Debunking modern witchcraft and other new age practices with Don Martin

0:02 A listener production. This past few years, there's been a focus on individuals being called to begin to recognize and unpack our privilege and to look at the behaviors and actions we might be taking that could be harmful to others. Certainly, the New Age world has not been exempt from this. It has come under fire for things. Like cultural appropriation, toxic positivity otherwise known as spiritual bypassing, and even victim blaming. But is it all bad? Doesn't mean that we have to walk away from these New Age or spiritual ideas and practices altogether, or is there a way that we can do them that is in integrity and that doesn't cause harm to others? Today, I am very excited to introduce you to the incredible Don Martin. Don is the host of the Head on Fire podcast.

0:56 He is author of. The book The Dabbler's Guide to Witchcraft, which he actually wrote under a pseudonym, which is Firelight if you're looking for that book, and he's published two collections of poetry. The first is called The Playground and the most recent is called While I Wait to Be a God Again. Don is here to do a big debunking of some of the myths and misconceptions around modern witchcraft and share with us how we can create spiritual practices and rituals that work for us but also do no harm. I think that you will love this conversation with Don Don Martin, Welcome to the Crappy to Happy Podcast. Well, thank you so much for having me. Don. I came across you on Instagram.

1:38 I love your content, and then I found out that you had written a book called The Dabbler's Guide to Witchcraft and decided that I absolutely had to interview you about this topic and about anything else that you want to talk about, because I just find you really interesting. Well, thank you, But let's start with witchcraft as a person myself who considers myself to be a person who is spiritual but not religious, And I know you talk about that in the book. What is witchcraft and what kind of drew you to it and to ultimately deciding to write a book about it? Big question, I know to start with, but what's. Your beddy is? But I mean it is, but it isn't.

2:19 It's all the same answers, So you do actually bring up kind of the crux of who the book is for. So you know, you call yourself spiritual but not religious. And the thing is the Pew Research Forum, big huge, kind of a data analytics group here in the United States, they operate globally, says that at least here in the United States, the largest religious group identifies as some flavor of Christian right. But that number has been on the decline for quite a while. And when people talk about the largest religious groups, they often talk about something with an anity or an ism behind it, you know, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, something like that. And what's left out of the conversation is the second largest religious group in the US and a rapidly growing religious group around the world are people that say that they have no religion, that they are not religiously affiliated. Now, under that you have an entire spectrum of people, but the largest number of people that say that they don't have a religion or people who identify as spiritual but not religious. And there are a number of different sort of sociological political reasons why people end up identifying as spiritual but not religious. And those reasons range from anything from my church got too political and they do not uphold the kind of ideals, values, mores that I want to see reflected in society. I don't want to see I don't want to go to

3:50 church and listen to a gospel of homophobia or transphobia or racism, xenophobia, etc. So I want to find a version of spirituality that works for me, that is tailored to how I see the world, that is tailored to the kind of world that I want to live in. And so people go off and they kind of create their own spiritual paths, They become dabblers, and they start exploring other religions, other ways of thinking. They'll verge off into all sorts of territories, including anything from the wellness industry and yoga to falling down a well of witchcraft, all sorts of things. And witchcraft is one of those things that people will kind of dive into, usually because they are seeking a way to kind of reclaim some lost power, reclaim some way of reasserting control over their own lives. And typically the people that come to it women, minorities, queer folks, people who do not have the social power that is given to folks that sit well inside the cystender heterosexual, white, patriarchal norm. And actually there's like a really long history of people claiming the title of which, especially in the last few hundred years, that aren't doing it for spiritual reasons at all, that are doing it

5:21 more for political reasons. Like there was a group that called themselves witch Witch. They did things like upend the stock market. They glued the doors of the stock market shut so that you couldn't get into it here in Chicago, And yeah, you know, we saw a movement where people of all different faith backgrounds and all levels of belief came together to do a hex against Donald Trump a few years ago, just sort of as a way of saying, you know, don't I don't have any power here. Clearly my voice is not being heard. I want to feel like I'm doing something. So coming together with a bunch of people to light an effigy on fire and say some words and scream at the moon or something like that is a way for me to feel like I'm at least doing something, like I at least have a voice.

6:14 So there's all sorts of people that get into some level of witchcraft, which ends up being just kind of a term that means somebody that practices magic, somebody that and what does magic mean to different people? Some people say that it is as benign as something psychological. You know, you're kind of training your brain to be more successful by telling yourself, Okay, I'm going to go carry around this greenstone while I do, you know, while I do my job applications or something like that. Well, if you're doing a bunch of job applications and you're also of the belief that you're going to get a job, you're probably gonna you're probably going to just be a little bit more assertive or a little bit more in your job application process to anything too. You know, people that do actually believe that they are working great works of magic upon the earth that defy physics and the laws of reality as we know them and stuff. So it's all of that, and people come to it for lots of reasons.

