Witchcraft, Community, and Cultural Change With Dr. Susan Harper

Dr. Susan Harper, an anthropologist of religion and practicing witch in Iowa, shares her experiences with building magical communities and reclaiming personal power through witchcraft.

• Defining witchcraft as reclaiming a word historically used against women while embracing the power of "paying attention" to the world
• Evolving from formal rituals to a daily practice centered on tarot, moon observation, and gardening
• Seeing witchcraft as liberatory practice that helps heal personal wounds while working toward cultural change
• Using tarot as a primary magical tool for nearly 30 years, finding it provides insight and structure
• Creating accessible magic through library-hosted workshops, providing democratic access while ensuring fair compensation
• Building community through Unitarian Universalist connections, especially CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapters
• Navigating witchcraft in the Midwest, finding surprising acceptance in seemingly conservative areas
• Sharing adventures from early practice, including getting lost in ritual robes in small-town Texas
• Announcing her new book "Feminist Witchcraft" launching July 1st, culminating seven years of writing

Find Dr. Susan Harper on Facebook and Instagram as "Dreaming Priestess" and look for her book "Feminist Witchcraft" available at bookstores near you.

Chapters

• 0:04 Welcome to Your Average Witch
• 0:35 Meet Dr. Susan Harper
• 3:42 Daily Witchcraft Practice
• 6:40 Liberatory Magic and Personal Struggles
• 10:43 Tarot as a Magical Tool
• 17:01 Discussing Money in Magical Communities
• 24:33 Building In-Person Witch Communities
• 34:26 Influential Books and People
• 44:26 Witchy Adventure Stories
• 51:22 Feminist Witchcraft Book Announcement
• 59:55 Breaking Authoritarianism Spell Craft

Transcript

Kimothy: 0:04

Welcome back to Your Average Witch, where every other Tuesday we talk about witch life, witch stories, and sometimes a little witchcraft. Your Average Witch is brought to you by Clever Kim's Curios. For altar tools, spelled jewelry, or spell kits, visit cleverkimscurios.com. This week I'm talking with Dr Susan Harper, an author and witch in Iowa. We talked about community building, witchy compensation and your local library. Now let's get to the stories. Susan, hello, welcome to the show!

Susan: 0:37

Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

Kimothy: 0:42

I'm glad to have you, can you please introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are and what you do and where they can find you.

Susan: 0:48

Absolutely. My name is Susan Harper. Most of my folks here in Iowa call me Dr Susan. I am a doctor, but not the kind that helps people, so, no, I don't want to take a look at it.

Susan: 1:00

I am an anthropologist of religion by trade. I use she/her pronouns or any pronouns that are offered to me with respect, and most of the time the bills are paid by working in creations, where I offer all kinds of classes and workshops, lots of things about tarot, lots of things about witchcraft and the divine feminine. We're going through a rebrand right now, so stay tuned. There will be a website update soon, but for now, you can find me on Facebook under the name Dreaming Priestess, and I'm also very excited that I am about to publish my first book on witchcraft. It's coming out July 1. So it is busy over here and you know a little bit of everything always going on. I'm in the upper Midwest and I'm from the upper Midwest but spent a long time in Texas, so my accent does weird things sometimes, so just bear with me. You can actually get me on Instagram it's @Dreaming_Priestess.

Kimothy: 2:12

Now, with all of those things, do you call yourself a witch? And if you do, what does that mean to you?

Susan: 2:18

Yeah, I love the word witch.

Susan: 2:21

So I was exposed to witchcraft through feminist politics and the idea that the word witch is very important for women and other femme folks to reclaim because it's a word that's so often been used to hurt us in history is I loved the power behind that, and I once heard Starhawk say in an interview that a witch is somebody who's paying attention, and I am somebody who likes to pay pretty exquisite attention to the world around me, so to me it's a power word.

Susan: 2:57

It is a word that helped me kind of reclaim myself and start to heal myself from the wounds of living in a capitalist patriarchy. Anybody who had five seconds in as in the pool for when I was going to bring up both capitalism and patriarchy, you win. You win nothing but you win, and I liked especially when I started practicing it was still controversial to call yourself a witch, so I'm not going to lie, it was a little edgy too, but as I'm entering my third decade of practice, I find that it's the best word to sum up what I do and how I live my life.

Kimothy: 3:42

Would you say you have a regular practice, and if you do, will you share any of it with us? 

Susan: 3:47

Yeah, I do have a regular practice and it's evolved a lot. I used to do a lot more formal rituals, setting up the circle in the living room and all that. My regular practice now is more solitary. I love working with people, but at the end of the day we're all solitaries. So I have my regular practices at home are working with tarot.

Susan: 4:08

I try to work with tarot every day. I try to get out under the moon and maybe there are some crystals and candles with me or not. I garden. I spend as much time with my hands in the dirt as possible and those are really the pillars of my practice. And I read. I read a lot because I am both a witch by practice and I am somebody who's. This is what I study in my academics, so I am always reading and searching.

