I trust you’ll pardon yet another title borrowed from the Bard. His use of the language is exquisite, and I am fairly sure he was a working witch…that double-double thing didn’t come from outside reading.
Borrowing, not coincidentally, is the subject of this week’s article. Specifically it’s on the borrowing of ideas, beliefs, and practices from cultures other than the ones into which we were born.
This is a hot-button topic under the buzzword “cultural appropriation” and has grown into a major concern of the esoteric community.
And I certainly agree that it should be. Yet, I am probably guilty of it to some extent.
And so are you.
The problem with cultural appropriation is that we live in a globally-connected instant information society where literally everyone has access, if not direct exposure, to everyone else’s sacred experiences; many of which are not explicitly identified as such.
Human beings are somewhat natural mimics. We are constantly adding bits and pieces from our daily life to our bodies and minds, usually unconsciously. We do it as protective camouflage, to attract friends and lovers, and to define ourselves to ourselves.
Maybe it’s an outfit we see in a store window. Maybe it’s from a character on our favorite show. Maybe it’s an hilarious meme of the socials. We add it to ourselves, switch it around, make it our own. But we do it because that’s what humans do.
Spiritual inquiry and magical practice are no different in this respect. There are literally thousands of books out there that purport to specific knowledge of this or that practice.
Some will follow them to the letter. Some will pattern their entire lives on one thin trade paperback.
Others will build a library of diverse works of all ages (raises hand) and forge a unique and personal path from the morass of opposing ideas.
Still others will go to the Internet (how great it would have been to have had the Internet in my teens. Well, no, not really…) and base their practice on clips from Instagram and TikTok.
None of these methods are inherently wrong. In fact, the anarchical nature of occult philosophy implies that wrong doesn’t exist. If it works for you, then it’s not wrong.
Except, of course, when it is.
Welcome to the socio-political miasma of cultural appropriation. We need to get a good definition of this. It should be fairly basic.
If you are practicing beliefs and rituals from a culture that is not your own, or one you have been accepted or initiated into, then you are potentially committing cultural appropriation.
Why is this bad?
Well, at the most basic, it is disrespectful.
At worst, it implies that you – usually meaning a Caucasian person, likely middle or upper class, with a European heritage and a more or less privileged lifestyle – feel that the ideas, beliefs, and practices of non-Caucasian peoples are yours to take without permission and do with as you will. It’s an act of imperialist colonialist aggression and a figurative rape of the culture. White Europeans have been doing this a lot for a long time, and finally there’s a push-back.
I grew up in rural Appalachia. Like many people in rural Appalachia, some of my ancestors came across from the lands of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where they had been disinherited and displaced by invading Normans (see imperialist colonialist aggression above).
But some of my ancestors were already living in Appalachia when the white people got there. That’s not uncommon in the mountains. The region is harsh and difficult to travel, even up to the time of my own childhood. Those who settled it were mostly hunters and trappers1 “Western expansion” in the early 1800s often shows the rugged buckskin wearing frontier hero, but the majority of settlers moved through the Cumberland Gap to homestead more hospitable farming land in Central Kentucky and Tennessee, The Appalachian region remains a micro-culture of it’s own., on good terms with the Native peoples, and sometimes taken in as members of the tribe, allowed to marry freely and raise children of mixed heritage. The Native American DNA diluted over time in some families, but it’s still there.
The people of the mountains are insular, wary of strangers, and tend not to stray far from their homes. Having moved to Texas, I am something of a pariah, but then there are a number of original Texicans (as they were called in the 19th century) who migrated from rural Appalachia, so I think I am in good company still.
You may recall (I hope) from your American history class, that in the 1830s, then President Andrew Jackson forcibly moved vast numbers of Native Americans from the Appalachians on a death march to the “Indian Territory” located in present day Oklahoma. The Trail of Tears, as it was known to the Natives, was one of the more significant acts of the American Holocaust, a long and slow process of exterminating Native Americans and eradicating their culture in the United States. Those of us with some little Native DNA in our bloodlines retain very deep feelings about this.
This is why I personally rankle every time I see someone on social media talk about smudging with sage to purify something.
This is a Native American ritual2It is true that the use of incenses and/or smoke for purification and ritual purpose is both ancient and worldwide. This specific practice is part of a culture that has already suffered horrendous treatment at the hands of ancestrally white Europeans. It need not be further diluted and distorted by them.
I know that I have ancestors who did it, but I don’t do it myself, because I am not now a part of the tribe.
I have not been initiated into that circle, and I do not understand the deep spiritual significance of the ritual components, and how they are used to clear away evil spirits.
