After years of thinking I didn’t want to have a child, I decided I did, but getting pregnant proved to be difficult. Unlike so much of my life, I couldn’t just set a goal and work to achieve it. I’d tried everything: obgyn tests, lots of supposedly well-timed sex, a healthy diet, acupuncture, herbs, psychotherapy, exercise. You should see The Oracle, an ex told me. She got my friend pregnant. Her name is Amanda Yates Garcia but she goes by The Oracle of Los Angeles. She’s a witch.

At that point, I was a devotee of psychoanalysis and felt that seeing a witch would betray the cerebral side of myself that I now realize I held in such esteem because it was part of my husband’s value system and identity. Despite the fact that I’d recently gotten the alchemical symbols Earth and Water tattooed on the backs of my ankles, I didn’t think of myself as witchy. But I was ready to try anything, so I emailed The Oracle. My three sessions with her had a profound impact on me. They were comforting and dangerous at the same time. I felt something like the rush you get with love at first sight, but I wasn’t falling in love with her. I was falling in love with a version of myself that I’d long pushed away.

I had such reverence for The Oracle, that I treated my relationship with her like my relationship with my therapist. I didn’t ask personal questions, I hesitated even calling her by her first name. It wasn’t until I had given birth to the baby she helped me conceive and published my memoir that I reconnected with her as a writer. She came to my reading in Los Angeles and told me that she had a book deal for a memoir. She had questions about publication, and we began corresponding about writing and life as Leah and Amanda. When I read her book I gained even more respect for the work she has done in her own life, as well as the effect she has on her clients, and now, her readers.

We conducted this interview via shared Google doc.

Leah Dieterich: In your book, Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, you use the word “enchantment” a fair amount. Can you define “enchantment” and talk about the ways in which contemporary Western culture and society has been dis-enchanted?

Amanda Yates Garcia: To see the world as enchanted is to see the world, the planet, nature, as sacred, as ALIVE and inspirited. For instance, a mountain that is enchanted is seen as having its own spirit, its own personality and will. That will and personality isn’t human, but it breathes, it grows, it rests, it has knowledge and memory. It has sovereignty over itself. To recognize a mountain as inspirited or enchanted is to enter into relationship with it. We can’t just treat it as an object available for our exploitation. We have to pay closer attention to it, we have to listen, we have to recognize that it might have a will contrary to our own. From this it’s easy to see what I mean about the ways in which Western culture is dis-enchanted. Here, everything is available for exploitation, for the right price. A mountain is not a being, it’s an obstacle to the coal or tin or copper that it is holding in its bowels. A bird is not a being, it’s a thing to be caught and caged and sold for our amusement. Even humans are reduced in value to the amount of capital they have access to or can generate with their labor. When the world becomes disenchanted, then everything is available to be used and consumed. To re-enchant is to reconnect, it is to enter into relationship with other beings and the planet itself. Enchantment is relationship. To live an enchanted life is to insist on the primacy of relationship. To insist on honoring our relationships as sacred, as holders of the greatest value, worthy of our love, protection and care.

Why do you think this is the time in which you were able to write Initiated and have it published? What is it about the current state of the world and your own life that allowed it to come into being?

For myself, there was a lot I needed to work through before I was able to write this book. First of all, this book came to me on the heels of my divorce, and I don’t think I could have written this book, or become the person that I am now, had I stayed in that relationship (or any of my previous relationships). In many of my previous relationships, I -- subconsciously, I think -- tried to stay small so that I wouldn’t make my partner uncomfortable. I was preoccupied with them and their needs. Though my divorce was devastating, it liberated a lot of energy for me. Being single meant I could be the biggest, wildest version of myself. I could be the Oracle of Los Angeles. I could be a witch that talks about her work on national television. I could write a book that talks frankly about my sexual history, about my magic, my anger and my desire in ways that my partner would have found threatening. I also had to get to a place, within myself, where I had the strength to be completely honest and vulnerable. When I was younger, I would have been too concerned with how people might perceive me to write this book, now I have the confidence I need to know my work is good regardless of anyone else’s opinion. As far as what’s going on in the world that allowed this work to be published… I think the world, people, women especially, are going through a similar process of awakening. We’re realizing that no one is going to come save us. No one is going to save the world. No superhero is going to step in and put the fires out. We have to do the work ourselves. We have to seize the reins and get active. We need to save ourselves. And the archetype of the witch gives us a model for that. A witch has agency, she is powerful, she doesn’t need prince charming to wake her up. The magic wand is in our hands, people are starting to see that, and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. That’s why the figure of the witch is making so many headlines right now; she shows us how to take power into our own hands.

