I Did Not Leave The Church To Find Another Doctrine

 

This will make some people uncomfortable.

So be it.

I did not leave structured religion to find another institution wearing black lace and a pentacle.

And yet, lately, that is exactly what parts of the modern witchcraft community feel like.

I have watched witches — women who speak of sovereignty, shadow work, liberation, divine feminine power — publicly diminish other witches over political differences.

Not over cruelty.
Not over harm.
But over ideology.

And my body recognizes it immediately.

It feels like church.

It feels like moral hierarchy.
It feels like doctrinal purity tests.
It feels like “agree or be cast out.”

I have already walked that road.

I will not walk it again.

Sovereignty Does Not Mean Sameness

Witchcraft — real witchcraft — is rooted in personal relationship.

With land.
With ancestors.
With intuition.
With truth earned through lived experience.

It is not a voting bloc.
It is not a uniform.
It is not a hive mind.

Since when did political alignment become a requirement for spiritual legitimacy?

Since when did disagreement become evidence of moral failure?

There is a difference between ethics and ideology.
There is a difference between protecting the vulnerable and demanding conformity.

When we blur those lines, we recreate the very structures many of us claim to resist.

And if our community cannot hold respectful disagreement without exile, then we must ask:

Are we building liberation?

Or just rebranding control?

I did not dismantle internal dogma just to inherit a new one with better branding.

The Crone Does Not Perform Belonging

There is something that happens when a woman crosses into her seasoned years.

She stops contorting herself to fit rooms.

She notices patterns faster.
She recognizes when liberation language becomes social currency.
She feels when community becomes conditional.

Belonging that requires self-editing is not belonging.

It is performance.

And I am too rooted — in grief, in marriage, in motherhood, in loss, in decades of private ritual — to perform my convictions for approval.

If sovereignty means anything, it means I get to think.

The Aesthetic Layer No One Wants to Talk About

Once I started noticing the ideological conformity, I couldn’t unsee the aesthetic performance either.

Crystal grids larger than the room they were created in.

The curated altars.

The algorithm-friendly “dark feminine.”

The carefully distressed grimoires.

The staged vulnerability.

Listen — I love beauty.

I love black walls and candlelight.
I love fitted black dresses and autumn florals.
I love moody rooms that feel like a sanctuary at midnight.

But there is a difference between living in the dark
and branding the dark.

One is sanctuary.
The other is strategy.

The witchcraft that changed me did not happen under flattering light.

It happened when my mother died and I had to learn how to speak to her in the unseen.
It happened in the quiet hours of tending soil before anyone else woke up.
It happened in the ache of empty nesting.
It happened in the friction of long marriage.
It happened when no one was clapping.

Initiation does not photograph well.

But it transforms you.

Initiation Over Identity

You can own every deck ever printed and never sit in stillness.
You can speak the language of ancestors and never confront your own lineage wounds.
You can post about shadow work and never descend.

Witchcraft is not consumption.

It is confrontation.

It asks:

What are you protecting?
What are you projecting?
What part of yourself are you outsourcing to community approval?

Those questions are not popular.

But they are sacred.

I Choose Integrity Over Approval

I choose depth over display.
I choose complexity over conformity.
I choose dark rooms because they calm my nervous system — not because they trend.
I choose sovereignty even when it costs belonging.

If that makes me difficult to categorize, good.

I am not interested in being easily categorized.

I am interested in being aligned.

Witchcraft, for me, is not a costume.
It is not a political badge.
It is not a social club.

It is relationship.

With grief.
With land.
With my mother beyond the veil.
With the woman I am still becoming.

Truth is rarely tidy.
It is rarely unanimous.

But it is sovereign.

And I would rather be sovereign than approved.

What I Hope My Granddaughters Inherit

I am a grandmother now.

And that changes how I measure everything.

When I look at my granddaughters, I do not think about algorithms or aesthetics or ideological purity tests.

I think about the world they will inherit.

I do not want them to grow up believing that belonging requires uniformity.
I do not want them to silence their questions in order to stay included.
I do not want them to fear respectful disagreement.

I want them to be strong thinkers.
Rooted women.
Women who can sit at a table with difference and remain sovereign.

I want them to know that spiritual practice is not about social approval.
It is about integrity.

I want them to inherit communities that can hold nuance.
That can hold complexity.
That can hold each other without exile.

Because division disguised as righteousness is still division.

And control dressed up as liberation is still control.

If we cannot practice respectful disagreement in spiritual spaces — spaces that claim to honor shadow and depth — then what are we modeling for the next generation?

I do not wish for my granddaughters to inherit a world where every difference becomes a fracture.

I wish for them to inherit courage.
Discernment.
Compassion.
Strength without rigidity.
Conviction without cruelty.

If my voice ever feels sharp, it is because I am thinking long-term.

Legacy matters more than trend cycles.

And I refuse to hand them a smaller world than the one I fought to step into.

Many Blessings J