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The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
Enchanted Suffering:
Queer Magick as Educated Hope
Jasper Jay Bryan
BA, MPS, Expressive Arts Therapist Student
Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada
jade.bryan@mail.utoronto.ca
Abstract: Is there magick in suffering? Moreover, how can an enchanted worldview assist care
providers in expanding horizons of hope for their clients, patients, congregations, or
communities? Using a magickal hermeneutics, case studies of self-identified “queer witches”
have much to teach us about hope. Following José Esteban Muñoz's conception of Queer Utopia
and Ernst Bloch's docta spes, these individuals demonstrate a hope that is rooted in adversity,
tended by enchantedness. As spiritual care providers, we can learn to purposefully integrate
magickal principles into our work with marginalized individuals, and all of those who are
experiencing suffering. We can hold magickal space---an enchanted, educated utopia---to
cultivate our clients’ inner power and expand horizons of hope.
Keywords: queer, magick, spiritual care, LGBTQ, queer utopia, hope, suffering
Introduction
Loki, the Norse trickster god, was known for weaving clever schemes, trapping other
gods in precarious situations. He was a shapeshifter. Loki changed his form, gender, and sex in
service of these tricks, playfully challenging whatever the Vikings (and their gods) considered
“normal.” He was a web spinner. His name, translated, means knot or tangle, and indeed he
tied many knots in Norse mythology’s threads, often bringing about a god’s downfall – if not
provoking a good laugh with his outlandish antics.1
Other pantheons have similar irreverent figures. Heretics, outcasts, oddballs, queers,
witches: radicals have always tied knots in how a society thinks and feels about the way their
world is, or the way it should be. One could contend that most, if not all, faith traditions – and
cultures – have analogous characters in their mythos. Throughout time and place, archetypal
figures have been represented as knot makers: characters, real and imagined, who challenge
“straight” stories. It seems that even the straightest and best-woven threads inevitably
accumulate knots, which become sites of anarchic collapse and liberatory recreation. Knots
remind us that the here and now is but a point on the thread, and sure enough, tangles will
1
Heide Eldar, “More Inroads to Pre-Christian Notions, After All? The Potential of Late Evidence” in Á Austrvega:
Saga and East Scandinavia: Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference, ed. Agneta Ney (Sweden:
Gävle University Press, 2009), 363.
26
The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
emerge then and there.2 Beyond a straight thread lies utopia; hope is raveled in snarls and
points of disjuncture, expanding perspectives on our web’s horizons. Soon, we may spot more
threads – opportunities for something, somewhere, else. Over the rainbow, and through the
looking glass.
The Witch is one archetype that shows up in countless cultures. “Witch” has a tangled
history: it’s been a title forced upon people to marginalize and persecute them, yet also a
heterodox self-identifier worn proudly by practitioners of varying spiritual traditions, most of
which are marked by magickal cosmologies.3 Similarly, the word “queer,” originally a slur for
gender and sexual non-conforming people, has been reclaimed as an anti-identarian identity,
praxis, and worldview.4 Both point to a conception of hope beyond what philosopher Ernst
Bloch terms “abstract hope” and towards a theology of “concrete” or “educated” hope (docta
spes): a form of utopian being, feeling, and thinking that transcends problematic progress
discourses.5
Presenting case studies of self-identified “queer witches” and tracing the history of
magick, this paper attempts to expand views on hope, suffering, and utopia to inform an
“educated” spiritual care practice. From a queer theoretical optic, Utopia can be a magickal
hermeneutics with which to interpret histories and personal narratives. It is a flower that grows
from the mud of suffering, but only when fertilized by enchantedness. It is the willful expansion
of horizons beyond the “quagmire of the present”6 towards new worlds, and new modes of
being. Lastly, Utopia is tangible, available to us at all moments in the form of “wishful images”7
– the arts, popular culture, fairy tales, mythology, and spiritual longings. Magick is accessible to
everybody. As therapists and spiritual care providers, we can learn to purposefully integrate
magickal principles into our work with LGBTQ2SIA+ individuals on the margins, and all people
who experience suffering. We can hold magickal space to cultivate our clients’ inner power and
expand horizons of hope.
