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Hello, lovelies. Welcome to another episode of squeaky’s cauldron. I’m your host, Sarah evergreen, and this is part two of my Christian witch two parter. If you’re interested in my back story, go ahead and check out part one. You can find that as a podcast or on my YouTube channel. And that basically just tells my backstory where I came from, how I got to where I am. And this episode, I talk about what it means to be a Christian witch to me, what those two words mean and why I think they go so well together. So, enjoy the episode. And it was a combination of yoga and mushrooms that led to my first deeply spiritual experience since speaking in tongues as a child. From there, I started studying Hinduism and shamanic practices, witchcraft started coming back in and eventually Christianity presented itself again through random discovery of a bit of rob bell’s teachings put over music and I can’t find that song anymore, but the first time I heard it, I was just weeping, absolutely weeping. And I have discovered in the years since my Saturn returns that when I start crying when I get this response to something, it means I’m on to something. And I need to pursue that thing or that I’m speaking a deeper truth for myself that I should not ignore. Ignore it my peril. I found my way back to the teachings of my youth and to the practice that is in my body, witchcraft and Christianity. But aren’t they opposites? This is a question I’ve got, aren’t they opposites? I think on the surface, again, moving back to conventional understanding of things, sure. You could say that, I guess. If you only want to look at what other people have said about what Christianity is and about what witchcraft is, there are opposites. I wholeheartedly disagree. First of all, I’m not a conventional person. Second of all, I believe that the boxes that we put around things or the boxes more specifically that we let other people put around things extremely limit our expressions as real human beings. We are not boxes. We are ever shifting, changing growing, loving, crying, miracles, absolute miracles, and miracles don’t do well when they’re put in a box. There’s not enough space. So what do I mean when I say I’m a Christian? Or when I use the word Christian? My understanding of Christian. The merriam Webster dictionary definition is a person who believes in Jesus Christ and follows his teachings. That seems pretty straightforward and that kind of works for me. A person who believes in Jesus Christ and follows his teachings. Not a person who hates witches or a person who hates the LGBTQ+ community or a person who hates abortion. A person who hates not a person who hates. Jesus Christ says all about love, baby. Not hate. The fundamental teaching of Jesus Christ was love others. He taught us to look out for people on the edges. People who the rest of society has cast away for whatever reason, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the poor, the widowers, the orphans. This would vary much include witches. Because we can just look at history and see how many times witches have been pushed to the edge of society. Reviled. And this, this comes through when a Christian comes up and says to me, you can’t be a Christian witch. Because Christians hate witches. I’m like, do you even hear yourself talk? Jesus Christ was pissed.
At the patriarchy, and he was pissed at the social constructs of his time and I deeply believe that he would be pissed at the social constructs of our time and what Christians in his name are trying to do to people are actively doing the people that the, again, the hatred that just rages through this religion. This set of beliefs that people claim to adhere to. It’s unconscionable. It’s absolutely unconscionable. Which is why it took me a while, and I’m still working on this to feel comfortable saying that I’m a Christian. Because I don’t want to be associated with that. Can you blame me? But Christ consciousness is not about hatred. It’s not about exclusion. It’s about loving people. It’s an open consciousness. It’s accepting and embracing and it’s absolutely religionless. I’ll say that again. Christ consciousness knows no religion. Religion is a construct of man. Christ’s consciousness transcends that. Religion, organized religion, the way that we have, again, put boxes around things that can not be boxed, that is where the problem lies. Not with Jesus Christ, not with loving Christ. But with trying to make something huge into something small and self serving. In order to make some one, feel better than someone else. I don’t think that’s Christian. So I sit here and say, I believe in Jesus Christ. I strive to follow his teachings. And therefore, I call myself a Christian. Now, what do I mean when I say which? Because I’ve gotten push back on this too that how can you say you’re a Christian, which is embroiled in patriarchy and say you’re a witch, which is just a feminine practice. And yeah, I don’t agree with that. What I mean when I say I’m a witch, I have a deep relationship with particular deities. One, in particular, I work with her in many, many ways. I practice spells and rituals and what I mean when I say that is that I create a sacred space I set an intention and sometimes but not always, I use tools like candles and herbs and bones and blood to focus that intention and to focus my energy. I use poetry. I use words. To say my intention to offer myself to deity to give thanks, all of these things, which if you’ll go back to one of the very earliest episodes of squeaky’s cauldron, I’ll talk about more. All of these things are prayer. Words spoken out loud to God to the universe to a deity. This is prayer. Spells are prayer. Prayers are spells. There’s a big fucking overlap there. I also meditate quite a bit, which I believe is the absolute under scoring like foundation of the practice of the craft is meditation. Getting quiet. So that you can hear spirit when spirit talks so that you can hear your deity when your deity comes to you so that you can learn to focus your energy. So when you go into a space, a sacred space to perform a spell or a ritual, you can get there. You access your subconscious, you get in touch with your body, like all of this is step one and practicing witchcraft. Without that, it’s just actions. And actions are meaningless without intention.
