Louisa Watt, and:
Why do witches start practicing? Why do they leave?
“You aren’t a baby witch. The term is infantilising, it takes away your agency, and responsibility for your own development. You’re an initiate, a novice witch. You initiated into this practice.”
I’m paraphrasing, but those were the first words I heard from Louisa Watt, former Hearth Witch. She was a prolific vlogger who produced informative videos on the history and practice of witchcraft, paganism, and the occult on YouTube. One week ago, on the 11th of November 2020, she expunged all material on witchcraft from her personal website, deleted her YouTube channel, removed her social media accounts, and dedicated her online presence to her new identity as a born-again Christian.
“This endless searching for the truth… I’m leaving it.”
These are her words on her new YouTube channel’s first video, “Converting to Christianity from Witchcraft”.
I think you could say those words about the transition to any sort of religious or spiritual practice! Indigenous people who reconnect with previously inaccessible cultural traditions experience that all the time—they find who they are, their ancestors, their history, people, and culture. One doesn’t fit into the social fabric that they’ve found themself in, and then, after roving, they connect with someone—a living embodiment of a tradition—and their whole landscape changes. So ceases an aimless searching for identity and place.
Is that what leads people to paganism, the occult, and earth-centred spiritualities in the first place?
In her video, Watt talks about her own family’s history of schizophrenia, dissociation, astral projection, intergenerational abuse, and probable ancient cannibalism and demonic pacts. (I had to stop taking her seriously after she started talking about Satanic ritual abuse. I was caught between gagging and laughter. If you want to know why, here’s a lengthy exposé on the poster-child of the SRA panic, the McMartin Preschool witch-hunt of 1983–1990.)
I don’t know how many pagans come to their spiritual studies with a history of abusive, mentally ill Christian parents and grandparents. I think that means half the population of Alabama are potential pagans. I might be mistaken, but I don’t think that most of Japan, 72% of whose population does not profess any religious faith but 70.4% practices Shintou even when they profess a different religion such as Buddhism or Christianity, have a family history of C-PTSD and schizophrenia. I wager that most non-Abrahamic people, which is roughly half the earth’s population, aren’t suffering from the influences of demonic possession that Watt says “spiritual jailbreaking”, of which she includes meditation, opens you up to. Otherwise everyone who’s ever attended a matsuri (festival) would have a prescription for valproate, and Kyouwa Kirin Pharmaceuticals would be the biggest sponsor of matsuri and jinja (Shintou shrines) in Japan.
OK, so in Japan people practice Shintou because it’s tradition. What about people without a cultural background in animism, witchcraft, ancestor veneration, or other spiritual traditions? Why do they turn to earth-centred religions?
One thing that Watt mentioned in her conversion video which I agree with, is that most people who identify as witches or magick practitioners are frank and open about using their craft to manipulate and impose their will upon others.
- ⟡ “I want my boss to give me a raise”
- ⟡ “I want my partner to find me sexier”
- ⟡ “I want to be regarded with greater renown”
- ⟡ “I want that family to give me my asking price on the house that I’m selling”
- ⟡ “I want people to stop hurting me”
One popular affirmation is “I am powerful; my intentions manifest.”
Watt found herself at odds with much of her pagan milieu because she was, relatively speaking, “moralistic” and “conservative” compared to her peers. I relate to that.
I’m not sure if I should refer to myself as a “witch”, even a solitary or eclectic witch to others, because of the predominant practices in the contemporary witch community. Not that this isn’t a small part of Shintou as well; jinja regularly make much of their income from selling omamori (amulets) for things like financial, academic, professional, and romantic prosperity.
But I don’t need an omamori, or to make a potion out of nettles to weather workplace gossip. I rise above that without magick because I’m a bad bitch and I’m genuinely not interested in anything unintelligent these people say.