I like the fact that you never name your sexuality in the book. Your relationships with men and women are treated equally. Was your experience of your own queerness this effortless for you in real life?

I love this question so much! No one ever asks me this and I’m glad to get a chance to talk about it. I’ve never felt the need to define my sexuality for anyone. In fact, I’m offended that many people - queer or straight - feel like they have the right to compel me, or anyone, to declare or justify who they want to have sex with. Like, as long as it’s consensual, why do I have to declare my sexual choice as if I were going through customs? Why is that my parents’ business or my neighbors’ business or anyone else’s business? Growing up, one of the sources of my outrage, was how heteronormative culture sees itself as this “enforcer of respectability and propriety” and yet those same respectable and proper people uphold rape culture, white supremacy, ableism, exploitation and the destruction of the environment. I didn’t respect that. I didn’t think it was proper. And I didn’t feel like I had to justify my sex life, or any other aspect of my life, to people who were so blatantly hypocritical. Then, in the times in my life when I was solely immersed in lesbian culture, I often received the same kinds of side-eye, the same demands that I justify my sexual choices. I was too femme, that was something I got a lot, no matter how baggy my jeans were, or if I shaved my head. I’m Venusian in nature, Venus is my chart ruler. I’m femme to the bone and proud of it. The fact that I had sex with men sometimes was perceived as a threat. I could never be gay enough. I understand that queer folx created this orthodoxy to protect us from a culture that is constantly seeking to destroy us, but so often the walls we build for protection also cause us harm. For me, being queer means standing firmly in my own experience and desire, without the need to break it down for anyone. I wrote Initiated with my ideal readers in mind. At this point in my life, I feel totally at peace with my sexual choices, and so I assumed a reader that was on my side too, I assumed my reader was a witch who didn’t need me to justify my sexual preferences either.

Speaking of claiming an identity, tell me a little about the experience of claiming your public identity as a witch. Did it share any similarities with claiming your identity as an artist or a writer, which I know many people struggle to do?

Oh, it’s so true! People really do struggle to claim their identities as artists or writers. What sucks for everyone is that so often, we don’t feel like we’re able to claim our identity until… we’re making money off that identity. So it goes for life under capitalist patriarchy. Like, people who write don’t feel like they can call themselves writers unless they’ve published a book and made money off it. Or that they can call themselves artists unless they’re selling their work in galleries. The Lords of Capital get naming rights. And so, of course, the fact that I make my living as a witch certainly does make it easier for me to claim that I am one. I mean, it essentially says that I am on my tax documents, so. But really, anyone who practices witchcraft can call themselves a witch. Even though I grew up practicing witchcraft with my mother, I didn’t really feel comfortable publicly calling myself a witch until I was well into my 30s. Coming from a background in the arts and in intellectual culture, the spiritual is considered taboo. And so witch wasn’t an identity I felt comfortable claiming, until it started to become so much a part of my art practice that it was essentially unavoidable. But then, at first, when I started introducing myself as a witch, I did it kind of apologetically, or expecting scorn. A bit defensive. Until I started to notice that the art bros I knew rolled their eyes, but most of the women I met greeted me with something like… relief. “I’ve secretly always believed I was a witch too,” they’d tell me. And so their reactions gave me courage, made me want to speak out in solidarity with other witches. So now I can go anywhere from a literary cocktail party to an interview on national television and say I’m a witch in the same way I might say I’m from California or that I majored in writing at grad school. 

There is a passage in Initiated that says: “Deep down, I resented money, hated it, and also fundamentally just didn’t believe it could come to me any other way but through men.” - I had never articulated this to myself before, but I immediately identified. I assume that your feelings about men and money have shifted. Was that a slow shift, or is there a moment you can point to?