2
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University
Press, 2009), 1.
3
Tomás Prower, Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World, Kindle Edition (Woodbury
MN: Llewellyn Publications), 2018.
4
Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer,” in Keywords for American Culture Studies (New York: New York University Press,
2014).
5
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, ed. N Plaice, S Plaice, and P Knight (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), 1.
6
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
7
Ernst Bloch, Jack Zipes, and Frank Mecklenburg, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
27
The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
Figure 1: "Jay" by Jay Bryan
An illustration of a merman jumping from a tower that is on fire, being struck by lightning, and rooted in the crashing
waves below. A version of the Tower tarot card.
28
The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
Utopia is a Magickal Hermeneutics
What is a PROVOCATEUR?
A provocateur is someone who provokes reaction in others through
unconventional behaviour/performance and fantastic expression. Willing
to say what others would be shot for saying, they are Picaros, confidence
men, satirists, entartistes, double agents, imposters, charlatans, jokers,
ringmasters, jesters, fools, actors, tricksters, and players. How does one
PLAY the PROVOCATEUR? When PLAYING the PROVOCATEUR, you can
play any role at any time, including yourself in masquerade… By making
others aware that we are only PLAYING, we must trust that they will
believe us. We become vulnerable to them, and hope that they will PLAY
the provoked, and challenge their own perceptions instead of trying to
dismiss us.
Who can PLAY?
Anyone can PLAY.8
What does it mean for something to be “magickal”? Derived from the ancient Greek
magike, the word referred to priests’ craft, but in the early Christian era it became associated
with deviance, sorcery, and witchcraft. While condemned in the Torah, Judaism and
Christianity’s relationship with magickal practices fluctuated from context to context, divided
into benevolent (mystery and “high” ceremony) versus malevolent (witchcraft and works of the
devil), sanctioned or condemned based on its contextual spiritual tradition.9 Unlike stage magic,
magick is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”10 It exists in
the liminal space between free will and fate. Magick is, by all accounts, queer. In Cruising
Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes that:
Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us
to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is
a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s
totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.11
I argue that magick is a queer striving, a desire for then and there manifested as free will. Magick,
in the form of ritual, arts, play, and creation, is the ability to imagine beyond the here and now,
materializing emergent visions into action.
8
Magixnartz, “Welcome to Optative Theatrical Laboratories!” Magixnartz, accessed April 11, 2020,
http://www.angelfire.com/folk/magixnartz/otlzplayidea.html.
9
Dale Wallace, “Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial
Conundrum,” Journal for the Study of Religion 28, no. 1 (2015): 25.
10
Aleister Crowley and Leila Waddell, Magick: Liber Aba: Book 4, Second Edition (Newburyport: Weiser, 2013), 127.
11
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
29The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
Magick is also play: tricks that frolic with “reality” (or our conceptions of it). The treatise
at the beginning of this paragraph demonstrates magick’s playful, radical qualities. Operative
Theatrical Laboratories is a performance art collective that incited spectators to act on a then
and there. Their and other artists’ spirits of play have been adapted by the Radical Faerie
tradition. The Radical Faeries are a group of gay magick practitioners who find spiritual meaning
in sexuality, sharing values that include environmentalism, feminism, and dismantling
hierarchies. Many identify as witches, and practice Pagan, Christian, Islamic, and/or other faith
traditions. Members of the sect reclaim “faerie,” a common homophobic slur, playing with its
double meaning – gayness and folklore – in collective spiritual practices. Faeries are tricksters
from European folklore: enchanted, mischievous creatures, benevolent or malevolent, who
shapeshift, appear, disappear and play with humans’ perceptions of time.12 Fairies tie knots in
linearity, much like queer-identified folks, witches, artists, mystics, radical activists, and others
who “play the provocateur.” They trifle with constructions of so-called “reality,” unbinding us (if
only for a moment) from the “quagmire of the present.” In doing so, opportunities for hope
emerge – even if hope takes the form of suffering as old worldviews collapse. Ernst Bloch would
call this sort of revolutionary hope docta spes: educated, or concrete, hope.
