Endless Thread - Cyberwitches

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

Since the dawn of the internet, cyberwitches have traded in their broomsticks and cauldrons for floppy disks and smartphones. This week on Endless Thread, we go into the history of cyberwitches, attend a Zoom ritual, and talk to members of a cyber coven.

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Somotibis. Somotibis. Somotibis. We are in the depths of a ritual. A ritual performed by about a dozen people, all gathered together on Zoom.

Guardians of the East, O mighty ones, keepers of knowledge and the day's new sun, we summon you forth. We call to you. What you're hearing happened some weeks back, and Ben and I participated in a similar ritual earlier this spring. To start the ritual, you have to cast a circle, a physical circle or an energetic circle,

to create a ring of protection around you. I conjure ye, O circle of art, to be a temple between the worlds, a meeting place of love and joy and truth, a shield against all wickedness and evil. Our ritual happened on a full moon. Its purpose was to connect us to the innate divine within and to the four elements, water, earth, fire, and air. Colorful spirits manifesting within the night. Seal our circle, hide it from baleful sight.

As you can probably tell, there is a leader to this ritual guiding us and prompting us to opt into the magic with some household products. We lit incense and a candle. Then we poured water into a container of salt and stirred it with our fingers. Then facing the candle, we dipped our fingers in the salt water mixture and touched the area around our eyes and our noses and our lips. May our circle be opened yet remain unbroken. And may the peace of the God and the goddess be ever in our hearts.

Is everybody confused yet? We've got some explaining to do. But I'm not exactly sure where to start. So let's hear from the person who, who got us mixed up in all this magic. Mira Raman, who's been working with Endless Thread for several months here. Mira, can we get some deets on what the heck's going on? So when I was an undergrad, I was a research assistant in one of my favorite professors' labs.

It was called the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. So one day she asked me if I could do some research on a group of people online called Cyberwitches. witches who integrate their magic and spells with technology. Man, did you go to Hogwarts? Is this from Hogwarts? Actually, you know what? This is like a perfect example of a course you could only find in college. It's amazing.

Well, doing this research was probably one of my favorite things that I worked on in college. It was very, very different from everything else that I was learning. And once I got past this shock, of what am I learning about what the heck is being a cyber witch? I was able to dig pretty deep into this corner of the internet and discover some pretty cool things. This community is really important to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons.

A lot of different reasons we're about to tell you about. Because whether it's subreddit communities of millions of users, TikTok videos with billions of views, or a group of people just jumping on a Zoom to plot together, the internet is connecting a world of like-minded people who have always been considered lonely outcasts on the fringe. All right, let's get witchy with it. Na, nah, nah, na, nah, na.

I'm Amory, what sorcery is this, Siebertson? I'm Ben Warlock Johnson. You're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. And today, we bring you... Cyberwe. You don't seem exactly surprised, but who are you? I teach computer science at the local high school.

Any of our endless thread listeners, Buffy fans? As in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which turns out depicted Cyber Witch in way back in 1997. You think the realm of the mystical is limited to ancient texts and relics? That bad old science made the magic go away? The divine exists in cyberspace, same as out here. Are you a witch? I don't have that. kind of power. Technopagan is the term. There are more of us than you think.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, fun fact, the subject of a course at my college, and a very popular show and movie about how a teenager gets supernatural abilities to fight demons, evil, and other monsters connected to the occult. But one particular episode talked about a specific figure that we don't see that much in the media. There's this episode in season one called I-Robot U.Jane, in which one of the characters, Jenny Callender, says that she's a techno-pagan. That is our expert in all things cyberwitchie, the person who was running the lab that Mira participated in in college. Technopagan cyber witches, turns out all of these things fall under the purview of... Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Alex Ketchum. I'm McGill University's faculty lecture of the Institute for Gender Sexuality and Feminist Studies, and my pronouns are she-her.

After watching that Buffy episode, Dr. Ketchum became fascinated with cyber witchcraft and cyberspace. But she didn't jump right into researching how to be a cyber witch 101. She was interested in tracing the history of cyberwitchin, which has its origin right when the internet was emerging. So let's back up to go to the 90s for a second. In the early 90s, when things were picking up on the old World Wide Web, we started seeing a new, group emerge. And there's the cyber witch who's the kind of figure that shows up in fantasy, shows up also in reality in terms of like cyber covens, starting in the 90s. A coven is a magical group of practicing witches that comes together for community building rituals. You know,

covenin. Yeah. Which before the internet happened in person. But a cyber covenan practices its witchcraft online. So as the internet has grown in popularity, Cyber covens have also grown. Now, a minute ago in that Buffy episode, we heard the character Jenny Callender distinguished between Technopagans and Witches, or Cyberwitches in this case. But what is the difference?

