👻6 -Deities, Ancestors, and Spirit Allies Course |Module 6 — Open and Closed: Cultural Responsibility in Deity Work
- Apr 30
- 11 min read
MODULE 6 — UPGRADED VERSION
Module 6 — Open and Closed: Cultural Responsibility in Deity Work Section: Core — Deities
This is the conversation modern witchcraft has been avoiding for a long time, and the avoidance has cost something on every side.
It has cost the communities whose practices have been taken without invitation — taken, repackaged, sold, performed by people who did not belong and did not bother to find out. It has cost the craft itself, which is treated less seriously by the wider world every time it appears in public looking like a costume party assembled from other people's sacred objects. And it has cost the practitioners — yes, the takers themselves — who end up with practices that are thin where they could be deep, scattered where they could be rooted, and built on a foundation that quietly will not hold weight. A practice with stolen pieces in it cannot grow into the kind of relational depth this course is teaching. The rot in the foundation eventually reaches the upper rooms.
The conversation matters because not having it does not make the problem disappear. It just lets it keep happening, with the next generation of beginners absorbing the same patterns from the same books and the same social media accounts, and the same harm continuing. So this module names the matter directly, and gives the working answer the beginner needs, even though longer academic arguments exist for those who eventually want them. The working answer is more useful than the long argument when a witch is standing in a shop deciding whether to buy something, or sitting at her altar deciding whether what is on it belongs there.
The basic distinction is between traditions that are open and traditions that are closed.
An open tradition is one that welcomes outside practitioners. There is no initiatic gate that must be passed through. There is no teaching restricted by ancestry or by membership in a specific community. The deities and practices of such a tradition can be approached, with respect and study, by anyone who feels drawn to them. The Greek and Roman traditions are open. So are most strands of the Celtic and the Norse. Ancient Egyptian religious practice is generally considered open in its broad form, though the modern Kemetic reconstruction has its own particularities. Slavic and Baltic traditions are open. The witch who feels pulled toward Hecate or Brigid or Freyja or Inanna can approach those goddesses without needing anyone's permission beyond her own willingness to do the work seriously. The traditions that gave us those names did not lock the door behind them.
A closed tradition is something different. A closed tradition has a defined community. It often requires initiation by someone already within the lineage — a teacher, a priestess, an elder who carries the line and who chooses to bring the new practitioner in. It carries specific practices and relationships that belong to that community by ancestry, by survival, by the long preservation of something that was almost destroyed and was kept alive at great cost by the people who held it. These practices cannot be legitimately accessed by outsiders without being invited in by the tradition itself, on the tradition's own terms. Reading a book about them is not access. Watching videos is not access. Self-initiating in one's bedroom is not access. The gate is where the gate is, and crossing without invitation is not crossing — it is climbing the fence and pretending one was let in.
The Yoruba-derived religions of the African diaspora — Santería (also called Lucumí), Candomblé, Vodou, and the wider family that preserved itself through the violence of enslavement and its aftermath — are closed. The orishas and the lwa are not free-floating deities available for borrowing; they belong to communities, lineages, and initiations that have specific structures and that the witch outside those structures has no legitimate way to participate in without entering through the proper doors. Hoodoo, as practiced within the Black American tradition, is closed in its full form, though it has been widely and wrongly treated otherwise by outsiders. Most Indigenous American spiritual traditions are closed — the practices belonging to specific tribal nations, communities, and lineages that survived deliberate attempts at their destruction and that are not the property of settlers to take up. Specific Jewish mystical practices, particularly within Kabbalah, are closed to non-Jews. Some Hindu tantric lineages are closed to those who have not been initiated within them by living teachers.
It is worth saying clearly why a closed tradition is closed, because the framing of closed in modern witchcraft sometimes gets read as exclusionary in a small or petty way — as if the communities holding these traditions simply do not like outsiders. That is not the shape of the matter. A closed tradition is closed because the practices belong to that community. Often they were preserved through survival against active attempts to destroy them — through slavery, through colonization, through forced conversion, through outright violence aimed at erasing the tradition from existence. They came through. They are still here because specific people kept them alive at terrible cost across generations. The structures of those traditions — the initiations, the lineages, the relationships with specific spirits — were shaped by and for those communities, and they do not translate cleanly when removed. A practice that requires the context of a specific community in order to function does not become something else when an outsider performs it; it just becomes a hollow gesture that sometimes looks like the original from the outside.
