Dear Known and Unknown Readers,
Many of you know me for writing on occultism, witchcraft and ritual magick. You’ve heard me discussing angels and demons. We’ve talked of the modes humanity has used to reach up to the celestial realms or down to the depths of hades for millennia. So much of this mysterious world of ritual stretches deep into history. The times and places of their original contexts have shifted–the buildings are ragged ruins, the languages have died, the customs faded to shadows quietly hidden or utterly distorted in modernity.
To be in this world, I’ve had to scavenge works written in monasteries or uttered at mountaintop shrines in the mediterranean. Thumb through grimoires, manuscripts on alchemy in grand and private libraries or squint at sus PDFs in sketchy Reddit forums. To read and interpret these texts, I’ve had to gain some language skills. I’m not a quick study in languages by a long shot. But that doesn’t mean that I am not a real language nerd, with some (imperfect) proficiencies. Mine are Spanish, Latin, Greek and Japanese.
Learning languages is the ultimate act of humility. Your tongue stumbles. You’re misunderstood and pantomime like a dumb ass. You can’t help but sound so, so stupid if you don’t have the words to match your thoughts. You’ll be laughed at by people who treat you like a fool. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, the way being ignorant of a language automatically makes you an outsider.
To learn Greek I’ve been a girl in a leather jacket in a classroom full of priests. I’ve been a girl cramming for a Latin exam in a punk house, struggling to focus through the din of drunken house parties that don’t end even after the dawn breaks. I’ve been a woman repeating the most beautiful Japanese word I think I’ve ever heard, so full of wonder, only to find out it means “toilet.”
To know arcane stuff you may have to learn arcane languages. It makes sense that we use dead languages to call up spirits and angels and demons–they are things not of this life. I can and will go on about those eternal beings and share all my sidequests along the serpentine paths of research on religion and esotericism.
Right now, I want to talk to you not of angels and demons but something just as sacred. I want to talk about humanity. My interest in literature and language is applied not just to religious thought but also in education. Although dead languages are treated as the pinnacle of impressive, connecting with the living matters more. For the past few months I’ve been working with highschool age multilingual learners. English is not their first language. The juxtaposition between the state of education, immigration policies and my primary vocation of spiritual caregiving has led me to an understanding.
The landscape of metaphysics and modern spirituality is in a state of crisis. I’m not talking about the abundance of Tik Tok scammers, cultural appropriators, celebrity politicos or wellness influencers peddling batshit ideologies. Everytime I hear someone moaning about the monetization of divination or ritual work as if it's a novel turn of events connected to social media, I think “someone’s never read Tudor English trial records on sorcery (or trial records from anywhere, actually) and it shows!” Ritual work for money is as old as turning tricks. We’ve been charging for this labor since before the common era. These are not matters of urgency.
The crisis of the spiritual landscape in the Western world I am referring to is its bent towards a strictly psychoanalytic framework. So many of us have shifted from religious institutions because we’ve found them overrun with corrupted bureaucrats, twisting the words of God into the shape of a gun and taking aim at us or others. It makes sense those on the periphery would flee to the margins of belief. This is where mysticism blooms like a medicinal plant that we gather up to treat our wounded selves. It's the antidote, the thing that stitches up the devastating chasm between us and the eternal.
We’ve been surviving beneath the long shadows of oppressive regimes. Eventually an overattachment to survivalism mutates into individualism. Now our scholars, influencers, content creators and practitioners are wholly committed to a discourse that is unapologetically self-centered or disingenuously interested in the well being of others. For a while it seemed to me that intellectualism had left the chat on mystical spirituality altogether.
That’s not the case, though. There’s actually interest in some of our greatest writers like Hildegard Von Bingen and Simone Weil thanks to the virality of #CatholicCore, an aesthetic internet trend that leans hard into the romance of impassioned mysticism. It's not as austere as the image of barren cloister rooms gracing CatholicCore Pinterest boards. This incarnation travels with baggage. We’re negotiating the fraught territory of delusion, dysmorphia, eating disorders and workout regimes rebranded as asceticism. In spite of the flawed nature of this terrain, it's not devoid of intellectualism at all.
There are astute narrators unpacking semiotics, symbolism and all the trappings of spirituality through video essays, Substacks, Discord channels and podcast platforms. Most of them, though, are not discussing the human condition. They're discussing the individual condition and the cultural condition as a way of either focusing on individual or national wellness.