Ernst Bloch differentiates two kinds of hope: “abstract” and “concrete.”13 Our dominant,
neoliberal conception of utopia is founded upon “abstract hope”: the rose-coloured progress
narrative that strives for a “better future.” This striving, according to Bloch, is wishful thinking,
contingent upon the ultimate obliteration of “negative” affect, conflict, and suffering – a
neoliberal, colonialist, and patriarchal imperative that reinforces the status quo.14 “Concrete
hope” (docta spes) is a critical alternative to such utopian daydreaming. It is a breed of hope
that is already always manifesting through revolutionary praxis and human culture. Concrete
hope is transcendent: a mode of being and acting.
Queer theorists have used “concrete hope” in pursuit of queer futurity. Queerness, a
political and philosophical orientation that evolved out of the AIDS crisis, is an embodiment of
impermanence, challenging heteronormative time and space. Munoz writes that:
Queerness is utopian, and there is something queer about the
utopian. Frederick Jameson describes the utopian as the oddball or the
maniac. Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and
imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire
that is both utopian and queer.15
Queer theorists ask: is there such thing as a queer future? What does queer hope look like? If
there is no future, can there be hope, or utopian drive amidst suffering? Using a queer,
12
K. M. Briggs, The Fairies in English Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).
13
Bloch, The Principle of Hope.
14
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 26.
15
Ibid.
30The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
magickal, utopian hermeneutics, perhaps we can turn to figures that live outside “straight time
and place,”16 learning from their narratives to open horizons of hope.
Figure 2: "Connor" by Jay Bryan
A boy dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West from Wizard of Oz, hovering over a crystal ball. There are a raven,
castle, and drawings of goddesses and witches in the background.
Utopia is the Flower of Enchanted Suffering
The Lotus grows out of the mud. Without the mud, there is no Lotus.
Suffering is a kind of mud, that we must use in order to grow the flower
of Understanding and Love. 17
16
Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender
Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
17
Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2014).
31The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
We [queer witches] give sacred permission by our liberating presence, to
become a unique, fluidic, expansive, and outrageous flower in the
garden of life. We must become who and what we are powerfully,
beautifully, and uniquely…We are the presence of the Queer-Fire that
gives the permission to human-kind to explore the interior landscape and
unearth the inspiration at our centres. This rainbow-colored flame is
unstoppable.18
“Witch” has come to mean many things. It has been used as a pejorative label: uttered by
colonialist institutions and branded onto suspect individuals who challenged social order. In
cultures across history, archetypal witches were represented as heterodox figures – mainly
women, and particularly old women like the hag or crone – who practiced magic, summoned
spirits, put curses on people, worshipped the devil, ate babies… and so on. Even today, it’s used
to scapegoat, exoticize, and persecute spiritual practices that are misunderstood, and as a tool
to incite fear to justify the anxious oppression of groups of people.19
The term “witch” has been used cross-culturally to blame misgivings on “Others” –
particularly women, people with disabilities, gender and sexual non-conforming people,
racialized groups, and indigenous people. From the Salem Witch Trials to McCarthyism and
sexist comments aimed at Hilary Clinton in the 2016 American Presidential election, North
America has had its fair share of “witch” hunts.20 Witchcraft as a spirituality, like categories
used to distinguish race or class, is one constructed by colonizers. In many societies, faith
traditions outside of dominant institutions, and particularly indigenous spiritualities, are
condemned as “witchcraft.”21 Post-Enlightenment secular discourses depicted witches as make-
believe: fictional creatures who are better left in the realm of children’s tales.22 Contemporary
popular culture places witches at the crossroads of demonization and invisibility. Caricatures of
witches in the media perpetuate long-standing oppression, even if less apparent (but arguably
more insidious) than public burnings at the stake.