Respecting closure is respecting the tradition. A culture choosing to keep something sacred to itself is not being unkind. It is being sovereign — exercising the right to decide what belongs inside the community and what does not. The witch who hears that a tradition is closed and feels personally rejected has misunderstood what she has been told. Nothing has been taken from her. She has simply been informed that something does not belong to her, which is true of nearly everything in the world.
A middle zone exists, and it is worth naming because the binary of open and closed does not always hold cleanly. Hinduism is the clearest example. It is not a closed initiatic tradition in the way the African diasporic religions are; it is a living global religion practiced by over a billion people across continuous lineages that stretch back thousands of years. But that fact alone makes casual approach inappropriate. The witch reaching for Kali or Saraswati or Lakshmi is not picking up an ancient pantheon free for the taking — she is reaching toward deities currently worshipped by enormous communities of living practitioners, with traditions of how those deities should be approached, what offerings suit them, what gestures honor and what gestures insult. Approaching Hindu deities outside the living tradition asks for far more care than many Western witches have historically brought. The right approach is to learn from living Hindu teachers, to read Hindu sources rather than New Age summaries of them, and to understand the specific tradition within Hinduism that the deity belongs to before doing anything elaborate.
Kemetic practice — modern reconstructionist Egyptian religion — sits in its own particular middle zone. There is a serious modern community working to reconstruct Egyptian religion on its own terms, and many within that community view casual outside use of Egyptian deities as effectively crossing a closed line. There is also a more open scholarly approach to ancient Egyptian religion that treats the material as part of the wider human religious heritage. The witch drawn to Egyptian deities does well to learn what the modern Kemetic community has to say before assuming the tradition is fully open in the way Greek practice is. Celtic paganism is open in its broad strokes — no initiatic gate keeps an outsider from approaching Brigid or the Morrigan — but specific modern Celtic reconstructionist communities have their own standards about casual use, and a witch entering that territory benefits from knowing what those standards are.
The principle for the middle zone is simple. When in doubt, research who the living practitioners are and ask what they think. The internet has made this far easier than it used to be. The witch who is uncertain whether her interest in a particular tradition crosses a line can usually find out within an afternoon of careful searching. The unwillingness to do that searching is itself a kind of answer about what is going on in the practitioner.
A handful of specific practices have become so widely misused in the modern witchcraft space that they deserve to be named directly. White sage burned as a cleansing technique — usually called smudging — is taken from Indigenous American traditions where the practice has specific ceremonial meaning, and its commercial spread has both harmed the source communities by appropriating their sacred practice and threatened the plant itself, which is now being overharvested for the broader wellness market. Palo santo is a similar story — sacred wood from specific South American traditions, now sold in every metaphysical shop. Dreamcatchers were taken from specific Indigenous nations and turned into a generic decor item. The word smudging itself, when applied to non-Native practice, carries a borrowing the witch can simply decline to make. Chakras, when used as a casual visualization tool with no reference to the Hindu system they come from, have been reduced to color-coded body diagrams that lose their actual context. Spirit animal, used to mean favorite-animal-as-aesthetic, has been pulled out of specific Indigenous spiritual frameworks where the term has real meaning.
Each of these has a better alternative the witch can simply use instead. Cleansing with herbs from her own tradition — rosemary, mugwort, juniper, garden sage, frankincense, or whatever grows where she lives and where her ancestral lines come from — does the work without the borrowing. Calling the practice cleansing or smoke cleansing rather than smudging keeps the language honest. Studying chakras within actual Hindu sources, and using them with that context, treats the system with the seriousness it has actually carried. Saying the animal I feel a connection to or my familiar or the bird that keeps appearing in my dreams describes the witch's actual experience without claiming a category that is not hers. None of these adjustments cost the witch anything. They just keep her practice cleaner, and they keep the original traditions in their place.
The harder question, and the one that arrives unbidden in the practice of many sincere witches, is what to do when a deity from a closed tradition seems to be calling. What if the witch dreams of an orisha and cannot stop dreaming. What if a lwa appears in vision after vision. What if a Native spirit seems to be reaching, and the call has the persistence of the real signs taught earlier in this course.
