Transcript

Season 1, Episode 1 - Seeking American Magic

THORN MOONEY: I had a couple of girlfriends who had found books about witchcraft and magic and they shared them with me during a Halloween party. And while all of the other kids were drinking punch and playing games — we were kids, we were really little kids, like very young teenagers — I was off in the corner with my two girlfriends reading Scott Cunningham's Wicca: Guide for the Solitary Practitioner and Silver Ravenwolf's Teen Witch, and that's what I did, and we stayed up all night, we stayed up all night talking about witchcraft. 

And it was immediate. It was a passionate, freefall, 13-year-old girl, Halloween sleepover, movie-time, absurd, wonderful, bit of delirium that I remember as one of the happiest times in my life. 

HEATHER FREEMAN: This is Thorn Mooney. She grew up a military brat and lived all over, but spent the 1990s near DC. Until that sleepover, she'd never heard of Wicca as a religion. 

THORN: I knew that witchcraft was a thing, although I didn't know that it was a thing in terms of a contemporary real practice that I could do today that might even be religious. 

HEATHER: This was before the internet so Thorn's key source of information came from published books. And as a teenage girl without a car, this wasn't trivial.

THORN: I actually borrowed a composition notebook from my friend at the party, and I started hand-copying her books because I wasn't sure that I would be able to get my own. So I took it upon myself to hand copy them like some sort of monk.

HEATHER: Some forms of Wicca are initiatory practices. In these practices, most initiations are community-based rituals where the novice is admitted into a priesthood, house, fraternal order, or other group as a fellow initiate. Many of these practices also require the community to train the non-initiate first. 

In Wicca, this non-initiate is often called a Seeker. They're seeking the gods, magic, and mysteries beyond the material. But for a teenage girl, books were Thorn's first teachers -- and her first rabbit hole. 

THORN: I didn't have the internet, but I could go to the bookstore. And they might have a catalog and they might be able to order things for me, and I just would go back as far as I can. 

And the conclusion that I came to was that if I really wanted to take Wicca seriously, if I really wanted it to be a part of my life, if I wanted to be a priestess, if I wanted this to be who I was, then I needed whatever Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente had been doing.

And near as I could tell, that was Gardnerian witchcraft. 

HEATHER: Teenage Thorn was looking for the O.G. witchcraft. This form of witchcraft is named after Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant born in 1884 who effectively founded this global religious movement in the 1940s. Core to this form of Wiccan religious belief is the magic circle where witches honor the Horned God and the Goddess of the Moon, observe eight Sabbats (their seasonal holidays), and perform magic, including spells and rituals. 

As Thorn got older and learned more, she realized that the age of the practice isn't the thing that makes it authentic: it's the fact that you do it. 

And today, almost 60 years after Gerald Gardner's death, there are many, many expressions of modern witchcraft. As Thorn told me, football is just one type of sport. And Wicca is just one type of witchcraft. And just like you have touch or tackle football, there's many different types of Wicca. Not all Wicca is initiatory, although Gardnerian Wicca is.

THORN: Central to initiatory Wicca is the idea that what you're doing by joining a tradition like this is you're tapping into a sort of magical current, like metaphysical sorts of power that are passed ritually from member to member.

HEATHER: This knowledge is gained through both training with a coven and through initiation. But most initiatory covens require members to be adults. So teenage Thorn was out of luck until her twenties. But then she became a priestess of the Wicca. And she's still seeking. 

These days, she's a Religious Studies PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thorn researches Evangelical Protestant communities and mega churches, but also spends a lot of time thinking about religion in relation to magic. 

THORN: Wicca sort of occupies this weird space where it's a combination of ceremonial magic traditions, the grimoire tradition, Freemasonry and this idea of the fraternal order; and then there's tons and tons of British folk magic, and there's also theatre and art and Victorian fiction. And all of that stuff goes into Wicca. 

And to be clear, I think that's true of practically any religion we could name. One of the things that really appealed to me about Wicca, even as a youngster, was that it was self-conscious about that.

HEATHER: In religious studies, this religious, spiritual, and magical remixing is called bricolage. And this bricolage comes from the things you encounter in your day-to-day. 

So, for example, a tech professional in San Francisco might pick, mix, and combine their notions of Yoga, supernatural manifestation, and ideas about Buddhism they encounter on TikTok. Meanwhile, a stay-at-home mom in rural North Carolina might combine things from her childhood, like her Pentecostal grandmother's speaking in tongues and the Southern Baptist church around the corner. And she might mix these with the Rootwork practices she observes from a neighbor. 

