Why Urban Wicca?

Wicca is, by most accounts, a throwback to fertility cults of yore. It celebrates a seasonal calendar, has multiple harvest and planting dates worked into its eight major holidays and has a certain ecstatic element that makes many of its more popular worship activities best performed outdoors. And while it's popular to take an established tradition and tag on another adjective from another practice, such as "Celtic Feng Shui" or "Jedi Wicca" or even "Buddhist Tarot" (I've truly seen all these things) - that's really not what this book is about. This is not about capitalizing on the fashion trend of the urban, nor is it in any way tapping into Wicca as a hobby-term for those with any interest at all in the occult. What this is about is integrating Wicca with where you live and connecting to that experience in an immediate way, especially if you've chosen a major city.

I am a Wiccan who lives in, practices and prefers an urban environment. While certainly there is some charm to the agrarian fantasy - and a powerful network of Pagan festivals in warm seasons throughout North America specifically to fulfill these dreamings - I find no need to escape my immediate environment in order to commune with the immanent divine that is the hallmark of Wiccan practice.

I live in a powerful and creative city with the Mississippi river flowing through it, multiple national highways running through it and a turn of seasons that gives you no choice but to experience nature in all its sometimes sadistic glory. God and Goddess find me here all the time, and I find them just as easily, and sometimes when I'm childishly avoiding them they find stunning ways to plant themselves in my path - and with the broad network of mass transit, people and natural areas, there are many, many ways that my gods find to cross my path.

I am most certainly not alone in this. Through the basic skills of city survival - observing, listening, feeling and trusting yourself - you can both protect yourself out in the concrete jungle and experience the divine in profound and powerful ways that weave into your daily life. A spiritual life can be a monastic one, or one where you take a few weekends in the summer to cavort in the wilderness. It can also be a way of living that is different from what might be your usual in one key way: you are aware of the divine presence, and how it is with you, even as you do the most mundane activities.

Rituals and spells are lovely and powerful and can help you connect to God. But they're not the only way to connect: simple awareness, simple welcoming, and even if you're 30 stories up in the air, God will find you and connect - even as you're tapping at those spreadsheets. God can give you a smile on the city bus, or sneak a breeze across your face on a sweltering day downtown in the summer. God is everywhere, and Wicca's practices can work anywhere - every city does have its very own outdoors, after all, and there are a few things that work better indoors, like tarot readings.

The tenets of Urban Wicca

There is no central tradition of Wicca called "urban Wicca" that I know of. What I proffer here as "tenets" are more suggestions towards principles of practice. If you practice within an urban environment and choose to embrace that urban nature, then you will want to involve yourself in a deeper connection to city life as you know it. While the ever-present guideline of "harm none" (the Wiccan Rede) manifests especially throughout this work, you do live in closer quarters with your neighbors than you would on a farm or even in the suburbs so the impact of even small actions ends up being quite significant.

An urban witch is, in one way or another, an involved witch. While most may picture themselves working soup kitchens at night or packing donations at the Goodwill, there are many other methods of community involvement that are just as important - and that you might already do as a matter of daily life. If you have children, you likely have to attend parent-teacher conferences and are active in your PTA. If you vote, you probably pay at least some attention to who your elected officials are, and you do send them emails and write letters. You may already participate in neighborhood watch, bring cookies to your neighbor or perform small favors for nearby shut-ins. These are all methods of community involvement, and many of them happen organically.

Even so, especially in a city, it's surprisingly easy to cut yourself off from your community. When I lived in a coop where the neighborhood was going downhill I found myself spending more and more time inside my apartment to avoid aggressive panhandlers, propositions from men walking and driving by and the imminent threat of violence. I didn't know my neighbors' names at all, and at least twice I found myself confronting emergencies with people whom I didn't know (one who had been thrown into a window, and another where her boyfriend was loudly and violently beating her as the other neighbors did nothing.) Even in safer neighborhoods, this sort of community disconnection is surprisingly common. But this is also part of why bad neighborhoods often have to fight to improve - certainly the interweaving of attitudes towards poverty and privilege make getting attention and care to unsafe neighborhoods a problem. At the same time there is the personal responsibility of those who live in that neighborhood - while a few polite and descriptive emails to my city council member didn't wave a magic wand to fix the problem, it did get a slightly increased police presence.

