractures between military leadership and the administration. Work those wedges. Put static in the lines of communication. Make their systems fritz. Use karma workings to let consequences find their natural homes. Let the weak-minded break under the weight of what they have chosen.

These are not small workings. This is how change actually moves. This is strategy.

This isn’t a lack of faith in your power. It is faith mature enough to be strategic.

An Invitation

If you are newer to practice and some of this lands differently than what you have encountered in popular witchcraft spaces, there is so much more depth available to you.

The belief-as-positivity framework is a starting point, not a destination. The older traditions offer something far richer, a path of genuine devotion, real experiential encounter, and a faith that gets tested and tempered into something that cannot be shaken.

That path requires patience. It requires honest assessment of where you are in your practice. It requires showing up when nothing seems to be happening and continuing anyway.

What you find on the other side of that work is not just belief.

It is certain knowledge.

And that changes everything.

Between the Candle and the Cable: Witchcraft, Discernment, and the Path Ahead

A traditional witch speaks on commodification, integrity, and the future of the Craft.

Introduction

There’s been a lot of conversation lately about the rise of online witchcraft teachers, the commodification of the Craft, and what it means to lead or learn in a world that moves faster than the turning of the seasons. Some of these conversations are long overdue. Some are rooted in necessary caution. But some forget where we’ve come from. And more importantly, where we’re going.

As a traditional witch who has walked this path for over thirty years, I’ve seen waves of change, and I’ve weathered them. Today, I want to offer not a defense, not a rebuke, but a reflection. A spiral walk through where we’ve been, where we are, and the witches we must become.

The Price of Breath: Commodification Isn’t a Pagan Problem, It’s a Cultural One

Let’s start with the truth: commodification is not some modern poison that’s only recently seeped into the cauldron. It is the air we breathe. Every aspect of our lives is filtered through an economic lens: food, water, shelter, healthcare, education, and yes, even spirituality. We live in a world where entire religions are monetized, where wellness is branded, and where sacred symbols become product lines.

So when people speak about the commodification of witchcraft as though it is a uniquely modern blasphemy, I wonder what world they think we’re living in. The issue isn’t that money has entered the picture; it’s that we often fail to see the larger picture altogether. Witchcraft exists within this world, not outside it. If we want to change the culture, we must first acknowledge it. And that means recognizing that yes, we charge for classes, we sell candles, we write books, not because we are corrupt, but because we, too, must survive.

And ironically, this presence in the marketplace, though imperfect, has also made space for us. It has created visibility. It has offered some measure of reputability. It has allowed witches, for the first time in millennia, to be seen not only as outsiders but as contributors to culture. That’s not a flaw. That’s progress, however uneven it may be.

The Oldest Exchange, Witchcraft Has Always Been a Trade

Witchcraft has always been a trade. Not a metaphorical one, but a real, tangible exchange of energy and skill. In ancient Babylon, priestesses accepted offerings for divination and blessings. In rural Europe, the village cunning person might be paid in eggs, wool, or labor for healing a sick child or blessing the crops. In Appalachia, granny witches received whatever neighbors could spare in exchange for poultices, midwifery, or protection spells.

This wasn’t a capitalist system, but it was an economy. One built on reciprocity, survival, and value. The witch’s labor has always had worth, not just spiritually, but also practically. To frame modern pricing as some kind of betrayal of tradition is to ignore this unbroken chain of sacred service.

The form of exchange has changed, from eggs to PayPal, but the principle remains: energy for energy. Knowledge for nourishment. Time for tribute. This is not commodification in the hollow sense. It is covenant.

Visibility and the Marketplace: What Sells Is Also What Survives

There’s a strange irony at play in today’s magical landscape. On one hand, we lament the commercialization of the Craft, crystals in every big-box store, moon water labeled as luxury skincare, mass-produced tarot decks with gilded edges and no soul. And yes, it can be disheartening. But on the other hand, this visibility has done something profound: it has made our existence known.

It wasn’t that long ago that being a witch was enough to cost you your job, your children, your life. We lived in shadows. Today, a young seeker can walk into a bookstore and find an entire section dedicated to our practices. That is not trivial. That is not nothing. That is a kind of power our ancestors would have marveled at.

Visibility also means safety, for many of us. Not universally, not without cost, but it’s harder to burn witches in public when witchcraft is in the mainstream. It means we can find one another, share resources, build community, and teach in ways our predecessors could not. It has opened the door for people who never would have found the Craft before to walk a path of power and healing.