Susan: 4:37

Since I moved back to the Midwest, a lot of my practice has been about getting to know, or re-know, the plants and the animals. Here, after living in a very different climate for a long time, I do honor the Sabbaths and the full moons with varying degrees of how would I put it? Varying degrees of complexity. Sometimes I'm just sitting in my lawn out of the moon and sometimes I'll have people over. I like to work with crystals and I like to work with herbs. But as I've gotten older, I also realized that for me, my witchcraft is everything that I do and that moving through the world, being a witch, is a particular way of living in the world, and that has made my practice like much more organic. Although I love to go to a big, open ritual with like 100 people out in a field Hook me up with that anytime you can, but on my own, you know it's me and occasionally one or two cats, that is, that are judging whether I'm doing it right or not.

Kimothy: 5:45

Did you go out under the moon a couple days ago?

Susan: 5:50

I did. I've been out under the moon every night since it's been full. I'll be out there again tonight. We are in the time of the year where the sun doesn't really go down until almost 9 pm here in iowa.

Susan: 6:01

So I was gardening at 845 last night and waiting for the moon to come up. It was. It's just, it's beautiful and I live. Well, I live basically in the country. I mean it's Iowa, so pretty much all of it's the country but I live out in the country literally surrounded by cornfields. So the view that we get of the moon is spectacular, no matter what she looks like, she just she's just so beautiful when she comes up over the trees and the corn.

Kimothy: 6:34

What would you say is the biggest motivator in your practice and can you contrast it with your biggest struggle?

Susan: 6:40

Yeah, they're actually tied up together. So, like I said, I came in through what we euphemistically called a women's spirituality back in the 90s. So I came in, I tell people I showed up for the politics and I stayed for the witchcraft, was starting to develop a feminist consciousness and recognizing a lot of the ways in which this culture had done a lot of damage to women and my analysis of gender was not very nuanced back in those days. It has come a long way and really got fascinated by the idea that a way that we could reclaim power was to start thinking in goddess language, and so I kind of stumbled into my first circle. I knew a little bit about Wicca, but I stumbled into my first women's circle and I was hooked. Hooked.

Susan: 7:47

And my primary motivator for being a witch, for staying in community, for writing about it, for studying as hard as I am about it, is that I believe that it is a liberatory practice.

Susan: 7:52

I believe that it is one tool that we can use to change the way that we live in this world and with one another, and I also found within that it was a huge tool for healing things that had been wounded and broken within myself, which then equipped me to go out and be kind of on the transition team of a better world, and I think that it's the flip side of my greatest struggle, no-transcript.

Susan: 8:58

We've forgotten how to interact with the planet. We've forgotten how to live authentically, and that's not how I want to live my life. I want to live my life in accordance with my values and it's I found so much of the parts of myself that I had kind of made small because society said they weren't acceptable, by being within witchy and pagan community and then by going through the practices learning to meditate, learning to journal, learning to make art, even if it wasn't good enough to sell. All of those things that kind of can be wrapped up with craft. It was like this amazing sort of coming home to myself, when I think my biggest struggle, like I think for many of us, was really being kind of distanced from my authentic self and I feel as though I've much more fully inhabited my life now that I've learned to see it through kind of a witchy lens and that everything is sacred and everything is magic and we should treat things as though that's true, because it is that includes that we should treat ourselves that way, because that's also true.

Kimothy: 10:16

Capitalism doesn't want us to do that part, unless we're paying them to do it.

Susan: 10:23

Right, go on a $5,000 wellness retreat. Oh my gosh, take a salt bath about it.

Kimothy: 10:31

What is your favorite tool? And it doesn't have to be a physical thing. It can be like a scientific theory or a particular smell that you like. What do you really like to work with?

Susan: 10:43

Tarot hands down. That's where it started for me. I started reading tarot about two years before I found witchcraft and that is I joke, that my longest committed relationship was with my first tarot deck, which I bought in 1992 in a small town in the Midwest. Let me tell you, it was the one deck in the shop all the way in the back, and those specific cards and also just tarot as a system, has been my constant companion through the best and worst parts of my life and I find that I'm always learning more about it. It's the first place I go when I want insight or I want to make sense of things, and it provides a kind of a framework for the way that I move through the world.

Susan: 11:41

I didn't forget you. You're my other favorite magical tool. In case you heard the meow, Miss, you were perfectly quiet, and I love crystals and I love goddess figures, but I have definitely in my life come to realize that the tools are fun, but the magic is in me. Come to realize that the tools are fun but the magic is in me. So it's you know, I have this really interesting relationship with most of my magical tools, but I pretty much always have a tarot deck handy, because that is that is has been my North star for a long time.

Kimothy: 12:24

Do you have a favorite deck? 

Susan: 12:26

Oh, I have to be careful, I don't want them to hear I love my Rider-Waite simply because it was what sorry Rider-Waite-Smith, sorry Pixie, because it was what opened up the world to me. But I have most recently been doing a lot of work with a deck that's all mushrooms, because I got really fascinated by the idea that mushrooms talk to each other and that every mushroom in the world is attached to one big network, and I think that's super cool. And I have a deck. It's Chris Walters, Goddess Tarot has been a favorite of mine for a long time because she does this really cool reinterpretation of the major arcana through goddesses and she kind of uses their stories to walk you through sort of the journey through those 22 cards and I I'd never seen anything like that. It's the second tarot deck I ever bought. I'd never seen anything like that and I learned a lot about mythology from around the world and when I want to use tarot for for meditation or spell work, that's the one I go to. 

Kimothy: 13:49

Neat.Are you a collector or do you just have working decks?

Susan: 13:53

Oh, I'm, I'm a collector.