In the late nineteenth century, public interest in Western Esotericism rose as a rebellion
against the positivist cult of rationality. By the 1920s, middle and upper classes turned to
Spiritualists to communicate with loved ones who died during the war. At the same time,
psychoanalysis was well-established in methods of unconscious exploration – practices that
drew upon a sort of secularized Spiritualism. The Surrealists, meanwhile, created art and
literature that resonated with people’s spiritual yearnings. Occultists founded societies offering
spiritual community outside traditional religious institutions, first-wave Feminists sought
18
Orion Foxwood, “Queer-Fire Witchery: The Rainbow-Flame That Melts the Soul-Cage The Emerging Fluidity of
Conciousness,” in Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries (Anchorage: Mystic Productions Press, 2018), 761.
19
Thomas Aneurin Smith, Amber Murrey, and Hayley Leck, “‘What Kind of Witchcraft Is This?’ Development, Magic
and Spiritual Ontologies,” Third World Thematics 2, no. 2–3 (2017): 141–56.
20
Kristen J. Sollee, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, (ThreeL Media): 2017.
21
Smith, Murrey, and Leck, “‘What Kind of Witchcraft Is This?’”.
22
Edward Bever, “Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, no. 2
(2018): 263–93.
32The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
religion devoid of patriarchal hierarchy, and interest in ancient Egypt proliferated through
Europe. Margaret Murray, a contentious anthropologist, published her theories on witchcraft,
inspiring the Wiccan religion – a return to fertility-based Paganism through ceremony and
magick. Wiccan practitioners reclaimed “witch,” and so too did others who identified with a
multitude of “New Age” Western Esoteric cults.
Popular interest in Esotericism resurged once again in the 1960s as people challenged
institutionalized authorities. Hippies looked to nature-based Paganism, and second-wave
feminism reclaimed lost goddesses.23 In the modern West – as in pre-modernity and antiquity –
witchcraft was marginalized, people were marginalized with fearful cries of “witchcraft,” and
the marginalized flocked to witchcraft for respite. Today, popular culture is saturated with
witchcraft, and magickal practice has piqued the interest of those seeking alternative routes to
spiritual connection. Millenial women and queer folks have cultivated a postmodern witchcraft
embedded in principles of radical social justice and intersectional feminism.24 Astrology,
spellcasting, tarot cards, and crystals have paved the way for contemporary magickal practices:
the Witch has returned, and ze is unruly. It is no surprise that queer-identified people, who also
experience marginalization, have found a home in witchcraft. These are individuals who have
experienced ostracization and persecution from institutional powers that be, including trauma
from discrimination within their religious communities or faith traditions.
At the same time, many feel dissatisfied with the LGBTQ+ community’s atheist leanings,
and seek spiritual fulfillment outside of conventional faith traditions.25 Reclaiming “queer” and
“witch,” like casting a spell, reroutes the oppressor’s curse back at them. It is the very suffering
witches face that is the source of their power:
Down to their core, magic and witchcraft are so very queer. They are
often hidden in the shadows. They follow their own rules, which often
don’t align with what is commonly known or accepted. They celebrate a
liminality that often makes larger society uncomfortable. They revel in
style…To live magically is to embrace the symbolic, the poetic; it is to see
beyond the limitations imposed upon us by the tyranny of rational
thought and emerge liberated into a world populated by spirits, angels,
faeries, and other fantastical intelligences that we perceive as being part
of the living, conscious mechanism that is the universe. It flies in the face
of convention, turns it on its head. Magic affirms that we have the power
within ourselves to make changes happen. When our religions and
institutions, or even our families, fail us, magic encourages us to live our
own truths and to take action in the world to make those changes that
are needed.26
23
David Waldron, The Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival (Durham: Carolina Academic Press,
2008).
24
Jessica Bennett, “When Did Everybody Become a Witch?” New York Times, October 24, 2019.