Yes, visibility invites dilution. But it also invites survival. And more than that, it creates a doorway. One that can lead to deeper study, to true community, to real transformation. It is up to us to guard that doorway with wisdom, not scorn. To meet those drawn in by beauty and teach them depth. The marketplace is not our enemy. It is our terrain. What matters is how we walk it.

Where We Came From: Lineage, Access, and Shifting Gateways

Once upon a time, the gates were locked. To learn the mysteries, you had to be initiated. To be initiated, you had to be vouched for. To be vouched for, you had to find someone who would even admit the path existed.

Traditionally, witches met in secret. Information was passed from mouth to ear, hand to hand. This wasn’t elitism, it was survival. It also meant that knowledge was limited to those with the right connections, geography, and luck. If you didn’t live near a coven, or you were queer, or disabled, or the wrong race, or simply not trusted, you didn’t get in.

That has changed.

The internet cracked the gates wide open. Books poured in. So did forums, videos, blogs, TikToks. What once required years of searching can now be Googled in seconds. But access is not the same as understanding. And knowledge is not yet wisdom. We need more than content. We need discernment.

From Covens to Cunningham: The Distance Between Circles

The 20th century saw a dramatic shift. When Scott Cunningham published “Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner” in 1988, he changed everything. Suddenly, you didn’t need a coven. You could dedicate yourself to the gods and begin a path alone.

This was revolutionary and necessary. It opened the door to thousands who would never have been welcomed into a traditional coven. But it also began a migration from group practice to solitary exploration. From mystery school to self-study. From oaths to openness.

In doing so, something was lost. Not in value, but in weight. Initiatory paths are not better, but they are different. They are shaped by elders, by shared rites, by lineage, by the crucible of community. And when those paths are rare, or corrupted, or commercialized, seekers are left to wander without map or mentor.

The Solitary Path: The American Spell of Self

There is a uniquely American mythos woven through modern witchcraft, the idea that the self is sovereign above all. That one’s own will is enough. That each person can be their own priest, their own coven, their own tradition.

There is power in this. But also peril.

We have inherited a rugged individualism that serves capitalism better than it serves magic. Real transformation often requires relationship, reflection, challenge, and accountability. The solitary path is not wrong. But it is hard. And without guidance, it can become a loop that never deepens. We must remember that being self-taught does not mean we are self-made.

Between Hunger and Harm: Trusting Again After the Wound

Many seekers today are not merely curious. They are wounded. By religion. By culture. By family. By former teachers. And they come to witchcraft hungry, for truth, for power, for freedom, for healing.

But hunger makes us vulnerable. And the online landscape is full of voices ready to feed us, some wise, some manipulative. The wound that drives us to seek can also blind us to red flags. It can lead us to pedestal people, or rush into oaths, or overshare before safety is earned.

Rebuilding trust takes time. Especially after betrayal. But discernment doesn’t mean we close every door. It means we learn to knock more wisely. To walk with both caution and courage.

Discernment, Devotion, and the Sacred Act of Asking Why

At the heart of all true paths is the question: why? Why this spell? Why this teacher? Why this tradition? Why do I want this? Where does this come from? What does it cost?

Discernment is not cynicism. It is clarity. It is love with boundaries. It is faith with teeth. It is the willingness to slow down and see what is actually being offered, and what is being asked.

The witches of the future will not be those who know the most lore. They will be those who can look into the heart of a thing and know whether it is hollow or holy. That’s what we need now. That’s what devotion looks like in an age of distraction.

Why We Pay Our Teachers: Energy, Time, and Sacred Exchange

Teachers today are expected to do far more than simply transmit knowledge. They must develop skill not only in their craft, but in pedagogy, leadership, and accessibility. They must build courses, write materials, research history and lore, adapt to changing technology, and hold energetic space. They must field questions, offer feedback, provide ethical frameworks, and serve as guideposts in a world oversaturated with information but starving for wisdom.

Hosting a class, whether online or in person, carries costs, including Zoom subscriptions, physical venues, supplies, marketing, time spent planning and following up, emotional labor, and spiritual preparation. In years past, a teacher might have been gifted eggs or labor. Today, it’s more likely to be PayPal or Patreon. But the spirit of exchange is the same.

And even when teachers offer their work freely, as many do, there is still value being given. For those teaching under 501(c)3 non-profits or in purely volunteer spaces, an exchange can still be honored. Make a donation. Share their work. Clean up after the ritual. Offer thanks with more than words. Bring them a cup of tea. These are not merely gestures. They are offerings. They are respect made visible.