Every city in the US does give its citizens chances to have their say in city government and planning beyond just elections. The city of Minneapolis, for instance, has several city volunteer advisory councils. Every municipality in the country has open city council meetings. And now that citizen journalism is overtaking traditional print media, the citizens themselves are becoming the fourth estate.

In addition to these pragmatic aspects of magical practice, anyone who practices magic has the possibility - and some might say the responsibility - to use magic. In places with dense populations, magic's subtle effect may spread a bit wider than expected, and that means the intent behind the magic must be absolutely clear. This isn't to say that untold disasters will come at the slightest miscasting of a spell: for the most part, even beginning spells hit their targets and fixing unintended consequences are an expected part of a beginner's practice.

The ways that magic can enhance your community are much the same as they would be out in the countryside: you can use magic to ensure good crops for local and indoor gardens, you will definitely need to use it to protect yourself as you travel from point to point around a city and you will want to open up windows of prosperity and abundance for yourself and your neighbors. A prosperous city is one that is both lower in crime and more likely to employ social justice to ensure everyone lives there safely.

This does raise the usual ethical issues: what if you're affecting someone's free will? A few readers may still be stuck on the common fear of magic gone horribly wrong.

My response, after 15 years of practice and botching a few spells is this: Wicca is an ethos of personal responsibility, not personal blame. I have yet to encounter a ritual that resulted in a tentacle sticking out of a floor from some nether dimensional space. And while I have wondered if I was behind a weather disaster in my early practice, I realize that it's highly unlikely because not only was I very new at magical working, I was completely outside the weather zone when currents would have processed those conditions. In real magical practice, the laws of physics do apply, and Boyle's Law matters just as much as the Wiccan Rede. If things go wrong, often it's in part because of conditions outside of our control - weather, moods, personal goings on behind closed doors that we're just not privy to.

So if a spell doesn't work, take responsibility for it not working, but don't assume blame for the continents drifting. Do what you would do if you acted without magic behind you: pick yourself up, wash your dishes (or cleanse your space, as the case may be) and try again after figuring out what you can about where things went wrong.

If you're concerned about influencing free will, you're not alone. Most of the time in Wicca you don't perform spells on people without their express permission, and then it's usually to help a healing process. In Urban Wicca, this does become a little bit more sticky because you're so much closer together with the people around you, and you have to think about who you're affecting. If you're affecting the free will of criminals, perhaps it's not such a bad thing. In most cases of crime, especially petty crime, those who deviate from social norms are also acting against themselves. But if you're influencing someone to act against their own best interests in a way that causes profound physical or financial injury, then it's a problem.

You may notice that this book brings up Minneapolis in nearly all of its examples. That's because I, the writer, live in Minneapolis, and this is where I have field-tested most of the rituals and practices in this book. Major cities throughout the world will have features wildly distinct from one another - where some build parks, other build parking lots, and while worldwide most major cities are not landlocked, there are quite a few across the Midwestern United States and Canada that are. If you do not live in a major city but still want to adapt this to your use, it is possible, just expect that the chapters regarding mass transit won't apply to you, and it's quite likely that you will enjoy fewer public spaces such as museums to incorporate into your own practice.

In order to help you examine your own city and find your own spiritual hot-spots, I have included in the Appendix a series of worksheets and exercises. (You may also download them from my website.) Take your time in doing them, and perhaps go out and do one exercise, evaluate what you've learned and then go back out and do the next - magical practice is not intended to be learned quickly, because it usually demands a reset of how you view everything from your physical environment to yourself.

Because this book focuses on integrating Wiccan spiritual practice with the everyday life of living in a city, it veers away from many of the altered-consciousness techniques found in most Wiccan guidebooks. An urban environment requires, above all things, alertness, not just because of the dangers of a dense environment but also to protect people from you walking into them or to save you the horrors of wandering across a busy street and failing to scurry when the stoplights change. The work you will do should you try these rituals is work performed fully conscious, sober and ideally after a proper meal. The art of urban magical practice is very centered in having your wits about you. Except in the passage on using magic in nightclubs, there is no reason to have recreational molecules running through your bloodstream - and in the club, if you have too much recreation, you won't be able to achieve anything magically.