Susan: 13:55

When we moved to, we moved from Texas and we're packing up my website how many, how many boxes of tarot and, to be fair, and Oracle cards do you have?

Susan: 14:06

And I was like we're not going to talk about it, like how, how many are there? And I'm like there's like five, but I but my thing that I'm really working on doing is and now I'm saying it out loud, so people have to hold me to it is that it is that every month, I try to work with a different deck and put a card a day on my Instagram and that's my way of making sure that I work with all of my decks. And if I get through six months or a year and I haven't touched one, then I figure out if maybe it needs to go someplace else. But I absolutely collect. I went through a period where I was really into decks that were all animals there were no people and went through a period where I was super interested in decks that use historical figures, and now I blame it all on Kickstarter right, there's so much out there.

Kimothy: 15:01

I was going to say there are so many indie decks now.

Susan: 15:11

So many and it is, I definitely have to limit myself because there's just there's beautiful things and I'm in actually, here in the central Iowa, where I'm at, there's a pretty good tarot community and a lot of people designing their own stuff. So I haven't bought it yet, but I have a friend who has one where all the cards are their pictures of where the artist took felt and made like like felt art, like you do in like first grade kindergarten, and she did the whole deck through that and I'm just like, oh, I'm gonna have to have one of those because it's just, you know, we're having a moment. We know that tarot becomes incredibly ascendant during times of cultural chaos and and cultural turmoil. So people are really working with this system in just such a cool way and it's so different than when I started and there were like three decks you could get at least reliably in a mainstream bookstore.

Kimothy: 16:17

I'm trying to remember which one. So the Thoth Deck, Rider Waite Smith, and the one that I can't remember the name of, shoot. And I have that one. I don't remember the name [Editor: It was Morgan Greer] , shoot, I actually it was an incomplete deck, so I I'm sorry this is sacrilege, but I cut it up and I made it into jewelry Because I didn't have all the cards.  

Susan: 16:51

Right. No, when I've come across incomplete decks, I've used them for collage a lot I actually just acquired from, actually, the woman who gave me my first books on witchcraft and she was my best friend for 30 years. Um, she passed away last fall and I was just in Texas sort of helping her partner go through her religious effects and, um, she was a brilliant witch and a brilliant human, but she couldn't get her head around tarot. She kept trying, it was just not her tool and so finally, some of her friends were like okay, enough of this, and they either created for her or had created something they called a minimalist tarot deck and they are white cards and they say things like hierophant and then they have an arrow that says this way up. It was just like just just memorize the meanings, just memorize. That didn't work for her either, but I I have that in my possession now.

Susan: 17:53

Yeah, it was just such a cool, a cool thing for I love that. But she carried it around for, you know, like 30 or 35 years, so I think I think she would be glad to know it's with me, yeah that's cool.

Kimothy: 18:16

What's something you wish was discussed more in the magical community?

Susan: 18:21

Oh, there's so much I wish we talked about more. I wish we had much more open discussions about how we confront predators and abusers instead of letting them become missing stairs and no, to avoid. I think we need to talk about that more Now. We're talking about it more now than we were in the nineties when I first started, but I think we need to have really honest conversations about those. I think a conversation that we need to have is we're a big tent and you know that's a wonderful thing and we love that people have self-determination, and you know that's a wonderful thing and we love that people have self-determination. I think we need to have a wider conversation about what the limits of that are. I watched a lot in Texas of kind of the Nazification of a lot of pagan spaces and you know my personal crusade is anything that's trans exclusionary like I just can't hang, and you know we've got to have that conversation.

Susan: 19:34

And I think we need to have much more honest conversations about money and finances within this community. We all, you know we do a lot of money magic, but it's, you know, definitely we have a clergy that is largely unpaid. There are a lot of things that people would like for us to do as a community, but when it comes down to it, they don't necessarily want to contribute to that financially. And figuring out how we do that in a sustainable way and account for the fact that we have people of all kinds of economic situations in our community, I think is important to like here. Like join, have my month, have a monthly you know, $50 a month with me for really anything, nothing you probably couldn't get out of a book, right?

Susan: 20:32

It's these extremes and I don't know if we don't talk about it because it might be different in other parts of the world but here in the US. I don't know if we don't talk about it because in general we're taught that talking about money is impolite or what it is. But I think I've been to a couple of really good workshops in talking about these things at Paganacon, which takes place in Minneapolis, takes place in Minneapolis, and those conversations. I think they have the potential to be really fruitful. I think five years ago, if you did ask me, I said we had to talk about accessibility and disability in our community more. I think we're doing a better job of that now, although we still have a ways to go, and I think in some ways it's all tied up right. It's all tied up with, like, what do we believe about equity and what do we believe about inclusion and what do we sort of believe about who belongs in our spaces? And that's a big conversation, but you can take a bite wherever you want to start.

Kimothy: 21:50

The idea that we're, that you're just supposed to do this stuff and not get paid Yep, drives me crazy.

Susan: 22:02

Yeah, yeah, I, I do a lot of things without monetary compensation. I offer them to my community, but I also think that you got to have a balance there. I've actually found an interesting balance in that I do a number of programs through my public library, so they pay me, so the people that come to the workshop don't have to. That's cool and that has been. I didn't realize that was a thing I could do and then I got here. We have a robust public library system in my little town here and somebody suggested and they came back and said, well, how much would you want for a 90 minute workshop? And I was like, wait, what? So because I was just gonna do it, to do it.

