with Tchipakkan

We pick workshops for CTCW to be useful to you, to help you negotiate the morass of weird stuff and wyrd stuff that is out there.

The last 50 years has been exciting, with the 60’s called “the Occult Explosion”, and the New Age. But there have been “New Ages” in almost every generation since the “Enlightenment”, and before that Magick was simply one of the things people studied. Knowing how things began can be useful for directing your attention to what you want to learn next. I’ll run through magic from the beginning of written history to the present, mostly from the European and Mediterranean/ Middle Eastern areas, and leave time for questions.

Oh the stories we tell ourselves! Witches are evil women who eat babies and have sold their souls to the Devil! Witchcraft is a fertility religion that has survived unchained in secret since the Neolithic matriarchy! This is the New Age, the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius! No one has been as aware as we are now! The Ancients had mystical power beyond our ken and it’s been kept by secret societies in Tibet! The Tarot is based on symbols found in Egyptian Pyramids! (and so on ad nauseum)

OK let’s be honest, there’s no way to debunk all the stories we make up since we continue doing it, but Tchipakkan is going to try to hit some of the highlights of what we really know about magickal practices in history, so that maybe we don’t have to be embarrassed about the dumb stuff we pass along ten years from now.