Hello and welcome to Practically Magick. We are here in season four. We did it. And I am recording back in the cave, my favorite place to record. So welcome back to the cave.

All right, friends, we've got a lot to get to it today. Today's episode is going to be all about the word witch. I'm gonna throw some educational things at you and then we're gonna discuss a little bit because I actually wanna know from you, witches and wizards, what you feel about the word witch. What comes up for you. Before we get into it, we have to do our card pull and I've got the good old ethereal visions deck ready today.

We're gonna be pulling a card for whatever you need to know at this moment in time. We're gonna trust that this card, whether you're listening to it, when this episode comes out or at any time, it is meant for you. As I'm getting ready to pull this card, friends, we've been discussing kind of the turn of the wheel of the year, what's coming up for a lot of us and the energies have been insane. I trust my astrologer to tell me what is going on with the planets because I know we were mercury in retrograde is just getting ready to be done and it was chaotic. I read somewhere something like Jupiter is moving into Leo, which is the fire sign and all kinds of things are going on but all I know, all I can sense and tell you is that my kids have been insane and it is summer, it's chaotic, I'm trying to juggle a million things.

So getting to record the podcast is almost like a little break in the day for me. So if you've been feeling a lot of those shifts in energy just now, you're not alone and hopefully we will start to come out of it. I think it's kind of like the universe's way of tapping into the cycles of summer and we talked about lithium one of the previous episodes about how it's just like slow down, take it easy, maybe take a few things off your plate and that's kind of the message that keeps coming to me when it's like you're trying to do too much in a time or a cycle that's meant for just weight and see, energy, okay. The card that I have pulled today, oh of all the shuffling I did, I got the high priestess. Love that girl, love that high priestess, she's gorgeous.

So what I love about this is it's very demure. The high priestess, she's one with at least a lot of the ways that she's portrayed is high collar, she has a book in her hand in this deck and sort of like a level of respect and respectability. And actually this is perfect because I was just listening to, earlier this morning I was listening to the interview that Amy Poehler did on her podcast with John Cena, my cohost on Parallel Frequencies, Just Blane was a wrestler, loves John Cena so he would get a kick out of it. But some of the words of wisdom from John Cena about his kind of advice on how not to fail was really interesting because I love the way he worded it where he said, I don't have the keys to success, I don't know if I could tell you exactly how to succeed but I can tell you how you would fail that if you are unprofessional, uncoachable, uninvested, you will most certainly fail 100% of the time. And I thought what wise words from somebody who had a career like him where he was very successful, very well loved, he is a good heart, a good soul of a person who's done a lot of good in the world and charitable acts.

So he's proven himself to kind of, maybe he says he doesn't know the key to success but I don't know if there's a lot of people that could claim themselves to be as successful as John Cena is but it's interesting that I listened to this morning and then I'm pulling the high priestess card and that's my first thought is thinking about how a very professional, very demure, very kind of like putting the sovereignty on your own head, your own crown to say, I know what I'm doing and I'm moving forward. I think a lot of people feel stuck right now. So if that's something that you've been feeling or we've been kind of going through the muck of that together, feeling unmotivated, I think that this card coming forward for us today is like a message of sit with that, learn the lessons that that has to bring and then that good old saying, put your crown or your tiara back on, lift your chin and lift your shoulders back and get to work. It's kind of a, it's motivating, especially if you've been in that stuck energy. So we're gonna keep the high priestess in mind as we go forward with our episode today.

I'm excited to talk to you about that, about the word witch because we've talked about the witch trials in season one and season two of Practically Magick. We've kind of delved into a little bit of that and I just want to reiterate that, whatever terms or language that happens to be used when connecting with spirituality and finding your own route, your own path and the titles you would rather use when it comes to how you address yourself, how you present yourself and that's totally personal and that's totally up to you. But I have been sticking my heels in more and more lately, especially in the particular demographic of people that I live around here in, I will just say it. We live where it's a predominantly Mormon society and it is a place that was founded and settled by Mormon pioneers. And I am recording this episode on the week of Pioneer Day.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about all of that. And because of that, I know that there are a lot of sticky points when it comes to the word witch. And so I'm gonna tell you some of my personal examples and this is not to judge anybody or to call anybody out on things that were said to me or done, but in hoping that we bring awareness to not everybody feels the same way about something and that it actually could be reversely offensive to treat it as if it is a certain way. So a little bit of history as we go through this, witch coming from old English words like wicca or wicca kind of came about talking about magic, talking about sorcery, talking about knowledgeable people who had this kind of old school wisdom. There is some etymologists tracing back the roots of the word witch to German.