Susan: 22:53

And then they're like, they're like no, we have a budget, and especially because I'm doing tarot work and I want tarot to be accessible to everybody who wants it, it's really worked out to where you know, I get more than fairly compensated for my time, but the doors are open to anybody who wants to come and that that has been really like, really rewarding to me, like it's been just a great compromise because you know, my wife and I were talking about I'm like I could charge 25 bucks a person for people to come into my workshop, but I wouldn't have the 45 people that I had at my workshop this afternoon either.

Susan: 23:34

So it's kind of a trade-off. And they've continued to bring me back for a series and then other public libraries in the larger metro area have started coming to me now too and they pay me for my time and then it's just open to anybody in the community because, I mean, their tax dollars go to pay for that library, right? So it's this really kind of cool, very democratic way of welcoming people in but also recognizing that the work that I put into developing and teaching is work and it's worth being compensated for.

Kimothy: 24:11

That's surprising to me. You're getting some of my bias here, because when I think of the middle of the country, it's pretty red and I would think that people would be really weirded out by the library having a tarot class. I mean, they don't like, they finger quotes, “don't like” libraries anyway. So when they have a witch, come in and do tarot classes. That's surprising to me.

Susan: 24:39

I was surprised too, because I'm from this part of the country and, in terms of politics, conservative than the maps would lead you to believe. I am outside of a major metro area and I am in a like capital C, capital T, college town, which probably helps. If I was out in one of these towns of 500 people, they would not probably be having me at the library. But I have been really surprised. Even my small town in back in South Dakota has a metaphysical shop now which you I mean, go back until 16 year old me shall faint. There seems to be a real. I just think it's because we're at such a weird point culturally and tarot seems to be the the gateway. But I have also helped put together solstice celebrations at our local botanical garden, like they're doing a workshop. I'm not even doing it, they're doing a workshop on how to build an herbal spell jar here in a couple weeks. So it's yeah right, gosh Snack in the middle of the course.

Kimothy: 25:53

We're already jumping into the next question, which is how have you built community near you, like in-person community, and it sounds like you're already doing all kinds of stuff.

Susan: 26:03

A lot of it has been through tarot, because that's something that is accessible to a lot of people and so I met a lot of people that way, because people like, oh, I hear, oh, I hear, and there are a lot of tarot readers at the university where I work, so you know, that's a way to connect and actually one of the local breweries around here has started doing a tarot social one night a month for people just to bring their decks and things and we sit and we trade and that's really fun. I had done something similar in Texas with a coffee shop, so that's been really fun. I am part of our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship here in my city and I started getting really involved with Unitarian Universalist in Texas because when you live in the South, people are going to ask you where your church home is and you better have an answer. So I I met a lot of pagans that found a lot of community through Unitarian Universalism, either because there was a CUUPS chapter at the church in question or just because there were a lot of earth centered people in the in the community and ours has. We don't have a CUUPS chapter, but we have a very active discussion group and our minister is familiar with this kind of spirituality and you know we talk a lot about having both moved in women's spirituality circles in the nineties, so you know that was some of it. And you get to talk into people in a Unitarian Universalist community and like lots of Buddhists and lots of pagans and lots of reverent atheists in my community. So you know it all kind of comes together.

Susan: 27:46

I'm on a few Facebook groups for witches in the Midwest which are useful, but when it comes down to meeting people like that are going to sit in my house so that I'm going to go and do ritual with that really hasn't been a thing. But I find what I found when I came here was I, you know I was going to take a break for a year from doing any kind of public events and see what was here, and the answer was a whole lot of people who are interested in looking for community that don't talk to each other. So I'm a connector, so I'm like, okay, I know you and I know you and I'm going to put you two together and it's built this really like lovely, lovely network of people and we swapped tomato seedlings and tarot readings and it's just all kind of lovely. It's very different than my community in Texas which was a much more like formal open rituals on the Sabbaths kind of situation, and here it's very like. I've got the people that come to my tarot workshops and I've got, you know, people that show up when I facilitate a labyrinth walk, which I do at one of the Presbyterian churches, and I've got people that you know are on my, my seedling exchange list and they're most of them are varying degrees of magically inclined or spiritually inclined, of of magically inclined or spiritually inclined.

Susan: 29:19

Um, it's been really fun to to build that out and and see who I found. And I've been here about two and a half years. So you know, the first year you'd kind of just kind of look around and wonder what you did to your life moving across the country. And then the second year you you start to meet people and I had just at Beltane had my first ritual gathering here at my house of four or five women and that was great, and then everybody always has friends they want to bring. So who knows what it's going to be like by winter solstice.

Kimothy: 29:53

Can you tell people what CUUPS is?

Susan: 29:57

Yes, it stands for Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans and it is an organization. It's a national organization. Actually, it might be worldwide that you find affiliated with Unitarian Universalist churches, which are generally welcoming to all kinds of different sort of theological paths. Right, the whole point in Unitarian Universalism is shared values instead of shared theology. But when a UU church, a Unitarian Universalist church, has a CUUPS chapter, it means that it is a formal group. That you know because it's Unitarian Universalism. There are committees and they elect officers. Because it's Unitarian Universalism. There are committees and they elect officers, but they tend to offer public rituals, usually on the kind of Wiccan Sabbaths, and they offer workshops and other kinds of get-togethers sort of, depending on how big the group is. Not every Unitarian Universalist church has one, but they are becoming more common.