Yes, my attitude towards money has radically changed as I’ve grown in confidence. Basically, I have so much belief in my work now, in the things I want to say, the work I want to create, the work I want to do with my clients. I can’t do that work if I am sweating it for money all the time, worrying how I will pay my rent. So, my belief in my work has really helped me shift my attitude towards money. My work is like my child, I will do what I need to do to protect it, and that means I need to be financially solvent and not dependent on anyone else to make sure my needs are met. As far as my former attitude about money only being able to come to me through men, that’s changed entirely. As a child, circumstances made it so that my mother was financially dependent on men, and when the men in her life pulled away, we were broke. And then of course working in the sex industry as a young woman, it was reinforced that what was valuable about me was almost exclusively based on whether or not men found me attractive. But you don’t have to work in the sex industry to feel that way! It’s a message that’s constantly reinforced in the media, and in the way we talk to young girls practically from the moment they’re born. Like when we tell three-year-olds, “You’re so pretty!” rather than, “You’re such a good problem solver,” for instance. But, almost all of my money comes to me through women or queer folks now! The editor who bought my book was a woman, my agent is a woman, my podcast partners are women, my clients are 85% women, I’m sure most of the people who buy my book will be women and queer folx. It’s so liberating! 

One of the things I find so satisfying about reading your work is the combination of intellectual rigor and “spirituality” for lack of a better word. Do you ever feel like the two are at odds? Tell me about how they intersect.

Intellectual rigor and spirituality often DO tend to be at odds because intellectual rigor is about precision of language and spirituality is often so ineffable and difficult to pin down. Specifically, I’m thinking about words often used in spiritual practices such as power or energy, let alone words like god or the Goddess. The trouble happens when we assume everyone means the same thing when we say these words, and we often don’t. Witchcraft is mystical in nature, meaning that it requires a direct, unmediated relationship with the divine, whatever you consider that to be. And that experience often is beyond words. So if you’re doing a ritual and you feel something within you crack open, and you see/feel a flash of light, and suddenly you “know” that you have to apply to school or move towns or call an old friend, how can you apply intellectual rigor to what is essentially a personal, emotional experience that might not have meaning for anyone else but you? For me the rigor comes in as we attempt to be precise with our language, regardless of how difficult it might be to do so. And when we are willing to examine our experiences and admit when we don’t know. Rigor is an openness to possibility and a willingness to accept that we might be wrong, and a willingness to work harder to get closer to the truth, whatever that is.

How do you incorporate witchcraft into your writing process?

I see witchcraft as a bundle of tools that helps you connect to your power. Power is the ability to transform reality at will. It’s really easy to feel disempowered when you’re writing, at least it is for me. Sometimes I sit in front of a blank page and freeze, or it’s like there’s this harassing drill sergeant standing over me, criticizing every word I put down, telling me, “you’ll never amount to anything.” But as a witch, I’ve got a spell for that. I’ve got tools I can use to silence my internal oppressor. Towards the end of writing Initiated, when the deadline was looming, and I genuinely didn’t know if I would be able to get the book into a shape I was pleased with in time, before I began writing, I’d chant the names of the muses, the nine goddesses of inspiration, and give them offerings on my altar. And then as I sat down at my desk, I’d invoke Mercury, the queer god of writing and communication. I made a novena candle with an image of Mercury borrowed from Penny Slinger’s Tantric Dakini Oracle deck on it, and on the back of the candle I wrote a prayer to Mercury asking him to help me make my speech graceful and my writing sparkle with intelligence. And then I’d light the candle for as long as I was working and burn frankincense, his favorite incense, and the words would come bubbling out as if from a spring. Mercury is a psychopomp and can speak to the dead, he’s the god of fountains and springs, places where water seeps up from the underworld. Since my book essentially documents my own travels through the underworld, working with him was helpful. But I want to point out that in addition to the spiritual assistance provided by Mercury, lighting a candle, and having sensory markers like incense and chants, helps to focus your mind and induce a light trance state that’s great for creativity on a neurological level. 

How did you feel about putting your history out there for your clients to read? Did you worry that it would change the relationship you had with them or future clients?