7:19 So much to unpack in just all right, Well, you asked several questions to answer them. Good job first out people who use the term which these are not. This is separate from this long what I assume is a long lineage or tradition of a particular kind of. I love that you bring that up, because that's actually a fun myth. Really, Yes, that's what I mean, Right, I need to yes, okay, go. So there was a woman named Margaret Murray in the early nineteen hundreds. She was an Egyptologist, I think, if we're being charitable, and she wrote a book called the witch Cult of Western Europe, came out around the nineteen twenties, and it is almost single handedly responsible. She drew on some previous kind of fake lore, which is, you know, folklore, but it's completely made up.

8:15 I like that. I like that fake law. Yeah. She is almost single handedly responsible for everything that we all of the wrong things that we think about witchcraft in the modern day. Wow. She is the one that said that there is this long, unbroken line of witches dating back hundreds thousands of years, going back into Western Europe, that there are all of these covens, and that they were in the secret war with the Church. And she invented the word spat to mean a sacred ritual the under certain kinds of moon phases, and you know, so that Sabbath, all of the stuff that people think of like this ancient unbroken line of witches and it's this ancient thing. She made that up and it got really popular. Yeah, she made that up and it got really, really really popular and then other people just started parroting it. But then actual historians got involved, folks like Ronald Hutton or Owen Davies or somebody and came in. We're like, hey, folks, this is wile. This is very fun. This is not true. This is not true.

9:25 There's this kind of parallel theory that she helped bolster. There was originally set up by a guy a little while previously to her, but that there's this time when this women's holocaust where nine million women were burned at the stake in what we now call the Burning Times in the witchcraft trials, when people were burned at the stake. Well, in Margaret Murray's world, all of those people were actually witches and they were fighting this war against the Church and all of that, and there were nine million people killed, and that's not even a little bit true. And it was all women, and that's not true. And it's yeah. So, like scholars tell us on the big side, over a three hundred year period, maybe forty thousand between I have seen the lowest estimates be thirty thousand, and the highest number I have ever seen anywhere is sixty thousand parroted by scholars, which is a far cry from nine million. Yeah, well it's also also over a three hundred year period.

10:26 You called your book The Devil Is God to Witchcraft. And while I was reading it and looking at the key themes that you've written, I really thought, this is really kind of the thinking persons. This should have been called The Thinking Person's God to Witchcraft because it was. Originally called Ethical Dabbling and the the marketers so my editor loved the title. I liked the title. That was the title the book was sold under. But a fun fact about nonfiction publishing is you never get to choose your title. Marketing choosers your title for you, and they didn't want the word ethics on there at all. But it was more geared towards kind of a social discussion of the culture and practice of modern practitioners, why they practice, some of the pitfalls of it, you know, how much fraud there is inside of that community.

11:11 In all of that, you didn't actually share how you came to witchcraft. Oh, band, I was in band in high school, and I was always the kid that you know, I read a lot of mythology as a kid, and I was, you know, I was just a super fan of I don't know, witchy stories and stuff like that. And a girl that I was in band with sat next to me and she had an old Scott Cunningham book and I was like, what is that because I thought it was I thought it was a novel. I didn't know. I didn't know what it was, just like, oh, it's reading material. I was like, Okay, can I read it? She's like sure, and I picked it up and I was just I was entranced. I was like, wait, magic is real. People do this like for real? And then like I was off to the races. I was off to the races. I will say the actual first introduction that I had to await people actually do practice magic for real was this book that my parents bought for Halloween and it was like the History of Halloween or something like that, and there were all of these like little stories and the history was terrible because it's a book for kids. But it introduced me to the idea that like, no, no, no, there were people that really called themselves witches or druids or something and they really practiced magic.