Susan: 31:00

What we have at my fellowship is a discussion group called Persephone's Children and we will then go to the Unitarian church in sort of the big city that's close to us who has a very active CUUPS chapter. So there's this we try and support each other rather than sort of be scattered everywhere, and it's really, really interesting. There's a lot of focus on being very beginner friendly, as you might expect, and the practice looks different depending on sort of who's in those roles, but it's also a really nice entry point. Either for somebody who's new to contemporary paganism or somebody who's moved to a new city and doesn't know where to find community. It can be a great entry point because it's, all you know, all public and affiliated with this larger organization and there's there's sort of a structure in place where you can wander in as a stranger and there's there's a like, there's a ritual for that.

Susan: 32:07

There's you know, they'll offer you coffee and ask you to put a name tag on, and it's all very lovely. And I really enjoyed the folks that I met through the cups chapter up here and I've really enjoyed. The Persephone's children are people we do something called called witches brew, which is basically just that we go take over a coffee shop which is is lovely, I don't. You know, it's just these very like informal kind of let's just get together and talk as well. As they will have more formal, like last workshop I missed it but with somebody talking about doing magic with seeds and garden magic and really that it all comes up from the membership. So what you're going to see in any given CUUPS group will be different than the one in the next city over.

Kimothy: 33:01

I know the past. I think two places. I know there was one in Colorado Springs when I was there. A CUUPS I mean, there's Unitarian Universalist in every place I've been, but I know there's a CUUPS in Colorado Springs and I know there's one here in Tucson. So look it up, everybody. C-U-Y-P-s. If you want to try it out, please find community near you.

Susan: 33:32

That's my big thing this year. You. I met some of my favorite people in my life through Cups, chapters and pagan groups at Unitarian Universalist churches, especially in Texas. I met just people who became lifelong friends and mentors. I've been doing this for 30 years, so they were people who were willing to talk to 19 or 20 year old me, who had a lot of questions but also thought she knew everything, and to kind of bring, kind of bring me along and and help me on my path, when, you know, the internet was nascent and you had to figure out how to navigate your way through the new age section of Barnes and Noble or…

Kimothy: 34:20

Waldenbooks.

Susan: 34:21

Oh, Waldenbooks. Actually, my first tarot deck was from a B Dalton. Oh, yeah, it's from a B Dalton. I was like, but I bought a lot at, uh, Waldenbooks and what was that other place called? It wasn't Books A Million, it was. Yeah, there was some other little chain that when all of those sort of folded we lost. And then when I was down in Texas we had half-price books. So there was a lot of things on my shelf from there.

Kimothy: 35:02

The good old days, sort of.

Susan: 35:04

The good old days, sort of, yeah. It's all a mixed bag. I think the fact that we can be so much more connected now as community can be really great. I can go do full moon with my friends in California if I want, yeah. But it also means, I think, that a lot of us tend to not necessarily go out and look for physical community, and so it's sort of, you know, finding that that balance is. I mean that, mean that's, I mean that's the key to life. Right, it's just to kind of keep it flowing. That's me.

Kimothy: 35:42

I don't leave my house. Think about the three biggest influences on your practice. It doesn't have to be people. It can be like a book or a pet deity, whatever. Yeah. Thank these three influences for how they influence your practice.

Susan: 36:04

So definitely Starhawk's work was and remains one of my biggest influences, not just her writing on witchcraft but her writing on activism and permaculture and the fact that she models and teaches witchcraft and magic as tools for cultural change. I've said since I was 19, it was like I want to be Starhawk when I grow up, but I guess I'm running out of time, so I often go back to her and find what she's been writing and talking about and you know it was like that was. The second book that I ever owned was the Spiral Dance, so my copy is well-thumbed. And although I came in through women's spirituality, when I read Starhawk and started to realize oh, there are entire groups of people for whom this is absolutely political and that we use it as a tool not just for self-transformation but of the culture, was huge. I also got a lot out of the book Ariadne's Thread by the late Shekhinah Mountainwater. It's definitely of a time. It was written in the late 80s, early 90s but I got that book through the first women's circle I was in and introduced me to the idea that you didn't have to use this kind of heteronormative model of reproduction to understand the wheel of the year, that you could be your own priestess and that forming these communities of sort of healing and shared experience was really important. So those are like two of my books that I'm surprised that they're still hanging together.

Susan: 37:58

And my late friend her name was Mary Desorny was a huge influence on my practice because I arrived in Texas with a little bit of information about Wicca under my belt and then I was in classes with her and somebody kept saying you know this girl, Mary, the one from Houston. She says she's a witch and I think that's not true. You know, that can't be true. What is that? And then I kind of like talked to her a little bit and I was like, hmm, okay, that thing that I was reading about maybe this is what she does.

Susan: 38:34

And like four weeks into the semester she calls me. She got my number because we all used to exchange phone numbers for our dorm room phones, and she said I heard you have a car. And I was like I do have a car. What do you need? She said well, I work down in Dallas, which was 45 minutes away, and I have a ride to work, but not a ride home, and I'll give you gas if you come and get me and I thought I will have an hour alone in the car with this woman and so I said, sure, I'll take it Like you don't even have to give me 20 bucks for gas, tell me when to be there.

