A Guide to Witchcraft in the Blockchain Age
Many years ago, during a time of great confusion and loss in my life, I stayed with a friend who identified as a witch. She performed a divination ritual for me that left a deep impression as it mapped out the sequence of events that would play out in my life for about a decade. At the time, many women and queer people in my life hid their identity as witches, but in this late pandemic era, more and more people are comfortable proclaiming this side of themselves publicly. In fact, the emergence of “witch” as a public identity is helping to remove the stigma of that phrase, at least in certain circles.
Spell Bound: A New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future (Smith Street Books), written by Chaweon Koo and illustrated by Kring Demetrio, contributes to the growing literature on modern magic and witchcraft. With rich illustrations and a multicultural perspective that encompasses both Eastern and Western traditions, it helps readers curious about the craft to both see and understand the wide range of expressions that magic can take, including in the context of new technologies.
Spell boundthe chapters are organized by the five Chinese wuxing, often translated as “elements” or “phases”: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Each chapter is then organized along the phases of Western alchemy: nigredoor burning; albedo, or the flash of insight; and rubedothe purified form that remains.
In the chapter titled “Fire,” for example, Koo crosses time, from ancient caves to modern VR spaces. The nigredo the section starts with the fire that our homo sapiens ancestors used to navigate the Lascaux caves in France, where they painted the ghostly animals that are now famous in the history of art and culture. The author uses this story to discuss the roots of ritual in contemporary magical traditions.
The albedo the section introduces the idea that rituals can and should be glamorous; as Koo reminds us, even the lotus position in meditation is itself a form of performance. “For any witch setting down her path,” she notes, “if you want to understand rituals, there’s no better place to start than a playlist of BTS videos.”
The rubedo part of “Four” explores the idea that ritual can enter the metaverse, with new implications for everything from sacrifice to creating sacred space: “The mark of a powerful, modern witch is her ability to perform high-performance rituals, rooted in history and tradition . She is not afraid of change and technology.”
Koo combines reflections, meditations and exercises, accompanied by Demetrio’s rich illustrations, which bring the book’s concepts to life. For example, a meditating figure of five with hair flowing out of an astronaut helmet reflects on what magic might look like on the moon. In a reflection on what magic means today, koi fish, symbols of happiness and perseverance, soar through Koo’s observation that magic is fundamentally about mastering our mental focus – perhaps the most important lesson in creating a better future.
One of the boldest design elements is the author’s use of layout to emphasize certain aspects of the text – words slide along the body and wind around in circles and spirals. Although I found this confusing at first, it forced me to pause, rotate the book, and move it around to understand the sentences. The materiality of the book is reminiscent of what Koo writes about the material world: namely that we exist in bodies and in the physical world. Books are not only channels of knowledge, but are physical things we hold in our hands and which we can, and perhaps should, leaf through, turn around and handle thoroughly.
Spell bound is a pleasure to read cover to cover, but it works best as a reference book, a beautiful object in itself to read for inspiration. Readers can slide from topics like incense and NFTs to lucid dreaming and Tibetan chöd meditation (a death meditation that involves imagining one’s own body being chopped up and fed to spirits and demons). As both introductions and provocations, each of these topics is likely to pique the reader’s curiosity about the breadth and range of areas to be explored under Witchcraft.
Why is modern magic so on the rise today? We live in a time of great uncertainty, to be sure, and the spiritual comfort that magic offers can help us navigate turbulent times. As archaeologist and historian Chris Gosden has argued, magic has played a role in human society since before science and even religion, helping us understand how we shape the world around us, which in turn shapes us. And one particular observation from Koo helped me connect the 21st-century witchcraft phenomenon to a larger move toward decentralization—of media, technology, spirituality, and identity.
“Witches are inherently decentralized,” she writes; “It is not a witch council, which rules as an authority for everything. Instead, the magic moves quickly, peer to peer, with more powerful nodes holding more code. But every node, no matter how small, is able to act in the ecosystem – to perform magical rituals. This is exactly how blockchain technology works.”
Spell Bound: A New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future by Chaweon Koo, with illustrations by Kring Demetrio (2022), is published by Smith Street Books and is available online and in bookstores.
