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.
Where the Blackthorn Grows Wild 