There's a German word and I am not gonna be able to pronounce this correctly, but I apologize to anyone who speaks German. Something that sounds like wicca or wicca, wicca, which relates to bending and shaping of reality. And reading about this, I'm really intrigued because so much of what I teach in the healing world and some of the episodes we've done here on Practically Magick talk about how the real and true magic isn't maybe as sparkly as Hollywood would have you believe, but that it is bending and shaping reality based on our own neural pathways, based on how we are changing the perspectives and noticing things that we haven't previously been noticing. And that's really kind of what the magic is. So I love going back to that kind of early etymology of the word.

Of course, we know that in the medieval times, medieval shift, when Christianity started to spread more and more throughout the world, there became a great fear of certain things being devil worship. We kind of see this shift in folklore and fairy tale tellings where we get stories like Red Riding Hood. And a lot of these stories show that things that were wild, things that are of nature or are natural are demonized and villainized in the story. So the dark forest, there's always a villain of some kind lurking in the dark forest. And what would have previously been stories and lessons taught to children, which would have been to respect that danger, respect the balance of nature, that the goddess or the goddess archetype in a lot of folklore and storytelling had to do with the balance of predator and prey.

That yes, the woods, the forest, the wild natural elements are and can be dangerous, but they're also to be respected and revered and held as sacred. So getting to be in those spaces, getting to go and engage with the trees and the plants to understand that there are nature spirits like the Fay folk who you respect and leave offerings and you don't go trampsing through, acting like you own the place. That would have been the previous kind of lessons of those fairy tales told to kids. And then we see this shift where it's just like, the devil is in the forest. And you see that when the witch trials do start happening because if usually women, and we're gonna get a lot to that, we're gonna talk a lot about that today.

Usually women were accused of being witches. They would have evidence of them being a witch because they spent time in the woods or they were recluse or they were maybe a little bit ostracized from society in some way. And so a lot of the victims of the witch trials were being accused of a witch had to do with whether they were women in poverty, whether they made a fuss in any way, shape or form, spoke their opinions too much, caused problems for the men in power. There was a pattern of who was accused of being a witch. But you see this for centuries happening where the word witch was changed into something that meant in their minds, devil worship, that meant something connected to nature or the wild or the herbs or healing in any of those ways would be then also coincide with devil, the devil, just as nature itself was.

And just a little side note about some of the things that we see in modern day and how this plays a part is even things that are natural like homosexuality or fluid genders or trans or gender-based or anything that the Christians would peg as unnatural. We know now, I mean, we know scientifically, we've proven these are actually natural things. There are animals in the wild with same sex attraction that pair up and mate. We see it all the time. Gender is fluid, gender isn't necessarily something that is a social construct among the animal kingdom as well as in human nature.

But again, we're using the term natural and kind of pegging it as unnatural or as we're demonizing it with that Christian influence. And I'm gonna get a little bit into that power play between Christian and paganism. But I just wanna point that out because I think that's very interesting as we continue to look at what is actually natural in the world and what sort of campaign are we still, sort of bias do we still have from that centuries old campaign where we were decided, as Christianity spread across the earth, they were like, we're gonna go ahead and demonize things that are actually natural and part of the natural world. So we kind of get into it as we look at like what happened in those 15th, 16th centuries where King James came out with his book about demonology and witch hunting and witchcraft. And of course we demonized a lot of the work being done by women.

