I Am a Witch Because I do What I want

Everyone who has spent more than twenty minutes in occult circles has heard it, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." It's got a nice ring to it. Crowley certainly thought so. Let me say that I'm not here to pick a fight with pompous magicians on a Thursday morning.

Here's what got me thinking about all of this. I kept seeing posts, and I'm sure you've seen them too, where one witch is telling another witch what they are or aren't, in this manner "You're not a real witch if you don't ___________" Fill in the blank there.

And I just have to ask, what does that even mean?

Because you started out saying that not everybody walks to the beat of the same drum, but now you want people to march to the beat of your drum?

Individuality is not a flaw in witchcraft, that's one of the most beautiful things about it. Yet here are the very people who will turn around in the same breath and complain loudly that mainstream culture tries to put everyone in a box, and they are doing exactly that. Drawing little boxes, handing out membership cards.

Deciding who gets to use the word.

I'm not interested in that game. I never have been. I never will be, Voldemort. Because honestly, the women and men who came before us, the ones actually doing the work in the hedgerows and the kitchens and the barns, they didn't have a certification board either. They just practiced, how they saw fit, and how they believed. Which is what made me sit down and really think about why I do what I do, and why I am what I am.

And the answer I keep coming back to is simple: I'm a witch because I do what I want.

I am who I am because I am what I want to be.

Because the women who came before me, the cunning women, the wise women, the healers and curse-layers and charm-makers huddled at the edge of every village in England and Scotland and the old Norse farmsteads, they didn't have a "law." They had a "life," they moved through it on their own terms, quietly and completely, and they practiced their craft.

That's the version that makes sense to me.

What I mean is something quieter and more radical than that. I mean that I know what I want, and I know who I am. I most certainly do not need your approval or permission for it. I want what I want, not what the trend cycle has decided is spiritually, or politically, appropriate this season, not what the loudest voice in the room says a real witch does.

"I am a witch because I do what I want" is not a boast. It's exactly what it means and says.

You can call it the Cunning woman's "do what thou wilt."

Know what you know. Do what you do. Be what you are.

No elaborate justification, or borrowed authority. Just the long, unglamorous, satisfying work of becoming yourself so completely that your practice flows out of you like water out of a spring, naturally, reliably, from someplace deep and underground that no one else can reach or redirect.

That's what I mean when I say I'm a witch because I do what I want.

It's a declaration of self-knowledge. Of earned, quiet, non-negotiable power over my own practice, my own craft, my own life.

The cunning women would have understood that perfectly. I like to think they'd approve.

Thank you, Judika, for your encouragement.