Tag Archives: deconstruction

Books, Paganism, Religion, Spiritual Development, Witchcraft

Let’s talk about “An Apostate’s Guide to Witchcraft” by Moss Matthey

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[Content Note: Brief references to of cults, homophobia, self-hatred, and authoritarian control.]

Happy Monday, dear readers! I thought I’d take a brief break from my polytheology series to talk about a book I recently finished reading. That book is An Apostate’s Guide to Witchcraft: Finding Freedom Through Magic by Moss Matthey. In it, Matthey describes his own experiences leaving the cult he was raised in and finding a home in witchcraft. Along the way, he shares a bit about his own witchcraft practice and offers advice and simple exercises to those readers who might be interested in exploring whether witchcraft might be something they’re drawn to.

In a lot of ways, I found a lot of Matthey’s story relatable. After all, we are both gay men1 who grew up in fairly conservative Christian church2 that essentially taught us to hate ourselves. We both eventually found freedom in our respective witchcraft practices, which bear some unsurprising similarities.

One of the things that I appreciated about Matthey’s approach to the subject was that he was quite clear that he had no interest in spending a great deal of time dissecting the beliefs of “the cult”,3 setting these goals for the book instead:

Through these pages I will introduce you to a world of magic and spirits, where queerness is celebrated and sin does not exist. I will tell you how I left a cult and the lessons I learned along the way. Culture and community will be celebrated through folklore, myth, and folk magic. We may even take a detour into theology and philosophy, though hopefully it won’t be too boring. Above all, we will celebrate the joy and freedom of Witchcraft.

I think he accomplished those goals quite well. I cannot recommend this book enough for those who are coming out of any religion that asserted any degree of authoritarian control. I think those who, like Matthey and myself, experienced abuse and/or trauma due to their sexuality or gender will find it particularly helpful. And if a handful of people read it and find a home in witchcraft, all the better.

Another reason that this book holds special meaning for me is that I think it diversifies the stories available to those deconstructing. I often get the sense that the stories available — both those published in books and those shared less formally — tend to come from who have either found a way to remain in Christianity (albeit a more progressive form) or those who have walked away from religion altogether. While I think both of those trajectories are valid for those who find comfort and healing in them, I don’t think they are the only trajectories available. Also, I feel that the fact that those two trajectories get the lion’s share of the attention means that deconstruction discourse still often focuses exclusively on Christian theologies and Christian understandings of the world. Combined with Changing Paths by Yvonne Aburrow, this book could help provide a needed correction to that.4

Post History: I wrote the first draft of this post on September 28, 2024. I proofread, revised, and finalized it on September 29, 2024.

Footnotes

  1. I want to point out that I’m using these words carefully when describing Matthey. In the book, he notes that he has started to prefer referring to himself as “queer” rather than “gay,” though he affirms the latter is an accurate description. He also notes that his understanding of his sexuality and gender continues to be more expansive. So while everything I’ve been able to find suggests his pronouns are still he/him and it’s okay to refer to him as a man, I want to draw your attention to all this just in case I missed something and am unintentionally misgendering him here. ↩︎
  2. I will note that I don’t feel that my church exerted quite the same degree of control over its members as the cult Matthey belonged to (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) tends to. For example, my family was not instructed to shun me at any time. But that’s the interesting thing you learn when you study cults: There are different degrees of cult behavior, and my church was “bad enough.” For more information on cults, I would recommend Cultish by Amanda Montell in addition to the books by Steven Hassan that Matthey recommends. I will note that I haven’t read any of Hassan’s books, but have looked over his BITE Model of Authoritarian Control (which Matthey also mentions) in the past and consider it an invaluable tool. ↩︎
  3. Matthey only mentions the Jehovah’s Witnesses by name once in the entire book. The rest of the time, he simply refers to it as “the cult.” I’m not sure if this was his reasoning personally, but there are traditions of witchcraft that hold that naming something gives it power, so it is often better to not say the name of those who are a disruptive influence. Again, I don’t know if that motivated Matthey’s choice about how he chose to refer to his former cult in the book, but I think there’s a certain amount of wisdom in that line of reasoning. ↩︎
  4. Of course, once Yvonne’s upcoming book, Pagan Roots, is released at the beginning of next year, I think all three books would make a powerful trio. ↩︎
Books, Memories, Meta-Blogging, Religion

Considering Peretti books for analysis

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After some thought, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a deconstruction — if you can still call it a deconstruction if you find more about the book that you like than you dislike — of another book by Frank Peretti.