I feel like the people who are my clients come to me because they know me, because they know my story, follow me on Instagram or listen to my podcast, and know that I don’t pretend to be anything other than vulnerable and human. For me, one of the most important principles in my work is that I don’t adopt the posture of guru with my clients. We are equals, we empower each other. That’s a fundamental principle of witchcraft. We are all participants, we are all priestesses. Everything I do in my work is to help people, but especially womxn, remember how powerful we are. In my book I talk about my experience as a sex worker, my experience with sexual assault, my experience loving people who didn’t love me back. I wasn’t defiled by any of that, I wasn’t corrupted or made irredeemably unloveable. And I want my clients to know that whatever they’ve been through, whatever bullshit story anyone told them about their worth and value, whatever mistakes they’ve made or trials they’ve been through, they are powerful witches, and no one gets to determine their value but them. If someone is trying to make them hold the burden of their shame, they can say no. They can burn it, banish it, and shout, “Be gone.” We get to love ourselves and each other, and helping people remember how beautiful and necessary they are is the main reason I do my work.

As The Oracle, you probably have a similar experience to that of a therapist, in that people bring you all of their hopes and fears and pain and heartache and trauma. How do you keep yourself healthy in this process? How has it changed over time?

If you follow healers on Instagram or ever take a workshop with a spiritual teacher, they’re going to tell you that one of the most important things you need to do as a healer is have strong boundaries and good “energetic hygiene”. When they first start out, most healers and professional witches don’t really know what that means. I know I didn’t. When I first began doing this work professionally, I so wanted to be of service, to help my clients, that I would spend a lot of my own energy, not just holding space for them, but using my own lifeforce to support them in their process. Of course, that’s a really good way to burn out. And ultimately, it’s a disservice, because even though it feels good for your client in the moment, they’re not really building the psychic and spiritual muscles they need to do their own work. My boundaries have become much stronger now, through practice. And before I begin my work day I ground, center and shield; I use bay leaf, sage and rosemary fumigations to clear energy after I work with people; at the end of my work day I do visualizations where I release any energy that isn’t mine into the earth, and call my own energy back. All of this is important to give me greater longevity as a healer.

Where do you think the boundaries of therapy and your practice with clients overlap? How are they distinct? What are their different purposes?

Well, I think my practices as a witch, and therapeutic practices are both working neurologically. For instance, when working with people dealing with grief or trauma, the goal is to try and move the memory of the event from the right side of the brain, the realm of feeling and imagination, into the left side of the brain, so it can be processed and made sense of, so that your body and mind can heal themselves. But how I approach that process as a witch is different from how a therapist might approach it, though I think there are still similarities. Working magically, you might make a drawing of the memory you want to banish, draw banishing runes on it, call the spirit of the memory into the room, tell it you are sending it away, ask your guardian spirits to help you banish it. You might burn the paper the memory is drawn on and take the ashes to a crossroads and send them into the wind. So you’re working physically and with your imagination, you’re working sensorially, burning incense, lighting candles, ringing bells. The ritual aspect of my work is highly immersive and compelling. In my experience, that’s what makes it effective. However, it’s important to note that neither I, nor any of the other witches I know, are trained therapists. When you work with a witch or a healer, you’re doing so at your own risk. The client needs to have agency and boundaries and only do the work that feels right for them. It’s powerful work, but if you’re in a really vulnerable state, you should also be working with a licensed therapist who can support you if anything comes up that might require more long-term support.

Did you ever consider becoming a trained therapist?

Yes, I think about that, but the problem with that would be that legally I wouldn’t be allowed to use a lot of the tools I use now. For instance, if you use tarot for divinatory purposes in a therapy practice, you could lose your license. Recently, I’ve been seriously considering getting a doctorate of divinity or something along that line. The tools that I use in my practice are really important to me: ritual, prayer, astrology, chanting, divination, working with spirits, I don’t feel like I’d be able to use those tools in a therapy practice, at least, not in the same way. Therapy is not based in enchantment. It has a different history, based in the legacies of Freud, Adler and Jung, and in the asylums of Salpêtrière. Whereas witchcraft is a folk tradition, and its roots are in the land, with the resistors on the heath, with grandmothers, and that’s the legacy I want to follow. Don’t get me wrong. Therapy has helped me tremendously; I go to therapy and am grateful for the work I do there. People should go to therapy! But what I do is something else, something inspirited, mysterious and playful. My work is based on helping my clients reconnect with the sacred traditions that are our birthright as earthly beings, and I don’t want to lose that.

