by Dakota St. Clare | November 6th, 2023
This is an excerpt from the upcoming book Saintcraft: Catholic Folk Magik for All by Dakota St. Clare.
catholic folk magik 101: an introduction
Ahistoricity is the total disregard for history and, as a result, our place in it and it is the main roadblock facing witches today. The central lie that capitalism uses to perpetuate itself is that nothing important happened before you were born and nothing important will happen after you die. As a result, many witches totally ignore history and its fundamental role in shaping our paths, traditions and the dialogue surrounding our work, as well as its ability to adapt and evolve. This is entirely antithetical to the values of ancestor veneration, for example, which sees you as only the current instance of a much larger narrative. On the great family tree of your line, you are but one leaf on one branch and when you die that leaf will fall to the ground and fade away as it nourishes the roots of said tree.
One of the most common examples of this ahistorical approach is the avoidance of anything even remotely Christian in modern witchcraft. The inherent flaw in these methods is their attempt to totally ignore or entirely rewrite the past two thousand years of Western history in which witchcraft and magik were inextricably linked with Christianity. Given that it was the dominating social, religious and political force it eventually became an unavoidable component of the cosmology and worldview for everyone at every level of society. We don’t have to like this fact to admit that it is true, but to ignore is to discard the wisdom of our ancestors, our individual cultural heritage(s) and our place in time, as well as the wealth of magikal knowledge which has accumulated throughout previous generations - their methods of divination, magikal practices, home remedies and lived experiences. One would then be forced to create something entirely new without historical context and this has led to a constant stream of misinformation and myth-making which each of us has to wade through when first starting out on our path.
Now, one is not required to observe Christian doctrine, to adopt its beliefs or to enter a covenant with its god in order to deal with this issue. As a matter of fact there is something deeply subversive in this work - the usage of Christian elements and methods outside of sanctioned parameters. The workers, healers and cunningfolk of Europe and later the Americas and beyond have consistently used Christian components in works which were roundly condemned by the Church. But that's the point of witchcraft in the first place - an act of resilience which utilizes whatever is available to tangibly improve one's circumstance, an act of agency which is at it's core amoral and will use anything it can to accomplish it's goals. Witchcraft throughout history was not a hobby or a plaything, it wasn't for escapism or "manifesting", it was a means of survival by which the average person could make ends meet when all mundane options had been exhausted. It's the ancestral wisdom passed down through generations on how to survive hardship, how to remedy various ills, how to protect one's hearth and home and how to successfully navigate a chaotic universe.
There is also another element at play here, especially when it comes to the various saints and madonnas: this work is often a profound reclamation of spirits who are the last vestige of a deity, folk hero or elevated ancestor put through the Abrahamic slaughterhouse of conversion. This is work we should carry out with pride because the alternative is to cede ownership of these spirits and the help they offer to the Church and its oppressive power structures. The aversion by many witches to anything that looks or feels Christian is totally understandable given the sizable number of us who survived religious trauma. However, this total avoidance also allows those same oppressive forces to hold a monopoly on both magikal practices, ancestral wisdom and cultural heritage in an attempt to live outside of history or its context.
That context is easily explained in the vast disparity between official doctrine and popular practice, a feature which Catholicism shares with all major world religions. The differences between the endorsed dogmas espoused by the Church and the faith practices found among common people are often staggering. This may seem shocking to some. We often like to the think of the Church as this iron-clad hierarchy in which the Pope and his cardinals set down doctrine and disseminate it through their bishops and other high-ranking clerics down to the local parish priest in a continuous, unbroken stream of communication and obedience. And don’t get me wrong, this has been more or less true at various periods in specific places, however the reality far more often flies in the face of this idea. For huge swathes of its history, the Church hierarchy loosely oversaw their officially endorsed and promoted concepts and ideas, attempted to correct or erase anything overtly contradictory and in the meantime focused on accumulating wealth, influence and political power. As a result, many of us have or had mothers and grandmothers who went to mass every Sunday and believed themselves to be traditionally good Catholics, but when there was a major issue (or they wanted their daughter to get married), they had some *less than traditional* ways to approach the saints and the madonnas for help.
