Day 18: What has been the most resourceful place to look for improving your witchcraft?



This post is part of a 31 Days of Secular Witchcraft series in which I answer questions about my own personal views about magic and witchcraft.  I urge you to answer the same questions, found here, on your own blog.

This is a hard question to answer.  Many readily available books, including the ones that originally informed my nascent witchcraft as a wee witchling, are full of misinformation, "creative" history, and confusion.  I generally find that information on the internet is terrible.  You have to wade through a lot of nonsense to find things that make sense.  I actually abandoned witchcraft and spirituality twice in the last seven years because of stuff I read in forums.  I felt deeply, viscerally embarrassed that someone could Google "witchcraft" or "paganism" and find the kind of garbage I was reading.  I'm sure all religions, political movements, and the like have similar issues.  I've since learned that what others think of me is none of my business, and that I can be both rational and spiritual.

My most resourceful "place" to look is people: other pagans, witches, and magicians whom I trust.  I check out the bibliographies of books that I think have merit, and I ask magical friends for advice and recommendations.  I think that having marathon coffee sessions with magical people, reading with a deeply skeptical and critical eye, and working with magic in practice and meditation helped me most.  Reading outside the Neopagan/NeoWiccan box helped, too.  I'm learned a lot from Gaelic recon community and syncretic religions, even though I'm not a recon person nor a santera.  Mythology, fairy tales, world religions, and other non-Wicca 101 sources are good for widening my understanding of magic.

I created Cross Quarterly to be a publication for the kind of rational yet mystical discourse that helps me.