12:27 And so it has meant different things to me at different times, but that was my introduction to the world was banned. I still am not really sure, So what is Can you just help me? And especially for people listening who like me are like, oh, I sort of imagine just like witches and cauldrons and spells and burning things smudging, what is wicka witchcraft and paganism? How do those three things? What's that connection to each other? Because I hear a lot about paganism as well. Is that some sort of religion? Look, none of this is ancient, actually, and you you, you might. You might have people that write in and say that guy is an idiot. He doesn't know what he's talking about. We are because they were talking about because there is this belief that we are reconstructing ancient pagan religions. And when you say pagan, some people use the word the way the dictionary uses it, which is uh, which is which is to say, basically anything that isn't an Abrahamic tradition. But there are a whole lot of Buddhists in the world that wouldn't call themselves pagan. There's a whole lot of Janists in the world that wouldn't call themselves pagan. There's a whole lot of Daoists in the world that probably wouldn't call themselves pagan, and I think it's wildly offensive to call to force a label onto people that that don't personally ascribe to it. The way that most people that call themselves pagan typically identify as is some level of earth based spirituality that has

14:02 some kind of reverence for the natur natural world, the natural cycle of things, And that is about as granular of a definition as I think it can be given. Because there are a whole lot of people that practice things with different kinds of names that fall under the pagan umbrella, one of which is Wicca. Wicka's the largest pagan religion, and people sometimes treat them as synonymous. Your wicked or your pagan, or your wicked, or you're a witch, and all of those things are synonymous. They aren't. Pagan is just sort of a way of thinking. It's a type of spiritual umbrella. Wicka is a religion that was credited to be founded by Gerald Gardner in the mid nineteen hundreds. He really helped he really helped some of those Margaret Murray theories kind of take off. He wrote a book called I Think Witchcraft Today, and he wrote several books, created a coven, got kind of fame. He was also a big famous nudist, which is probably why a lot of Wickens practice things what they call skyclad, which is where they do at naked and has everything to do with the fact that it's very spiritual and nothing at all to do with the fact that Gerald Gardner was a nudist. So for me, but it's its own religion. It is new and if you talk to anybody who is any kind of scholar, legit person inside of the community, like I love folks like Thorn Mooney, they'll tell you no, no, it's it's at most seventy years old.

15:34 It's it's really yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. None of this is ancient at least not how we mean any of these terms. Gotcha. There are people that consider that they are doing something called like reconstruction and you'll hear somebody call themselves like a Hellenic reconstructionist or something, and that to them, that means that they believe that they are reconstructing the faith and spirit practices of like ancient Greeks, and then they will say that they then have a tie to like an ancient practice. It very rarely tends to line up with history. But that's that is not my bag. I will leave that to to the historians.

16:16 Uh. There have been some really fascinating discussions actually about sort of reconstructionism amidst not only folks from inside the communities that are still existing, Like there are some Greek scholars these days that are like, what is it that you people are doing? Why do you why does like some person anyways, So there's some fascinating discussions about like what is reconstructionism, the value of reconstructionism, whether it's actually reconstructing anything, or whether it's still just kind of brand new, and all of that again not my lane. I just know that it's there, and I know all the people that I respect, who who I listen to, that I listen to them, and I listen to those voices. Witchcraft is then the practice of magic, and I think that that could probably be said to be the most ancient of any of these words, because where there are people, there is witchcraft. Go look back at any level of humanity and there is someone somewhere doing some kind of reverence of the world around them and thinking that they can influence it by some type of spiritual intercession. Had ancient people that thought that they could make it rain by certain acts or all sorts of stuff. So that has been around about as long as humanity has been around.

17:39 In the book, I say witches are sort of like birds and the fossil record. There's just not really a point in the human in human history where we can point and say, oh, before this was witches, and after this was witches, Here's where witches came from. Like, there's just no point in human history that we can point to and say, oh, here's where we started believing that we had that we could do magic. Like it just seems like something that we've always done. Magical thinking has always existed in some former fashion. Have particular rituals or practices for things like the spells or the barrowing or the saging, have they changed over time just because of Oh? Sure? And I think the more that the Internet kind of gets involved in that, the faster things change because we see what other people are doing and we do that.

18:28 But you actually bring up a really good point. There are things that we've been doing for a long time that we've started to stop doing, Like you're talking about white sage. White sage is a plant that is very sacred to certain native American groups here in the US, and there's a lot of problems with it. There have been claims that it is being over harvested to the point that the actual indigenous people themselves can't get access to it, or that the way that it is being harvested is damaging the plants permanently and killing the plants, opposed to when Indigenous people harvested the harvested in a way that saves the plant so that it can continue to provide sage leaves forever on. There are folks that are just saying, like, what you're doing is not is not smudging, That is not the sacred ritual that we do.

