You can celebrate the autumn equinox any time within two weeks of the actual date because it’s all about your personal harvest journey and your intentions. You don’t have mugwort for your dream pillow? Valerian will do because your intentions matter more.
I hear these things regularly, and I sit with my discomfort. It’s not because I think everyone needs to be up at dawn tracking astronomical moments though there’s something to be said for that. And it’s not because I think there’s never room for substitution in magical work. It’s what these statements reveal: we’ve turned the Wheel of the Year into a self‑help framework with vaguely pagan aesthetics, and reduced spellcraft to an exercise in positive thinking with props.
The equinox is no longer an astronomical relationship between Earth and the sun that we align ourselves with. It’s a metaphor for emotional balance. Harvest isn’t grain; it’s personal growth. Mugwort isn’t a plant with specific properties; it’s a symbol for “sleep vibes,” interchangeable with anything vaguely adjacent.
When did that become enough?
The psychological turn
A quiet shift has taken place in contemporary witchcraft.
Magic isn’t real, but it works. Spells don’t actually do anything, but they’re psychologically effective. The gods aren’t real beings, but they’re powerful archetypes. Witchcraft isn’t about power; it’s about empowerment, and that empowerment is entirely internal, entirely psychological, and entirely safe.
We can trace some of this to the mid‑20th century, to figures like Dion Fortune who wrote about magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will,” or to the integration of Jungian psychology into magical practice. Jung believed in forces that couldn’t be reduced to “just psychology,” and Fortune worked as if magic operated on multiple levels at once—psychological and energetic, symbolic and real. They were trying to build bridges between the material and immaterial worlds, not collapse one into the other.
A lot of contemporary practice has abandoned that both/and position. We get ritual reframed as cognitive behavioural therapy with incense. We get pagans who talk about “working with deity archetypes” and gods reframed as “aspects of the self.”
If it’s only symbolic, why not just go to therapy?
The answer, I think, is that we know it’s not just symbolic. Something happens. But admitting that, admitting that magic might actually do something, that the gods might actually be something, that’s dangerous. That’s not palatable to the overculture. And we learned a long time ago what happens when we’re dangerous.
The witch hunts and the impossible bind
The European witch hunts created a theological and logical trap that Christian authorities never escaped. Once you’ve tortured and executed tens of thousands of people for witchcraft—and both Catholic and Protestant churches participated—you’re stuck. If you admit you were wrong, you face two impossible options.
Option one: admit that those people weren’t actually witches. But if they weren’t, your methods for identifying witches don’t work. Confessions extracted under torture are worthless. Learned treatises on maleficia are rubbish. You murdered people, and your institutional authority is built on a foundation of false testimony and innocent blood.
Option two: insist the witches were real and the executions justified. But then you have to keep executing witches, keep defending torture and burnings, right into the Enlightenment. Eventually, you look barbaric.
Christian authorities chose a third path: insist that witchcraft itself isn’t real. It’s delusion, mental illness, feminine hysteria, peasant superstition. The witches we killed? Confused, deceived, perhaps under the devil’s influence, but not actually doing magic, because magic isn’t real.
Modern church positions keep this useful ambiguity. Magic and divination are condemned, but witchcraft is framed as either demonic danger or personal delusion. Magic is not real enough to take seriously, but real enough to condemn. You can pathologise practitioners while keeping your demonology intact.
Turning witchcraft from a real practice into a psychological aberration didn’t end with the witch hunts. It’s the template for how the dominant culture has dealt with magic ever since. You’re not a witch, you’re mentally ill. You’re not doing magic; you’re experiencing a placebo effect. You’re not communing with spirits, you’re having a dissociative episode.
The Satanic Panic of the 1980s showed how easily that logic reactivates. Daycare workers were imprisoned on fabricated ritual abuse charges. Teenagers’ hobbies were treated as evidence of possession. The message was clear: if they think you’re dangerous, they will come for you.
Somewhere along the way, we internalised that lesson.
Making ourselves safe by making ourselves small
When the overculture has spent centuries burning, hanging, drowning, and crushing people accused of witchcraft, and has shown it’s still willing to ruin lives over occult panic, there’s wisdom in making yourself less threatening. When admitting you practise magic can cost you your job or your children, you learn to frame your practice in ways that sound less dangerous.
“I don’t really believe in gods. I work with archetypes.”