The Technopagans tends to be more of a figure of 1990s alternative culture with a bit of neo-paganism mixed in with rave culture, rave music. Whereas the Cyber Witch doesn't have that same kind of overlap, I think the cyber witch kind of harkens back to longer traditions of witchcraft, covens, and then it's taken up in popular culture in this kind of like reimagining the figure of the witch to meet today's modern consumers.

All right, so techno-peganism is more modern technology and music with a splash of neo-peganism. Cyberwitches are witches who have integrated their more traditional magic with modern technology. Easy enough. But there's more than one way to Cyber Witch. Which, which would you like to talk about first, Ben? Ah, yes, which-witch. So there are Cyberwitches who use the Internet and technology as a medium for their magic, like, say, using emoji as a way to cast spells online,

which we are going to get to. But first, I think we should talk about cyber witches who use technology really just as a platform for gathering and connecting with one another. Like the Cybercoven we heard at the top, doing that ritual together on Zoom. Our circle is cast. We stand between the worlds beyond the bounds of time, where night and day, birth and death, joy and sorrow, meet as one.

So moated be. You can see kind of early covens in 1994. A lot of these covens only exist for a couple of years and kind of early internet spaces. But there are some that still continue for more than 20 years. So there's this one called Jaguar Moon, which was founded in 2000, and you can still go their website today, where they really explain what they're doing in cyberspace

and how a cybercoven works. My name is Lisa McSherry. Lisa's the leader of the cyber coven, Jaguar Moon. I'm also the author of three books with a fourth one coming out in October of this year, and I live in Portugal. When she's covening with her cyber coven, Lisa goes by Mott. She tells us that a lot of people who get into witchcraft and paganism use pseudonyms, partly for anonymity, partly for a sense of becoming a new person.

Lisa grew up in a religious Christian household, but she never really connected with the tenets of Christianity. But the ideas of energy and interconnectedness and the existence of something bigger than herself, those resonated. One day I came across my mother's copy of the Spiral Dance by Starhawk. And it is literally a primer on how to be a witch. This book, The Spiral Dance, inspired Lisa to start practicing witchcraft. Two things from the book in particular stood out to her.

One was a affinity for the natural world as opposed to the man-made world. I really like the idea that I could control my world. And that's a very important part of magic and witchcraft, is you have this sense that you can use this energy, once you align yourself with it, to create your own reality, to change the reality that is around you in positive and beneficial ways for yourself and for your community. Ben, I feel like more and more people in my life have embraced this concept of manifesting things for themselves. Have you heard anyone say that? Yeah. I'm trying to manifest some tulips out of the

ground right now. No, I think that's right. A lot of people are manifesting these days. It's true. What made you want to start a cyber coven? I didn't. Who forced you to start a cyber coven? No, deity did, actually. Like any religious leader, Lisa was struck by a divine being. For the uninitiated, a deity is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. For Lisa, deity is her goddess.

In the late 90s, as everyone was getting, online, a friend of a friend of an acquaintance said, hey, wouldn't it be neat to try and do teaching each other magic and witchcraft online and we'll do it in this kind of a way, on this kind of a space, we'll use a list. And I was like, yeah, it sounds kind of interesting. Lisa prayed to deity and asked for a clear sign on where to go from here. I had a dream. And in the dream, a black jaguar walked through a woods to me. looked at me and said, the Coven's name is Jaguar Moon. And I woke up and went, okay, well, I asked for clear. That's, that's clear. Jaguar Moon officially started in May of 2000.

Lisa says that she got backlash at the time for using technology to practice magic. She still does. There is a hardcore contingent of people who say that it is utterly impossible to do magic online. it is utterly impossible to do magic unless you are physically present with one another and in the meat space of life. Yes, the meat space of life. Now you're typing my language. Yeah. I just want to know, is it M-E-E-E-T meat space or M-E-A-T? Ben is it M-E-A-T? Yeah. It is definitely M-E-A-T. Oh, okay, okay. Like you and I, Emery, as much as your... We're the meat space. Yeah, we're the meat. We are the meat. We are the meat. We are the meat. meat.