It’s important to remember that popular Catholicism has always developed within the parameters set down by doctrine but that doctrine is driven by public devotions. There are many beliefs and practices which the Church has chosen to ignore, silently affirming their validity, while other concepts and their associated cults and rituals have been the subject of attempts by the Church to suppress, erase or punish their adherents to various degrees of intensity and success. And while the Church has often succeeded in suppressing certain cults, there are just as many examples of these attempts ultimately failing due to the support for said cult by the local clergy.
A perfect example of this dichotomy and the disparity between official doctrine and popular practice is the divine hierarchy of Catholic spirits. According to doctrine, especially post-Trent, God and his son Jesus are the only ones worthy of worship, called latria, while Mary and the saints are fit only for veneration, called dulia. Of course, there is the key distinction made in which Mary is chief among the saints and so is due her own special veneration known as hyperdulia. The defining trait though, and the one which irrevocably divorces official doctrine from popular practice is the official stance that Mary and the saints have no intrinsic power, they cannot grant favors, answer prayers or work miracles on their own – they are strictly limited to intercession, through which they may hear prayers addressed to them, carry them to God and advocate on our behalf. And while Mary is said to be the greatest intercessor of all as the Mother of God, she is still unable to do anything on her own and only exists to further God’s glory.
According to the Church’s established hierarchy, the following is the unchanging ranking for authority and influence:
• The Tridentine Godhead The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator. The one and only god, whose will is absolute and without whom nothing is possible.
• Jesus Christ God made manifest on Earth to carry out His divine plan.
• Mary The most powerful of all the saints, she has no power of her own but does have the most direct access to God through her son Jesus.
• The Saints are simple intermediaries. They have no intrinsic power of their own and only exist to hear the prayers of the living and pass them on to God.
Regardless of how ardently this framework has been held or propagated by the Church and its prelates at various times, it remained unrecognizable for the majority of the populace and just as with any other theological argument beloved by the intelligentsia it fell on deaf ears, leaving popular practice almost entirely unaffected. One need only look at Italy, the home of the Catholic Church and its seat of power.
When we look at the evidence available to us since the Middle Ages, we see a totally inverted order as seen above. For the average person in the Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy, Sicily & Sardinia), the essential hierarchy placed the community’s patron saint(s) at the very top, akin to the genius or deus loci, the spirit or god of the place. After this we have the rest of the saints, whose devotion is regionally specific, often acting as figureheads for various tensions and conflicts between competing communities. Next, we have the madonnas, who are transcendent, often bringing whole regions together in their shared veneration. Christ and God were at the very bottom, of little concern to the average person – with Christ only slightly elevated as he has a specific story and image which was recognizable to all. Essentially Christ was the figurehead or mascot for the Church, while “God” was a distant, unknowable Creator, the universe itself and/or the power source for all things. A key component in the popularly recognized hierarchy lies in the common acceptance that the saints and madonnas maintain their own power to answer prayers, grant petitions, etc.
• The Saints are everywhere. Streets, schools, hospitals and neighborhoods are named after the saints. Villages, towns and cities each have their patron saints. Children are named after the saints and take their names during Confirmation. The Saints are ubiquitous and so is their aid.
• The Madonnas are remote. Their shrines are places of pilgrimage, where the faithful journey to witness apparitions, miracles and wonderworking. Its important to note that the madonnas are not below the saints, they are just far less accessible and usually only approached with major crises.
• Jesus Christ is the face of the Church, the central figure of worship inside of the church. However, devotion to the figure of Christ pales in comparison to nearly every other figure in Catholic iconology.
• God is essentially the power source behind all things; however he is blank – unrelatable, unknowable and unapproachable.
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This post is part of an ongoing series I'll be doing here. Feel free to come back next week when we'll deep dive into how Catholic folk magik is a natural product of the Church's origins and history. If you want to learn more about this subject and how you can develop an authentic personal practice, check out Saintcraft here.