“A spell is like prayer.”
“It’s just psychological. I’m manifesting.”
We made ourselves palatable. We gave materialists, sceptics, and nervous Christians a framework they could tolerate. Look, we’re not so different from you after all. It worked. Witchcraft became acceptable, even marketable. “Witch” is a feminist identity, an aesthetic, a lifestyle brand.
We don’t demand this kind of materialist justification from other religions. Catholics are not required to describe transubstantiation as symbolic. Muslims are not asked to call angels psychological constructs. Hindus are not expected to apologise for offering to deities.
The materialists who want our cake
Watch what happens when psychologists, neuroscientists, and other committed materialists “discover” ritual, symbolism, and the power of intention. Suddenly, they’re very interested in our techniques. Meditation becomes a stress‑reduction tool. Ritual becomes therapeutic. Visualisation is a performance hack. Working with symbols and archetypes is wonderful for integration and healing.
They can’t call it magic, and they certainly can’t say “the witches were right,” so they rebrand it. Placebo, mindset, ritualised behaviour, cognitive reframing—anything but enchantment. It’s fine to make offerings to an archetype, but not to a god. You can invoke qualities you want to embody, but not spirits. You can absolutely perform elaborate therapeutic rituals, just don’t claim anything numinous is happening.
They want our practices, our millennia of work with will, trance, and transformation. They just want them stripped of any claim to reality beyond the brain. Witchcraft without witches, magic without magic, communion with nothing but their own neurons.
When precision becomes “gatekeeping”
When everything is symbolic, nothing has to be specific. When it’s all just archetypes and psychology, precision stops mattering.
Someone asks when to do a money spell. The replies: “Whenever feels right.” “Thursday if you want, but any day works if your intention is strong.” “I did mine on a Tuesday and it worked great.” Mention the waxing moon, and you’re “too rigid” and “not everyone can work with the moon’s schedule.”
If Thursday is Jupiter’s day and Jupiter governs expansion and abundance, and if the waxing moon is a time of increase, those aren’t arbitrary rules invented to be difficult. They recognise that different times have different qualities and potentials. Saying “any time works if you mean it enough” isn’t flexibility; it’s a claim that none of that matters, that Thursday and Tuesday and the dark and full moon are all functionally identical.
If that’s true, why do we even have correspondences? Why learn them, teach them, or write them into books? Why not admit we don’t think they’re real?
The same thing happens with ingredients. “Full Moon Water” is made from tap water under any moon phase, or just water you’ve set an intention over. Spell bags that list herbs and then say, “or whatever you have in your kitchen that feels right.” People insist you can call The Morrígan for a love spell because “all goddesses contain all aspects of the divine feminine,” and calling it gatekeeping to suggest Aphrodite might be a better match.
Specificity isn’t gatekeeping. Saying that roses and thorns have different properties isn’t elitism. Saying the full moon and the dark moon suit different workings isn’t rigidity. It’s recognising that the world, material and immaterial, has structure and patterns that exist whether we acknowledge them or not. Accessibility is not the enemy of precision; pretending nothing has distinct properties is.
Someone working night shift who can’t be awake at dawn isn’t the same as someone who just can’t be bothered to wait for the full moon. Someone who’s broke and substitutes what they can afford isn’t the same as someone who insists all ingredients are interchangeable because intention is everything. There’s a difference between “I’m doing the best I can with what I have” and “nothing material matters.”
When we reduce everything to symbols and psychology, we’re saying the only thing that matters is what’s happening in our heads. The rose in the love spell isn’t bringing anything but what we project onto it. The full moon doesn’t do anything except provide a pretty backdrop for intention. The goddess we invoke is just a personification of qualities we want to cultivate.
If that’s true, if it really is all just happening in our heads, then why are we doing any of this?
The “you are divine” problem
It gets even more circular: many contemporary witches will tell you that all goddesses are manifestations of your inner goddess, your Higher Self, your own divinity. You are divine. You are your own ultimate authority.
I’m not arguing against the idea that we contain a divine spark; I believe that. But there’s a vast difference between “I contain divinity” and “I am a goddess and therefore accountable to no one.” The first acknowledges something sacred while maintaining humility and relationship. The second is ego dressed up in spiritual language.