You've already won him fully over, Lisa, just with your use of meat space. Oh, good. I'm so glad. When witches are not in the meat space, they meet in cyberspace. Cyberspace is the astral. So when I access cyberspace through my computer, I am touching the astral realm. And that's where we do our work as a cyber coven. Out of curiosity, have you ever heard this saying any sufficiently advanced technologies

indistinguishable from magic? Thank you, Arthur C. Clark. Yes. Arthur C. Clark, the scientists, science, and sci-fi author who coined the phrase. Think about it. Here I am holding my telephone in my hand, which the computing power of which would fill three business buildings from back in the 70s. Lisa's on to something. Every time a new iPhone or something comes out, I'm like, like, what is this sorcery? How can this little object do such powerful things?

Belison or Coven are more traditional in a sense when it comes to the world of cyber witches. They use cyberspace to connect and conduct rituals together. But in the early 2000s, cyber witches started to actually integrate technology into their spellcasting. Here's Dr. Ketchum again. Examples of how you can use your computer as part of your spellcasting. Some of it is to put things like crystals or different herbs on your computer. These techniques come from the cyber spellbook, magic in the virtual world, by Patricia Telesco and Serona Knight. It came out in 2002.

Some of it is to use a floppy disk that has what we would, like essentially a computer file image of an herb. If you don't have it in your house, you can put in a floppy disk or like clipart essentially to stand in for that herb. Okay, a floppy disk. which, by the way, is how us olds used to save files before things like thumb drives and external hard drives. A floppy disk with a digital image of an herb saved onto it being used in lieu of a real physical herb. Who knew you could perform magic with a floppy disk? I definitely remember some floppies that seemed cursed as hell. What else can you use?

Things such as an air conditioner into your spells for the cooling of the air to cool and the air to cool a load. There's things of like how to use a calculator or a breadmaker or a camera, digital camera. By the mid-2000s, Dr. Ketchum says, as the novelty of the internet was wearing off, so was the novelty of cyber witchcraft. Covens like Jagbar Moon kept on witchin, but the cyber witch surge of the early 90s plateaued to a more under-the-radar existence. Until 2015. Two days before Halloween, a writer and witch named Terent Tarrant-Tow. wrote an article for Vice Magazine titled How to Cast Spells Using Emoji. So basically you can put a combination of emojis in a text on your phone or online as a tweet,

and that can be a way of making a spell. In the words of Taryn Towers, quote, instead of sub-tweeting your ex, why not cast an emoji unbinding spell instead? Next time your friend needs help getting over someone, am I right? Terran Towers talks about how every modern witch always has her cell phone at hand at any time. And yes, you're used to looking up information on your phone, but maybe you can also actually use it to create spells. Terran writes that to cast an emoji spell, you first have to set an intention. Like, I lost my keys and I really need to find them.

Then identify the emoji that feel relevant. So in this case, Terran uses a crystal ball emoji, then a magnifying glass, then of course, a little key emoji, and then rounds it off with another crystal emoji for good measure. Terran's piece goes viral, re-shared all over the internet, especially Tumblr. And there's this kind of renewed interest in cyber witchcraft and casting spells online. One of the reasons that this partly takes off is because of the rise of Donald Trump running for president of the United States. Cyberwitches, the majority of whom are women, were very active online during Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. Habercadabra! Here's a spell. Donald Trump could go to hell! I wanted to hex Donald Trump and the bad energy around that.

We're very hopeful that today we will cast spells that will make the great orange one disappear forever. So mode it be or not to be when we come back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about. science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing. Politics. Country music.

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So it's 2015, and lots of which. are not happy with Donald Trump's campaign for president. There were a lot of people that were feeling frustrated and that on top of going to protest and rallies, they also want to express that frustration online. And so there were gatherings online of people cursing him. And then there are also people casting emoji spells against him. In June of 2016, user Birdie Witch, which is just a good username right there, on Tumblr posted an emoji spell with the word Trump,

bookended by a crystal ball, a red X, a downward stock symbol, and a red pushpin. They wrote, quote, a spell to take down Donald Trump, likes charge it, reblogs cast it. The post currently has about 60,000 notes, which is a combination of all the reblogs, likes, in replies a post is received. Dr. Alex Ketchum, our Cyberwitch scholar from McGill University, says this connection between activism and witchcraft makes sense. I would say that there's been a long-standing relationship of witchcraft and the idea of witches and feminism, right?

