I've already talked at length in my essays about this, but I think generative AI is a poison on the Pagan and Witch community (and the wider community, especially where art is concerned) and refuse to use it. Everything on this website (including the writings, the art used for the background and header, and the code used to build the website) was directly made by me, unless directly stated.
However, because I am neurodivergent—we really like our em dashes and semicolons—people sometimes think I'm using AI. I'm not. This is just how I write.
The Pagan and Witch world is full of language inconsistencies and minor controversies about things like capitalization, spelling, etc. I am not a linguistic prescriptivist—I don't believe there's One True Way to spell, define, or use any word—but we do need to be on the same page, so here are the language conventions I use:
In general, this is how I'm defining words:
My general opinion is "If somebody identifies as a Pagan or Witch, they are." That doesn't mean I think everybody who uses these words means they are Pagans or Witches in the way I would mean it, but that there aren't many people using these terms self-referentially who wouldn't, by some definition, qualify.
Occasionally people will insist that "Pagan" and "Witch" should not be capitalized because they would not be capitalized in something like an academic paper about the subject. My convention is this: If I am using it to refer to somebody's self-declared religion, I capitalize it. If I am using it in a folkloric, historical, or fictional sense, especially to refer to people who would not identify with the terms used, I don't capitalize them. For instance:
The reason I do this is really simple: People capitalize mainstream religions all the time. The only reason people bicker about whether or not it's appropriate to capitalize our religious labels is because they don't take our religions seriously. And yes, I know that there are people who would counter "but Paganism and Witchcraft aren't religions, Paganism is an umbrella term describing a bunch of religions and Witchcraft is a practice, not a religion," and that's a nonsensical argument. As I mentioned, people use both of these terms to describe their religions. Despite what any particularly-arrogant Reconstructionist or Traditionalist will tell you, there are people who are, in fact, "Just Pagan," and for that matter, there are people who describe their religion as "Just Witchcraft."
I also usually capitalize God and Goddess, whether they're being used as a title or just a descriptor. Again, Christians get away with capitalizing pretty much anything they want to, including not only God but also his pronouns and a bunch of shit vaguely related to him, so I think it's fair that we at least be allowed to capitalize some of it.
Does this mean I'm policing academic papers that don't capitalize all the same things I do? No, and I'm not saying you have to, either. But if you were curious why sometimes I capitalize "Witch" and other times I don't, this is why.
A while ago, I decided I wanted to do some sort of Pagan/Witch project, but I wasn't entirely sure what that project was going to be. Did I want to make a YouTube channel? A TikTok channel? A blog? Ultimately I decided to get back to my roots, as somebody who was really into the Internet in the late 1990s, and I built this as a static website.
Do I need to justify this? Of course not. But I still wanted to explain why, because in many respects it overlaps with my philosophy as a Witch and Pagan, and may also shed some light on the subject for people who happen upon this site who did not know the Internet before algorithmically-generated social media came along.
Look, I don't believe everyone needs to do things the same way I do, and that includes learning everything the same way I did. There are a lot of resources I'm thankful Pagans and Witches have today that I didn't have when I started practicing back in 1997, and plenty of the resources I did have back in those days... well, they fucking sucked. There used to be hundreds of websites dedicated to Witchcraft that were copied-and-pasted content from other sites or directly copied from books with no credit whatsoever.
But nonetheless, a lot of the reason I decided to make this website was nostalgia. Like, "Hey, remember when we had static websites?" I kind of missed those!
Unfortunately, though, that's like... the nicest reason on this list. The rest of the reasons I have for setting this website up this way are all based on deep concerns I have about how people (including myself) currently engage with the Internet.
Right now a lot of us are suffering from a thing called "context collapse." Gigantic platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are constantly trying to get you to connect and engage with people from all aspects of your life, constantly, at the same time, with no distinction between those groups of people. I have created profiles on social media with the intent to use them for, frankly, NSFW things, only to have those platforms attempt to get me to add relatives and coworkers because I was required to add a phone number and they connected it to my account. These platforms are constantly trying to trick you into connecting with more and more people in order to generate more engagement, and they use unethical methods to do so, such as dark patterns. These are design changes and techniques used to shame or trick you into agreeing to or doing things you didn't want to, things like randomly changing where the buttons you clicked every day to get to a feature you use a lot are and replacing them with something you didn't want to use. The fact that Facebook changed the search bar in their app to a generative AI chatbot that just summarized what you were looking for badly instead of searching Facebook? That's a dark pattern. A game that generates a popup with a button to make an in-app purchase right on top of a different button without warning so you accidentally almost spend $4.99 on dice in Monopoly Go? That's a dark pattern.
So if I were to choose a big platform for this project, it would have a lot of negative consequences for me and potentially the people I'm trying to reach. For one, any platform I use is probably going to try connecting me with my family and coworkers, many of whom have no business knowing about my religion. There is always going to be a chance somebody will stumble on this and identify me based on what I say about myself, but at the very least this website is not actively trying to direct my coworkers and relatives here.