19:24 You all are using some kind of like bastardized whole foods suburban white lady yoga version of smudging, which you know, what we've done is we've taken it and boiled it down to Oh, I burn this leaf and I wave it around my house and the bad things go away, Whereas in Native American practices, it is a much more thought out ritual that purifies. It's not just purifying your bedroom. It's purifying, purifying yourself, purifying your spirit, your soul, and it's this whole other beautiful thing that isn't just lighting a leaf and waving around in your room. And Native people have really gotten in to say, okay, if you're going to do it, we ask that you at least learn what this is from Native people, maybe buy from Native people if you absolutely must do it. And if you don't want to do any of those things, then find something else to burn. And that's where you see people, you know, finding other things. You know they'll burn rosemary or lavender bay leaves or something like that. So there are certain things that I suppose, I guess you could say have always existed in some kind of fashion. People have always thought that, like blood is a very powerful kind of thing, A piece of a person's personal effects, your hair, your nails, anything that came off of your body is powerful and should be protected. Your name shouldn't be given away so freely. What is actually ancient and

20:55 what is faux ancient? What's a bit of fake lore. I'm not a historic and I don't know. That's why I interview them on my show and when I do research. But I know enough to know that very few things are as ancients as a lot of modern practitioners like to say that they are. This is why I love that you've written this book, and I'm really pointing people to read it because what you're just talking about them with the White Sage. You talk a lot in the book about the cultural appreciation versus appropriation. I think these are conversations that we're obviously having more and more currently, thankfully, because there is so much that we have been doing that is completely offensive and inappropriate. Are there other examples of things that we've been doing? I was going to say witchcraft or not, but it sounds like anything kind of spiritual, anything a bit new age or alternative, and probably even the things that I do in my life, probably from what you're saying, fall under that banner.

21:50 I will call them witchcraft. So that's the thing is that while this book is the Dabbler's Guide to Witchcraft, right, it does go to the fact that we are just having bigger conversations and spirituality is a part of our lives that intersects with all of those things. So, like in the book you're talking about cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation, I use the metaphor of is it a gate or is it a window? And I talk about pride parades, so we're not talking about witchcraft at all. We're not talking about anything spiritual there necessarily, we're talking about a marginalized or oppressed group.

22:31 And what I tell folks is okay. So there are times whenever communities will invite you in, like at a Pride event, if you are not yourself a member of the LGBTQ plus community, you can go to a pride event. You can be invited in, you can interact with folks, you can learn from, you can maybe take from, you can take a piece back home with you. You can celebrate alongside, you can engage in rituals, you can get engage in memorials, you can engage in all sorts of things. But then when you leave, you or either while you're there or when you leave, you need to always remember that that is still not yours. Your comfort and your safety and your personal needs and wants and desires are not central in that space. And when people come into spaces that are not theirs, and these are pre existing spaces that exist and work and function by the rules of that particular marginalized or oppressed community, people with privileged tend to come in and want to make it about them and their safety in the book about the fact that you know, you might see something that makes you uncomfortable. You know, these days, drag makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable for some strange reason, despite the fact that we have been putting it on our TVs and movies and stuff for many, many decades, and everybody laughed along and gave people oscars for it and stuff. But all of a sudden, it's terrible and we need to save our children from it.

23:57 But you know, you might see somebody in drag, might see somebody in something you don't like. You might hear words that you don't like, and in the wrong circumstances, you might want to call the police, or you might, you know, want to seek something that makes you feel safe, but you seeking the power structures that make you feel safe might be putting that person in danger, and you asserting your control and your dominance in a space that is not made for you inherently puts those people in very real danger. Or you know, you voting in a way that is antithetical to these people's life and liberty and freedoms and stuff, even though nothing that is granted to them affects your life negatively in any way you know you asserting your dominion and command over them is causing harm. Or sometimes there are windows into a culture you're not invited in, you're not able to go in.

24:57 And I saw this the other day on line where a person was sharing a video from I don't actually know the culture. The people in the video were black, and they were doing some kind of spiritual ritual. And then the person was sharing it and saying, well, I want to know what's involved in this ritual. I want to know what's under this mask. I want to know why you all are doing it this way. And then somebody seemingly from within that community responded back and said, this is not actually yours to know. You're welcome to watch the video, you're welcome to enjoy the video, but what is actually going on, like the actual components of what makes this ritual and why we do this ritual and stuff. You don't get to know all of that.

