8. Do you practice witchcraft why/why not? Is it “Devil” or “Lucifer” (a reference to Light Bringer/Bearer) involved? Why or why not?

I am a witch because… I just am. 

I realize that sounds pretentious. I don’t claim to be super powerful or super special. I don’t claim to come from a long line of amazing witches tracing their lineage back to wherever the fuck. I do, however, have a witchy mother, and the tarot cards she gifted me with were her mother’s before her. So, something’s going on with us. There’s some kind of sensitivity and interest that we just seem to have. 

I was reading tarot and having lucid dreams, and prophetic dreams, even as a child. I was designing sigils before I even know what sigils were, and that they could be used for magic! I learned how to shield myself with energy while I was still a kid. Some of these things I was taught, some I intuited, some I sought out and learned myself. 

As a young adult I became very skeptical, but I still for some reason kept collecting tarot decks and doing other things typical of the “witch in denial.” 

Eventually I stopped resisting my natural impulses and started doing the things that felt right to me, and a lot of those things are referred to as “magic” or “witchcraft.” 

As you might be able to tell from this, I’ve been sort of a casual, intuitive practitioner until recently. I am now trying to do some research and step up my game. I find myself most inspired by the stereotypical ideas of diabolical medieval witchcraft– flying off to the witches Sabbath to bone the Devil, etc. The confessions extracted from “witches” under torture paint a picture of a practice that probably never existed, and yet… I could make parts of it real, you know?

(Minus the child murdering and cannibalism, not my jam. And unfortunately I just don’t have an extra nipple to feed my familiar XD.) But I can learn astral flight. I can go give myself to Lucifer sexually on the astral plane. I can make potions and do divination and cast curses and charms. Embodying that archetype, whether it ever existed or not, is what is truly interesting to me. 

At the same time, my research into “traditional witchcraft” and “sabbatic craft” has been both inspiring and at times frustrating. I’m a little too eclectic by nature to fit into those comfortably, and I have no interest in an initiatory path, or in putting myself in a situation with human hierarchies. 

I’m not completely solitary– I loosely belong to at least three informal, overlapping “covens.” I have mentors and people who I look up to and get advice from. 

But look– I already believe I am talking directly to Lucifer. He is my main mentor, guide, and initiator. Given that, honestly, why would I let a human being initiate me? 

My mind could be changed if I found a coven or group that is VERY in line with my values and very egalitarian in nature, but honestly most Luciferian groups I have come across are not terribly trustworthy and are big old cults of personality. Anybody trying to be the LaVey of Luciferianism can suck it. I want nothing to do with that. 

All that said, I consider myself a novice with pretty much everything except tarot, with which I consider myself intermediate. Sometimes my spells seem to work. Sometimes they don’t. 

I am fortunate enough to work in a queer coffee shop almost entirely staffed by trans witches. I am the only Luciferian in the mix but everyone else is friendly to my path. We have a Thelemite, a bunch of assorted Chaotes, another Satanist more on the atheistic spectrum, a traditional witch with hermetic flavors. (You guessed it– I consider the cafe one of my “covens.”) But what’s really cool is that my workplace is literally always filled with sigils, doodled on sticky notes or drawn in dry-erase marker on the white tiles of the walls. 

Sigils hidden behind the tip jar for better tips. Sigils to protect the cafe. Sigils for fuck knows what, the boss drew it and no one really knows what it’s for so better not fuck with it. Sigils charging underneath the blistering hot water of the espresso machine. 

On slow days, I practice my sigil craft to improve business. It’s great because I can see immediately how it worked, and I am surrounded by other witches who can suggest ways to tweak my wording and improve results when it doesn’t go as planned. 

(Yeah, I basically work in witch heaven– or hell, depending on your point of view.)

So a lot of my successes have been in the area of money magic, because that’s what I get to practice most. I also seem to do fairly well with anything involving protection. 

Still, I consider my greatest talents to be in the areas of divination, not spell-casting. 

And I am still learning. Oh my gosh am I still learning! One problem with being so eclectic is that I have built my path from bits and pieces rather than coherently from the ground up, and I am still discovering ways in which I am missing basics. For example, recently I gave another witch a case of the vapors when she found out I had no idea how to gather energy from sources other than myself, and was basically just throwing a ton of my own energy into every spell, leaving me exhausted every time I did magic. 

OOPS. 

So yeah, that’s me. Eclectic, novice, inspired by aspects of traditional witchcraft, chaos magic, and pretty much anything I stumble across that I like.