The one on the right is from a deep discount store that imports products from mass producers overseas. You’ll note that in addition to Sage and Sweetgrass “wands” (last month was sage and palo santo) you can also get authentic “meditation crystals”. They’re badly dyed quartz points. I suppose you could use them as quartz in a pinch, but I think the dyestuffs might be a little sketchy or possibly even toxic. Probably not the optimum choice for aligning the chakras.
Not sure how to use these? Well, the same shop has stacks of cheaply produced books on various topics to make you an expert. The trendiness of Magic and it’s trappings is being fed by mainstream mass marketing. That will not end well.
In my personal opinion, little white college girls with the “dorm room smudging kit” from Five Below who saw all about it on TikTok should NOT be doing it.
Ever.
NOT EVER.
I don’t care if you have watched a video online about it.
And yes, there are even how-to videos made by Native peoples on the Internet, both to communicate this to other indigenous persons who no longer have the connection to their tradition, and to teach non-indigenous people.
So even within the Native American community, whether this constitutes disrespectful cultural appropriation is still not clearly defined.
As I don’t consider myself “native enough” to perform the ritual, I certainly will not speak for the Native American culture. But for me, personally, it’s a bad thing, and it always trips my trigger.
Largely because a number of the examples I see are people who don’t really invest in the spiritual nature of the ritual.
For example, the aforementioned college student, who just discovered that being a witch is a sure way to rebel against mommy and daddy, so she’s dressing goth and playing with ouija boards. And smudging everything in sight.
I’m sure I’ll be called out for “gatekeeping” on this. Well, my response is that this is my personal opinion, and I am not going out seeking the so-called “baby-witches” and telling them what they can and can’t do. “Gatekeeping” has unfortunately become one of those “chilling words” that stops dialog and attacks the messenger rather that addressing the message.
There are very good reasons for saying that any practice should not be done by those without proper training, proper awareness and the proper reverence for the sacred nature of the act.
It’s a form without substance, and that can only offend the spirits and invite chaos into your life.
And trust me, friends. You do not want to offend Native American spirits.
Or Native African ones either. Stay away from that Voodoo unless you have been brought into the culture. It’s not going to end well.
This is coming from someone who has made what is probably a Baron Samedi hat. As I said, I may be guilty of unconscious cultural appropriation myself. Or not entirely unconscious. That goes back to that natural tendency to mimic.
Human see. Human do.
When I was a freshman in college (coming up on four decades ago), my rebellion included buying a Victorian style top hat. One of the actors in a play had one, and I fell in love with it. It’s the Mad Hatter style, purchased not unexpectedly from a now defunct shop called The Mad Hatter.
Being the natural weirdo that I am, I started to gradually embellish this hat. I stuck in some feathers from a hawk and a falcon that I had found in the woods near my home. I got this silk covered mask somewhere, a theater shop most likely. Behind it I placed the eyes of two peacock feathers. These were a gift from a friend, originally attached to a bronze candlestick. The mask and feathers we pinned permanently in place by an Egyptian scarab style pin…except instead of the sun his wings hold a skull.
It evolved from there. A morticians veil. Playing cards from the Dead Man’s Hand. Black roses.
It’s a Death thing. But it’s not supposed to be Baron Samedi’s hat.
On the right is the Baron Samedi hat I bought in New Orleans on Halloween, 2015. I have embellished it so that it is no longer a Baron Samedi hat either.
The original was plain with the white and black skulls on the band. Far too plain for my artistic sensibilities.
Yes, that is Buzz Lightyear in the background. Some things must remain a mystery. .
Baron Samedi is a Voodoo spirit. He is a spirit of the cemetery – sometimes known as Baron Cemetery and Baron Saturday. He usually manifests with a skull face, top hat, and cigar.
You’ve seen him. He’s even been in Disney movies. And so he’s probably been tacked on to a number of non-Haitian occult personalities, including my own.
But I honestly had zero connection to that when I started transforming my hat. If anything I was riffing on the magician’s hat of my youthful memories – waiting for a rabbit to appear.
That said, I do have a Baron Samedi hat. They sell them in the souvenir shops in New Orleans. I bought it on Halloween weekend a few years ago, as a sign of recognition and token of respect to the Baron. He doesn’t seem to mind.
The 1973 flick Live and Let Die fueled my existing fascination with Tarot cards, and got me interested in Voodoo for its malefic qualities.
Somewhere on my bookshelf is a tattered copy of the International Imports Catalog, wherein Miss Anna Riva offered personally manufactured Voodoo charms, talismans, and conjure bags. It’s a good thing that in my teen years, I could never afford them (nor was able to have them delivered away from parental eyes) as Miss Anna Riva does not appear to have been initiated into the Voodoo religion or any other tradition.