Susan: 39:08

And I peppered her with questions the whole way home and she gave me Scott Cunningham's Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, which was a new and very controversial book at the time, and we were best friends for 30 years we were born three days apart and a lot of the early experiences I had building community.

Susan: 39:35

Actually I have a story about her that I will save for later, that we went out and we did these things together and there are things I'm pretty extroverted, but there are things I might not have done if she hadn't been willing to go on that adventure with me, not have done if she hadn't been willing to go on that adventure with me.

Susan: 39:58

And we talked, you know, all the time about craft and we'd go off to festivals and in the wilds of the American South at a time before cell phones, before pagers. You know, we were just kind of. We were together so much that some people didn't know which one was which. We got called by each other's names all the time, um and I I think about a lot that I mean she was just a huge influence in my life. But if she hadn't handed me that like little pink book and been willing to answer all my stupid questions, I think I would have found this path eventually. But I think it might have looked very different and the experiences that she and I had running around in the woods and reading tarot for people in the dorms and all those things they really like, shaped who I am as a practitioner and also just who I am as a person. She's awesome. I miss her.

Kimothy: 41:06

What was your favorite moment?

Susan: 41:12

Oh, there were a couple of good ones.

Susan: 41:14

 I think I was just telling somebody about this the other day that we got invited to a full moon circle out in what at the time was a very small town in Texas not a small town now, but it was a very small town and like, we knew the person who invited us, because she was this older woman who worked at a bookstore and she wore a rather large pentacle, so we know.

Susan: 41:43

We were like oh, and so she said oh, you should come out. So we decided we would go and of course, this was there was no, I mean, this was before even MapQuest, right, you just had to get directions and write them on a legal pad. And it was a Friday night and we hadn't been to enough public rituals to realize that you wear your street clothes and you take your robes with you and you change when you get there. So we are in our robes and all of our jewelry and we drive into this little small town in Texas on a Friday night and the public religion in Texas is high school football and that happens on Friday night and it means that everybody's out and around. And that was the moment we realized we were lost.

Susan: 42:29

We kind of made our way around and we're like we're lost, like we can't find this house, and we're like what do we do? So we pulled into the gas station it was a Diamond Shamrock, I'll never forget it and we looked at each other and I said, well, one of us has to go in. Like we, we don't, we don't have a choice about this. One of us has to go in. We have to ask for directions. Like I'll go. If I don't come back, like call my dad, tell him I'm sorry, and I'm walking across this, this Diamond Shamrock park parking lot at like 8 30 PM it's October, it's Texas. There's like big trucks with country music blaring out of them everywhere and I'm like this is how I die.

Susan: 43:14

This is how it goes and I walk in and I like wait in line at the, at the cashier and, of course, small town, Texas. So the cashier is just kind of shooting the breeze with everybody. And I get up there and like my heart is in my throat. I'm like what am I like? What am I even going to do? And this man bless his heart, he looks at me and says y'all must be looking for Janie in Roger's house. Okay, what you need to do is go down about three blocks and you need to take a right. If you got here, what it means is you took a left, but no, you need to take a right. And I kind of stood there and I was just like uh huh. I just kind of walked out and I was like well, that didn't go how I think it was going to go.

Susan: 44:02

And we found the ritual and it was great. But I just like that was so quintessential of what our witchy adventures were like is that we had? You know, we're 19 year old girls. We had no instinct for self-preservation and just tried to try to find, find community and you know, trying. Both of us were so new on this path. We did, however, learn that you pack your robes and take them with you after that. That was the last time I drove out into the wilds of Texas in my full ritual gear.

Kimothy: 44:44

I would feel weird about doing that here, and Tucson is a a pretty, pretty liberal town considering.

Susan: 44:47

There was one time we were coming back from there are these beautiful open rituals that were put on by a group in in fort worth and we were coming back and we weren't ritual robes, but we were definitely like 90s witchy, like think a lot of washable silk and broomstick skirts and we went I think it was an Applebee's and there was like eight of us and we get to the hostess station and the hostess looks at the waiter and says find these people a nice seat in the back. So they paraded us past all the people. It was Sunday afternoon, you know. They paraded us past all the people. It was Sunday afternoon, you know, so there were definitely people who kind of reacted to us in public, and you know, I think some places you're right we'd still get that but it was definitely, yeah, fact that it's something that I learned.

Susan: 45:49

Part of what made me want to study paganism in the South for my doctoral work, which I did, was that experience of, you know, living through. It was the. It was the height of the satanic panic. People were, you know, burning books and all these things, but these people seemed to, in this town, seemed to be OK, because those were their witches in this town seemed to be okay because those were their witches and they knew them as people and their kids went to school with their kids and that's something that I noticed sort of throughout the South when I lived there. I noticed it with the South and gay people too. It's like in theory, we don't like those people, oh, but those are ours, and it was seriously. I had to go like get a whole doctorate about it because it was so it was. It was just so interesting to me. Didn't even bat an eye. 

Kimothy: 46:47

Now that you've seen what the questions are like and you've seen, you've seen how I am as a person who do you think would be good to have on the show next?

Susan: 46:54

Oh, I think you would probably enjoy talking to Kimberly Moore, who runs the mother house of the goddess.