Many of these practices don't fit neatly into most folks' ideas about religion, much less spirituality or magic. But people throughout time and around the world, including in America have done the same thing: they're seeking. 

I'm Heather Freeman, and this is Magic in the United States. 

In today's episode Seeking American Magic, we get to know two very different practitioners: Thorn Mooney and Reverend Aaron Davis. We'll look at the living practices of these two Americans to take our first peek into the vast, rich, and creative landscape of American magico-religious practices; and unpack the complex tensions around the word ‘magic’ itself: to understand why some practitioners describe what they do as magic and don't think twice about it; while others see it as a historically classist, racist or sexist pejorative; and for others still, it's a reclaimed slur, in defiance of that very history.

We'll be right back. 

[BREAK]

HEATHER: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman. 

Thorn Mooney identifies as Gardnerian Wiccan. But she also explores many other practices, particularly as they help her deepen her practices of modern pagan witchcraft. There's a lot more to her story, but let's bounce over from the East Coast to the West Coast and meet another practitioner.

Reverend Aaron Davis lives and works in California. He has a lot of different practices in his toolkit, but he very seldom uses the word magic at all. Yet, historically, many of his practices have been called magic by outsiders. 

Aaron grew up in New York where he attended two traditionally Black churches. One was a national Baptist church, a more conservative version of the denomination created by Dr. Martin Luther King.

AARON DAVIS: And that tradition shaped and formed a lot of different things for me. My grandma, my mother taught me how to pray, and her devotional spirituality definitely came from her church community. There were many things about worship and the rituals that were done in a church that had a big impact on me, even as a kid. Like, I could really feel the power of God kind of flowing through the church.

So that's one side. The other side that also had a huge impact on me is my father's side, which is A. M. E. Zion — African Methodist Episcopal Zion — Black Methodist Tradition in Auburn, New York, that is where Harriet Tubman's home is located. I would say that she is one of the saints of that tradition. 

And the AME Zion Church makes annual pilgrimages every year to her home. All the upstate New York churches go there and have a bunch of rituals and worship services. When the combined choir would sing the slave spirituals, I could really feel a lot of energy. I wouldn't have been able to use this language, but I could really feel the spirits of the ancestors when those songs were sung, you know, I could really feel the power of those songs in my body. 

That spirituality in particular really laid the groundwork for me developing this awareness of ancestors, but also this hunger of wanting to connect. 

HEATHER: Aaron still identifies as Christian today, but as a young person, something was missing for him. Something earthy. 

Aaron's time in those churches was formative, but as a young man in college, Aaron realized there were many more religions, spiritualities, and traditions in the world than he'd guessed. The chaplain at Aaron's college didn't know about his childhood experiences in church, but recommended he take classes with a particular Religious Studies professor. This exposed Aaron to the traditions, practices, and beliefs of many different cultures and communities. 

AARON: Up until then, I wasn't really fully aware of indigenous African religions, that that was actually still a thing that, that they still existed, that they were still vibrant, that there was still whole parts of the world and on the continent that were still practicing. And so by the end of those four years, I kind of made a big mental note to myself. I said, “You know, I'm going to find my way to one of these traditions.” 

HEATHER: After college, Aaron explored several Afrocentric practices, but none felt like his spiritual home, so he kept seeking. After a few years, Aaron started meeting people within the Lucumí tradition. 

Lucumí is an Afro-Cuban religion that combines Yoruban spirituality and Catholicism. It formed when enslaved Africans, who were brought to Cuba, continued their religious and spiritual practices. These practices were shaped and remixed by other social forces, such as restrictions by the Roman Catholic church, and later by Spiritism (which Aaron will talk about in a minute). 

This connection to African and African-American practices, plus the strong emphasis on ancestor veneration, struck a chord with Aaron: this felt closer to what he'd been seeking.

The spirits of Lucumí are called Orishas. But they're tricky to define. They're neither gods nor saints – they're a little more like divine powers of nature.

AARON: How do I describe what an Orisha is? An Orisha is a force of nature that rules some kind of aspect of the natural world, it could be thunder and lightning, it could be the wind, it could be the sun, it could be the ocean. But Orisha are also very cosmic, they have a much bigger influence, which makes them, Mysteries of the universe as well.

HEATHER: Lucumí also holds space for God. But this is not the ever-watching or personal God of many Christian theologies.