How can people connect with magic or achieve some of the same goals if they don’t have the means to work with someone like you?

Probably the best way would be to read widely, and then get together a group of friends and start practicing together. The book I started with, which my mother gave me when I was about 12 or so, was Starhawk’s Spiral Dance. If you don’t have a group of people to practice with, it’s just as effective to spend a little time each week practicing on your own. I’d start with building an altar. Spirit needs a space to enter your life. If you carve out that space, you’ll see that Spirit begins to show up more and more. And by Spirit, I mean imagination, poetry, an enchanted world view, the occurrence of meaningful synchronicities; when you call on Spirit, a deeper relationship with your world will begin. 

***

I’ve seen you three times as a client. The first was for a fertility spell. I had been trying to get pregnant for a couple of years and was reluctant to try fertility drugs for one reason or another, (finances being one of them), and I remember coming to see you because a woman I used to date told me that you’d gotten a friend of hers pregnant (meaning she’d gotten pregnant with her husband after doing a fertility spell with you). We were in the attic of your house on what felt like the hottest day of the year and my lavender sports bra and white shorts were sticking to me and my hair was matted to my face. I remember kneeling and closing my eyes as you called the spirits into the room. I was overcome by how loud your voice was. How commanding. It was invigorating and also scary at the same time. I thought, This person is utterly devoted to what she is doing, and totally unselfconscious. Do you actually feel that way? Did you always find it easy to let your voice fill a room?

I remember that! It felt very intimate, that experience. Which is what one might expect if you’re getting girls pregnant. Lol! In those cases, I’m actually just holding space for my clients while they clear away any of their own spiritual blocks. I don’t take credit beyond just being there in support and as a guide through the realms of the imagination, where we sometimes hide our obstacles… and the gifts we’ve been afraid to claim. And yes! I LOVE to call in the spirits. I respect them too much to be self-conscious about it. As soon as I start the chants, I can feel them come, they lift the hairs on my arms, they fill the room. It’s exhilarating. Recently, I was officiating a wedding out on a mountain in the woods, and when I called in the spirits of the air, the wind picked up and made the pine needles whistle and shake. What could be more beautiful than that? Calling in the spirits is a total pleasure. And, I didn’t always do it that way, but the spirits taught me how. They tell me how they like to be called. They tell me their names. It feels like we’re dancing together.

One of the main things we did in that session was to clarify my intention for having a child. Why do you want a child? you asked me, which is a question I think more people should ask themselves as they contemplate becoming parents. I said that I wanted to experience more love. A new kind of love. I was in my early 30s and I’d been with my husband since I was 19. We’d just become monogamous again after five years of polyamory and I wanted to experience a new type of love that was different than romantic love and wouldn’t compete with my husband’s love or induce jealousy in the same way. You had me write a letter on the spot to the spirit of my unborn child, inviting him or her into my life, and read it aloud in front of you. I still have that letter and I can’t wait until my daughter is old enough so I can show it to her. How often do you use writing in your sessions with clients? What power does it have?

I love that so much! I can’t wait to hear what your daughter has to say about that letter, and how her relationship to it changes over time. I almost always use some form of writing in my spells. In any case, magic is a kind of speech. Recently, the spirits were telling me that with every gesture you do in magic, it makes it more powerful if you say what you are doing. So, for example, if you’re blessing the water on your altar, you might move your hand in a circle above it, and visualize the water being purified or filled with light. But then you should also say, “With this gesture, I bless this water, and restore it to its natural state of calm and purity.” Of course, this is symbolic work, so if we wanted to restore purity to the water in Flint, Michigan, we need to legislate, and change the pipes and infrastructure. Magic is not an effective way to remove lead from water. But in a poetic sense, magic could help remove the lead from your heart. For instance, let’s say you were going through a break up. Blessing the water and adding it to a cleansing bath could help remove some of the hurt; it can help in your healing process to take imaginative action like that. As far as using writing in spells, yes! I use it all the time because it’s just such a simple, effective way to work. In the tarot, the Magician in the card is pulling thought down through their body and bringing it into material reality. Writing does that! It pulls from the unseen realms of the imagination, and makes it physical, inscribes our thoughts into material reality as we place pen to paper. Writing is an effective way to change our reality, to destabilize the power structures that have been keeping things in (the wrong) place, which is one of the reasons why Plato argued that poets should be banned from the ideal republic. To be a witch is to be a poet who brings her poems to life. She lets her poetic visions loose, to re-enchant her own life, and to re-enchant the world.