And this is where we get into my personal connection with the word witch because witches, and as I've said before in Wales, they don't really have a word for which they have cunning women and cunning men. The Swinrig was a cunning woman who knew about medicines and helped people, had some knowledge about the folklore and about the Fay folk and about magic and about talismans and charms and things that were useful and helpful in the community. And in a lot of maybe pre-Christian civilizations, these were revered women. These were an honored position to have, was the person in the community who knew that stuff and had the knowledge passed down to them, probably from their mother or grandmother and served a very important role in the community. And isn't it interesting that when Christianity started to spread, it was also a very patriarchal society that was developed from that.

And that women being able to provide for themselves with this knowledge, be able to conduct business or trade or to be cared for with this position of witch, of course, to demonize it would be to take away her livelihood and make her controllable. Not just the witches, but all of the women in general, all of the society as a whole, men, women, everyone, as we went from a feudalist system into a capitalist system, it became not so much about the work being done or the society working together as a whole to create what the community needed, everyone playing the part that they could play and being respected for the part that they could play in that small community, even if it was above a aristocrat or a lord over them. Obviously that's problematic in many ways as well, but we sort of shifted into a society where now it's about capitalism and the control over the people was really important. So we have then people basically owning other people and making sure that they stay in their place as it were. So women have always been below men on that hierarchical system.

You have the systems in place where the people, the rich and powerful, yes, they had the power over everybody, but in general, whether it was the church, the pope and the bishops and the cardinals and those with authority spiritually, in the family unit, it would be the man first and then the women and children underneath that. And we see that still playing out a lot in Christian upbringings. And I'm not demonizing Christianity here while we're getting into it because I have some things to say about that as well. But it is something to note that with the spread of those ideas came the demonizing of witches and it took away women's power to be able to have a livelihood that they could then support themselves with. The word spinsters even comes from the fact that a lot of the women that didn't marry, the only way that they could provide for themselves was to spin yarn because even in there as they aged, they would be able to physically continue to spin yarn and provide for themselves to sell the yarn.

And that was one of the only ways that women were allowed as it were to provide for themselves or to contribute to society in any way other than being a wife and mother. So all of this to say as we're coming around to it is that we like to act like the witch hunts and demonizing witches and things like that or a thing of the past when in fact, it's still very much happens and that we still live in a patriarchal society and especially in America, we are threatened every day with the separation of church and state not being so much of a separation and to be forced into a Christian nationalism. And we're seeing sort of like court cases where terror is illegal in certain states. And I know a woman, I think in Pennsylvania, I read a story about how she was being taken to court because she owns a little metaphysical shop and she reads terror in a state where there had been laws against it and she's fighting against that. This is again a way for a woman to provide for herself with her gifts and talents and abilities and the government is trying to shut that down.

So they are harassed in a lot of places the more that we keep reiterating and reestablishing this idea that witchcraft or paganism or anything in that realm is of the devil. It is against God or it is against the Bible or it is against whatever the Christian beliefs are that if we keep going down that road, we are going to be so sorely against each other. And this is where I would like to bring up and have brought up in my own community, the idea that the word witch didn't start out as something evil at all. That in fact, many of us, whatever our religious beliefs are, would be considered a witch. So I do energy healing work.

Obviously, you know, I own Prism Healing and I do a form of integrative processing technique that I learned at the Institute of Healing Arts. It was a very rigorous year long program to learn how to do this modality of healing. It is considered energy work rather than therapy, although a lot of therapy modalities have kind of adopted and integrated with that modality of energy healing as well. But what's interesting is that the place and people that I learned this from are predominantly Mormon, LDS, Latter-day Saints. And there was some talks at the time I was at the school of the church being against any form of healing that wasn't medically professional or if it was spiritual wellness, that it was sought directly to your church authority, which is always a man, by the way.

Only men can hold a priesthood in the LDS church. So roughly there was some conversation at the school, especially with the woman who founded the school because she is LDS and what she felt about that. And I know you have to do some mental gymnastics sometimes to be able to justify, but basically her take on it at the time was, I know the work I am doing is God's work and so I am going to continue doing it. And that's where she kind of landed on that. I don't think she was willing to go so far as to say, well, screw those guys up in the higher rings of the church.

They're gonna say what I do is bad and I don't care. But she did take a stand on backing her work. And what's interesting about that is I know that a lot of those people still going to church and still doing that who do Reiki energy healing, who do, they're really open to a lot of these ideas of energy and things that are available to us in the natural world that can actually offer us a lot. And what they wouldn't do, I know, is call it witchcraft. And I do.