AARON: So, like most indigenous African traditions, however you conceive of God, God is not close and involved in every little thing we do, which is one of the differences sometimes with Christianity where like, no, God is very involved. You have to watch everything you do because God is watching everything you do. And we're like, ‘Not really, God is running in universe.’ 

HEATHER: Lucumí came to the United States in the 1940s and 50s with Cuban immigrants and the tradition is passed down from elders called godparents to their students. Along with worshiping the Orishas, ancestor veneration is core to the practice.

AARON: Your godparents, whoever they are, they're going to say, ‘Okay, set up an ancestor table, ancestor altar, and really start working on connecting with your ancestors because that is your foundation within that.’ Though there's the blood ancestors that we all have, but also your spirit guides, so there are ancestral spirits that walk with you to support you throughout life.

And so part of the spirituality of Lucumí is to connect with them, and to work with them using their gifts and your gifts together to really navigate all the challenges of life.

HEATHER: Aaron is a Lucumí initiate today, but that's not the end of his story. 

He also practices Espiritismo or Spiritism, which involves communication with the dead and spirits. And for Aaron, his practice in Espiritismo has been key to helping him continue to evolve and grow in his practices.

AARON: It is one of the most open-ended, open-minded, all-inclusive spiritual practices that I know. So we all have spirit guides, and those spirit guides can literally come from any place in the world. So you can be like you, Heather, you can be white as white can be, but you may have like a Tibetan Buddhist shaman, you may have a Native American medicine woman, you may have all these spirits from different places in the world that walk with you, that have something to teach you and show you and guide you throughout your life. And when you really realize that and you realize what that means, it makes you just more open as a person as well.

HEATHER: The global inclusion of spirits from all walks of life is a common concept in both Spiritism and Spiritualism. But it's not without controversy. 

Beginning in upstate New York in the mid-1800s, Spiritualist mediums relayed messages from the dead. Many of the first spiritualists were white, although this religion spread rapidly, and soon spanned across race, gender, and class. Some of these mediums also claimed to convey messages from Native American spirit guides. And many of these messages perpetuated stereotypes and myths about Native Americans. Much of this misinformation is still common in media today. We'll revisit this phenomenon in a future episode. 

The ethics of many kinds of spiritual and magical practices are complex. A challenge for this podcast series will be to honestly present the meaningful practices of others with an open heart and an open mind, but balanced with the histories of how these practices have overlapped with cultural conflicts in America. 

But for Aaron, Espiritismo has helped him frame his spiritual path within a diverse and complex global history. And the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of his spirit guides have helped him keep an open mind in the material world.

AARON: So, for example, a few years back I suddenly got this strong push to, you know, learn ceremonial magic. And I'm just like, “Why? That's— I don't understand.” But I trust the push.

HEATHER: Aaron's religious and spiritual seeking took him from the Baptist and Methodist churches of his childhood to Lucumí, an African Diaspora Religion. He continued to seek and his practices in Espiritismo opened a new door: ceremonial magic. 

Up until this point, Aaron's practices are spiritual and religious traditions-- but not exactly magical practices. Thorn Mooney, on the other hand, has a religious practice that’s also a magical practice. And her explorations have led her to study both magic and religion more broadly. 

They're both seeking. They're both remixing. And they're doing it in their own ways. 

After the break, we'll learn how ceremonial magic became part of Aaron's practice, and why the word ‘magic’ is such a fraught term for so many practitioners.

[BREAK]

HEATHER: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman. 

The ceremonial magic Aaron was drawn to is a highly ritualized form of magic, generally involving personal purifications and the creation of a protective magic circle. Ceremonial magicians also use prayers, Psalms, and invocations to summon and communicate with spirits such as angels, demons, or gods. Through this practice, magicians seek to interact with invisible forces, gain spiritual insight, affect change in the physical world, and much more.

Ceremonial magicians have many different religious identities, including Christian. And some, like Aaron, are willing to work magically with non-Biblical spirits as well. One example is the Greek goddess of crossroads, magic, and witchcraft Hekate. 

AARON: My relationship to Hekate is more of a contractual sorcerous relationship, because I'm strongly in the Lucumí and Espiritismo world. That's my primary practice. And so I'm really clear with myself and my spirits and any other spirits I work with.

