The Power of Ardyss Body Magic for Body Positivity

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Many people believe that the idea of zombies came into Haitian Voodoo culture as a means of expressing the deadness of being a slave. In other words, the concept of zombies, and Voodoo itself, arose as a spiritual force among slaves to help them endure their suffering.

Enslaved Africans brought Voodoo to the Americas, especially to Haiti, where it evolved and mixed with other religious traditions, like Catholicism, into what is known as Haitian Vodou. Conflating these traditions can lead to ignorance and stereotyping, which can be offensive to the practitioners and the cultures they originate from.

These distributors can be found in various cities and towns, making it easy for you to find a location near you. To find a nearby distributor, you can start by visiting the official Ardyss website. They have a search feature where you can enter your location and find a list of distributors in your area.

Trans and Intersex Witches Are Casting Out the Gender Binary

Moira Goree is a regular workaday witch who thinks this mediocre world was slapped together by regular workaday gods and goddesses. She received this insight during a near-death experience.

“What I learned was how imperfect any deity must be, to have made this,” she says, gesturing around at the smoky front porch of an Asheville punk café, and towards the semi trucks pulling in and out of a warehouse across a dusty street. She pictures deities like regular people, headed in to do a particularly weird job. “They get drunk after work’s over…sometimes they mess up, and they’re like, oh crap.” Moira laughs, her head tilted, watches for my reaction from behind her blue plastic shades. Behind her there are bright maples, and the air is crisp and autumnal: perfect conditions for chatting up a witch.

Moira is, as my father would say, “straight out of central casting,” witch department. She’s 25, tall and awkwardly hesitant to talk at first, with long dyed black hair and light eyes, and her part-time job is making magic potions for a local shop called Raven and Crone. She wears a black hoodie which covers up a casual Dr. Who-themed dress, and as she opens up, Moira is funny and engaging; turns out her side gig is as a stand-up comedian.

I met Moira in Asheville shortly after I arrived in what I’d been told was a town full of witches, a touristy spot perched in the mountains of western North Carolina that Moira says is overrun with both “traditional Appalachian mysticism and hippies who want that.” When I asked folks where I could find trans witches to talk to in Asheville, more than one replied, “What kind of trans witch do you want to talk to?”

A growing movement of trans and queer people in the U.S. engaging with paganism and magic makes sense on its face: queer and trans people are often pushed out of our communities of origin, and even the more progressive wings of Christianity are only barely starting to engage with trans issues. Magic and witchery are easy to claim, and they are also associated with a resistance to Christian hegemony. But as I talked to trans people around the country about their magic practices, I also realized there is more to this trans magic revival than the fact that it’s a convenient alternative to institutions that reject us. One could argue that magic made Moira trans. She’s been reading Tarot cards and having visions since her early teens. When she was 16, she had a vision of a death deity during a suicidal episode. At the time, she was confused about her gender identity.

“I’m not going to just change your body for you,” the deity told her “You have to do it.”

Moira describes the deity as “hard to look at. An extra-dimensional thing, like the end of perception is talking to you.” Whatever it was, it told 16-year-old, male-assigned Moira to get her shit together and make the sex change happen herself.

Ever since, Moira’s been both in the process of transitioning her gender, and in a fairly regular spiritual practice as a Wiccan, or a witch. She celebrates pagan holidays, and occasionally casts a spell over a protest or a situation in need of some magic (for example, she tried a spell to get the money for her gender-related surgery, which she says “hasn’t been effective yet”).

Like a lot of witches, Moira was raised with Christianity, but like a lot of trans and queer people, she didn’t see much of a place for herself in most southern Christian traditions.

“Going outside of the Christian context is the only way I could be myself in a spiritual context,” she says.

Moira Goree. Photo credit: Lewis Wallace

A 2015 survey found that one in five trans people who had ever participated in a faith community experienced rejection in that space. And, while we don’t know much about trans people’s religious faiths, a Pew survey of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people found they are twice as likely to be part of non-Christian religions as straight people.

Raven Kaldera, a shaman and writer who I reached on his homestead in rural Massachusetts, says these days, trans and queer people are to the point of seeking more than tolerance or the absence of outright bigotry in spiritual spaces.

“For trans folks, we need more than just, ‘well, [you’re’] not evil,” Kaldera says. “We need, ‘[Being queer and trans] too is sacred, a sacred way of being in the world.’”

Kaldera, who follows a Norse shamanic tradition and teaches workshops about paganism and sexuality, also initially came to paganism through a near-death experience. While he was in the hospital, he had a vision of goddesses that he says have been with him ever since. He is trans and intersex, and he came out about that after he began exploring pagan shamanism. Later, he learned that gender-nonconformity had been an accepted part of some old Northern European shamanism.

“I kept seeing stuff about people who were in between genders, people who were in between male and female,” he says. “I saw myself in that, and saw that I am just another bigendered shaman in a very long tradition.”

But that tradition doesn’t exist in the same way now—he first found these stories in books about anthropology and history. “We are recreating a shamanic tradition that was killed off 1,000 years ago.”

And the recreation process is part of the appeal, too. Neo-paganism is just that: a newly-formed version of traditions that have been suppressed or disappeared for hundreds or even thousands of years, largely due to Christian domination. The fact of its newness is another advantage for queer and trans people over modern religions with ongoing traditions. Because neo-pagan traditions like Wicca and Kaldera’s mode of shamanism have only been around in this form for the last few decades, they remain flexible. LGBTQ+ people can write ourselves into them, be a part of their creation.

Austen Smith, who was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, is another person re-creating old witch traditions, largely on their own. We connected by phone and they described their house across the river from Louisville, surrounded by ancestor altars, crystals, gratitude offerings. They’re genial and sweet on the phone, and tell me their daily practice is grounded in rootwork, or hoodoo, an African-American southern magic tradition. While Wicca is often associated with European neo-pagan traditions like the ones Raven Kaldera associates with, witches and people who practice magic have a rich history in African diasporic cultures, one that is also often based on resisting Christian hegemony.

They were raised in the Black southern Baptist church, and had relatives who spoke in tongues and feared all things pagan and witchy. But they were unable to connect with their own spirituality until after they’d come out as trans and nonbinary a couple years ago.

“When I came out and started hormones and became more in tune with myself, that was the key that unlocked my ability to manifest things, to receive it and be grateful for it,” Austen says. “It was this circle: the deeper I go into myself, the better I am at connecting to the universe, and other humans, and the earth. That’s a lot easier now than it was before I knew that I was trans.”

Austen largely practices alone, though they link up with other queer POC magic practitioners online, in particular through a Facebook group called Urban Coven.

“I have ideas about spells to protect frontline activists, and spells that can heal people who are in direct contact with law enforcement, or people who are in racist environments, or people who are trans or gender nonconforming being in spaces that are not welcoming,” says Austen, adding that all of this came to them through dreams and automatic writing. “I think where that’s leading is developing a spellbook or some kind of text that can help people: POC, queer, trans, non-conforming, people with intersectional identities.”

They are even hoping to use spells to help white people face up to white supremacy: “How do white allies use their ancestry to do social justice healing work?”

Austen Smith's Altar. Photo courtesy of Austen Smith.

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Ardyss Body Magic: A Revolutionary Approach to Body Shaping