And here's where we're gonna get into it, really get into it, okay? We've been circling around it, but I'm gonna say it. A lot of people in this state and then probably in many other states and places around the world are very much opening up and awakening to the idea that there is more ways to heal breathwork and sound healing. And all of it is now being legitimized and backed by science, which is awesome. We're having all these new findings.

They're doing Cancer research with Reiki practitioners and showing improvement, showing actual results of healing work, people how they're feeling going through Cancer treatment or in that their Cancer is actually going into remission more often. And so it's legitimizing the work and that's awesome and that's great. So why is it different than witchcraft? And I'm here to say, I don't think it is. I think that we just have such a bias against those words that people get really uncomfortable and prickly when I use words like, it's witchcraft.

You're setting intentions, you're performing a ritual, you're doing hands-on healing, which is what Jesus did. It's all part of the same work, using the same processes that somebody who engages in witchcraft does. When crafting a spell, you're using words for intention, you're using herbs and stones and whatever objects and tools that are going to help you set that intention. In the last episode, we talked about the three pillars of magic and how to engage with it. And I use words, will and way, and I go into depth with those in previous episodes in season one.

But what I'm here to say is that the effort to go into prayer or to study things that help the human race in any way, to dedicate your life to it, to practice it in your daily life, that is being a witch. Even if someone else wouldn't like calling themselves that. So I have, over the last couple of years, decided to dig my heels into that word and to say, you know what, I could call myself a priestess, that's accurate. I can call myself a lot of different things, a swindrig. And I love all the names for different reasons.

But if it really comes down to it, and if we really wanna pinpoint one word that sums it all up in energy healing work, in the studying, the work that I do, in tarot readings, in everything that I do, which is probably the perfect word for who I am and what I do. And I'm actually very proud to use that word. In a long line of women who were not allowed to use that word, who would have fought anybody to not be called that word, and to have been burned or hung because they were accused of being that word. I feel like it's my reclamation of that word. And if I call someone a witch in my life, it is a compliment and an honor to be a witch.

I saw the acronym woman in total control of herself is an acronym for witch. And I thought all of those women in our past, in our history that were accused of being a witch, accused of witchcraft and devil worship and selling their soul to the devil and making a pact with the devil, all those things. Most of them were just women in total control of themselves. They were trying to earn a living. They were trying to help their community.

They were trying to speak up. They were trying to be a voice for people who were voiceless. They were standing up for themselves in a lot of cases. They didn't do anything wrong. And if doing all of those things makes you a witch, then yeah, I'm a witch and I'm honored to do it.

Here I am with a microphone in my face, calling myself a witch and calling all of you a witch and I'm asking you to join me. Now I stood up in some networking meetings and it got to a point where I had stood up and told people what I did and tried to explain energy work and tried to kind of, for lack of a better term, sell myself like, hey, what I've got going here is something you could all benefit from. And you get your 90 second or your 60 second pitches in those networking meetings and that's all you get. You have to present yourself in some certain way that shows who you are. And I decided, screw it.

I'm gonna stand up and tell people who I am. I'm a witch. I am your local witch. You need something emotionally or healing and I'm your girl. You want a card reading, you want to cleanse your spaces, your home, your land, your vehicle.

I have that. I've got that for you. You wanna know why you feel cursed and you would like something to lift that curse? I'm your girl. I got you.

And as I peruse Facebook and sometimes see the posts and I'm part of a lot of different groups because I like to connect with people who are on a faith journey, meaning they're deconstructing their faith and learning how spirituality can look without those authority figures telling them how it should look. I'm in pagan groups. I'm in a witchcraft for beginners or witches for beginners group. And I get a lot of people asking questions that have to do with their lives and they're questions like, I feel stuck. I don't know why I do what I do.

I'd like to know. I'd like to, I need help. And at first it was hard for me not to be one of those annoying people, you know the ones, who get on those Facebook groups and they're like, I do energy healing work. Do you wanna have a session with me? It's really hard for me not to do that because I do know that I could help them.