But other people are not so independent, stoic, and self-assured (some might say pathologically apathetic and callous, which is probably true) as I am. Some people really want their old invoices to be paid. They really want to sign that book deal. They really want to look pretty (beauty spells are a dime a dozen these days). They’re not sure how to mundanely make for certain any of those things, and they can’t accept that the Universe isn’t all about their blink-of-an-eye 100-year-span-existence, if it even spans that, so they turn to magick instead. They don’t want to settle with any discomfort and pain. Well, taking initiative to better oneself is admirable, but it all reminds of the pharmaceutical companies who’ve sold the idea that ageing-related back pain is a malign, abnormal pathology: so that even though the incidence of severe back disease hasn’t changed in decades, outpatient medical treatments for back pain has increased five-fold in the course of a single generation.
What was the traditional context of witchcraft? We’ve moved from an intimate, skills- and knowledge-intensive (not labour-intensive) relations with the natural world and a mode of living hingeing on life-long cooperation with our fellow man, to: consumerist, near-total alienation from the processes that have to do with sustaining ourselves, and a socially cannibalistic mode of living based on the exploitation of others (Pay me, bitch! Work that pussy for me, bitch!). We should remember that this transition coincides with the mass witch-hunts that swept Early Modern Europe in the beginning of its shift from feudalism to a capitalist economy—gone were the communal ties of the village and the value of the aged and the wise. Entering the stage was a new and vastly more unequal world built on rampant and ruthless competition, in which we envied our neighbours, were scared shirtless of the poor who envied us even more, and hated any old beggar woman who couldn’t work because they were lonely and creepy and had too many cats and wanted to talk to young people and didn’t do anything to benefit your coffers financially. Such were the social tensions that 100,000 people were executed, largely for the crime of being poor old ladies. (Now we’re much more civilised. We just exile our elderly to far-off apartments and never visit or talk to them.)
Instead of working to build an appreciation for all of life’s wonders, powers, joys, and sadnesses, these witches have accommodated themselves to exploitation in capitalist society. They’re miniature magickal capitalists, who want to join the big capitalists by means of magick. Bravo, you petty-bourgeois tools. You couldn’t give a crap about Bobmalinda or Philop the tree, or the frosted glories of winter, or summer earth and wind and your shadow running alongside you across the blazed grasses. You got your promotion with green spell candles at a time when no one from my generation knows what COLA is.
“Witchcraft is… clear, and glossy, and predatory.” Honestly, I feel the same way about a lot of practice I see. A Rule-Your-Man spell—I see a dysfunctional, power-tripping disaster of an adult refusing to build a loving relationship. They shoulds just break up with the guy and get a fantasy dildo from Etsy.
I practice what I do, whether you call it witchcraft or eclectic Shintou, because I love the world and can’t live any other way—every human infant is born with synaesthesia and my neurodivergent butt this body has had the good fortune to keep those excess neurons. Others practice what they do because they hate themselves and whatever inextricable situation they find themselves in, and they want to change that. Still others can’t find it in themselves to live for something they love—they have no love for this world—so they look to some divine, “higher” purpose instead of actually enjoying the beautiful, awesome Universe that surrounds themself.
If one finds oneself drawn to the teachings of an alternative religion because every person of faith around them is an abusive and hypocritical asshole, I suppose that conversion’s no surprise. Isn’t that the reason why most people leave Christianity?
It’s a shame that Watt’s pursuing a salted earth strategy and destroyed her oeuvre on her old religion. She can do whatever she wants with her own personal website, but she doesn’t have to pay to keep her YouTube videos up—and every single one of them is gone, now. Even if you don’t believe in magick, or think it’s all a load of superstitious crock, that’s the equivalent to the book-burning of an anthropological record. You don’t need to be of the Oroqen tribe to lament the the death of the last Oroqen shaman after the degenerated Chinese Communist Party converted the others into Party bureaucrats. From a purely anthropological standpoint, she provided valuable documentary record of the practice of witchcraft in the early 21st century, and she’s burnt that all up.
Even if I stop practicing magick, I’m not going to delete any of my works. Even if these aren’t my thoughts in the next week (and certainly not after my death, be that spiritual or physical), culture is a record of humanity—its foibles and achievements—and belongs to it as a whole.