25:37 That's partly for us. Well, then why is the video on the internet. Okay, Well, that's a window. That is a window from which to learn, that is a window from which to explore. You can see a lot of things through a window, but you're not necessarily invited in. It's not a gate, you're not welcome in. We are showing you a piece of our culture. We are showing you a piece of this but that is not yours to take, That is not yours to decide that you own in any kind of way. You just get to watch. When you talk about gates and windows, it's always important to remember that the people in control, the people operating the gate, the people that are deciding whether or not something is a gate or a window, are the people from the community of themselves, and it should always be that way. You don't get to decide, well, you put it on the internet, so it's mine now. And those are really the kinds of conversations that we're having. And the more that people get on this kind of dabbler path of spiritual but not religious, of spiritual exploration, of kind of exploring and interrogating the world around them, the more that they begin to ask these kinds of questions about power and control and ownership and what is right and what is mine and what isn't mine. I think that's kind of the crux of the book, is that we're starting to live a life that is informed by all aspects. We're not having to check our intellect at the door, We're not having to check pieces of ourself at the door in order to be a spiritual person.

27:06 I talk later on in the book about things like, you know, rocks in the crystal industry, plants and stuff like that, And there's a whole lot of information out there that's sold as spirituality, religion, as a magical practice, or something that is very potentially harmful, very very very harmful. Not only is the crystal mining industry a very harmful thing to support in many cases, but many of the plants and stuff that you're told to use and the way that you're told to use them can be quite dangerous. And since this advice is coming to you in the form of books that are sold as religious practice, none of that has to be vetted by a doctor or any kind of science editor or anything like that. So you know, you have a lot of bad information going out there. And I go over a number of examples in the book. One of the big ones is that I like to talk about is the crystal lapidolite. Lapidolite is said to be a fantastic stone that can help you ease the burdens of depression lapidolite and what often goes and said in those sections of the book when it's saying, oh, you should and I have I have seen books, I've read books, I own books where it tells you to put lapidolite in your drinking water, where it tells you to stick it in your bottle of water and make it alixir out of it and drink that, which is just stick the rock in some water and then drink it, or you know, put it in your

28:36 food as it's cooking, or put it sometimes put rocks inside of you in certain places. Yeah, yeah, yep. The problem with that is that the folks writing these books are very often not geologists or biochemists or anything like that. They're crystal enthusiasts. And what they tend to miss is the fact that the reason lepidolite is associated with an antidepressants is because it's made of lithium. It's made of lithium, which which might mean something to one, No, two disclose, and three maybe talk to your doctor before you stick it in your drinking water, because the lapidolite isn't just lithium, it's lithium and other things like caesium and rubidium which go boom when exposed to water. Right, So maybe don't like crush it up and stick it in water, or don't don't don't just do that. And the other thing about putting like raw rock in your water is even if you think you've cleaned it, there's all these like crags and grooves and stuff that you just can't get to that could have all sorts of harmful bacteria and all sorts of other things in it. That's like, I have talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of people who are spiritual who do consider themselves witches or spiritual practitioners that use crystals in their work, that are also geologists and geophysicists, and folks that I actually do this

30:10 stuff for real, for real, for real and are like do I would not put a single solitary rock of any I don't care how polished you think it is. I would not put a single bit of that in anything that is going to go inside of my body, not any of it. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, Please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you EPs drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. This is why I find you so interesting to talk to you, because you're into the magic, You're into the crystals.

30:56 Oh sure you are fling on. Board with it, but you you come at it with this like scientific skeptical. Brain that essescially what you know like that. I think there needs to be. More of these well, because I think, and what I tell my readers and listeners all the time is that why is always a much more valuable question than what and listen, there are times sure I feel powerless or I want to put a little bit more control back into my life, and yeah, I'm going to light a candle. Maybe I might carry some rocks with me, I might do some rituals and stuff. What is that doing? Is that the same is just me just sitting quietly and meditating, like you know that other people might meditate or have mantras that they say or something like that, and maybe for me that's just doing the same thing. Maybe it's all just psychology. Maybe it's psychology and the placebo effect and all of that as long as I'm not doing something that hurts myself or somebody else and I get the same result. Okay, but at least I know that.

31:52 Or maybe I'm doing some great work of magic, and maybe I'm this powerful sorcerer that is, you know, bending reality and events to my will, and I can put my thumb on fate, and maybe that's what I'm doing. But I think that it's important to always keep that kind of skeptical why behind the what mindset, because this kind of world can very quickly devolve into frauds and scams and schemes and people promising you incredibly incredibly kind of terrible things like get You scratch the surface of like the law of attraction community, and you find a whole lot of victim blaming. You find a whole lot of people that you know tell you that the reason that you're sick or that you have cancer, or that you're poor, that you're living on the street or something is that you're just not thinking happy enough thoughts. Yeah.