Like, the witch has this kind of feminist figure. But Dr. Ketcham says the cyber witch of the 1990s and a cyber witch of the mid-2010s aren't necessarily the same thing. In the 90s, cyber witches mostly practiced witchcraft online. By 2015, cyberwitches have a much. much bigger toolbox. If there's an app for it, there's a spell for it. But as the internet has become more accessible and community-based and more people have started practicing magic online like emoji spells, the definition of cyber witch has become

a little blurry. Since the resurgence in 2015, more people have been using witch as a feminist figure first and the actual witchcraft part as a kind of secondary aspect. Does not to undermine anyone's religious or spiritual beliefs, but it does kind of seem like the driving force between the two is a little bit different one where it's kind of like feminism and political activism first as being the driver in kind of 2015 and onward. But there are some cyber witches in 2022 who prioritize the witchcraft. In college, that was when I was like, I want to be a witch. It was always a question of like how to be. How? How to do it? Where's the textbook to become a witch? Hi, everyone. My name is Cy X. My pronouns are they and we. And I'm a cyber witch, energy worker, and a lover based in Brooklyn.

Say hello to our 21st century cyber witch, CyX. They are far from the old witch hunched over a cauldron. Syx is a young tech savvy witch who has seemingly no bad problems. And since Sykes started practicing witchcraft in college, it probably comes as no surprise that their first spell was a love spell. Maybe it was a curse. Yeah, they were still figuring it out. There's so many things that went wrong. It was like, the candle blew out before I could even finish the spell. And I was like, let's just relight it. A bunch of people entered the room and were screaming, what are you doing? And because the spell didn't go as planned, Sy X figured they'd cursed themselves. I had a familiar that would follow me around. It was this cat that lived.

by my apartment and I considered it to be a familiar in a guide and after that spell it froze to death. I broke a tooth by eating a french fry. Things that were just so absurd. What drew Sykes to witchcraft was stronger than the disappointment of that first spell gone awry. They grew up in a religious home, but never really felt connected to the structure of Christianity. Sound familiar? Like Lisa, the leader of Jaguar Moon, Syax connected with the energy that came with their spirituality and from the possibility of manifesting a better reality for themselves.

I think at the root of magic, the way that I understand it is a lot about change and intention. Syax incorporates technology into their spellcasting, not in the way Lisa and her coven use the internet as a gathering space, but in a way where their spells and tech intertwine. They even use an app that a lot of us use daily as a way to do magic. Instagram, if I want to direct attention towards something, maybe I'll participate in a glamour spell. And I think an example of that is the idea of posting a selfie for the algorithm.

I think that is a glamour spell. Using beauty to direct attention towards something specific. Man, I've been casting glamour spells. this whole time and I didn't know it. Or not. What? I'm not glamorous. Come on.

You are the most glamorous, Ben. But have you been setting an intention behind your Instagram post? Just being cool. Setting an intention of being cool and looking glamorous. Not enough. It's not enough, Ben. Syak says you really need to set an intention, similar to that emoji spell against Donald Trump.

The intention is what. turns your everyday Instagram post, Ben's glamour post, into a spell. But like we said, there's no one way to Cyber Witch, right? And for SciX, a lot of their witchcraft has been trial and error, just like my glamour. It can be hard to sort of decipher where to go when you're curious about learning about magic because maybe many of us don't have mentors. I mean, it was sort of a curiosity that I had, and then I had to turn. to the internet in order to find how do I learn about these things.

Sykes' path to becoming a cyber witch evolved over time. When they first started practicing, they just wanted to cast spells and make magic in the digital realm. It was that simple, me trying to figure that out. And now as my understanding of technology has shifted, I think the idea of what a cyber witch is has also shifted. I really now think of magic as a form of technology and I think of now technology as being beyond our devices. For Sci-X, it's not just about copy and pasting what witchcraft looks like in the physical world

and putting that in cyberspace. It's about our relationship with our devices that we depend so heavily on. The cyber witch part of it is understanding how then we can communicate with our technology, with the technologies of today, with the technologies of all times, including devices, including the internet, including algorithms, including all of it. So, SyX is one person, but there are different cyber witch communities online.

There's one specific community that has made waves in cyberspace recently. Hey, witch talk. Let's get blasphemous. Witch talk. The witches of TikTok. Witch talk was the subject of many headlines from NPR to Vybers. to Cosmo back in the summer of 2020 for a thing that they did. There were a group of witches that were hexing the moon, and everyone was freaking out about it. I'm sorry, hexing the moon, as in cursing the moon, wishing ill upon the moon? Yeah, seems like a bad move for feminists and witches. I'm just putting that out there.