But I try to offer some bout of wisdom, something that, you know, you do what you do. There's a reason you do what you do. You're not abnormal. There's no shame in it. You just need some help figuring this out.

And we're just full of people going through their, it's all of our community is full of people going through their stuff, right? And I just hope that one day I will be able to be seen. And I think in some ways I still, I am already seen as a person that can be trusted, that I can be trusted with your stuff, that you don't have to sneak to my back door and wrap on the window with a wad of dollar bills and asking for a spell, that you can come in my front door and you can come into my healing room and we will work on whatever it is that you need. And we can call it spells, we can call it prayers, we can call it whatever you want. But I do not shy away from calling it spells and witchcraft because I think it all is.

I don't think there's any difference in it, really. I think that spells and witchcraft can look like a multitude of different varieties and coming from a lot of different cultural backgrounds. I happen to be coming from a Celtic background. So a lot of the work that I do is going to be in that space and in that venture. Okay, so we've gotten to it.

Witches, you're witches, I'm witches. I will say when I started to call myself that publicly and not be afraid and not shy away from it, I did have some people, some very, very positively minded, helpfully minded individuals, like I was saying before, no judgment. I know that they were doing it out of kindness, they thought. They reached out to me and they would try to give me advice because I was one time on a group chat and asking about a conference that someone was putting on. It was more for business women, one of those boss lady conference or yes queen, I don't know, one of those kind of conferences.

I was looking at it and I was looking at the workshops and I thought this would be kind of interesting to kind of learn some of the things about running a business that can help me. And I asked the group chat, I was like, so what do you guys think? You guys know me, what do you think? You know my vibe. Would I be welcomed in a place like this?

What do you guys think? And someone private messaged me and said, all due respect, but sometimes it's the language you use that makes you feel ostracized or makes you feel othered. And she's like, people are opening up to energy healing and words like energy healing is a safe space for people in any religious background, in any belief system, they can open their mind up to, yeah, I will try energy healing. But I think sometimes you use words that, prickle people a bit and then they don't give you a try and it's hurting your business or it's hurting you. And I said, I really appreciate, this was my response and I'm paraphrasing, obviously I don't remember exact words of how this conversation went, but I said, Lisa, I understand what you're saying and I really appreciate that you're trying to help me, but I spent a lot of years warping myself and my brand into what I thought everybody would like me or have me be more approachable to everybody.

And when I try to please everybody, I end up pleasing nobody, least of all myself. I wasn't true to myself and I often tell people, if I howl with the wolves, the right people who are meant to be with me, there will be people howling with me. The people who think it's weird or uncomfortable or awkward to howl with the wolves, they won't and that's okay, they don't speak my language. And so yes, language is very much an important thing to consider, but I decided it was better to be me and to show people who I am and to almost be an advocate for the word witch. If you hear me say I'm a witch and you immediately think, I don't wanna know that person, then that is something to check your bias about, because you're missing out on knowing a person who could help you, a person who not to be braggadocious or anything, but I think is a pretty cool person and sometimes I'm funny.

And you miss out on getting to know what this is all about when just the word I call myself shuts you down and says, I can't be a part of that. I was a part of a community here locally and you've heard me talk about it on the podcast and an incident happened where when I was joking around with them, we were making a reel for Instagram at one of the events and everybody was lighting candles and putting them in a cake and saying an intention, saying something they were proud of themselves for and I made a joke on the reel about how everybody just used witchcraft. Well, I was taken out of the reel. Now I'm not mad about anybody for it, but it did show me that people still hold such a negative feeling around the word witchcraft. We have a lot of work to do in that department and that it showed me that this community that was, although it was presenting itself to be very inclusive and to be all about supporting each other, I was the only one taken out of the reel and made to feel like, well, that's, you tried to include everybody in the word witchcraft and we don't support that.

And my question is, why not? Why would that be a negative thing? Let's ask the questions, let's dig deeper, let's find out what it is we're still holding onto that makes us think that practicing witchcraft is in any way a negative thing. And I'm gonna challenge that probably until the day I die, probably, I'm gonna challenge all of it. One of the questions and I said we would get around to it, so I'm gonna answer the question real quick before we wrap up here today.