32:47 I don't think that's true. Yeah, And I think people that think that are bad people that need to go to therapy and drink some water and find some grass somewhere to touch. Yeah, I get that, and. I get that at the same time I also get that like I'm a positive psychologist, like there is actually something to be said for intentionally focusing on what is positive and what is good and going well. That sure is, yeah, but there's all the psychology like if I just if I am in a bad mood, if I am in a toxic little anxiety spiral, and I force my face to smile, if I force myself to do if I stand and wonder woman pose and force myself to smile. I hate it, but it does make you feel a little better.

33:35 It actually works. It actually it does. And I actually did a whole episode on my podcast about can we stop calling all positivity toxic positivity? Because it's not all toxic. I feel like sometimes the pendulum swung the other way, where anytime somebody encourages you to God forbid, look on the bright side or attempt to find some meaning in something in some pain, then there used of toxic positivity when that's actually not that's actually kind of helpful advice. But that's a whole other conversation. But you're right, there are people. Comming to positivity is absolutely something that just purveyed some of this, especially once you geto the law attraction community, because it's like, Okay, there is a difference between working through grief and trying to find some good in it.

34:22 You know, there's I'm currently writing a book about death that's not any kind of secret and talking to death duelas and death researchers and death workers. It's like, well, part of the strange work that we do and part of the strange realization that we've come to is that there's all sorts of reactions to somebody dying or somebody having like a horrible death, and once the death finally comes, you'll see people laugh. So you'll see people have this great relief, they will feel joy. They're grieving, they're sad, but there's also joy some times in it. I mean, there's just there's a difference between finding joy, finding goodness, finding bits and pieces of ways to be positive and move on and you must be happy about everything that happens to you all the time forever. Those are very different things.

35:18 Very different things, very different things. Yeah, totally agree. And also when you were talking before about if I carry this rock and I get the job, is it because I was carrying the rock? Or is it because I was applying for a lot of jobs. I consider myself to be like I Like I've said before, I'm a spiritual person, and I focus on coincidences. And the more I focus on. The coincidences and the synchronicities and the little serendipitous moments I've just had one happen today, then the more they seem to happen. Is it miracles? Is it magic? Or you know, is it I think there is. I think there is a little bit of a magic to that I fully believe. But also it's where I'm putting my attention, you know, perc.

36:00 I mean, yeah, there's a little bit of the Barnum effect there, There's a little bit of the polyanna principle there. But there's there's also I mean, you know, the dumbos feather argument. Could could he have flown all along? Technically yes, would he have flown without the feather? Now, I think we all know that elephant would have stayed on the ground if he hadn't had the feather and been told that he could. So sometimes you need that. Sometimes you need that the Sometimes you need to be told that you can do the impossible in order to do it. But also, I mean, even if this is all just psychology, you're kind of gamifying your life, and like you're talking about the you know, oh, I'm if I'm doing a bunch of applications and I start to get feedback and I then it becomes this really positive feedback loop where I've gotten positive reinforcement. So I'm going to keep you know, maybe today I'll do ten instead of just one, because I really liked the positive feedback of you know, oh, this thing that I wanted came true, So I'm going to keep doing that. Of course, where where the magical thinking goes wrong is thinking I'm just going to light this green candle. I'm just going to carry this rock, and I'm just going to wait for somebody to run up to me with a job.

37:10 Yes, yes, exactly. Can we talk about spells for a minute, sure, and then I'll have to wrap it up soon. So a big part of witchcraft is the casting of spells. How does that work in the modern world? What is this entil in the modern world? So the way that I do it in my book, I wrote out so every little book you ever pick up on witchcraft is going to have a whole section of spells, yes, yeap. And usually this ends up being a two hundred page book where like the first fifty pages are theory and it's usually rehashed from a lot of other books that you've read, and then it's just one hundred and fifty pages of spells and it's light this candle and say these words and do all this stuff.

37:53 And I don't do any of that. And in my book, I do still have spells in my book. I call them spell canvases. They're in the back of the book, and they're the way that I see other people doing magic. And it's using stuff that you probably already have in your home. It's telling you don't go out and buy anything. You don't need to go buy special rocks or special tools or special things to burn or anything like that. You can do everything that you want to do with whatever is already in your home. It already exists. It's very non capitalist, but it's giving you a way to create a ritual for yourself, create a spell for yourself that does pretty much whatever it is that you are looking to do. Because that's how that's how practitioners that I know, actually operate instead of buy the book because kind of once you understand the function of the different mechanics of magic and what they're doing and why they're doing those things, you can pretty much just make stuff up from there. You can start throwing your stuff into a cauldron because you know why you're doing it. But I mean that's the same with anything, because you know, once once you have the basic skills of carpentry down, suddenly you can kind of break them. You can do whatever you want with them. Right, So I will give you kind of a format. Oh, like, one of my favorite ones, the first one that I put in the book, the one that I knew I was going to put in the book, was a little tea bag spell of Release.