When the gods become aspects of your Higher Self, when all divinity is really just you talking to you, you’ve eliminated actual relationship with powers beyond yourself. There’s nothing to push back against your desires, no reciprocity required, no traditions or protocols to respect because you’re making it all up as you go. Your intuition is infallible because it’s divine. Your feelings are sacred truth because they’re the goddess speaking through you.
And yet people who believe divinity is just their Higher Self still make offerings, cast circles, and perform rituals as if they’re in relationship with something other than themselves. They’ll say the Higher Self, like the Inner Child, only speaks in symbols. Back to Jung again; everything goes through the psychological lens. But if you’re just doing symbolic acts to talk to parts of yourself, why the specificity? Why elaborate correspondences and ritual structures? Why not art therapy?
Somewhere, underneath all the “you are divine” affirmations and inner‑goddess branding, we know we’re not just talking to ourselves. Admitting that means admitting we’re accountable to something, that the gods may have preferences we need to respect, that materials and timing might matter because they have properties in a real world we don’t fully control, and that magic may not bend to our will just because we really, really mean it.
We’ve ended up with a kind of doublethink where we practise as if magic is real while insisting it’s not.
Power that changes the world
There’s another cost to this dilution: we’ve made witchcraft politically impotent.
When magic becomes purely internal—shadow work, healing your inner child, manifesting abundance for yourself—it stops being a tool for changing the world. It becomes self‑help with candles, and nothing beyond that. All that power turns inward, into personal transformation and personal growth. That’s not what witchcraft was for.
Think about Aradia, Gospel of the Witches: the daughter of Diana teaching witchcraft to the oppressed, to enslaved people, to those with no other recourse. It’s magic as resistance, magic as survival, and magic that does something in the world, not just in your head.
Today, that might look like protection workings for protestors, magic around land and water under threat, spells for tenants or asylum seekers facing hostile systems, workings done explicitly in solidarity with marginalised communities. That’s magic that refuses to stay confined to self‑esteem.
“Change yourself to change the world” sounds nice, but it’s not the same as “change the world.” One keeps you focused on your personal journey. The other is dangerous to the status quo.
If magic is real, if it can affect reality, if we can actually change things through will and work and power, then we have a responsibility to use it for more than self‑improvement. We have access to something the powerful don’t control, can’t regulate, and can’t take away from us, but only if we stop pretending it’s all in our heads.
What now?
I don’t have a neat answer. I’m not suggesting abandoning critical thinking or swallowing every wild claim. It doesn’t mean we can’t talk about harmful practices, the line between religion and delusion, or the very real material constraints people live with. What it does mean is stopping our pre‑emptive capitulation to materialism and refusing to pathologise ourselves before anyone else gets the chance.
The witch hunts taught Christian authorities that it’s easier to deny the existence of witches than to face the moral consequences of killing them. We’ve internalised that lesson. We’ve made ourselves small, symbolic, psychological, and safe. But witchcraft was never meant to be safe; it was meant to be powerful.
Maybe the psychological framework is a pathway. Maybe some people need to start with “it’s just my brain” because that’s the safe way in. But the practice itself, if we let it, can take us past that framework. The gods start to feel like more than projections. Spells work in ways that don’t quite fit confirmation bias. Timing starts to matter in ways we can feel but can’t prove. What if we let ourselves follow that thread instead of cutting it off? What if we asked, “What if there’s really something to this?”
We need to reclaim the possibility that magic might actually be real, not just “psychologically effective,” but actually affecting reality, that the gods might be something other than, something more than, aspects of our psyches, that timing and materials and words might matter because they have properties and powers of their own, not just because we’ve invested them with meaning.
We need to be willing to look foolish. To make claims we can’t prove. To practise with precision and specificity even when we can’t explain exactly why it matters.
Are we willing to be dangerous? Not dangerous in the sense of harmful, but dangerous in the sense of making claims the overculture can’t assimilate, practising in ways that can’t be reduced to self‑help, and insisting on the reality of things that can’t be measured or explained away.
I’m going to keep working with precision. I’m going to keep insisting that materials have properties, that timing matters, that the gods are real and the magic works, not just psychologically, but in the world. Maybe some of you will join me because you’ve felt that sense that we’ve traded something vital for safety, that we’ve made ourselves so small and acceptable that we’ve forgotten what we’re capable of.
The wheel turns whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is whether we’ll turn with it or just journal about the metaphor.