How to Discern if that Witchcraft Source is Worth your Time
It has never been easier to find information on witchcraft as it is now. Witchcraft/metaphysical/new age publishing is a multi-million dollar industry and there are more blogs and social media accounts devoted to teaching or talking about witchcraft than you shake an incense stick at. But this hyper-saturation of information means that for every good bit of information out there, there is a mountain of information that is incorrect, blatant lies, make believe, and flat out bullshit. And, unfortunately, a lot of this bad information gets spouted by the loudest voices, gets the most likes and shares, and attracts the most people despite it having no historical, traditional, metaphysical, or even practical basis.
Once, a part of learning to be diligent as a witch came through learning to hunt out the snippets and clues to cobble together a functional practice, now it has become almost a sort of right of passage to learn how to sort through tall of this information available to us now in order to find the good stuff.
To help you more easily sift through information (including anything I offer up,) I humbly offer the following few tips:
Consider the Source
Are they well known? What’s their reputation? Where does their “expertise” lay? Are they qualified to give this advice?
There are a lot of insightful and experienced voices with small or nonexistent audiences, but there are also many people with huge audiences that do little more than spout nonsense like some sort of new age text generator. Some “leaders” also have troubling history, such as of abusing students and threatening those that disagree with them, as well as disturbing views, such as not so subtly making homophobic, transphobic, or misogynist remarks. It’s also incredibly common in our community for people to present information as if it were their own when, really, they ripped the words out of a book or flat out made something up without any historical, traditional, or metaphysical backing.
It’s worth taking time to look someone up, to do research on who they are, what their background really is, and what training they do or do not have. It’s easy to get burned, but it’s just as easy to spend a few minutes on an internet search.
Consider the Advice
Does it hold up to other things you’ve read? If it differs from what you’ve read, does it hold up to common sense? Does it advocate harm? Respect?
Remember, just because this is magick doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules. Things work in a certain way, it’s not because of our intentions. If there weren’t rules, we couldn’t successfully work a ritual or cast a spell. But that we can -and that we can repeat that successful spell and, again, be successful- is proof that there are some sort of rules to all of this, there are ways to do this right (adhering to those rules) and ways to do this wrong (not adhering to those rules and, thus, not getting results.)
It’s not unexpected to find information that is outside of what you typically come across. After all, there is a lot of bad information out there as well as a lot of information that just keeps getting regurgitated over and over. So information not conforming isn’t cause to immediately dismiss it but it is cause to analyze it carefully.
Consider your Personal Experience
Does what you’re reading match what you’ve noticed first hand? If it differs, how? Can that difference be attributed to levels of experience/ expertise? Or could it be attributed to differences in worldview?
Witchcraft is an experiential craft. We learn, first and foremost, by doing. Yet, despite that, there tend to be similarities in experience among witches, even witches who have never met and never read the same sources or had the same teachers. So if you come across something that stands in opposition to what you have personally experienced in doing witchcraft (not what you’ve read, what you’ve done) that’s good cause to consider that information carefully before implementing or sharing it. Sometimes different worldviews, due to living in different locations or prescribing to different religions (because, remember, witchcraft is secular: it can be practiced within or without any religious context), can present very different attitudes and advice in regards to practice, too. So this is something to keep in mind before dismissing or clinging to as truth.
Consider your Intuition
We develop psychic skills in order to use those psychic skills. So use them. What whispers do you hear? How does this info hold up to what you’re feeling? What impression do you get?
While this isn’t the most reliable way to tell if information is worth applying (when first developing your skills, it’s really easy to mistake genuine psychic impressions for emotions, i.e. it’s easy to mistake areas within yourself that you need to work on for a psychic impression of something being wrong or dangerous, easy to mistake psychic impressions of yes, explore this with emotions of comfort for finding something that agrees with your own delusions -and we all have delusions, it’s part of being human) it is still a tool that you have and one that you should absolutely put to use. After all, regular use only helps strengthen those skills -which makes them more reliable and better able to help you get a good feel on something.
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