39:13 It's my favorite thing, and I got it from a little science demonstration a million years ago. But I was everything that I put in the book looks like magic, And I personally think that spells are a lot more fun to do when they look like magic, because that's that's more fun for me personally. So you know, you take a tea bag and you cut it lengthwise, and you unless you're using those fancy tea bags that you all use in London. You might have the fancy see I have the cheap tea bags that you unfold it turns into a tube. But then you explain that how does your tea bags work? You have a little. String and can show you. Yes, please, it's a podcast. Nobody else can see it, but I can see you're going to do the demonstration for me.

39:58 Yes, right now, it's very fun. Okay, here he is, I'm back. Okay, okay, So you know you have your little tea bag. Yeah, okay, that's like my tea bag. Yep, yeah, okay, yep. So what I do, and I like to tell people, you know, use a kind of tea that associates with your purpose. So if you're wanting to release something because you need some peace about something, then maybe get a tea bag that's filled with tea that makes you feel very calm or something. Maybe we'll get a Canon Mile tea or something like that. I just used my Nearest and Dearest chi bag. So you kud it like this, You cut it lengthwise right, Oh yeah, right, throw that bit away, dump the tea out. Okay, so now you have this, you have a little.

40:43 Two b Yes, you've just emptied the tea bag. Yep. So then you you can either use it just like this, or you can write something you want to get rid of, like you know, write your excess name on it or something like that, you know, just be real petty about it. Then then then okay, okay, you turn it into a little too b. Now Here you can say if you want to say words, say say we are dealing with an X, and you just start just cussing his name out right. You just really just get going and be like, I hate you, I never want to see you again, you know, blah blah blah blah blah. Good a friend who's gonna love this? I want to show you. Yeah, then you light it on fire, Oh my god, and it's gonna fly. Oh wait, no, oh we didn't do it. Oh wait, Oh oh it fell? Oh it fell.

41:29 Oh we didn't do it. I didn't do it. Oh it didn't do it. Oh it fell. I'm marriage. You're going to burn your desk. No, I'm not. These things burn clean. That's why you use them. Ah, yeah, they don't. They don't catch other don't do the things. You're good not good tip. Yeah, so you always have to cut it really flat. I always tell people make sure you cut it really flat so you get like a good standing surface. Okay, see, and sometimes stuff just doesn't work. And then you have people online that are like, oh, it fell because the spirits didn't want that to happen. I'm like, no, it fell because I'm standing it on an uneven wooden plank. Yeah. Okay, So we're we're cussing out Todd and we're saying terrible things about them, and we're like, f you, Todd, YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA, and then oh here we go. Okay, Well, if it's on a flat surface, it flies. I'm on a piece of wood right now. They fly. But if you do it in your kitchen counter, it will fly, I promise, And.

42:23 I'm not going to burn my kitchen. Canna trust you on that. No, they fly, It burns clean the little fabric that the tea bag is made out of. Do it. I promise it works. Yeah, I flies. Very cool. I'm going to do it and all that. Yeah they fly. I've done a ton of recordings on it, and I promise they fly. I do. It's just it has to it has to be on a perfectly flat surface because the fire is creating a vacuum that once the tea bag burns down, it creates this vacuum and sucks it up into the air. But when you're doing it on a on a jagged wooden surface like I just did, it won't do it because the air is pulling it from underneath. You're so sciencey even in your that I wouldn't have I would have just gone it didn't work.

43:04 I didn't witchcraft and the spirits didn't want this to work. That's why the spirits didn't want this to work. I just did bad science. You. I am concerned that anybody listening to this podcast is going to think, well, you've just gone and debunked all of that witchy stuff. And I want to know, don like what does what is it about it for you? Like what does the witchy stuff do for you? How does it help you in your life? Like Witchcraft, spirituality, all all of it allows me a place to come to whenever I am feeling very troubled, like I don't have control over my own life. It's a place to feel very present. It's a place to to have some conversations with myself and the gods of my understanding, to kind of reorient and reevaluate my place in the universe and what that means. It helped to pull me through, you know, kind of an existential crisis, a dark knight of the soul where I just didn't know, you know, when I had a lot of problems about death and dying and a lot of questions that I had never interrogated about myself. And I just think that I'm not alone in that. It's just a place of, like I said, regaining control over the world around me whenever the world feels like it's spiraling out of control.