Absolutely meaningless. They’re performative. Which you could say quite a lot of Christian stuff that we see is quite performative. Like that’s super boring to me. I am interested in having a deep real connection between myself and deity and meditation and meditation takes many, many forms, but meditation is absolutely essential. Connected with meditation, kind of compounding on it, I suppose. I embark on astral journeys to commune with deities and helping spirits. This is something that I have developed after meditation. Meditation came first. That, again, this is a starting point. And then I moved into these astral journeys and shamanic journeys from this place of stillness. In those journeys and sometimes in meditation and very often just when I’m living my life and doing my thing, I receive messages from deities, and from spirits and from spirit, all the damn time, which can make me feel a little bit crazy sometimes. Speaking to that, when I did find God, going through my Saturn returns, I felt legit crazy for about a year after, like I was absolutely losing my mind. It was scary. I see both of these practices Christianity and witchcraft as fingers pointing at the moon. And this is, I believe a Buddhist saying. The moon is God. The moon is spirit. The moon is universe. The moon is this ineffable energy that moves through all of us and connects us and makes us move and dance and love and drink and cry. It is the thing that is beneath all things in all things above all things and through all things. That’s the moon. All of these practices, yoga, witchcraft, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, sufism, jainism, you know, go off anything, anything. Those are fingers. Connected to human. Fingers connected to human. Things that we have been graced with in many ways and things that we have created. Things that have been channeled through us, but they’re all things that have been processed in one way or another through a human being. In an effort to get closer to God. But they are not God. They are paths. They are fingers pointing at the moon. And one should not ever, ever. Mistake their finger. For the moon. There’s a lot a lot of damage that happens when those two things are mistaken for one another. But what about what is about which is in the Bible, you might ask. Well, there’s a few passages that mention, which is sorceresses, this kind of thing. And I’m not a biblical scholar. I just want to give you a little bit of something to think about when thinking about the Bible. And if you want more of this stuff, again, check out rob bell. He does a great job of exploring the context behind the Bible. And putting it into perspective for the 21st century. So the most famous verse is exodus 22 8. This is the King James version, which is important when we get to that. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Oh, gosh, that sounds like the Bible. God. If you’re gonna take it that way, has said, you should kill witches. Kill the witches. I don’t think that’s what that says. First of all, let’s look at like I said, the King James version. Okay, the Bible has been translated so many times by so many different people with so many different agendas. King James had the Bible rewritten in 1611 for his own purposes, which I won’t go into here.
But they were very pointed to get a particular version of the Bible out there based on how he thought it should be interpreted. And the Old Testament was translated from Greek. Not from Hebrew. That Greek had been translated from Hebrew by a human. The Hebrew version of the Bible had been written down by a human. Do you see what I’m getting at? There’s a lot of human fingers in this pie. And they’re human. People are, again, subject to their own perspectives. And their own vision of things, which can be really great, but is not should not be confused with actual messages from God. There’s a lot of beauty and truth in the Bible and we have to take it in context of what it is. And how it got to be where it is and how it got to be what it is. For this particular verse, that’s the King James version, a witch. Other translations of that particular word have been poisoner, evildoer, sorceress. Regardless of what word we choose to put there, there’s one thing that we can’t overlook. It was written thousands of years ago. Thousands of years. Let that sink in for a second. Let’s look back at like a hundred years ago. If we said a particular word that we use now, would it have translated a hundred years ago, like one to one? Chances are very good it wouldn’t have. Now, go back thousands of years, completely different culture, completely different. Part of the world to the United States or definitely a completely different world just in general. They were dealing with a lot of things that we’re not dealing with now. Obviously, like very obviously, and to take this word, any of these words. And to yank it out of history without looking at the context of what was going on and plop it into our current understanding of what a witches and what to live even means, ’cause that can be interpreted many different ways. It’s apples to fucking the color purple. It’s apples to shoelaces. There is no way to understand exactly what they meant. When they said this line. And so then, to take this verse and use it as a weapon of hatred is quite frankly delusional, bizarre, absolutely bizarre, and yet this is a verse that gets called upon when people are like, oh no, witches are bad. Another bit of pushback that I’ve received, which I alluded to earlier is, but isn’t Christianity like the patriarchy and witchcraft is like feminism? I don’t agree with that. So to say Christianity is essentially patriarchal is, again, missing the point, I believe. It’s certainly missing my understanding of Christianity. And that’s where I’m coming from, really, is from my understanding. Again, I’m human. This is what I’m processing. This is my view on things. The Christian church. The organized religion around Christianity is quite patriarchal, not because the teachings of Jesus Christ are inherently patriarchal, but because the church has been utilized to control people. And that control is at the fundamental basis of the patriarchy is to control people. Create divisiveness to create a sense of power over and to eradicate a sense of power with. And when we have a sense of power over, again, we will constantly have people scrambling to get into that position of above and to put people in the position of below because you can not be above if there is no one below you.