The consistent answer from teachers within those traditions, across many decades of being asked, is the same: seek the tradition itself, on its terms. If the call is real, the practitioner will find her way to the actual community, to the initiation, to the teacher. The path will appear because real calls open real doors. If she cannot find that path — if the door does not open, if no community welcomes her, if no teacher takes her on — the call may be a test of respect, a measure of whether the witch will honor the closure or attempt to crash through it. It may also be a misreading of her own longing, projected onto a figure she has been romanticizing. Or it may be a signal pointing back toward her own ancestral traditions, where something analogous lives that she has not yet looked at — many of the deities and spirits a Western witch might be drawn to from closed traditions have counterparts in open traditions that may serve her actual longing better than the figures she initially reached for.
What she does not do is self-initiate. What she does not do is practice the closed tradition outside its community. What she does not do is decide that the rules do not apply to her because her connection feels strong. Strength of feeling is not the criterion. Many people have felt strongly drawn to things that were not theirs. The willingness to accept that one's feelings do not override another community's sovereignty is part of what builds the integrity that makes any spiritual practice real.
Building a practice with integrity follows from all of this, and the principles are simple enough to carry in mind without needing to consult a list. Start with one's own ancestral heritage when possible — there is real ease in working with traditions one's own bones half-remember, and the practice tends to deepen faster on familiar ground. When ancestral heritage is unclear, complicated, or simply does not pull, choose from open traditions. There are more than enough within the open traditions to fill several lifetimes of practice. When uncertain whether something is closed, research. When still uncertain after research, ask living practitioners — they exist, they are findable, and they tend to be more willing to answer good-faith questions than the worried beginner expects. When in doubt after all of that, err on the side of restraint. The craft is old and deep. A witch does not need to take from a closed tradition to have a powerful practice. The notion that the most exotic option must be the most powerful one is the wellness market talking, not the actual logic of the work.
A final distinction is worth holding clearly, because the witch who takes cultural responsibility seriously sometimes worries she will overcorrect into a kind of frozen avoidance — afraid to study anything outside her own narrow inheritance, afraid to read about traditions she will never practice, afraid to engage with cultures other than her own at all. This is not the goal, and it is not what the principle is asking for.
Appreciation is not appropriation. The witch who studies a tradition with genuine seriousness, reads its sacred texts, learns its history, supports its community, attends events open to outsiders, follows the work of its scholars and elders, and respects its practitioners is appreciating that tradition. Nothing in this is taking. Reading a book about Vodou with care is not appropriation. Learning the history of the orishas as part of one's general education in the world's religions is not appropriation. Donating to organizations that support Indigenous land back is not appropriation. The line is between studying-and-respecting and taking-and-performing. The witch who reads about Santería and decides to honor what she has learned by not practicing it has done something honorable. The witch who reads the same book and decides to set up an orisha altar has crossed the line the book itself, if she read it carefully, was telling her not to cross.
The line is real. It is also not so subtle that an honest witch cannot see it. The integrity of a practice is built one decision at a time, and most of those decisions become much simpler once the basic principle is in place: a witch does not take what she has not been given. The traditions that are open are open. The traditions that are closed are closed. There is more than enough work for a lifetime within the doors that stand open, and the witch who walks through those doors carefully tends to find that the depth she was hoping to reach was always available there.
Internal Family Systems & Parts Work Integration Practice
IFS Parts Journaling
Cultural responsibility begins with the willingness to pause before reaching.
For this practice, take five to ten minutes, or longer if desired. Find a notebook, journal, blank page, or small card.
Write one sentence at the top of the page:
A tradition, deity, practice, or symbol I want to approach with more care is…
Let a part answer honestly.
Then write a short note beginning with:
Before I reach for this, I want to understand…
Let the note name what needs more study, context, permission, restraint, or respect.
When the writing feels complete, pause and read it back.
Notice what your system is showing you about sincerity, caution, entitlement, humility, and the kind of practice that can hold weight.
When you are ready, put the pen down. Take a final moment to acknowledge the parts of you that helped you listen for the difference between being drawn to something and being invited into it.
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