Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries

by Lee Harrington

We are beautiful and powerful. We don’t have to settle for “good enough.” A second-rate status is not our birthright.

There isn’t a competition over who is more oppressed. There is no queue for liberation. We can work on small issues and large issues at the same time.

As we attempt to understand these greater concepts and infuse our social justice into our embodied spiritual practices and communities, our approach cannot be “either/or” thinking, but must be “both/and” thinking to account for this diversity.

That means acknowledging that all of our bodies have been used against us for those in power to maintain social power and supremacy. That acknowledging how we have hurt others, no matter how inadvertently, is our duty to accept and change.

As activists and as healers, it sometimes can become a habit to deny our internal unaddressed, unhealed pain, and to focus solely on all of the pain that exists out in the world outside of our bodies. We must come back to ourselves. We must remember to take the time to connect on a heart-level with one another to heal our own buried pain, while also grappling with social injustices. They cannot be separated lest we continue to be divided, lest our souls be lost to ourselves.

We have to take our freedom rather than ask for it. We must access our freedom from deep within and express it by being our unapologetically truest selves, which is the definition of resistance.

As we open up our hearts, minds, and bodies to one another, we create powerful collective grids across the planet that give us all the potential to be free – the socially-marginalized as well as the socially-centralized.

those trans spirits in body are the mysterious ones, the evolution of the human species, the ones for whom magick is the alchemy of the flesh.

Demand the right to be at home in your body.

Are you imagining or is this really happening? Does it matter, if it is supportive?

In many ways, physical form is the Spirit in drag.

Life is art waiting to happen. We have vast powers that walk with us.

If humanity is to become divine presence, our journey must come out of conflict with the desire to make life predictable by making boxes of our own design and then superimpose that it is ordained by nature of God.

Nature wants innovation, creativity, and wanderlust from us. Nature requires for us to co-create, commune, collaborate, and coexist: all with the importance prefix of ‘Co-,’ meaning “together.”

We are the presence of the Queer-Fire that gives the permission to human-kind to explore the interior landscape and unearth the inspiration at our centers.

You were born to bear pain and the truth of your spirit, and imprint it onto the canvases of form, not to be trapped in another’s painting.

My Queerness drew me to the experimental playfulness of magic, and magic asked that I listen to who I really am.

For me, the Queerness of my magic is far more than a set of meaningful self-descriptors and sexual lifestyle choices. Queerness also embodies the role that we as magicians play as edge-dwellers who question oppressive categorization and help to pull our culture forward.

If our magic is to mean anything, we must be willing for it to Queer and haunt us. The certainties that we cling to must be placed on the altar as our Gods and ancestors draw us to the crossroads at which the sacrificial cost of true change must be weighed.

all space is sacred all the time, but if you want to do something special, then you can create that space right then and there. Creating a container if you want to call it that.

There is an innocence and simplicity to the body’s appetite

Gender is more than a conversation about pronouns and bathrooms. Gender is an invitation to make beauty out of our dynamic self-alignment.

To be a traumatized person, then, is necessarily to experience time non-linearly - to contain suspended pockets of time inside one’s body between which one moves involuntarily. To be triggered is to be punted from a linear (“present”) experience of time into a stalled (“past”) one, a state that lies dormant in the matter of the living body until activated. A trauma trigger is thus a form of time-travel.

We have been sold the lie of a consistent self and consistent body, but we are not static; we are verbs. We are ever-changing amalgamations of selves, of cells, of emotions, of desires, and of atoms, made up of vastly more empty space than matter. We are constantly in motion. We are change.

Magic may flow through every craft.

The power of coming out is the power of the seedling breaking free from the seed and slowly, steadily, pushing up through the soil, out of the dark, and reaching towards the sun. Just one blade of grass from a single seed may not change the terrain much, but thousands upon thousands of shoot sprouting from countless seeds of diverse plants can transform a landscape.

how would that be any different from death? Those who seek merely ecstasy, and not the ways it can transform them upon their return, are chasing the end of their existence, whether they know it or not.

Your gender identity and your work as a spiritual practitioner/vessel do not have to conflict with each other. Embrace that you are divine, become self-possessed by all that you are, and allow Spirit in whatever form you see it to work with you and through you.

When I use the words Queer and Witch now, I capitalize them as I would any magickal word of power.

sometimes in the darkest of places, a Witch is the only source of light.

Our Queerness is the lens through which we experience all forms of Love. Love is the language of the Divine. How could our Queerness and our spirituality not be inexorably intertwined?

If “know thyself” is the undermost work of the Witch, surely “create thyself” is the core work of being Queerkin.

We are innately programmed to expand and develop. To remain stagnate is a certain type of death.

My magic is a political statement; it is done despite the barriers placed on me. To me it is my true freedom.