The interpretations and translations, particularly interpretations of the Bible are often deeply patriarchal. Again, this goes back to control. And as I mentioned before, Jesus was against the patriarchy and Jesus was against toxic masculinity, he was against this nasty stuff that the organized church is now doing. He was against the nasty stuff that the church was doing back then. Like, to use his name in a way to foment hatred is so hypocritical. But we already knew that, didn’t we? Most of us watching this already knew that the Christian church is pretty hypocritical. I don’t belong to the Christian church, and I’m really not interested. I like looking at the old ones. That’s pretty cool. You’ll see some of those on this channel for watching on YouTube. If you’re not watching on YouTube, check out my YouTube channel. That covers Christianity. Christianity is not fundamentally patriarchal. The organization around it is. So is witchcraft fundamentally female? No, absolutely not. Witchcraft, the practice of spells and rituals, the practice of ceremony, the practice of herbalism, that is absolutely not fundamentally female. The label witch has been applied to women a lot. For various reasons, women were often doulas, midwives, herbalists, healers, many of these women were financially independent. Which was threatening to men, because many men have been taught to be incredibly fragile. And when a woman threatens a man, there is often a movement made to criminalize her in one way or another. We can see this with the stuff going on with the abortion. Laws in Texas. The word which had been demonized at this point was very often put onto women who were financially independent unmarried and posed a threat or were unassailable in other ways by the men in an area. But we can look at like the practice of druidism and shamanic practices and it’s not gendered. Witchcraft doesn’t gender. And Christianity isn’t gendered. They are practices. There’s a been a lot of focus on goddess worship in witchcraft. There’s been a lot of women who are attracted to witchcraft, but to say that it is fundamentally female is really missing the point. I think. There’s worship of God’s and goddesses and genderless spirit in witchcraft. It’s across the board. I can understand how people have come to this idea. Again, going back to conventional understanding, if you look at the surface of what we are told Christianity is and what we are told witchcraft is, it looks very gendered. It looks very much like patriarchy and matriarchy and never the Twain shall meet. But this is an extremely limited view. Conventional understanding is always an extremely limited view. And I highly urge you to go beyond what you’ve been told. Go beyond even what you believe in this moment and really check in with that belief. Like examine it. And see if that works for you, if that really is working for you. And if not, maybe you can open up to thinking about things a little differently. Just a thought, you know. Justify. Because when it comes right down to it, we’re all unique. Every single one of us is, again, a miracle. And miracles are beyond comprehension beyond labels beyond boxes.
When it comes to your spirituality and your life and your beliefs, I urge you not to listen to what other people are saying. Not even to listen to what I’m saying. This is just my opinion. This is just my experience. Listen to your heart. Not your stories, not your ego, not the voices in your head of what your parents told you or what your church told you or your school or society or any of this. Listen to your heart, drop into that space and get really quiet and listen. And let’s spirit guide you. Not somebody’s ideas of what spirit is saying or what God is saying. Again, meditate, meditate. I will say this forever. You gotta meditate. Because this is what’s going to get you quiet enough to hear what your heart is saying. And so here what spirit is saying? Meditate, start with 5 minutes a day, just sit, shut your eyes. There’s no wrong way to meditate. Just like, pay attention to your breathing, you’re gonna think you’re gonna think some weird stuff. You’re gonna think some fucking stupid stuff. But that’s fine. That is totally fine. Just sit and be still. Sit and be still and quiet. Or, you know, I really like listening to binaural beats. You can find them everywhere. They’re really great at like helping the neural pathways in the brain connect from one side to the other. At least that’s been my experience. Don’t be afraid to explore. Explore deeper in the religion or the practices that you have in your life right now. Go beyond the surface, go beyond what you’ve been told and really do some exploration. Also explore other practices. Explore how other people express their connection to God in the world. See, what is out there, how people are thinking, you might stumble across something that really deepens the practices that you already have on the understanding that you already have through the lens of another practice through Buddhism can be so beautiful in helping us to drop our ego, drop our defenses and drop into ourselves. Your childhood practices ear the things that you grew up with around what spirituality was supposed to be, those may never make sense to you. Those may never resonate with you, and if that’s the case, that’s totally fine. Like they don’t have to. For me, they struck such a deep cord that I felt compelled to reexamine how I was interacting with Christianity with those beliefs. But if that’s not you, that’s fine. If that is you, please don’t be afraid to explore that. I understand that a lot of experience that many of us have had with religion and practices like this as a child come from a place of trauma. Mine did, too. Mine do, too. And there is something there beyond the trauma that human beings inflicted on that precious little girl. And that is what I am striving to connect with and understand. I am proud to be a Christian witch, because it feels absolutely right for me. And I am excited to continue discovering what that exactly means for me and maybe helping you to discover what that means for you too. Thank you so much for joining me. Please like, comment, subscribe. If you’re watching this on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel. If you are listening to this on a podcast, please go rate the podcast. And if you are interested in any of this if you have any questions you have any concerns, as long as you’re not being a dick, please reach out to me. You can find me on Instagram at squeaky cauldron. You can find me on my website, WWW squeaky cauldron dot com. And if you’re interested in booking a tarot reading with me, either one of those channels is a great way to contact me. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening.
And as always, my dear sweet, beautiful souls. Use your voice.