Yeah, these novice witches, or as SyX calls them, baby witches. Baby witches. Hexed the moon using TikTok. The sun is next. Stop! Exactly my reaction. There were a lot of people that were involved in this. It's hard to know just how big the cyber witch community is.

But when you search witch talk on TikTok, the videos under this tag have been viewed more than 25 billion times. And then there's the Reddit community, which is versus patriarchy, which describes itself as a woman-centered subreddit with a witchy twist. And I love this subreddit, and I'm a member, along with half a million other people. You are too, Ben? Yeah, I love it.

Well, to this point, like how many of these people and how many of the witch-talk video watchers are actually practicing witches? Do you have something to tell me, Anne-Marie? We don't know how big this community really is. I guess the long story short is that it might seem like this is a very niche group, but your next door neighbor could be using an emoji spell to hex you at this very moment. Or you're a podcast co-host. Oh, no. Okay, so we've gotten to understand some of the ways Cyberwitches practice magic

and their beginnings in the 90s and how they surged and evolved with the rise of social media. But there's still a question of why. Why are Cyberwitches a thing? Yeah, not in a pop culture. way or a surface level kind of way, but what does this group of people actually get from being together? I'm Ursa. pronouns are they them?

I'm Siren. I'm Danu. I'm Red. I'm based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm a wander. My pronouns are he. He came. We got a chance to speak with members of Jaguar Moon, and they told us why being part of a

cyber coven is important to them. It made me go to therapy. Because, yeah, honestly. For me, I'd say it was confident. I've not historically had a great deal of that in myself. There are places that will say, you know, come as you are, but this group actually means that. There's one specific lesson that we talk about with affirmations. For me, my affirmation for my class year was, I am worthy of love from myself.

And that changed my life. For me, it has allowed me to meet with and work with people. I never would have encountered in a million years. Lisa McSherry again, the leader of Jaguar Moon. It connects people who otherwise couldn't be connected. It offers a path to a non-traditional spirituality for people who are differently abled. It offers modalities that aren't in the mainstream. And that's always important.

I mean, witchcraft is already liminal. It's already on the edge. marginalized. So having a group of people who are further marginalized and can't practice because of where they live or because they can't read or are deaf or one of a hundred things, you know, you can be a cyber witch. You can connect with people. You can find people just like you or really, really close who are doing it and doing well. We asked the group on our Zoom ritual call, what other commonalities they realized after coming together in cyberspace? We're nerds.

Our covenant also has a D&D night. Yes, you may be shocked to learn that people who dabble in witchcraft and people who play dungeons and dragons can be the same people. Nerds finding each other because of common interests and yearning for community. As Lisa points out, being a witch for a long time, has meant being an outcast, someone who was doing it wrong, according to mainstream society. And they were burned at the stake for it, or thrown into ponds with rocks tied to them, or any number of horrible things.

Witches have always been at risk for being different. And being different can be lonely. If you identified as a witch or witchy or magic curious, even as recently as a few decades ago, it was hard to find community. Which is kind of funny, since so many of their practices feel, pretty similar to other mainstream religious ceremonies. Ritual, praying, manifesting. This is all pretty familiar stuff.

The Internet has made it a lot easier for witches to practice their beliefs. For some, like SciX, that's spellcasting with Instagram. For others, like the members of Jaguar Moon, it's just hopping on a Zoom call from different cities and countries around the world to cast a circle. And despite witches' love of the supernatural, there's something fundamentally human about that, right? And just about wanting to feel like you have a little ounce of control, maybe, just maybe, in a world that otherwise feels pretty chaotic.

So what do you say, Ben? You're going to become a cyber witch? I don't think so, but I might light a candle for these cyber witches out there. So moat it be. So mode it be. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag bonus content, My Witch Talk Hexes, Amory's love spells, join our email list. You'll find it at WbUR.org.org slash endless thread.

This episode was written and produced by Mira Rahman, and it is hosted by us, Ben Brock Johnson. And Amory Sebertson, mix and sound design by Matt Reed. Editing help from Maury McMurray. Our web producer is Megan Kattel. The rest of our team is Nora Sacks, Dean Russell. Quincy Walters and Grace Tatter. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines. I already know it's coming.

Between digital communities and a coven of, you want to sing it with me? Tiny little baby witches. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild witchy story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up please email endless thread at wb ubr.org the tiny little baby witches you just do it over and over and tell it's funny

it's funny the first time it shouldn't still be funny by now that's the problem okay all right