Cultural Appropriation in Witchcraft: How to Practice With Respect

Take a moment and look at your altar, or stop for a minute to consider everything on it. Then think for a second, and ask yourself, what would it feel like to have an intuitive level of trust for every single item you’ve placed there?

Does your chest loosen a little? Or does something in your shoulders brace instead? Don’t worry, there are no wrong answers here. Whatever presented itself is information your body is sharing with you, and we’re going to work with it

Where did our rituals originate?

Witchcraft has gotten louder these last few years. Witchtok became a thing. Witchfluencers on insta found it. Pinterest made it an aesthetic

The practices that used to be passed down, between grandmothers and covens and years of relationship, got compressed into fifteen second clips with a trending sound underneath or spells purely for an aesthetic quality

A lot of us who were new to the craft built our practice out of whatever showed up in that feed because it was what was available to us. There was nobody to hand us a way to sort what's welcoming from what's someone else's closed door

I want to be crystal clear about something: wanting a spiritual life is not the problem. Wanting connection, wanting ritual, wanting something bigger than the grind of capitalism to hold you, is sacred and you’re allowed to yearn for a connection to something bigger than you

We just weren't given the questions we needed to be asking before adapting these practices. Questions like "where did this come from, and why" got left behind and turned into “am I doing this right?” with no curiosity into its history

Why we need to practice witchcraft with respect

I have noticed that when confronted with this, people tend to go one of two ways. Either "I guess I can never do anything spiritual again," or getting defensive and refusing to ask questions about it at all, stubborn in their belief that they can practice anything they want. Both responses are coming from a place of fear

We weren't taught to tell the difference between a tradition that welcomes outside practitioners through real relationship and reciprocity, and one that was closed, sacred, and actively harmed by being taken

Cherokee scholar Dr. Adrienne Keene has written about this directly, in the context of the witch aesthetic specifically. She argues that framing Native spirituality as "witchcraft" was itself one of the tools of oppression used against Native peoples, collapsing distinct, living spiritual traditions down to the same level as a crystal from a gift shop

The word "witchcraft" has itself been used as a way to make someone else's sacred practice sound like fantasy, something ours for the taking because it was never treated as real to begin with

And then, as usual, capitalism finishes what colonization started. A practice gets stripped of its context, put in a box with good branding, and sold back with no mention of the people still fighting to keep the original alive

Spiritual discernment is the key to practicing without appropriation

I don’t want to just hand you a list. Don't burn this. Don't call on that deity. Don't use this word

Without understanding the reasons behind why certain elements of a ritual are disrespectful, you’re bound to make future mistakes. New things show up faster than any list can cover, and a list doesn't teach transferable judgment.

I find that what helps you to improve your judgement and create better discernment are three questions that can be asked every time something new shows up in your practice

1. Where did this come from, specifically, and is it still practiced by the people it belongs to?
2. Who is harmed when it gets overused, extracted, or sold outside its own community?
3. Is there a version rooted in my own ancestry I could turn to instead?

That third one is the one almost nobody asks. It's often the most expansive, because most of our lineages have their own herbs, their own words for cleansing, their own way of asking for protection, buried under a few generations of "we don't do that anymore” or hidden under Christianity

I call this your ancestor altar homework ;) A dig for what's already yours, instead of borrowing someone else's

Discernment is a muscle you need to develop with time. Muscles get built through repetition, and none of this has to land perfectly on the first try but you do need to try and make an effort

You get to build something that's yours

There is joy and a sense of reward to be found in a practice built on respect instead of extraction

Fear shrinks a spiritual life down to nothing. Respect builds one with roots you know, tended with the same care you'd want someone to take with the things that belong to you

Remember, you are made of more colors than one label could ever hold and within that, are your own sacred practices you can bring to life and customize

If you're sitting with questions about your own practice, your own lineage, or which threads are yours to pick up, that's exactly the kind of conversation I love having one on one

Holding space for every question you're brave enough to ask