Dorothy Spencer, the real name of Miss Anna Riva, wrote several books of spells and rituals, all of which required one or more of Miss Anna Riva’s oils, incenses, or powders Even then, that seemed a tad shady to me. It just demonstrates that marketing the occult is hardly new. The ancients did it.
In fairness, I learned from those catalogs a number of things. My practice from my pre-teens to my college years consisted of inferring what some of the things in the catalog were, or did, and what I could substitute with locally. I freely admit that I may have unintentionally borrowed from other cultures through that process.
I don’t practice Voodoo, but I have studied it. Admittedly I went to it looking for malefic powers, and the ability to harm my enemies by sticking pins into a doll. We’ve all seen that episode of Gilligan.3The problems inherent in Hollywood Voodoo are much worse than even Hollywood Witchcraft. If you’ve never seen the episode (and I can’t imagine how) the plot is that a Voodoo Witch Doctor (sic) has come to the island and carves wooden effigies of the castaways. Once he obtains a personal possession from each of them, he has complete control over them, including turning the professor into a zombie (basically paralyzing him). The Skipper knows all about these South Sea Island Voodoo practices, and manages to lift the curse by stealing the dolls and getting their items back. While no one will look to Gilligan’s Island as representative of high art, cultural sensitivity, or even basic reality, the liberties that Hollywood has taken in other movies and TV shows with almost this exact plot is horrendous.
But I discovered a beautifully rich and complex ancestor religion where the spirits of the dead are invited to “ride” the living for a short time, to re-experience the joys of the physical by eating and drinking and smoking and talking, before returning to their slumber.4Once I realized that Voodoo was an ancestor religion of a very specific group of people, I stopped my research into it. I did not feel that I belonged, or was connected, and that further study was inappropriate. So if this paragraph is inaccurate, I apologize. It generalities are based on a few books that I read on the subject before I ceased studying it.
So though I might have the knowing of how to do certain Voodoo rites, I will not do them because I am not part of that culture, and I am not likely to be.
But I think the Baron and I would get along. I did, after all, spend a lot of my younger life hanging around cemeteries (and I still do when I can), so we have that in common.
And there’s probably a lot of the magical aspects of Voodoo that has filtered over into Southern myth in the last few centuries. So it’s hard to say if some of the things I personally do is borrowed from that culture directly, or accidentally amalgamated into my own, at a time in the past when “cultural appropriation” was not an idea. 5In fact, it’s fair to say that some aspects of Voodoo and related practices in the American South may have been “contaminated” by traditions from white folk magic in the region.
The term didn’t exist in the 70 and 80s when I was studying the various occult disciplines, so it is extremely difficult to determine if I borrowed something then, and have since forgotten the source. I am examining a lot of that, and re-reading many of my old books with an eye toward original sources. It’s a growth process.
And there’s a different rabbit hole to go down. Through my studies in art history, I can find you prototype of most of the spirits and deities as far back as the Stone Age. Humans have a number of shared spiritual concepts because a long time ago we were all part of the same general culture.
One of those fundamental concepts is the doctrine of sympathy – that things that are of the same nature- whether they look alike, feel alike, or are called by similar names- can affect each other. Thus the doll is an image of a person that can be manipulated to control and potentially harm that person.
The bulls on the walls of the ancient cave of Alta Mira are believed to have been ritually “attacked” to either bring about a successful hunt, or initiate a young man into his new adult life as a hunter.
Likewise, putting on the skin or the antlers of the deer, transformed one into a deer. And yet, this may have evolved out of the most practical need to look, and smell, like a deer when stalking the herd. At some point the line between the physical deer and the spiritual one is blurred, if, in primitive humanity, they were ever separated.
We can see in the so-called Sorceror image the Cave of the the Three Brothers, that even before we developed writing the idea was firmly fixed. Here is the remote ancestor of Celtic Cernunnos. Her also stands the Minotaur, the Apis, Pan, Aries, and every horn, corn, and herm of ancient myth.
The white on black image on the right is sketched based on the actual cave painting. While we find petroglyphs all around the world of people wearing what is probably ritual gear or headdress, this is possibly the oldest, estimated at having been made 15,000 years ago.
When I look at it, I am reminded of ritual costumes among the native peoples of the American Southwest, as much as the Celto-European Horned One.
Not far away we can find the Venus of Laussel, with her voluptuous form shared from many small portable fertility idols. Laussel is somewhat unique. She holds forth a horn with thirteen lines across it. The horn, here, is the masculine symbol, transformed into the symbol of the moon, and its thirteen lunations per year. So even as we had barely mastered fire, we had made the connection between the lunar cycle and the feminine one.