Urban Wicca in no way denies that value of Wicca's roots/inspiration as an agrarian cult. No matter where you live, the seasons affect you - and this has been especially true living in Minneapolis. People in cities have cold winters, harvests to consider and seasons where it's all outdoor life all the time. While most city dwellers do not have to worry about livestock, there are those that raise chickens and almost anyone with any plot of land keeps some sort of garden.

It is my belief that the gods are not concerned with your address or traffic density. One of Wicca's consistent core beliefs is in an immanent deity - this means that God (or God/ess if you prefer) is everywhere, not just in the trees and plants but in the cement of the sidewalk, the brick of your building and in the conductive wires of the telephone poles. All materials, even the most synthetic man-made stuff, started off as a raw, natural material and on some level it still contains within it the divine spark that can connect to God.

The idea that we are separate from nature comes from the Judeo-Christian concept, where God gives man "dominion over the animals." This belief does not pair with Wiccan belief. In Wicca there is no separation between God and nature, and that means that any separation between humanity and nature is merely a perception that we choose. Even the tallest concrete mountain must still bow to the pressures of Mother Nature - pipes can burst when it gets too cold, bugs find their ways in to the crevices of buildings, and every year there are news stories about yet another dangerous wilderness animal that has decided to move into the city. I have a suspicion that animals have become aware of hunting seasons and similar human conventions: on one bright fall day that was the first weekend of hunting season, I visited a busy city park in Minneapolis to find a doe calmly resting next to one of the human park visitors as though she were simply weekending. If I knew it was hunting season on me, I'd probably take a weekend in the city myself.

Some might call this core belief of immanent deity a form of animism, and it does make Wicca as an animistic or deistic system a bit blurry - we are God, we aren't God, we're separate from God, we're all connected to God, God comes in little pieces of multiple gods but is really just one entity. The simple answer to all of this is "yes." And with that "yes" I can take you into your city, and recommend you respect not just the bus driver but the bus seat, not just the mighty river but the bridge that crosses it.

Population density makes some practices more difficult - such as any ritual where you want nudity - but also makes certain types of magic possible you might not be able to do elsewhere through a simple grace I think of as "crowd forgiveness." For instance, street performance art flies far better in a busy city than it does around the square of a suburban town. If you ever watched the TV series Gilmore Girls, you might remember the town troubadour. Only in a town as small as Star's Hollow would the troubadour end up discussed at a city council meeting. In larger cities where there's a busy downtown with enough people that a certain level of anonymity just happens, buscers, jugglers and street preachers are just accepted as part of the scenery. Everyone has their own reason for coming downtown - and sometimes that reason is the other people there. This means that, if you're brave enough to perform in public, you can actually work some magic and tap some of that bustling crowd energy publicly - and it's not necessary for those crowds to recognize that you're performing crowd magic as you know it. Whether you want to juggle in order to help traffic move along or you want to perform a trumpet solo to cleanse the space where you're playing, you can actually get away with practicing magic right out in front of a lot of people with none of them knowing exactly what you're doing.

Street performance itself likely has historic roots, and some of those roots can be seen still in practice around the world today. In the movie Slumdog Millionaire, there was a street begging racket set up that used children to panhandle for the wealth of the adults. When boys reached a certain age, they were blinded - because blind singers earned more. "Singing for supper" likely goes back to folkloric tradition in many cultures. For the most part in the United States these disturbing attempts at making money don't happen - poor children are a great deal more protected than they are in other parts of the world (though the protection is still inadequate.)