To say we should not pay for spiritual teaching is to ignore the reality of our economy and the deep tradition of exchange that our ancestors honored. A priestess leading a rite is not simply casting a spell; she’s spent hours writing the working, gathering and paying for supplies, holding the weight of the circle, the working, and the well-being of the gathered. That deserves compensation, whether in coin, contribution, or care.

In my first coven, we always grabbed a plate of food for our Priestess first, fed her, let her relax, and did all the clean up. We also bought charcoal, herbs, candles, and oils to replenish what we used. We all benefited, and I never forgot this lesson. I do it to this day.

The Questions That Matter: Red Flags and Right Fits

So, how do we know which teachers to trust? Whether they’re online, local, published, or self-taught, we owe it to ourselves to ask questions. Not just about the class, but about the person leading it. Here are some of the questions I wish someone had given me thirty years ago:

  • What is your background and training?
  • Who trained you? Where did your teachings come from?
  • How long have you been practicing, and how long teaching?
  • What are your spiritual values?
  • What are your boundaries? What are your expectations of students?
  • How do you handle power dynamics?
  • Are you open to feedback? Correction? Dialogue?
  • Do you welcome students growing beyond you?

And here are some red flags to watch for:

  • They discourage questions or get defensive when challenged.
  • They demand loyalty without earning trust.
  • They blur boundaries, especially around money, sex, or emotional labor.
  • They don’t cite sources, refuse peer review, or rewrite history.
  • They promise quick power, easy spells, or guaranteed results.
  • They isolate you from other teachers or traditions.

You don’t need perfection. But you do need integrity. And clarity. A good teacher will invite questions, not fear them. They’ll be transparent about their history, their gaps, and their growth. They’ll tell you who they learned from, and they’ll encourage you to keep learning beyond them.

And you, dear witch, must be a questioner. Of self, of culture, of content, of tradition. Our future depends on it.

Between the Worlds: Adapting the Craft in the Digital Age

We are in the middle of a sea change. Traditional teachers, those of us who trained in basements, woods, and whispered spaces, are being asked to evolve. To learn new platforms. To stretch old bones into new shapes. To bring the mysteries into rooms with ring lights.

It is not easy. But it is necessary.

The digital age has transformed how seekers find the path. No longer must they stumble into a metaphysical shop or hope to meet someone at a festival. Now, a scroll on TikTok or a link on YouTube can become the doorway. And for teachers, this means shifting how we serve without sacrificing what we guard.

We must learn new tools. Hosting Zoom rituals is not the same as calling quarters in a forest. Filming a teaching series is not the same as holding a student’s hand through shadow work. But the essence can still be honored.

The sacred must still be felt.

Many of us have spent years, decades, walking this road. And now we are building bridges into this newer world. We’re learning to write PDFs and edit audio. To manage online communities. To translate presence through pixels. And this, too, is part of the Work.

But let us be honest. It takes time. It takes energy. It takes a willingness to change and to be changed. The screen is not a substitute for the Circle. But it can become a vessel. A chalice. A flame carried forward, if done with care.

We ask seekers to meet us with patience. To understand that digital doesn’t mean lesser, and old doesn’t mean outdated. That both carry wisdom. That both can serve.

We must also speak the truth: not everything old is accurate. And not everything new is wrong.

There are texts, teachings, and theories passed down through generations that have not stood up to the light of history, archaeology, or cultural analysis. Some have even been disproven, but still circulate, reappearing as if time has not touched them. Just because something is ancient does not make it infallible.

I have deep reverence for my first priestess. She was a brilliant teacher and shaped much of my early Craft. But even she, for all her wisdom, passed on information I later discovered to be incorrect. And when I found those errors, I corrected them, not out of disrespect, but out of devotion. Devotion to truth. To integrity. To the living current of our practice.

This path demands that we be fierce in our discernment. That we wield our minds as well as our hearts. That we become, not followers of tradition for tradition’s sake, but stewards of wisdom. Sharpened by inquiry. Guided by conscience. Honoring what has come before while being unafraid to evolve.

The world is changing. So are we. The Craft has always survived because it knows how to transform. Let that be true of us now.

The Flame That Carries On: A Closing Reflection

We are the living threads in a tapestry both ancient and still in the loom.

Witchcraft is not a museum. It is not a fixed point in time. It is the fire stolen, the bone buried, the whispered name across centuries. It moves. It breathes. It changes form so it may survive, and changes us in return.

As we move forward, let us do so with eyes wide open. Let us be bold enough to ask questions, humble enough to admit when we are wrong, and wise enough to sit at both the hearth and the keyboard with reverence.

To those who carry the candle, and to those who transmit the signal, may you each tend the mystery well.

The Craft endures. And through us, it lives.