Uncloaking witchcraft: exploring Paganism as a Muslim
Real-life paganism is beyond the blood, drama, and telekinetic miracles on television and is rooted in natural connection to the Earth’s seasons.
Papilla Estelar (Celestial Pablum), Remedios Varo
Let the light around you shine brighter, let it encapsulate you. What do you see? Where does it take you?
The light took me to the middle of a wispy hill at Seven Hills to commemorate the full moon, an entity shining in its full glory waiting to be celebrated. I am a lover of the moon, and even though I do not worship it officially, its patterns intrigue the novice astrologer in me.
I grew up in a strict Muslim family that flinched at the devil motifs in Harry Potter and thought of Sabrina the Witch as a queer deviant (laughs in gay). My defiance showed in acts like reading tarot cards, creating astrology clubs in school, and thirsting over hypersexualised witchy characters in the media. But real-life paganism is beyond the blood, drama, and telekinetic miracles on television and rooted in natural connection to the Earth’s seasons.
Paganism is an umbrella term for nature-based religious practices that use seasonal and moon cycles as symbols for their worship. It overlaps with Wicca, a practice of modern witchcraft publicised by Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, revering nature-based spiritualities and pre-Christian practices. Wiccans follow a Wheel of the Year, marking different sabbats, seasons that define the movement of the sun and the moon.
Sylvia, the organiser of a Greater Western Sydney Wiccan group, walked me to the altar during my first ritual. Her black robes and knowledgeable smile complemented the orange hues of the moon and, in my head, we were stirring a cauldron of moss potion. We stood against a humble yet potent setting of a shrine, cauldron, incense, and food offering for the deities. I was just a child of nature’s prowess.
The ritual commenced with acknowledging the Dharug people of the land, after which we took rounds of the circle and soaked in the familiarity of the land we stood on. We raised our hands towards each quarter: earth to the north, fire to the south, water to the west and air to the east.
The circle is cast. We are in the space between the worlds where time and space cease to exist.
The blurring of time and space is not foreign to other religions, let alone Islam. When you are on the Jaa-e-namaz (prayer mat) or winding through a tasbih (prayer beads), you are transported into a space filled with light, focusing solely on Allah and his mightiness over the world. Looking up to deities and providing them offerings is shirk (polytheism), but nature nevertheless plays an important role in Islamic traditions. Water’s wrathfulness is illustrated in the Quran through the story of Prophet Nuh’s ark being consumed by the sea and the signs of akhirah (end times) displayed through catastrophic climate change.
Connecting with nature as a form of worship on a burning planet can be a tumultuous task. How do you honour the water bodies when they are so polluted? Can we still feel nourished breathing the air that gets increasingly sooty? For Julie Brett, a writer and teacher of Australian Druidry, connecting with nature is “a practice of joy.” Following the Anglo-Celtic practice of Druidry requires living by the natural philosophy of going out and seeping in what nature’s seasonal and agricultural cycle is trying to communicate in the moment.
Practising paganism on Indigenous land requires sentience about people’s traditional connections to the land. Things like the Djangawwul song cycles comprise songs curated by ancestral beings who made all the natural territory on this land. Indigenous people also use dreaming as a form of humanising nature and their connection to it as they navigate through the world. Western witchcraft practices, however, can play a complicit role in obliterating First Nations people's totems and magical practices they have inherited over the years. By associating magic solely with British and Celtic traditions, we risk claiming spiritual prowess on stolen land.
Gemma Lucy Smart, a sessional academic at The University of Sydney, grew up finding paganism, at the time, offered what she already believed in: the sanctity of nature. “Connection with nature is what makes us who we are and that should be fostered,” believes Lucy Smart. She calls her practices “banal” and said that they are not the “supernatural, hard to understand practices” that everyone associates with paganism. She mainly focuses on meditation which is about “feeling into the physical body that I am in and noticing the environment that I am in.”
Modern-day paganism is more eclectic than traditional, meaning it takes inspiration from different spiritual practices. Lucy Smart’s altar at home consists of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, Norse goddess Freyja and an empress tarot card with pregnant women. Her practice is not restricted to deities but she takes a deep interest in the tenets of Jainism, a religion that believes in connection with non-human entities as miniscule as microbes. Being a witch comes naturally to her Anglo-Celtic heritage. By taking inspiration from the power and teachings of other cultural followings, paganist practices strengthen their acknowledgement of non-western natural thinking.
Close your eyes and feel the grass of this hill beneath you. Transfer all your energy on to the land and block out the noises of Seven Hills surrounding you.
David, our ritual leader and the founder of Pagan Awareness Network, guided us through meditation. Meditative practices in pagan rituals open imaginative worlds – creating scenarios in a world drastically different from your own but still reflective of your position in life. All the Lunar deities, from Artemis, Hecate, Luna to Kabigat, Chieng Xi and Maya, took over the 25-minutes of silence in our minds. Islam views any sort of magical thinking as an antithesis to one’s commitment to Allah, considering it as an association with Djinns (the evil). Growing up, I heard stories about aunts who were physically unclean, involved in black magic, and possessed by evil forces that tried to ruin the holy sanctity of our home. They were insane pariahs who needed to be taken to a mufti (priest) or dargahs (shrines) to be treated. I was in an internal altercation with myself – was I hysterical? Would I get possessed? Was my body now unholy?
Open your eyes and let the sounds of Seven Hills enter you again. Energy is flowing in all quarters and they are with you.
After the ritual, I call David to ask for interpretations of what I see. My parents would have hated this because I am confiding in an entity that is not Allah. David tells me that purple and violet hues of light usually hint at self-consciousness; that feels like a positive reading. We ended the night with cake and ale by offering arrowroot biscuits and juice to the gods. It is a form of expressing gratefulness towards them by consuming a bit of it and spreading the rest on the ground. Crumbs of the biscuit fell onto the grass and the juice trickled slowly within me as the moon got only brighter. This was another fitnah in the eyes of my parents but that day I was just a novice witch bathing in lunar greatness.