44:27 And why it works, I don't know. I don't know. There's a lot of different reasons why. I just think it's important to interrogate those, to be aware of those, so that you know not to fall for scams, so that you know, so that there's no fear in it. That's why I talk about kind of the things that I do, because there's a lot of fear mongering in this space. There's a lot of people who are going to tell you, well, the reason that didn't work is because you're cursed, or you know what, the spirits are telling me that you're cursed. But if you pay me five hundred dollars. I can remove the curse for you exactly. That's a fraud of creating a problem that didn't exist five minutes ago. But I also have the solution, and you can only come to me for the solution. You know, so you're not susceptible to frauds and scams and schemes.

45:12 But if you take all of that out, there's still something magical and valuable and wonderful about creating your own intentional spiritual path. That's the thing is that, sure, on its surface, there's a there's a way to read the book that reads like this is a book that's actually just debunking a bunch of stuff. But that doesn't seem to be what many many thousands of people around the world who read the book and loved the book came away thinking. They came away saying, oh, this this is a magical book. This is These are the conversations that people who've been doing this for ten years, for twenty years really kind of wish we're being said more often.

45:54 You know, you're not going to summon a demon in your bedroom, at least not like what you think. You know you're not going to you know, some of these wild claims that you see from people online. That's not what's going to happen for you. That's just that's that's that those are things that people are making up for clicks and likes and downloads and stuff. But that doesn't mean that there isn't something of value here, And that doesn't mean that there isn't something you can't get out of this, and that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. The Great Terry Pratchett said that magic doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works. Yeah. Yeah, I think the other important point that you made was you know, you've got these spell canvases and you can use anything in your own home. I think so many people get drawn into these ideas and they think they need the special candle and.

46:38 Special crystals, and they need crystal. They need to spend fifty dollars on a crystal that's basically a pipe bomb because it's got you know, it's it's made with a bunch of dried herbs and stuff that as soon as you light that candle on fire, the whole thing is going to your house is going to explode. Yeah. People get really sold on the idea that in order to go on kind of a magical spiritual journey. You do have to go buy a lot of stuff, and I'm like, I haven't bought stuff in a very long time. I have. I really appreciate your time today. I actually am really enjoying the book. Oh thank you, No, I am. And it's very well written. It's I really appreciate the effort that you've gone to research and to talk to people who know what they're talking about to provide just a really intelligent and balanced perspective on.

47:27 The whole Thank you. Yeah. I always think of it as a book that's not necessarily it might not necessarily be somebody's first book about the topic, but I hope that it's a book that can kind of help you read other books. It's a book that helps kind of teach some critical thinking skills, that helps you understand definitions, that helps you spot read flags, that helps you understand sort of the why behind the what of what other people are saying and why they're saying it this way, so that you can kind of figure out what it is that you believe and know how to go that those claims, know how to go find other resources as well to back up that claim before you just start thinking that I don't know Scott Cunningham knows everything because he's the first book that you read.

48:08 Because you know, we all do that, right. You find a book, it becomes your new Bible, and you're just like, well, this person knows the secrets of the universe, and I'm like, nobody does. There's the fun secret. I'm going to point everybody to your Instagram page. Where else do you suggest that people go to follow you? Find you know what you're doing. Obviously you have your own podcast. I do plug. Yeah, yeah, So I have a podcast. It's called Head on Fire. It's a podcast where I talk to experts in overlooked or misunderstood fields, fields that either everybody kind of thinks they already know everything about or they've never considered before. So I always say that I asked the questions people didn't even know they wanted answers to. I'm an encourageable, curious person. You can also find me all over social media at head on firepod. I'm on tektok and Instagram and Twitter for what that's worth, So I'm everywhere you are.

49:09 Thank you so much for your time today. This has been really fun. Thank you so much much. Cool. What a fascinating guy. If you love Don's energy, I recommend you go and watch his TikTok or his Instagram. Head on Firepod is his username on both of those platforms. His book comes highly recommended from me if you are looking to explore your own spirituality in a way that works for you without causing harm to others or the planet. And hey, listen that tea bag stunt should I say spell? It didn't quite work out while we were recording the interview, but Don did come back to me with a video showing me how it actually does work. It is very cool. It is a great visual which obviously doesn't translate particularly well to audio only, so the team has put together a hilarious video of the whole shebang. Be sure to follow me on Instagram or TI talk cas Done Underscore.

50:02 XO to watch that video. It really is a laugh. If you want to check out Don's book, his podcast, his socials, check the show notes for details. Will have the links there for you, as. Well as links to my website and all my socials. I cannot wait to catch you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy Listener