Lots going on! In this video, I share a bit of a life update: I’ve got a job, and I’m settling in Utah and opening up a Gardnerian training group. More deeply, I talk about the magic that I had been doing during my job search. I probe into why I had a series of […]
Read more "Video: Magic Doesn’t Work (Until It Does)"Hmmm. Are my thoughts coherent enough to write into a blog post? We’re going to find out together. I have a few different topics swirling around in my mind, all of which are loosely related. For one, I’ve been thinking a lot about community and what it means to be in community. I’m living in […]
Read more "Late-Night Thoughts: The Lovers and the Interdependent Self"Is there such a thing as a Wiccan theology? In some ways, the answer is obviously yes; we’re all familiar with a basic Wiccan cosmological framework of the Goddess, the God, the Wheel of the Year, the elements, and so on. But in other ways, there’s such incredible diversity of practice and belief among Wiccan […]
Read more "Video: Does Wicca Have a Theology?"Life is pretty damn good right now. For the past few years, I’ve felt like an animal caught in a trap. No matter what I did, my life just felt stuck, and it seemed like there was nothing I could do to escape it. I would have chewed my own leg off to get out, […]
Read more "Finding Happiness with the Eights in Tarot"In the Tarot de Marseille, two of the trump cards are missing something that the others have. One card, the Madman, has a name but no number; it exists outside of the numbered sequence of the trumps. Meanwhile, there’s another card that has a number but no name. This is the thirteenth card in the […]
Read more "Death and the Madman"This is the #OcculTea tag started by Ella Harrison, Joanna the Polish folk witch, and Leah the redheaded witch. I’m not terribly online and don’t inhabit a lot of the Internet spaces that this tag is largely focused on, so I come at it from a bit of a different perspective. I think a lot […]
Read more "Video: OcculTea – Algorithmic Social Media and Internet Witchcraft"Traditional Wicca is centered on coven-based practice, but a coven isn’t just a group of strangers who meet every full moon. It’s an intimate, tight-knit community. In this video, I talk through some of the implications of traditional Wicca’s emphasis on covens, ranging from initiating new members to the relationship a witch has with the […]
Read more "Video: Covens and Community"I’ve talked before about how I consider some form of necromancy integral to my experience of Wicca. Wicca centers on mysteries of death and rebirth, and part of what that means magically is that I am often engaging with the spirits of the dead. This sounds spooky, but really it looks pretty simple, especially when […]
Read more "Asking Dead People for Advice"As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m in the process of moving. This has, among other things, meant packing up my whole life and making some critical decisions about my possessions. Some things are getting packed into suitcases and taken with me to my next (semi-temporary) home. Some get going into storage until I […]
Read more "Downsizing My Tarot Deck Collection"Anton Mesmer was a weird dude in the late 18th century who put forward a (now thoroughly debunked) theory of “animal magnetism.” In this video, I talk through a little bit of what Mesmer thought and how I think it’s connected to the way early Wiccans understood their magic.
Read more "Video: Animal Magnetism and Wiccan Magic"
Jack Chanek 