I’ve read a total of five Peretti books.  Each one of them is slightly different in some way.  This Present Darkness is about the war between angels and demons as it plays out in a small town.  Piercing the Darkness, its sequel, is also about angels battling demons, but this time the main focus is the battle over a particular soul (though it did have a swipe at the public education system, which was a popular topic at the time I was reading it due tot he emergence of outcomes based education).

The third book that I read was Prophet, which was not about angels and demons but about a journalist who found himself living a “prophetic” (in the terms of warning others of the consequences of their misdeeds) vocation.  The book mostly focused on the evils of the (liberal, of course) media and abortion.

The fourth book that I read was The Oath.  It was a strange book in that it was far more a Horror book than the others.  While it got preachy about the nature of sin, there was also no clear connections to actual spiritual movements (at least not that I’m aware of) like the first three were.  I often joked that The Oath seemed more like Peretti contracted Stephen King to write a book for him in comparison to the others I had read.

I should note that I read these four books when I was in high school, when I still considered myself a fundamentalist Christian.  As such, I read them as a member of Peretti’s target audience.

I didn’t read my fifth book, The Visitation until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, long after I became a witch and devotee of Freyja.  In many ways, I suppose that’s why i liked the book.  In this book, Peretti turned his critical eye away from “outsiders” and turned it upon his own religious subculture.  As a former member of that same subculture, I appreciated his look.

I’ve decided that I want to do an in-depth analysis of The Visitation.  As I said, I’m not sure I can call it a deconstruction, as many of the parts that I will be exploring are places where I actually identify and agree with Peretti’s thoughts.  However, given the nature of the main plot, which I wasn’t as impressed with, I don’t expect my comments to be entirely glowing, either.

I’m also hoping that it might be interesting to compare this book with This Present Darkness.  Who knows, maybe it’ll even spark up some sort of discussion between Yamikuronue and myself as we compare our experiences of our respective Peretti books.

Around The Blogosphere, Books, Religion

Great deconstruction

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I’ve been fascinated by Fred Clark’s deconstruction of the Left Behind series since I first came into contact with it.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve been reviewing Alisa Harris’s book chapter by chapter.  I have also been considering tackling a more thorough reconstruction of another book.  The book that kept coming back to me was Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, which I originally read while I was in late elementary school (approximately fifth or sixth grade).

While This Present Darkness is nearly three decades old, I think it’s still relevant in that it has shaped and still expresses many of the ideas central to those Christians who are members of the spiritual warfare movement.  As I spent time involved in that movement, attacking this book made a lot of sense.

Yesterday, however, I discovered that a fellow Slacktivite, a woman who goes by the name of yamikuronue on her blog, began deconstructing Peretti’s book back in September.  I read through the entirety of her deconstruction so far (thankfully, she’s only fifty pages into it) and found it to be fascinating and remarkable.

From what I’ve gathered reading yamikuronue’s blog, she was never a member of the spiritual warfare movement herself.  In many ways, I think this is proving to be an asset to her deconstruction.  I’ve looked at a lot of things that she covers and realized that I probably would have taken them for granted and glossed over them.  To give you an example of that, consider the following excerpt from her post dated 22 October:

The man has serious issues with anger management and victim-blaming;
why complacency as his major sin? Complacency goes with despair
certainly – “I can’t fix anything, so why bother” – but that means the
entire bit of irrational anger was all his own doing, with absolutely no
infernal aid. Marshall is an abusive man without the demonic
intervention; all the demon was doing was encouraging him to stop trying
to be less abusive. And this is meant to be our hero?

Understanding how spiritual warfare types often see anger, I would have glossed over this excellent point, whereas yamikuronue focuses on it quite well.  As such, I think she is doing a far better job at deconstructing the books than I would have.

So instead of doing my own deconstruction, I’m going to follow along with hers and offer my comments.  I still have a lot to offer, such as how the things she is deconstructing ties into the greater spiritual warfare mindset and the community that subscribes to it.  I would encourage my readers to follow along as  well.

And I’ll find another book to tackle when the time comes.