One of the questions that I see a lot of beginner witches asking on a Facebook group is, can I be Christian and a witch? And I'm sure there are a lot of witches with a lot of harm and trauma around being a part of a Christian religion and deconstructing that, that have their opinions about this. But I always jump in and say, I still consider myself to be a Gnostic Christian. I grew up in the LDS religion and as Christian I have a deeply found respect for Christianity as it was originally intended to be taught in the way Jesus taught it. And I do study the Gnostic Gospels to get more of that pure, what was it supposed to look like?

What were the messages Jesus meant for us to hear that were lost to us for a long time when it became very patriarchal and hierarchal and the Roman Catholic Church kind of took it over. But I don't see anything different about Christianity in that form and witchcraft. And I will say it, as many have said, Jesus was a witch. He did hands-on healing, he taught in groups and he was even ostracized and killed for speaking up and making his kindness and his loyalty and his spirituality a subject or a message for the people. So that wraps it up for our discussion today on witches.

Before we leave, I just need to re-announce, if you haven't been watching the social media, you need to check it out at Practically-Magic. We have Practically-Magic-Podcast on Instagram and you can find us on YouTube. You can subscribe on our website, Practically-Magic.com. All the places that you can find the podcast you've been seeing are contest announcement, the screening of Practical Magic 2 on September 10th, we have a limited number of tickets that we are giving away free to locals here in the South Jordan, Salt Lake area. If you're in this area at all, anywhere, shape or form and can get here to watch the movie with us, you can get free tickets.

And we have finalized some of the details on how this contest is gonna work. So there's a couple of steps in order to enter. There's gonna be a QR code, you'll see it in a link on our social medias on our website, but you're gonna go to that link and you're going to enter your email and to Ride The Wave Media so that we have your email, we have your contact info, all that. And with that, you will be sent a map and 10 clues. The tickets, the QR codes to the tickets are going to be hidden around this area.

And a lot of the places that we are hiding the tickets have clues having to do with Practically Magick, the podcast or Parallel Frequencies, the podcast. So if you've been watching and listening to both of those podcasts, you're gonna know the answers to these clues right away and you're gonna know right where to look. It's kind of a treasure hunt. We're calling it a talisman hunt because the QR codes are on little talismans. And this event is all put on by Aurora Apothecary.

I have one of their candles here. This is their practical magic candle. So my podcast is Practically Magick. This is Practical Magic with a CK and the movie is Practical Magic 2, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman. Practical Magic was my absolute favorite movie.

That's why I named my podcast after it because it's all things magical. And I cannot wait for you to win those tickets so you can come and see the new movie with us on the Thursday before it comes out. So you get to be like the first person to see it. Well, maybe not actually, but one of the first people to see it with me. I'll be there, Just Blane and Lorianne who owns Aurora Apothecary.

We are all gonna be there to watch it together. So please enter to win. And if you, any of the work that I talked about today resonated with you and you'd like to book a session, I have virtual sessions available as well as in-person sessions. On my website, prism-healing.com. Don't forget to say hi to Wispy when you go to that website.

We have been working hard on creating some cool new tools on Prism Healing this summer with my partner at Lumos of Pygon that we are creating some really awesome healing connections with using the tools that AI has to offer. So more on that later. And finally, don't forget, I am at the Conjuring Tree in Salt Lake here. Or is it, I think it's technically Salt Lake. I'm not sure.

It's over here in this west side of Salt Lake over on 70th South and Redwood Road. We are there every Tuesday. I am, we are, we all are. You are there too. We're there on Tuesdays.

I do card readings there from one to six. So you can book a session with me through the Conjuring Tree website or through my website. Or I take walk-ins and you can pop in anytime and check out the shop. They have some really awesome tools for witchcraft and a lot of very knowledgeable people that work there that can help you figure out how to build your craft. So those are all the announcements for today.

And I can't wait to see you next week. Thanks so much to Ride The Wave Media for producing this podcast and helping me out with this whole Practical Magic 2 contest we have going. I can't wait to see you there. And go make magic witches and wizards.