Musings On Magic and Cultural Appropriation

In the pagan community, one often hears about "cultural appropriation" and how terrible it is. As a pagan myself, and having heard the numerous terrible things about people appropriating Native American culture and practices, and misrepresenting tribal culture and tradition, it's no wonder that cultural appropriation has such a bad name.

What does this mean for those of us who practice magic of a Jewish flavor, like Kaballah? For those of us who are not Jewish, who do not even have Jewish family or anything rooting us to it by blood or marriage, what business do we have using Kabballah? What business do we have speaking the god names, and working within a magical mythos that we have no ties to, other than practice? What does this mean for me as someone who identifies as pagan? I'm basically someone who has taken old gods of the Egyptians, the people who enslaved and killed Jews according to the Torah. How do I even reconcile the fact that I work with Egyptian gods, and yet work in Kabbalah, a system which I have appropriated from a culture that I'm not even a part of.

People who work in Kabbalah, and who are not of Jewish blood, are guilty of cultural appropriation. The question becomes, does that make it wrong? To answer that, we have to look at why cultural appropriation has been a problem in the past. To look at a more modern example, lets look again to the Native Americans. There are plenty of New Agers who have no idea what they're doing, who have no training, who try to run sweat lodges, and end up killing people who thought that they were some kind of leader. Great example, and a recent one. The person who ran the sweat lodge, appropriated native practices to fit his agenda- making money off of the gullible who thought he was some kind of guru. Then there are other people who claim to be shaman of a native flavor, without understanding what that actually means, and without having ties to any actual native shamanic tradition outside of the "new age" phenomenon. It appears that this mostly becomes a problem when dealing with people who claim to be a leader, a spiritual authority in an area that they have no business with.

There's a reason why cultural appropriation is so common right now. There's a reason why people are turning left and right to different religions and cultures to find identity. At least here in America, we don't have a culture. We don't have a mythos or framework we can turn to. Even our bedtime stories, our fairy tales, all come from a continent away. Cultural appropriation becomes a problem because we have no culture without adopting from another. The problem isn't so much cultural appropriation, but the con men who make a living off of it: the people who both exploit and discredit the cultures they are taking from. There will always be con men though, and there will always be people to fall for their cons.

Western magical practice is not exempt from this. How much "knowledge" was supposedly taken from Tibet, according to magical history writings in the early to mid 1900s? How much do Hermetic groups claim their lineages back to ancient Egypt, when it is likely not true? Western magic is rife with appropriation!

Now we're back to the question though: Is cultural appropriation wrong? I think the answer is no. Cultural "exploitation" is wrong, but the appropriation in and of itself is not. Appropriation isn't something that is going to stop, and is a big part of how we learn and grow. The thing we have to do as responsible mages, is we have to check ourselves. Do we have the authority to do what we're doing? Is something you're doing damaging to others who you may have taken ideas from? We also have to put our foot down when we see con men and women in our communities. If these people have less of a chance of flying under the radar, we will have done more to help the magical communities we know and love, as well as prevent others from becoming victims.