Nerd & Tie Network

BS-Free Witchcraft

Bullshit-Free Witchcraft is a monthly podcast on the Modern Witchcraft movement, minus any extraneous, well, bullshit. Look, aesthetics are great, and none of us would be here if we didn’t love the mystery — but there’s a lot of misinformation floating around, and this podcast aims to dispell it.

It’s a show designed to cater to all ranges of experience — from those who have been witches for decades to those just starting out. We hope there’s something here for everyone.

New episodes come out the last Saturday of the month.

BS-Free Witchcraft
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86. Shadow Work (And Maybe Why We Shouldn’t Tell Other Witches to Do It)

If you’re in witchcraft spaces, over the last six years or so, you’ve likely heard someone talking about “shadow work” (or more obnoxiously telling someone “they need to do some shadow work”). And while some folks seem to consider it an essential element of witchcraft, for those of us who have been in the community a long time it’s just a little bit puzzling. Likewise, a lot of the people pushing shadow work don’t seem to know where it comes from to begin with. With that in mind, this month I’m going into the origins of shadow work, what it is, and maybe why some folks need to stop pushing it so hard.

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84. We Clicked on Every Facebook Witchcraft Ad (with Bree NicGarran)

Last month we talked about a good source new witches might want to add to their libraries, because I know how hard it is to separate the signal from the noise. But this month I thought we’d go look at some of the noise instead! I clicked on every terrible ad for witchcraft stuff I could find on Facebook for a week, and decided to inflict what I found on Hex Positive’s Bree NicGarran.

It’s so, so bad y’all.

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83. An Honest Review of Thorn Mooney’s “Witches Among Us”

One year ago I put out this podcast’s first book review. It was for Annwyn Avalon’s Celtic Goddess Grimoire, and I absolutely hated it. It was everything I despise in modern witchcraft publishing, and it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

I felt like I needed to fix that.

So I decided to make it my mission to find a new witchcraft book I might actually like — to find something I could actually talk positively about to this show’s audience. And that’s when I found Thorn Mooney’s Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca (ISBN: ‎ 978-0738777375) last fall.

And it turns out I really like it.

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82. The Pagan Invasion and Propaganda

The 1991 Christian propaganda series the Pagan Invasion by Jeremiah Films was oddly formative for me. It’s a masterclass in propaganda, and a perfect example of the kind of misinformation that was spreading during the heights of the Satanic Panic. So in this episode we’re going to break down how “documentaries” like these work to push an agenda, and how to recognize these patterns in other places.

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79. The Telepathy Tapes and the Dangers of ‘Magical Autism’

One of the biggest podcasts out there right now is The Telepathy Tapes. It’s topping the podcast charts on both Apple and Spotify’s American listings, but it perpetrates an incredibly dangerous idea about people with autism. But none of this is new, and we’ve seen this kind of trend before.

So it’s about time we talked about it.

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