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What is Queer Witchery?

That is not such an easy question to answer. I truly believe that being queer influences the way I view, experience, and interact with the world. Would this then not mean that all my witchery is queer? Yes. I think so, in a way. However, that is not what I wanted to talk about today. For my own path, when I say Queer Magic, or Queer Witchery, I mean workings that have to do with my personal experience of queerness, or workings for the queer community.

Queer Magic

So, how to practice queer magic? Like with many magical paths or techniques, the sky really is the limit. But to get you started, here are some ideas for workings to get you started. (I will share a bunch of links at the end of this page, with even more ideas)

  • Queer Joy! Celebrating queer joy is so important! Make an altar to queerness, add pride things to your sacred space and magical tools, make moodboards and grimoire spreads. It is tempting to focus a lot on the bad things going on around us, but our joy is such an intrinsic part of queerness. Celebrate it, dance, sing, twirl some rainbowribbons around for self-love. Spread some joy.
  • Glamours: A glamour on your make-up to be perceived as the correct gender. Or for those in the closet, a glamour to perhaps not be perceived as queer at all. Glamours on pronoun pins to make sure you are gendered correctly. Or a glamour on your lipstick to attract some new love.
  • Protection: Being queer is not always safe. On a personal level, on a political and law level, and on a community level. Working protection magic for yourself or for the community is a great way to practice queer magic. The use of enchanted jewellery, sigils, or candle magic for larger communities, as well as binding spells for certain laws or politicians are just some of the ideas.
  • Colour magic: Work with the colours of the pride flag, or the flag of your community to make magic. For example, the Gilbert Baker pride flag, where Baker gave each colour a different meaning: Pink = Sex, Red = Life, Orange = Healing, Yellow = Sunlight, Green = Nature, Turquoise = Art/Magic, Indigo = Serenity, and Purple = Spirit. You can work with the colours individually, or with the flag as a whole to bring in all the colours.
  • Rainbowmancy: By now many of you know that I work a lot with rainbow magic. To me, because of the links between queer symbols and rainbow colours, my rainbowmancy is often tied to queer magic
  • Sigils: Sigilwork is an easy way to practice some queer witchery. There are already so many sigils out there, but some ideas for sigils to make or use are statements like "I am confident in my identity", "I attract like-minded people", "Transfolx are protected", "I am perceived as my correct gender", "this law is blocked", and "dysphoria be gone", which would be great to place on a mirror.
  • Enchant your HRT: If you are currently in transition, enchanting your HRT is a wonderful way to bring some queer magic and joy into your life
  • Honour Queer ancestors: Research your queer ancestors. Who were those fighting in the front lines for our rights? Who wrote poetry that still brings you to tears? Who is someone you admire and look up to? Who's music still moves you? Who, perhaps in your own family, came before us? Learn about them, speak of them, honour them perhaps on a certain day in Pride Month, or include pride symbols on your ancestor shrines.
  • Celebrate victories, no matter how small: Are you transitioning? You could add the day you start HRT, or the day you got surgery, or even the day your mom used your correct pronouns without thinking to your calendar of festivities through the year. Same goes for days where you came out, or where you chopped your hair off to look more butch, or when you got your lesbian flag tattoo. Celebrate the milestones.
  • International holidays: in that same vein, add international holidays and days of remembrance to your yearly calendar! Celebrate international women's day, men's day, enby day, ace week, trans day of remembrance, the entire month of Pride, anything that speaks to you.
  • Banishings: not only banishing TERFs or any -phobia, but also think of banishing your dead-name, or amatonormativity, or the gender that you were perceived as, but does not fit you
  • Exploration: There are some amazing card spreads and books out there (I'll link some below) that helps us work through our feelings around gender, sexuality, and identity. Exploring the self is an act of self-love and self-care and can be extremely sacred, if we wish it to be.
  • Symbols: there are certain symbols tied to identities, which can be used to power our workings. For example lavender and violets for lesbians, the comet for non-binary people, dragons for ace folks. Through the years each identity has amassed a dictionary worth of flowers, plants, creatures, stones, and symbols.
  • Divination: use queer inclusive decks for your readings, or rainbow stones for your pendulum. There are also many spreads out there for exploring gender and sexuality.

Queer Gods and Spirits

For those of us who work with the divine, or other spirits, seeing ourselves reflected in the Gods can be an incredibly healing and sacred thing. There are deities whose myths tell us that they are queer, like Loki, who is known to change gender often, or Apollo who was deeply in love with Hyakinthos. There are others who might not have been queer themselves, but are closely tied to our community anyway, like Inanna, who would change the gender of her priests if asked. And then there are those who might not be stated to be queer, but who are often perceived to be anyway, such as Artemis, who needed no man and surrounded herself with women instead.

However today, I want to take this even further and ask this: Why would the divine adhere to human norms of gender and sexuality?
And this not only goes for the divine, but for other entities as well. Many entities are not human and never were, think of the Fair Folk, for example. They have their own culture, language, and etiquette. So why would their view on something like gender and sexuality be the same as ours? Not to mention the way this has changed and shifted over time, and in different places. Modern Western thought on gender and sexuality is just that. So try and xperiment with letting that go when it comes to entities and the divine, and some interesting things might happen.

Queering the Divine

Many of us have heard of, and butted heads with, the concepts of Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine. A system of polarities based on the Western view of the gender roles they represent. The Feminine is passive where the Masculine is active, the Feminine is feeling where the Masculine is rational. A two-sided system that in the current age leaves much to be desired. When I first found the four-parted system designed by Delffin Reyes – aka TheQueerophant, it was like a shock through my system. They speak of not only the Divine Feminine and Masculine, but add to that the Divine Chaosyne and the Divine Androgyne.

Let's start with the Divine Androgyne. The etymology of androgyne comes from the Greek 'andro', for male, and 'gyno', for female. Androgyne is therefore the amalgamation of the two. The Divine Androgyne according to Delffin is the merging or coming together of the Divine Masculine and Feminine. Both are present within the Divine Androgyne. In this way they explain it with the prefix bi-; bigender or bisexuality, in meaning "two or more". For me the Divine Androgyne is the all-encompassing. All genders and expressions come together, working within the framework of our cultural understandings.

Across from that is the Divine Chaosyne. Where the Androgyne is the "yes, and", the Chaosyne is the Void. Delffin ties it to the Trickster energies of figures like Veles, Lucifer, and Loki. "Slippery and ever changing, hard to pin down." The Divine Chaosyne is the emptiness of space, not empty as in hollow, but filled with impossible opportunities for change, creation, and magic. Where the Divine Androgyne works within the framework, the Chaosyne kicks against it, happy to dismantle it and built something wholly new in it's place. Delffin also states: "I also feel that in turn perhaps the Div Fem and Div Masc, and any potential others, emerge from the Div Chaos before reuniting in the Div Androgyne."
The Divine Chaosyne is the beginning, the creation. The Divine Androgyne is the chthonic, the psychopomp, an end that is not an end.

Read Delffin's original posts here:
Divine Chaosyne
Divine Androgyne

Spirit of Pride

When people come together, they generate energy. In this day and age we can even come together for common goals, without even meeting each other face to face. I have a thought. What if, every time we come together to march, all over the world, every time we shout our truth during a parade, every time we talk about our queer experiences online within our communities, we generate energy and share it, with the Spirit of Pride. What if, each time you spend money to buy pride merch, each time you wear a pronoun pin or a flag, it is an offering to the Spirit of Pride. What if, Pride has become an egregore: a communally created Spirit or Entity, that we can call upon for our magic, protection, workings, divination. What if?

Sources and extra information