I’d brought an egg with me as part of the homework you had assigned me, and we hadn’t yet used it at the end of the session, and I wondered what it was for. Go home, break the raw egg on your naked body, rub it all over yourself, and have crazy sex you suggested. I told you that my husband was out of town, and we agreed it would be fine if I just masturbated. I will never forget that experience. It was incredible! I always wondered, where do you come up with these things? Are there books you’ve learned these practices from, or do you sometimes invent symbolic actions for people on the spot? Are there set things that you assign to anyone who is seeking a particular outcome? Are fertility spells always completed with raw-egg-sex?

Eggs are a powerful symbol of fertility. Think of Easter, the spring holiday known to pagans as Ostara; we still search for the eggs even now. The egg is a symbol of springtime, of growth. The bursting bud. I highly recommend egg sex for anyone (who is not vegan) that wants to get pregnant! But eggs are not just a symbol. An egg is literally potential life. Many will be familiar with the Orphic Egg, an egg with a serpent wrapped around it, which in the Greek Orphic traditions was the primordial seed from which all life emerged. That snake image is really speaking to the moment snaky spirals of DNA emerged from the lifeless void of space. Our unconscious speaks in the language of symbols, but it’s through the body that we experience magic. And it sounds like you really did have a physical experience. Magic is most effective when our passions are roused, when we can feel our breath come faster, when we feel the shift in every cell. If we listen to our intuition -- in tarot intuition is known as the High Priestess -- if we listen to the High Priestess, she tells us how to perform our spells. She’ll give me a flash, an image. She’ll whisper in my ear. Sometimes she will direct me to the right book. Or sometimes she’ll help me build upon spells I’ve been working on for a long time, and she will nudge me a little, to use a different herb, or add a phrase I hadn’t used before. Magic comes from the beyond, from the realm of dreams, from the land of Tir Na Nog, the Otherworld, and that’s where you need to go to get your spells, or at least you need to receive a visitation from a spirit who lives there. I wish I could just tell you a book or a website or something easy, but true magic requires that you get weird. 

In that session and another one I did once I was pregnant with my daughter but terrified I’d lose the baby (because I’d gotten pregnant once, and had a miscarriage) we did a guided meditation, and again, I was floored by your voice; by your ability to create images with words in a way that felt improvisational. It was so fluid. You were never searching for words. How do you do this?

That ceremony was especially great…because of you! When I do that work, I narrate what I see as I travel through the otherworld realms of my client’s unconscious. But, because the unconscious is collective, I tap into the collective unconscious too. The visions I see aren’t just yours, but your psyche informs them, adds to them, brings its own flair.  So in that ceremony we were in this cave, stalactites dripping into milky pools, with a silky white cow standing in a ray of light, a lowing mother goddess, and you were invited onto a stone slab, where these healing beings sluiced you with the milky healing waters, and I remember your daughter appeared before you, and you asked her what you needed to do to bring her in, and she curled her fingers in your hair and she said, “You don’t need to do anything.” Meaning essentially, that you could, that you needed to, relax. And you started crying. It was really beautiful. I was just narrating what I was seeing. I don’t get lost because what I see comes from you, and from the collective unconscious, I’m just describing what I see. But your internal world was especially vivid, bright and beautiful, so it was easy to pull from. Though that pool, that healing temple, was not yours alone. Lots of women go there when they’re trying to conceive, I’ve been there when doing this work with other women. Your connection to your spirit child was especially strong, I could feel her sticky fingers. It’s not always like that. And I don’t control what happens there. I can nudge a little, but mainly I’m a witness. What inspires me most about my work is that, not only do I get to experience my own magic, but I get to witness the magic that lives in all the people that come to visit me. And it is so beautiful. My book is about that. Initiated tells the story of how I came into my witchcraft, so that my readers could find a way into their own.