Performance art is not a guise for magical practice but actually is a magical practice. If you talk to artists about the scenes that they establish on street corners and in public parks, nearly all of them have the intent to establish a change through their artistic expression. One woman who was overweight covered her books with "how fat is contagious" as an expression of mocking for those who avoided sitting near her on the subway. An arts organization local to Minneapolis called the Soap Factory has a summer solstice tradition where they take over the Stone Arch bridge with musicians, actors and tour guides all in an effort to get people to pause and look at the bridge perhaps a little differently, and to think of how the bridge really does more than just cross a river - it connects two halves of a community. In Nashville, a land where street preaching from bullhorns happens all the time, a small group of college students decided to buy their own bullhorn and preach across the street from the more obnoxious pastor in the area. They would have nightly readings from the phone book after (and sometimes during) the time when the preacher was reading from the Bible. Even mimes, whatever you may think of them, serve a purpose. These actors keenly observe human behavior and then play out that human behavior - making passerby pause and think about how they look to others in the course of their daily interactions. Buscers, who play to earn money and to practice, also do it because music can change the entire tone and mood of those who pass by.

Engaging in performance art means that you really do seek to effect a change in your community, and like an old-school shaman, you're prepared to look a little weird while doing it. It's well worth stopping to observe these artists, and the scenes they create. Try to figure out what change they're trying to effect: are they spreading peace? Are they altering the mood? Do they simply want to startle passerby out of complacency? These stirring of energies and raisings of questions are often gentle if strange acts of magic - and to be exposed to any art, whether it hangs on the wall or plays out on the street - is to open yourself to change, which is also the intended effect of most magic.

Along with the ethical and territorial premises of any discussion of Wicca comes the question: so, in this scenario, who is God? Who are your gods? Some Wiccans will give very specific, pantheon-based answers. Others will argue that especially in the context of urban America, the gods have evolved from the thoughtforms of the urban dwellers themselves with the belief that that is ultimately how all gods become. Certainly the question of god: creator or created? Is the chicken and egg of contemporary paganism - and there is no single perfect answer. And there is evidence that enough people believing in an entity long enough will cause it to exist. At this point, for instance, whether or not there was a historical personage Jesus of Nazareth who got crucified is immaterial - enough people believe so powerfully in this particular figure that he exists now, regardless of any physical evidence or location.

In my own practice of urban Wicca, I don't see much need for "creating" gods. While certainly ancient pantheons were tied to specific locales and geographic landmarks, I would imagine that their ability to travel and communicate evolved along with humanity's. Besides, isn't prayer to a divinity that hears you the ultimate wireless plan? So while some people may have given power to a thoughtform for discovering objects, I'm perfectly happy to give an offering to Hermes (when Mercury's not in retrograde) and if I want to find employment in the big city, I will go to the government center where battles and judgments play out and leave an offering to Athena. Certain pantheons may be more inclined to an area than others - ancient gods tend to be attracted to their modern descendants. However, in locations of origin like Greece, Rome and Egypt where the ancient pagan culture has been buried or dismissed, the gods do seek new followers (especially in Egypt.) The Celtic and certain African pantheons managed to hide themselves among the Catholic saints, and Asatru along with some forms of Slavic paganism have been practiced without interruption. As to indigenous North American spiritual practices, those spirits are still tied to the land and their descendants prefer that those spirits be left to them. While I have found that at times working with them is unavoidable - it's hugely important to leave offerings to native spirits - adopting American Indian practices without the heritage, training and initiation is simply gauche. There are many, many other forms of shamanism that do not tread on the toes of people who have very little of their own left to them. (And casinos are only so much revenge in a world where Gamblers Anonymous already exists.)

Given that gods can travel freely, may not be acknowledged by the direct descendants of their original worshippers and - if actually immortal - have definitely kept up on technology themselves - it stands to reason that certain gods would be pleased to receive offerings and prayers from a new and mainly unexplored land away from their point of origin. If you lived forever, wouldn't you want to travel?

I have had it said to me that a "real" Wiccan will only perform ritual outdoors, or take great strides to do so. And while I have done quite a few rituals outdoors, including leading one Samhain ritual during a freak blizzard where I couldn't see the tip of my own athame, I find this assertion rather silly. I'm reasonably certain that Gerald Gardner conducted quite a few of his rites indoors, just like the freemasons and occult ritual orders he borrowed some of his ritual concepts from. Certainly the interactive experience of calling elements and experiencing some facet of them is powerful, especially if you call the winds and get a rush from each direction.