25
Storm Faerywolf, “Column: Magic Is So Queer,” The Wild Hunt: Pagan News & Perspectives (September 2019).
26
Ibid.
33The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
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Spiritual crisis begets transformation.27 Often, magick facilitates meaning-making and post-
traumatic growth.28 Queer gods and goddesses, gender-changing priestesses of lore open
horizons for new types of worlds, wherein magick grows survival into resilience. As such, Utopia
is not the absence of suffering, but blooms out of suffering when it mates with enchantedness:
a sense of wonder, meaning, and astonishment. Writes Munoz, “astonishment helps one
surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and
place.”29
27
Kenneth I. Paragament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy: Understanding and Addressing the Sacred (New
York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 111.
28
Robert J. Wicks, “Seeing in the Darkness: Appreciating the Paradox of Posttraumatic Growth,” in Perspective: The
Calm within the Storm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124–48.
29
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 5.
34The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
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Figure 3: "Jae" by Jay Bryan
A beautiful woman wearing a long flowing dress, surrounded by different animals in a field of flowers. There is a pool
of blood and a sky full of stars and a moon.
35The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
Research Article
Utopia is Expanding Horizons
Witches are creatures of liminal spaces. Witches keep one foot planted
here in the everyday world, and the other foot planted in the world of
spirits. This liminality, being between states, is one of the things that gives
witches power. Many, but not all, queer people can identify with this as
well due to our very existence.30
Witches play at the queer edges. In magickal practice and society, they dwell in liminal (queer)31
time and space:
Liminality is a position of structural outsiderhood and inferiority. To be
liminal is to be vulnerable, without the protection of role or office. At the
same time, liminality implies potency, the capacity to become more than
one has been. The liminal person is ‘naked’...without defenses yet
has…‘the power of the weak.’32
Those relegated to liminal space are divested of social status for a transitory period, and upon
their return bring wisdom back to their tribe. The very same people who are forced to the
margins of mainstream Western society, feared and reviled, are in historic and contemporary
cultures revered for their liminality: priestesses, witches, shamans, elders, artists, healers, two-
spirit people, those outside binary genders.33 This is not to romanticize violent histories or
wistfully daydream of a “better past,” or to lean into Orientalist and racist exoticization. We
can, however, take pause and pay homage to ancestors who have enchanted our world. As
Bloch proposes, utopia exists beyond distinctions of past, present, and future. Imagining
beyond “the darkness of the lived instance”34 does not mean forgetting the past. It is not,
either, to evade the present moment. It is to realize that time is animated, always becoming –
unfurling just out of reach.
Munoz uses Bloch’s terms “no-longer-conscious” and “not-yet-conscious” to describe
how Utopia rejects entirely the here and now as ontologically static, breaking free of
heteronormative constructs for a present fueled by then and there. Utopia exists in the spaces
between, not far off in the distance, but laced among the everyday: “the mark of the utopian is
the quotidian.”35 Psychologist Kenneth Pargament, too, writes that everything in life can take
on sacred qualities, and sanctifying the everyday enriches how we experience the world,
looking at life through a sacred lens.36 Moreover, hope is relational, spun into moments of
30
Aaron Oberon, “A Drag Queen Possessed and Other Queer Club Magic,” in Queer Magic: Power Beyond
Boundaries (Anchorage: Mystic Productions Press, 2018), 2613.
31
Halberstam, “Queer Temporality.”
32
Stephen K. Levine, “Bearing Gifts to the Feast,” in Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul
(London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1992), 49.
33
Prower, Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World.
34
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 5.
35
Ibid., 22.
36
Pargament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy, 35.
36The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
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belonging, connection, and process.37 Liminality, thus, need not be an inaccessible borderland,
but can be embodied in the mundane of daily lives.