Like I would literally say, “You're cool. I respect you. I will give you the offerings and things, but I want to make it really clear that you're not my first. Are you okay with that?” And if I get any funny feeling from that spirit, that they're not really okay with that, then I say, “Okay, bye-bye.” But if they're okay with that and they understand that, then we can work together. 

HEATHER: Explaining how magicians communicate with spirits is a little like trying to explain prayer -- there's a lot of methods and it resists description. 

But a magician might watch incense smoke and interpret the shapes they see, or they may silently ask a question in their mind and wait for some unusual sign or experience as the answer. There are many, many ways ceremonial magicians communicate with spirits. It's highly personal and often highly private, and we'll revisit this topic in future episodes.  

But of all of Aaron's practices, this work with spirits -- in the context of ceremonial magic -- is the only one of his practices that can be comfortably labeled magic. 

This is because in many other contexts, the word ‘magic’ has been used as a pejorative. Throughout American history, the religious practices of marginalized groups, such as people of color, women, and ethnic minorities, have often been viewed by the dominant culture as magic. At the same time, some use the word magic to deliberately describe their practices. 

For many practitioners, the word ‘magic’ has real meaning, separate from religion, spirituality, or philosophy. So this is a complicated topic that we're going to come back to again and again throughout this entire series. 

But Aaron's ceremonial magic practice is just that: magic. And his journey didn't end there. 

Aaron’s spirits also led him to Hoodoo, Rootwork, and Conjure. These words are often used interchangeably, but as a whole, they encompass a spiritual tradition, belief structure, cultural system, and healing practice first developed by enslaved African-Americans. And it varies, but many practitioners do not refer to these practices as magic. But Hoodoo became a uniquely American folk tradition through the remixing of African, European, and Native American lore. And we've got a whole episode about this too, by the way.

AARON: When I discovered that I had ancestors who were Rootworkers, I said, “Okay, well, I need to learn more about what this is, because this is in my blood.” There were rootworkers in my family. But my family kind of disconnected itself from that, moving north and everything. So I'm kind of bringing it full circle, you know. I brought it back.

I teach it now, as well. And how can I teach the people around me to be honest with themselves if I'm not in the process of doing that for myself? So, for me, it's really important to have a spirituality or a religion that does that on some level.

An important part of my spirituality is the way in which it forces me to deal with myself. I get to my core self, and then I get to really deal with myself, learn to love myself, validate myself, and then operate from a place of strength in the world around me. And for me, that's what all these spiritualities that I practice do.

HEATHER: Aaron's religious identity is Christian. It's the box he would check on official paperwork. But what he does is bigger, richer, and more complex than one word. 

The traditions of Lucumí and Espiritismo that Aaron found sometimes get called ‘magic’ by non-practitioners because they don't understand these traditions -- but they're not magic. These are religious and spiritual practices that are deeply meaningful to the practitioners -- who are often people of color. And these practices don't look like what most Americans think of as "religion". There's no church, pastor, or central authority. And throughout American history, religious and spiritual practices that don't ‘look’ like religion get dumped unfairly into the category of magic. At the same time, there are magical practices in the United States like Thorn Mooney's initiatory Wicca. 

So, when some folks say they practice magic, it's simply a matter of fact. 

For others, saying their practices are magic is transgressive. 

And for others still, it's complicated - even offensive - because the word magic is sometimes used as a slur.

Here's Thorn Mooney again.

THORN: Often magic becomes sort of this dumping ground between religion and science, where we dump religious stuff that we don't like, right? There's this whole history of extractive ethnographic practice where white people roll in to whatever community and declare everything “primitive and magical”. 

A lot of the assumptions that we make about what religion is stem from this idea that, well, religion looks like church, and religion is about beliefs, and it's about faith in a God. Things are religious when they resemble church. 

If you're hanging out with your friends and you're talking about religion, that's the assumption that most people are going to make, especially in the United States. And magic is everything that's outside of that, right? 

They're both really, really nebulous categories. It's turned out that in my scholarly life, the insistence that magic and magical communities are worth studying is still a marginalized perspective.

HEATHER: Religious studies is an academic discipline where scholars use things like anthropology, sociology, history, and literature to try and understand how people experience this nebulous category of religion. And this sometimes includes the nebulous category of magic. Sean McCloud is a Professor of Religious Studies and American studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

SEAN MCCLOUD: In the academic study of religion, the things that minorities, the poor, women do are more likely to be thought of as superstition and magic than authentic religion, right?