They typically emphasize the breasts hips and sexual organs, while the faces are often anonymous, simplistic, or sometimes covered in a stylized hairdo or perhaps a veil. Hands and feet are frequently absent or only suggested. The women are round and ample, desirable traits for a Neolithic mother, whether actual or spiritual.
Laussel’s is a permanent installation, which would indicate that the place was either inhabited over the long term, or returned to frequently by roaming peoples. This context may mark the transition of the Venus from a fetish object into a proto-goddess. I first encountered this image in a graduate art history seminar, and immediately felt there was more significance to our modern beliefs than was generally expressed by the historians.
By – photo 120, œuvre dont l’auteur est mort depuis environ 25 000 ans – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5044488
Our remote ancestors weren’t the primitive knuckle-draggers we see in the popular fiction. Cro-Magnon man – generally recognized as the first full human, had the same size brain, all our faculties, and certainly all our curiosity. The majority of his time was spent pursuing and defending the bare essentials of survival. Complicated things like rack and pinion steering and mobile phones weren’t going to get done, but it’s not impossible that his brain could have worked them out. If he’d needed them in the first place, that is.
The need to survive and the limited resources meant that most of early humanity lived in small mobile groups where the philosophical observations were passed through oral tradition, and frequently to an anointed or otherwise chosen receiver. So we aren’t sure what was actually done or actually believed except by observing similarities between ancient surviving examples and that which is more recent and better documented, like the cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece.
Cultures existing on the fringes of these “civilized” nations certainly maintained less formalized practices, and these were transmitted word-of-mouth down the generations. As humans migrated around the globe, their traditions transformed to include and respond to new plants, animals, and spirits encountered in the local landscapes.
So we end up with very distinct and very individualized spiritual and ritual practices that reflect our unique cultural experience. And while Baron Samedi, Anubis, Thanatos, Charon, and the Grim Reaper may all be personifications of the same essential entity, each of us has exposure to that entity and its masks in a different way. This is true not just for cultures but for individuals. I will have a very different view of death than you, because I have led a different life.
And this ultimately is where the issue of cultural appropriation must be understood. The things held as sacred and profane by one person or one group are that because of what that person or that group have experienced.
Absent that particular experience, your understanding of that particular sacred and profane simply doesn’t exist. At best you’re fumbling around and at worst you are mocking both belief and culture. In either case it will not bring you the results you seek. And it may cause you grave harm.
If you believe in the power of the spirits or the gods to affect change in the real world; power beyond your mortal ken; then you should be very wary of making them angry. That’s just basic.
And coming to the table uninvited is, to my thinking, a sure way of irritating the spirits that are out there. If you feel you are truly called to a particular belief system, then seek, humbly, for those who live within it. Ask, respectfully, if you can become an initiate. In some cases it will still be forbidden, because you are not part of that culture. But you may be able to join that culture in some cases. If so, you need to join it. You’re not there to pick and choose. You have to become.
I personally have not felt the call of any such thing. I come from a different time. The Internet offered no easy instruction. Covens or initiatory groups were few and far between, and rarely advertised. And there were not books and books and books delivered conveniently to your door from B&N and Amazon. You had to go find them.
For me, magic was an individual practice, derived from such books as I could locate, deep personal contemplation and making acquaintance with those spirits that I could, as dictated by my particular talents and temperament. In my case, there’s a lot of old bones and cemeteries. Still, the dead have outnumbered the living for a very long time, so there’s plenty of choices for conversation.
So I don’t pretend to work with Baron Samedi the same way a Voodoo priest or priestess would, or even to understand fully what he represents.
But I know who he is. I tip my hat to him when I am over his way. He tips his hat back. It’s mutual respect, between two individuals, who are from different cultures. And that’s how we should all act, whether we are made of this crude flesh or of rarer stuff.
By all means, study other cultural practices. With luck you will grow to understand that we all have much in common as humans. The understanding of others makes us better understand ourselves. That is as true of magical practice as it is of anything. What I do, what I know, and what I pass on, comes from many years of study and contemplation and carefully tracing back the threads.
You can find so much information out there now, but acting upon it without taking the time and effort to evaluate and understand it will not aid you.
I hope you have enjoyed my diatribe. If you were offended by my perspective, remember that is just that- mine. I am not campaigned or advocating or otherwise trying to convince you. I am just standing on my soapbox saying what comes to mind. I appreciate your reading to the end, and I invite you back next week for another journey inside my mind.