Perhaps we can look to “creatures of liminal spaces” for glimmers of hope. Theologians
Pamela McCarroll and Helen Cheung define hope as “the experience of the opening of horizons
of meaning and participation in relationship to time, other human and non-human beings,
and/or the transcendent.”38 Liminal spaces lie beyond the horizons – through otherness,
magickal ritual, prayer, meditation, therapy, play, telling and listening to stories, coming of age,
moments of deep grief, performance and catharsis. Being immersed in liminality, then, can
surface a looking glass to peer into new horizons. Apart from imagining, educated hope
necessitates action: empowered agency to enact one’s will upon the world. This can look like
embracing suffering, while also summoning reservoirs of power within to transform one’s
worldview, and potentially the world around oneself (as Wiccans believe, “as above, so
below”).39 Magick, like educated hope, is the power of enacting one’s agency to manifest the
not-yet-conscious into material being. In other words, magick is imagination made real. If we
are indeed striving beings,40 in constant pursuit of sacred meanings, in accessing desire we can
uproot the world we live in – tying it backwards and upside down in knots, opening new
horizons to the there and then. Psychologist Viktor Frankl writes that despair is suffering
without meaning.41 Perhaps magick can be seen as the process of conjuring meaning from
suffering.
Hope is a White Rabbit, Golden Ticket and Ruby Slippers
Fairy tales are queer, at the very least, in the nineteenth-century usage
of the term, to mean odd, strange making, eccentric, different, and yet
attractive … if straight time acts like a straightjacket, the queer time of
fairy tales invites participation in the realm of enchantment … it
refreshes potentiality.42
What does utopia look like for us at this moment? And what does it mean for spiritual
care practice? How can we empower people to bring magick out of their stories of suffering?
Looking to art and literature, we can witness the queer, magickal utopian impulse manifested.
Spiritual traditions and popular culture touch upon humanity’s innate capacity for hope. Of
particular note are queer reclamations of “wishful images” – fairy tales, stories of the hero’s
journey, myth, and spiritual quests. For many queer folks, queer readings of enchanted utopias
have been wells of resilience. Otherworlds like Oz; Wonderland; sci-fi, musical, and fantasy
universes turn the normative “now” on its head, offering queer schemas for new realities.
37
Pamela R. McCarroll and Helen Cheung, “Re-Imaging Hope in the Care of Souls: A Literature Review Redefining
Hope,” in Psychotherapy: Cure of the Soul, (Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, 2013), 107.
38
Ibid., 106.
39
Waldron, The Sign of the Witch.
40
Pargament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy.
41
Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
42
Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2012).
37The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
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Provocateurs – Disney Villains, Willy Wonka, the Wicked Witch of the West – resonate with
marginalized people as some of the only mainstream representations of queerness. Enchanted
fantasylands are blueprints for worlds outside straight time and place: one, perhaps, just on the
horizon (or over the rainbow).
Art serves a utopian function.43 Even if utopia is beyond here and now, its horizons can
be glimpsed in magickal aesthetics. Expansive hope narratives give insight into how we, as
spiritual care providers and therapists, can encourage people to summon “wishful images.”
Through storytelling, potentiality unfolds — described by Giorgio Agamben as enduring
indeterminacy in affect and methodology (dwelling in the subconscious region of the “not-
yet”).44 With its postmodern bent, the therapeutic uses of enchanted hope are especially
compatible with humanistic therapies such as narrative, existential, expressive arts, and
relational psychotherapies.
Narrative therapy teaches that cultural stories can help people express experiences that
are too raw to verbalize, holding space for meaning while avoiding re-traumatization.45 It is
therefore necessary to pay attention to the stories people hold close: when clients speak of
magickal worlds in film, television, books, and so on, it invites us into their worlds of play.
Magickal play is no less meaningful than “serious” spiritual practice; after all, “play is serious
learning.”46 Play therapy, too, can be seen as a type of magick, providing a liminal holding space
for transformations to occur.47 Stories aesthetically and affectively reveal peoples’
vulnerabilities, deepening the potential for creating new meaning in difficult circumstances.