That said, indoor ritual matters just as much, has different hazards and can be just as powerful. Also, as someone who lives in a state where the summer's humidity can almost stop breathing and where the winter's cold can make a polar bear cry, I'm just not zealous (or foolhardy) enough to risk my own health and safety for the sake of some sort of purism. In Wicca gods don't distribute brownie points for piety; if there is any such system at all, I suspect the value is placed on sincerity rather than stiff adherence to locale.

As an extension of this, there is an assumption that most urban rituals by necessity take place indoors. This is absolutely not true. In cities with rich park systems there are plenty of spaces and places for ritual both public and private, and one need not be surrounded by grass and trees to perform acts of magic outdoors. When I lived in the Warehouse district of Minneapolis I would often find tracers of another magical person who would mark magical symbols on the sidewalk with chalk, and I myself in the process of walking through a public crowd would sometimes murmur a chant to myself or visualize a certain type of energy and mood emanating from my being as I walked through a crowd. Nowadays I often enjoy performing small acts of magic from my fourth story balcony - I may live in a city, but it does not mean I do not experience the outdoors.

There are also certain rituals that may be better performed indoors. For instance, practices that require the use of tarot cards tend to do poorly when a wind might pop up. And while some Wiccan traditions may enjoy ritual nudity, mosquitoes, sunburn and the local police may necessitate some indoor space. There are also a host of magical practices that are based around working with a stove or a fireplace - and few people want to need to build an outdoor fire in below zero weather.

The limits of urban living on ritual practice are often imagined rather than real - with enough will, a person willing to use the Internet and make a few phone calls and a basic understanding of local ordinances - it's entirely possible to find or create ritual space within a large city. Just remember, if you use a balcony or other residential space, that your neighbors did not sign up to see your naked butt before their first cup of coffee in the morning.

While this book focuses on the premise of Wicca, a loosely defined religion at best, other contemporary pagans may pick up this book for their own practices. Some will find it valuable (I hope.) Others may find this book far from their tastes. One of the realities of the neopagan movement is that while we connect over our differences from mainstream culture, we are not a community of shared values. The pagan umbrella contains many different religions with drastically differing values: while some of those religions value Goddess worship, feminism and an immanent deity (a sort of metaphor on the physical plane for one-god), others believe in objective, physical gods wandering around the globe sometimes interacting with mortals. Some of those gods are contained within strictly defined pantheons. There are those individuals who, out of pure cussedness, want to stay on the margins of society.

Some of those described will not like Urban Wicca.

There are other excellent books on the market that explore the differing values among Pagan religions. Here, however, it is advisable to focus on the tenets of our primary practice. You might want to examine these questions for yourself, just to know where you're at ethically before engaging in any magical practice:

  1. Is it ethical to use magic to influence your environment? Why or why not?
  2. What are your responsibilities regarding your immediate environment?
  3. Do you actively seek change through magic, and through other venues?
  4. What about your life and space do you need to change?
  5. Do you hold conflicting belief systems within you?

There is also the addendum "act in accord." Except in very specific situations, magic can only set the stage and make the work you need to do auspicious. You can't escape the work behind the action, but you can make that work a little bit easier. It's hard to tell when magic works for two reasons: it manifests in natural, often subliminal ways, say, a spell to make your paperwork go smoothly resulting in a short line at the DMV. Also, the bulk of magic is usually protective in nature, and in protection magic you know it worked because nothing happened. These are not exactly measurable or recordable results.

The core propositions of Urban Wicca are as follows:

  1. The divine is everywhere, regardless of geographic location or population density.
  2. Nature is the divine, and nature is everywhere - all things, even synthetics, at some point originated from a natural material.
  3. Wiccans have a responsibility to their community, and not just their religious/spiritual connections. It is paramount within Wiccan values that a Wiccan make their neighborhood a better place.
  4. Collective belief and energy can imbue certain areas with spirit, some so much so that the spirit itself becomes sentient and can be called upon for magical aid and interacted with in order to learn more about the neighborhood.
  5. History matters.

Once you have had time to absorb this book and explore the possibilities of Urban Wicca, please visit my website and share your experiences. This is a new area of magic (sort of) and it is ripe for your unique contributions to this area of knowledge.