HEATHER: Both the names Aaron and Thorn are pseudonyms, and they use those names to maintain a separation between their practices and their families and professions. Thorn has magical reasons for having a Craft name, while Aaron teaches classes online, so a little privacy from his students is helpful. 

But for both of them, and for many other practitioners, there's a real and practical need to hide their magical practices from employers, friends, and even family. This might seem logical on the surface --  but when I think about the people in my life who are using pseudonyms, they're mostly magical practitioners.  As Thorn told me, sometimes, it would be nice to just have one identity. And this split seems to come from this tension between magic, religion, and secular society.

THORN: I think there are a number of ideas at work that don't necessarily serve us. One of those ideas is that religion is dumb and religious people are gullible and we can just ignore it. That's not true politically, that's not true socially, right?

There's this assumption again, that religion always has to look a certain way. And if it looks that way, it's ‘real’ religion, and if it doesn't, it's a ‘cult’, or it's ‘magic’, or it's something else.

A lot of the time what we're actually doing is further marginalizing marginalized people, right? Like the word ‘cult’ is often flung at particularly people of color, it's flung at poor people — like, we fling these words around like they have objective meanings, and sometimes they're weapons. 

So I think a level of religious literacy is worth having, regardless of our personal convictions, or our professions, or anything else. 

HEATHER: So we have magic and we have religion. And the difference between them is complicated. And then we have remixing, which includes magic, religion and spirituality. 

But let's take a step back for a second. When I say the word religion. What's the first thing that pops into your mind? 

When many Americans think about religion, they probably think about Christianity, because it’s been the historically dominant religion in the United States. They think of someone born in a Christian family, they're raised in that belief, spend their life in the same Christian church, and they die with that belief. Sure, that does happen. But that's just one slice of religion in the United States. 

If we take a beat, most of us acknowledge that, “Well, yes, there's also other major religions like Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.” But for many individuals, their beliefs change, evolve, and remix over the course of their lives. Sean gives us a hypothetical example: A woman living in Maryland who was born and raised Methodist.

SEAN: She still sometimes identifies as Methodist, sometimes she doesn't. She also is one of the 25-30% of all Americans who believe in a doctrine of reincarnation, that when she dies, she's going to be reborn again in a human body on Earth. (Um, Methodists aren't supposed to believe that, right?) 

In addition to that, she's one of the 40% of Americans who believe in ghosts. (Again, if you're a Methodist, there's no such thing as a ghost, but she believes in ghosts.) 

And she's also very taken with concepts like the Law of Attraction and Manifestation, which is explicitly non-Christian. Yet, she is all these things at once, right? 

HEATHER: Think about the people in your life. In what religious context were they born, and how did they identify now? Americans - well, humans in general - are super creative, and we often remix things we encounter in our everyday lives. From friends and family to video games and even advertising, people remix things from their environment to meet their immediate needs – including their spiritual needs.

Reverend Aaron Davis's religious, spiritual, and magical life is complex. Rich. And despite what many people might think religion is, his story is as American as apple pie. 

Thorn Mooney's path from her childhood to modern witchcraft is maybe more direct, but no less iconically American.

Rootworkers and witches, Santeros and sorcerers: These individuals are participating in the rich cultural remixing that is American magical, spiritual, and religious practices. They use different words for what they do, for good reasons –  and we'll get to know many of them and their practices in this podcast series. 

But they share one thing in common: They've been pushed to the edges of conversations about religion and society. Or ignored entirely. 

We're standing here at a three-way crossroads, between religion, magic, and secular society. This is Hekate's domain, and we've just taken our first step down the road of American magic. So let's see what's there, let's find out what we can learn, and where these three roads might actually reconnect. 

Wherever you are in the United States, the East, the West, the North, or the South: magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman. And I'll see you again next week, right here at the crossroads.

Next week, on Magic in the United States, we’re going to really geek out over both magic and technology. We’ll learn about pagans and magical practitioners who found each other online in the earliest days of digital communication on Bulletin Board Systems, the ancient ancestor of today’s social media; and we’ll see how these individuals shared magical knowledge – and life-long friendships – with practitioners all over the world.

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our Associate Producer is Noor Gill, and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Suleman. The Executive Producer for PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. The show’s music is from APM Music and Epidemic Sound, and our Project Managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. Thanks to advisors Danielle Boaz, Sean McCloud, Thorn Mooney, Cory Hutchison, and Meg Whalen. Thanks also to guests Rev. Aaron Davis, Sean McCloud, and Thorn Mooney. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.