Narrative therapists seek out “sparkling moments.”48 Such moments are enchanted knots in a
client’s story that, when collaboratively untangled, reveal more helpful alternatives to problem-
saturated narrative threads.49 If we dig through stories with our clients to find the magick, we
can name the many ways they cultivate resilience, in metaphors and language that resonate
with them. Moreover, channeling the utopian impulse in therapy through play, sanctification,
and the arts can make magick happen. A story, when it’s told, is an act of magick: a spell that
expands horizons to the boundless then and there.
43
Bloch, Zipes, and Mecklenburg, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature.
44
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3.
45
David Denborough, Collective Narrative Practice: Responding to Individuals, Groups, and Communities Who Have
Experienced Trauma, (Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications, 2008).
46
Leslie Irvine, “The Power of Play,” Anthrozoos 14, no. 3 (2001): 151–60.
47
Ibid.
48
Denborough, Collective Narrative Practice.
49
Ibid.
38The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
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Figure 4: "Tallan" by Jay Bryan
A person in vivid rainbow colours with long hair, and pink lips. A collage with illustration. There are psychedelic
mushrooms, flowers, lotuses, and the Cheshire Cat in the background. There is a golden ticket from Willy Wonka, and
the words "We're all Mad here". The star of David hangs on their neck.
39The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021
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Conclusion
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who
don’t believe in magic will never find it.50
Queer magic is too often invisibilized and propagandized by colonialist doctrine. It is
thus necessary to read first-hand narrative accounts if wisdom is to be gleaned. Magickal
stories, fiction, and nonfiction open us to spiritual knots that challenge crises of “stuckness”
brought about by goal-oriented versions of hope. Rather than a rose-coloured abstract hope,
nuanced and more sustained hopes can flourish from suffering. It can be argued that hope is
not separate from suffering and, further, that suffering mobilizes hope in the form of radical
consciousness, particularly when brewed with enchantedness.
Dominant “regimes of knowledge”51 are but one reality that simply does not work for
everybody, particularly those without access to neoliberal currencies of here and now.52 In
spiritual care and psychotherapy, as we open our own horizons to the magickal potentiality of
new kinds of realities, we can “watch with glittering eyes” clients’ stories unfolding before us.
With a magickal hermeneutics, we can hope to encourage every person to draw upon their
unique resilience. Enchanted acts within a therapeutic context will imagination into being. When
we dream of new worlds together, magick opens horizons towards then and there: Utopia.
Author’s note: I wrote this piece in the midst of a gender transition, separation from my partner,
and the beginning of a worldwide pandemic. Drifting through in-between space, I wondered
what it would be like to dance the line of here and there, now and then, hope and suffering. It
began as an art project. I realized that I happen to know quite a lot of ‘witches’ (including myself)
in various pockets of queer subculture. I asked some of these inspiring folks if I could have an
hour long Zoom chat. They spoke about their spirituality, queerness, and how magick manifests
in their life. I asked things such as what traditions they draw from, how they find or make magic
in suffering, what mythological creature they relate with the most, and “what is your living
utopian fairy tale in a dystopian now?”
The conversations inspired a series of portraits. Each portrait is an aesthetic response to each
queer witch’s lived experience and perspectives. Enchanted Suffering is a continuation of the art,
exploring more deeply theological motifs of enchanted suffering and queer utopia. Grounded in
my
50
“10own hope,Roald
Fantastic it also
Dahltended to Celebrate
Quotes To it throughout the creative
His Birthday,” process.
Huffington I had tasted
Post, September 2013,enchantedness
accessed Octoberin
27, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/roald-dahl-
my art and spiritual practices, but the intentionality of this process held me as I ventured deeper.
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The visual art, writing, relational dialogues and my own embodied spiritual practices all speak
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with one another and continue to create a magickal vision of hope in real time. Constantly
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evolving, I hope to expand upon this project so that, like hope, it is always in-between:
51
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Vintage,
transforming and shaping itself into what we need in times of suffering.
1980).
52
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 5.
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