Susan: 47:05

I teach some classes through her website. I was just at Paganacon with Enris J Book, who writes a lot about queerness and magic. As a non-binary person, I think you and Enris could probably have a really good conversation. I think I've got their contact information somewhere. Um, is there a really lovely who else am I following these days? I mean most of? I mean I've got people in my my little local circle too. Who else I might have to put a little brain on that and drop you an email. But this kind of like conversational style. I think there are a lot of folks I know who would enjoy this Cause I don't know I get. You've probably figured out like which is we can talk.

Kimothy: 48:07

That's why I give us two hours.

Susan: 48:10

Right, right, well, and also, every thought with me comes with at least one bonus thought. So I keep joking. I'm going to get a T-shirt that says diagnosed, but not diagnosed, but pretty sure. So everything is kind of a spiral. It's all related, which is, I guess, if I want to be very like, witchy about. It, is a wonderful metaphor for the interconnectedness of the world, but also is a little bit about having a squirrel brain. I relate, yeah, yeah, oh, like, absolutely.

Susan: 48:47

You know, I think one of the things that's appealing to a lot of people about sort of witchy, pagan, magical community is that a lot of us are a little weird in numbers a number of ways, and the things that make you kind of have a hard time fitting in out in mainstream culture are understood and appreciated to varying degrees within community, within sort of magical community broadly, um, and there's also, I think, generally speaking, a wider acceptance of that. Like, people are different, some of us are real different, but that is, if you're not hurting anybody else, you kind of have right to be who you are and that can just be such a relief, such a relief. I think that's why a lot of queer people love witchy stuff and magical community too, is that there's just a wider definition of how you can live your life and how you can be as a human. And if you know, if you want to wear purple cat ears all day, you can wear purple cat ears all day. I don't really care.

Kimothy: 50:03

Is there anything else you wanted to bring up? Anything I didn't ask, anything you wanted to ask me. Do you have anything going on that you want to promote?

Susan: 50:12

Yeah, the biggest thing I have going on is that the book is launching. I actually got my author's copies the other day and that was a super big thrill for a book that took me seven years to write and I've been hoping to write since I was 20. The book is has a very simple title. It's just called Feminist Witchcraft, and it's written under my name, Susan Harper. You can find it on amazon.com or soon, hopefully, through your local bookseller, and it is available in ebook format and in paperback. The paperbacks are sitting in the warehouse and will ship out. Should be delivered to you by July 1. Your ebook should probably download right away.

Susan: 50:58

I'm really excited to bring this book out into the world and see where it kind of goes. I'm working on a course and things that go with it. Keep an eye on Instagram and the Facebook page for a launch party that'll be happening in early July and for some classes and other bonus content, and if you're in my city or if I'm in yours, I'm working on a book tour. I'll even sign the book for you if you buy it. This has really been. I just keep looking at them, I keep petting them. They're so pretty. I really want people to read it and use it to start having conversations and to launch off into their own practice. It's short, it's a great little introduction and it is beautiful and it is the sum of everything that I've learned and all the people that have influenced me on my path, and I am delighted to be able to share that with the world.

Kimothy: 52:02

Well, I have two things left to ask you, okay. The first thing is to recommend something to the listeners. It doesn't have to be witchy at all, it can be just the cool thing that you discovered in your town this week. What is it? What do you recommend?

Susan: 52:18

Oh, so I recommend traveling for the Ryman Gardens, which is the botanical garden here in Ames, iowa. It's attached to the Iowa State University. It has been voted one of the top 10 gardens in the country worth traveling for and I recommend one. The garden is beautiful, but we have a butterfly wing which is worth traveling for, and if you come on the right day, I'm the docent that lets you into the butterfly wing. So come enjoy, especially if it's super hot where you're at. It's beautiful. We have like five hot days in the summer in Iowa and they don't usually come in a row. The garden is always changing, there's always something new, and then you can go down the street to the Iowa State Creamery and get ice cream made by the smartest cows in the Midwest, to the Iowa State Creamery and get ice cream made by the smartest cows in the Midwest.

Kimothy: 53:16

Why are they the smartest?

Susan: 53:19

Because they all have Mooster's degrees. 

Kimothy: 53:22

Oh, no. Why would you set me up like that on my own podcast? 

Susan: 53:24

They are the Iowa State herd. They run the creamery through our food science program. We also make beer through the food science program. Thank you very much, but yeah, it's the best ice cream in the Midwest.

Kimothy: 53:53

Okay, so the last thing is please tell me a story. 

Susan: 53:55

Oh, let me tell you a story. I think I've got a lot. I've lived kind of a crazy life. I have to top the one where we pulled up on the Diamond Shamrock on a Friday night and didn't die. So this is another Mary story.

Susan: 54:15

Where we used to go to this camp out that was held at Samhain and Beltane, so like April, May and October was held down outside of Austin and what used to be a little bitty town and it was there, there, kind of a nonprofit organization that you know, you joined and were a member, right, and they held these cam ops In fact they still do, although in a different location and we went and there was always. I mean, there's lots of things on the schedule, but there's one main ritual on Saturday night. The idea is that's when everybody goes to and people take turns doing this ritual, and this ritual was being put on by the OTO, the Ordo Templi Orient List. So the Crowleyites, right, the ceremonial magician folks, and it was the early nineties, there were people who had feelings about them even being there. But you know, I can, I can, I can hang with kraljit, but I was young and didn't know a lot, knew most what I knew was wiccan. And so we're standing in the circle and you were there and it's it's all very serious because it's and you know, we're thinking about our, our dead ones. We're all there in our black clothes. It's beautiful.