This also is for the benefit of people who read this website. If you interact with groups and pages on Facebook, if you aren't dilligent as fuck about your settings, it's going to pop up on other people's feeds, including those of some you maybe didn't want to know you were practicing Witchcraft. And OK, I can't save you from everything, you'll still need to do basic stuff like clearing your history if you're on a shared device (this is how some of my relatives found out I was interested in Witchcraft in the late nineties), at the very least, I am actively trying to avoid putting your business everywhere for your mom, boss, uncle, and elected representatives to see.
Relatedly...
OK, since I don't own my web host, there's always a chance that they're collecting some data, and of course however you initially got here probably collected data on that, too. I cannot promise that nothing about this website is being used to advertise to you. I also reserve the right to advertise things I periodically sell, or provide links to products and services I found useful (although I have no current intentions to do so).
But almost no other platform I could have chosen was going to give me the option to post content without it being included with a bunch of data-harvesting software that sends things like where you are, what your social media habits are, what your interests are, who you know, and what kinds of content you are into to data brokers to hyper-target advertising at you. An enormous amount of the Internet today is directly connected to Facebook, or sends data to Facebook, for the purposes of pushing a bunch of Sponsored posts on you that are designed to make you feel like you accidentally stumbled on a bespoke product that was made entirely for you.
What this means is that people go to a bunch of Witchcraft sites, only to find themselves repeatedly seeing an ad for something like a monthly crystal subscription, or cheap Witchy aesthetic goods, that are likely to do nothing but part you from your money while not doing anything long-term to enrich your practice of Witchcraft.
I do have a YouTube channel where I talk about transgender issues. I have never experienced transition regret, but I did temporarily go off hormones because I was going through a weird hippie phase, but YouTube's algorithm decided that this was the same thing, so the "recommended videos" associated with mine were frequently related to transition regret, a lot of transphobic conversion therapy videos, detransition videos, and so forth. There was nothing I could do to control this, I had to just accept that there was a chance my content was shuffling people toward transphobic nonsense.
The other thing I have no control over on most popular platforms is advertising. YouTube and TikTok both rely heavily on people voluntarily creating content for free that generates advertising revenue for YouTube and TikTok, and while they both have programs that give a little cut of this to the people who make content, these are exclusionary programs that tend to increase their barriers of entry after a while, people don't get paid fairly when they do join these programs, and the revenue encourages people to make things like low-quality bait posts instead of useful content. A lot of people who once created quality content devolve into selling cheap bullshit on TikTok shop or shilling for products and services that are likely to generate a class action lawsuit in the near future.
A lot of platforms out there, while they typically load pretty fast on a modern Internet connection, have a bunch of extra pieces that struggle to load under certain circumstances. Facebook, for instance, will load great on almost anything... unless you have an ad blocker, in which case the website basically throttles itself to punish you for it. Components that do things like show video, throw up popups, and display advertising can completely thwart the loading process, and while it's easy to forget this if you (like me) have a fast Internet connection, not everybody has unlimited fast Internet.
As a relevant update from November 2025: I am currently going through trouble with a defective phone that refuses to turn the Wi-Fi on. Because I use my phone's Internet a lot, I wound up hitting my maximum high-speed data within two weeks, and had to spend the rest of the month with a connection so slow that a lot of things refuse to load. While this isn't a common situation for me, there are people who have to deal with this all the time due to their location or other barriers.
Most social media rewards people for making short-form, highly aesthetic content. On TikTok, for instance, "WitchTok" is loaded with short videos of people putting together unrealistically aesthetic spells as a form of ASMR, with Pinterest including a large number of pictures of unrealistically aesthetic shrines, spells, and setups. Most of the actual educational content is extremely shallow, like "5 Herbs Every Witch Should Have." High quality content certainly exists, but it can be fleeting; swipe the wrong way on accident and you're on to the next piece of micro-content with no way to look at the prior one. But above all, the content that people wind up seeing, that gets repeatedly suggested to us, tends to be content that makes us feel good without making us think or really enriching our practice.
As I've said elsewhere on this site, I'm a big fan of aesthetics, and I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with getting inspiration from (or posting) this kind of content. Hell, sometimes I stumble upon a short-form aesthetic video that does wind up enriching my practice! But for the most part, these are a lot like recipe videos... you aren't really supposed to cook the recipes, you're supposed to get second-hand dopamine watching somebody else cook the recipe.
It's bad for your attention span, and I think it's important we all spend time doing things that don't involve scrolling infinitely in an app.
So I decided to put my content somewhere that you're only going to keep reading if you're interested, that I hope gives you things to actually think about and ideas to enrich your practice outside of just aesthetic inspo.
Happy Trails,