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| Pinrose Starter Witch Kit from Sephora |
Recently news broke in our community that the makeup giant Sephora will be selling "Starter Witch Kits" in October, including a bunch of "Witchy" scents (this is basically the bulk of the product; it's a perfume set that happens to have some other junk in it), a Tarot deck, a bundle of white sage, and a rose quartz.
There are a lot of opinions swirling around regarding this Witch Kit. I've taken a lot of them in quite well (particularly those from Indigenous folks talking about the problems with selling white sage in any sort of Witchcraft context), but a lot of the commentary from Witches--both in the United States and abroad--sort of skips over the issue, perpetuating bad habits that we have in this community.
1. First, on the white sage thing.
I am not going to go on about the sage bundle included in this, not because it isn't important, but because Indigenous people have already talked about it and you should be listening to them. Flippantly swishing around a bundle of sacred medicine you don't understand is not Witchcraft (even though a lot of Witches do it, it is problematic).
A good run-down of why selling a sage bundle in this context is terrible can actually be gleaned from the Smudging entry of Wikipedia, particularly the Controversy section. There is a lot wrong with Neopagan use of white sage, and it absolutely shouldn't be in any kit.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, most of the critiques from Witches ourselves don't center around us appropriating other cultures... and that's what I want to talk about the most here. There's a lot to unpack in our response.
2. A lot of people are accusing Sephora of "appropriating Witchcraft," but I don't believe such a thing really exists.
Here's the hard truth of modern Witchcraft, especially modern American Witchcraft: We are constant drive-by appropriators of other faiths. We appropriate so much that we can scarcely remember what was appropriated and what wasn't. Wicca, in particular, was cobbled together from a mixture of multicultural religious practices and bad history, and more and more has gotten absorbed into it as time goes by. As an American Witch, it's taken years to realize that the knowledge I learned as just "generic Witchcraft" gained inspiration from (and often quite frankly stole) huge portions of its knowledge bank from Hinduism, Hoodoo, Vodoun, Indigenous faiths, Buddhism, and loads of other traditional and marginalized religions, while simultaneously distancing ourselves from parts of those faiths that we found objectionable (we love insisting that cursing is bad while stealing from curse-heavy practices, that animal sacrifice is bad while eating CAFO meat and stealing from Santeria, etc.).
And this reconfiguring of beliefs, deities, and practices is very deep in a lot of strains of Witchcraft. If you're a Wiccan who believes that all Goddesses are actually your One Goddess? That's taking a myriad of knowledge from other faiths and saying "This is now mine, and not only is this mine, I'm changing it to meet my expectations."
Because we do this so rampantly, I always find it kind of absurd when we turn around and suggest other people are somehow appropriating our ways when they draw inspiration (shallow though it may be) from us, like somebody stealing stolen goods from a thief who then complains that he was stolen from.
If you're going to be the kind of religion that absorbs things for the aesthetic, it's worthless to complain that other people try to absorb you.
The same, by the way, goes for Halloween stuff. It baffles me how many Wiccans try to talk about Halloween cultural artifacts (the Witch aesthetic, especially) as being stereotypes of us or appropriating us. If anything it was the other way around. These things existed independently of spiritual Witchcraft.
3. Is this oppressing us? Meh.
When I think of the marginalization of Witches, I think about things like the fact that my co-workers can talk on and on about the Christian retreats and missions they've been on but I feel compelled to call my weeklong Pagan retreat "a camping trip" or "a music festival." I think about parents in custody battles who have to go join churches and pretend to be good Christians to keep the kids because their ex-spouses suddenly decided they hated Paganism when they got divorced and keep bringing it up at the proceedings. I'm thinking about the constant barrage of Christian symbols on government property that affects all non-Christians.
People keep bringing up things like "Well, what if they made a Christian kit?" This is absurd, because there are loads of things like that already. Christians want people to be Christian so bad they'll market the hell out of their shit. Right down the hall from our Sephora is a shop that sells loads of Buddha kits (mini resin statues of Buddha with little booklets of shallow Buddhist thought), you can get sets of supplies for Muslim prayer, and you can get dozens and dozens of different kits for Witches.
You can also find shoddy Native American beliefs kits in our stores.
So it's not that we are being somehow uniquely oppressed by some ridiculous perfume kit. This is a problem among all religions that has to do with commodification for the spiritually lost.
4. Commodifying our faith is bad... but we already do it to ourselves.
Right now there's a rush among Witches to give alternatives to the Sephora kit. I'm not going to judge people who get a kit for the accessibility (a kit that has basic ritual tools and candles is not the worst thing ever), but most of the tools of Witchcraft can be made or purchased at a thrift store or rummage sale fairly easily.
If you think it's hard to get Witchcraft tools, it's because you believe (either through your own decision or more likely because other people have trained you into thinking such) that you need stuff Made For Witches. You think you need the pentacle-emblazoned cauldron, the triple-moon-carved chalice, the official black-handled athame, and so forth.
I started Witchcraft back in the late nineties and most of my tools were from my basement. Some I made in art class. These lasted me for years because they weren't made to be superficially pretty for a bunch of flaky Witches. Later when I started buying Witch tools from Witch stores? A lot of these wound up being fragile garbage, because they were made to look ornate and be pretty decorations, not useful Witchcraft tools.
And this is largely what you'll get if you buy kits and tools from any of our dedicated stores or vendor tents. I've been to a lot of events and have really felt the pressure people lay on you to buy from the tents. "Buy from the tents! They make all this possible!" But where are the tents getting their goods? Sure, you get the artisans who are selling things they've made themselves (and this is no comment on them), but how many of them are just buying the same mass-produced, ethically dubious garbage you can get on Amazon while adding an exorbitant festival price on them? Is buying something at a festival at an 80% markup (something that was reported to me at least twice at Pagan Spirit Gathering when vendors forgot to take the original tags off their goods) really much more ethical than this kit is?
5. If any more of you bring up the Burning Times I'm going to goddamn scream.
We already got through the part where I talk about how people appropriating from us is kind of a silly thing to believe, but I'm going to talk about something now that's just super unnerving: There's this resurgence of bad history I thought we got over ten years ago.
"Don't steal our culture! People were burned for doing this!"
The vast majority of people killed during the Witch Trials were Christians. They were targeted for entirely non-religious purposes using religious rhetoric. We have known that the Witch Cult theory has been garbage for many years now, and yet every once in a while it resurfaces in order to either try legitimizing our practice (we don't need ancient history to be legitimate!) or, more often, to justify our horrendous oppression complex.
The things that we have done to us, the ways that Christians are given preference here, are already bad enough without trying to connect ourselves in some unbroken line to an even that had nothing to do with us. Much less in reference to some shitty kit people are going to forget about in a year.