Susan: 55:35

We're standing there and there's this beautiful priestess in the middle of the circle and in my mind she's like 6'2" but she's probably gotten taller over time, but she's got a big sword and she's very quiet and she hushes everybody in the circle and she's very quiet and she hushes everybody in the circle and then she throws back her arms and she goes yo Penn, yo Penn. And we both jumped and went. What just happened? And I looked at her and she looked at me and I was like what did we just wander into? She's like, I don't know. So I'm like let me get it back. And we're standing in the East and the priestess walks over. She's very quiet, she's very serious. And she walks over and she wields this sword in our face and she starts yelling and what I probably well, she was projecting let's be fair in in what I now know to be latin like in my face. And we both jump back and say, what, what just happened? I don't know, what do we do? I don't know.

Susan: 56:38

And it was like that for, like the priest would get very quiet and she'd watch in this corner, she would yell, and then we're doing that and there's like 200 of us in this circle with five people who know what's going on and we're like what is what is happening? Like I didn't know anything about all this. Right, and it was just one of those things where we were so kind of startled that we were trying not to laugh because we knew that you know you don't laugh. This wasn't funny. This was supposed to be very serious and nobody takes themselves more seriously than a 19 year old girl who's just gotten into witchcraft. We were taking it very seriously, but that was so like it was one of those like confusing moments and we we left and we looked at each other and we're like what Did you get any of that? And we're like, no, I didn't get any of that.

Susan: 57:42

What was that? I don't know what was that, but for 30 years, every once in a while, if we were hanging out together and it just got too quiet, one of us would lean over and go yo Penn, yo Penn, and we would just crack up and it was just such an experience. I hadn't been to anything like that and what's sort of funny is, within our community there are people who when you bring that up, they're like oh my gosh, I was at that ritual, what was that? And it was beautiful. There was dancing and all kinds of things. You know it was obviously very carefully put together but just it was. It was a, it was a thing, and it's still one of the funniest things that's ever happened to me. Just because it was so unexpected still one of the funniest things that's ever happened to me Just because it was so unexpected.

Kimothy: 58:42

I'm an uncomfortable laugher, so I would have well for us so I would have lost it.

Susan: 58:55

It was the person I am today would have been on the floor. I, you know cause. I just and, and, and. Of course, in the ensuing years I've learned a lot about how the OTO does their rituals and and all that. But I was like this crowd is full of a lot of beginners. I'm not sure what's happening here, like, does everybody here speak Latin? What is what's going on? Um, and I was like this is like advanced level paganism and I'm like taking the intro class. What's happening here?

Susan: 59:26

I like I accidentally registered for a three-piece level class. What happened?

Kimothy: 59:40

Thank you for that.

Susan: 59:42

Yes, yes, feel free, if you have, feel free to tuck, tuck some Yopan in the back of your, in your back pocket, in case you need it.

Kimothy: 59:52

So will you craft a spell with me?

Susan: 59:55

Yes, what kind of spells do we want to cast?

Kimothy: 59:59

I don't know uh, do we want something socially relevant, or do we just want to do something around our house?

Susan: 1:00:07

Well, I have kind of a favorite that I use during these times, okay, which ideally involves an orange candle, but if you don't have one, a baby carrot or a puffy Cheeto will do, and you need some sewing pins or sewing needles.

Kimothy: 1:00:33

Oh, perfect, perfect.

Susan: 1:00:41

Now I want some of those and you know I create my sacred space however I want. But since I'm going to be doing a little chaos magic, it's usually pretty easy, it's mostly. I learned from a friend of mine who's a chaos magician that in this type of thing you just kind of run to the directions and say hi, I'm like bringing the man. We don't do anything formal and the goal of this spell is to break the hold of authoritarianism over our country. So I'm going to guess we've been talking for about an hour. I think we're on the same page about that. We'd like that to stop, and you just sort of picture whatever that would look like to you, what it would look like for this fever to break, and then you take your needles [fades out]

Kimothy: 1:01:35

To hear more of the members-only episode, head over to crepuscularconjuration.com. The Monthly Magic tier will give you access to the Monthly Magic Marco Polo group, the private Facebook group and access to the written monthly spells. There's also Crepuscular Conjurations giving you bonus podcast episodes, coloring pages, guided meditations, spellcrafting videos, printable downloads and a lot more. The free Witchy Wonderment level will give you a little sample of everything I just mentioned. You can also visit my shop, Clever Kim's Curios, to get spell boxes, one at a time or by monthly subscription, intentional handcrafted jewelry that I make especially for witches, and handmade altar tools. You can even listen to the full Your Average Witch podcast library, including show notes and transcripts. Check it out at crepuscularconjuration.com. Thanks for listening to this episode of Your Average Witch. You can find us all around the internet on Instagram, @youraveragewitchpodcast, facebook.com/groups/hivehouse, at www.youraveragewitch.com, and at your favorite podcast service. If you'd like to recommend someone for the podcast, like to be on it yourself, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, send an email to youraveragewitchpodcast at gmail.com. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next Tuesday.