Jungian and archetypal psychology are interesting approaches to therapy. Somatic methodologies can anchor us holistically. They allow us to investigate our capacity to self-regulate, not just have prescriptions shovelled in our faces without the opportunity to see if other options might help. Consciousness expanding plant medicines are being decriminalized because of their power to ferry us safely through the shattering scenes of our memory, recovering lost and broken parts of ourselves.
In the end, all the inner knowledge we gain isn’t worth a damn if we use it only to be at peace, rather than working towards it. In the end, all the long form essays and philosophizing isn’t any less vain than a Botox injected iphone babe making no pretenses about caring. The latter is just more honest about who they are. There has to be a meaningful application of intellectualism or it is just another pointless brand of vanity.
There seems to be something we’ve accepted as a core truth. For all our emphasis on positivity, we’ve arrived at a conclusion that we cannot change hearts and minds. What is meant to be a community of enlightened individuals has lost touch with its roots in alchemy and Hermeticism. We don’t act as we believe in the possibility of miracles, let alone transubstantiation, transmutation, revelation or the arrival of a messiah. We’re nihilists masquerading as optimists. I am pleading with you to understand that no part of you is dead inside. It is ensouled, it is enspirited and it is capable of making great change. Very vulnerable lives and freedom depend on it. Your life and freedom depends on it.
For those who are just meeting me, I not only have a background in education but in prison related work. In both places, I am witness to haunting things. I am a walking library of funny, inspiring, and very heavy, sad stories. Like so many others, I am ebbing and flowing through a cycle of commitment, burn out and exiting, and recommitment. My heart goes out to those with greater resilience and fortitude than myself who remain steadfast. There are so many things I have to share, but this is the one I need you to hear and act on today.
I’d like to preface with a comment on immigration. Those who have the privilege of citizenship in the United States are often descended from others who immigrated here. Those ancestors further distanced the landscape of this place from its Indigenous origins. Like your forefathers, people travel here not to vex and disrupt the peace of white people, but simply to live. Most of my students are terribly homesick and wish they could return home, but the conditions there are often filled with violence or poverty. Some are asylum seekers whose families aided the U.S. military during its occupation in Afghanistan. There are so many reasons, and if we knew them all, we would rethink our positions. If we want an end to a crisis in immigration, the answer is not stricter border security. It's divesting from the neo colonial economic policies that drive people from their homes in the global south.
Immigrant children did not have the power to make a decision about being here. They were brought here, and sadly sometimes trafficked. If they make normal, teenage decisions, like going to a house party that gets busted up by the cops, they risk winding up in ICE custody. Regardless of laws that prohibit the police from colluding with ICE, there is collaboration. Because I have a background in carceral work I know what the interior of detention centers are like. They are concrete rooms, usually crammed, where detainees are on the floor with no blankets. Instances of sexual assault perpetrated by guards is a systemic issue which is continuously monitored by public health and human rights organizations. Minors in detention share space with adults who may or may not have a criminal history. They are not safe, benign places.
A couple of weeks ago I was on a field trip. It was the least relaxing trip to a lake I have ever been on. A student who was disappointed he could not join followed the school buses in his vehicle and was pulled over by the police. The police contacted ICE and he was taken into custody, where he remains today. Maykol wanted to participate in an outdoor event, to be in nature, to learn and to socialize like any kid would. Because he is eighteen he is being treated as a criminal. Maykol’s teachers are working diligently to galvanize support to bring him home. I am asking you to sign this petition they’ve created to support him and student services that advocate for children in similarly vulnerable positions. I can and will share every incantation and ritual that resides in the nooks and crannies of my peculiar brain. But if you truly wish to be in the good graces of angels, count yourself as one who loves humanity.
Fides, Spes et Caritas,
Alejandra
Thank you for reading my newsletter. Your time and attention is deeply appreciated. If you’d like to support me as I take time to work on my next writing and research endeavors, you can always book me for a divination at www.gemineyetarot.com or subscribe for free (or donate if you wish) to this newsletter. News of upcoming lectures, classes and offerings are here or on social media platforms @gemineyetarot. Any typos are intentional to make sure you still know how to close read. Xo.
The belongings of students of mine who stopped coming to school in the middle of the semester. Both were impacted by personal and immigration issues that disrupted their education.
