When getting started with magic, especially magic influenced by Wicca, nearly everything is immediately split into a gender binary. To many people, this system is reductive, exclusionary, and sorely outdated. Here’s how we can rework it and make it useful.
Projective vs. Receptive
When a spell ingredient is listed as masculine or feminine, it rarely has anything to do with actual gender. Reducing the idea to its root, we find that gendering an ingredient is shorthand for depicting the way its energy moves, projective or receptive.
- Projective energies, formerly deemed masculine, work their magic by going out from the source and changing things. They banish, they influence, they alter.
- Receptive energies, the feminine, draw things in. They work their magic by serving as a beacon/sponge. They attract, they collect, and they accumulate.
With this in mind, we can swap out gender for these meanings and have an extra layer of nuance to our spells. If our spell is focused on, say, drawing in wealth (receptive,) we can use ingredients that focus on bringing the outside in. If we’re sending out influence to convince somebody to give us that new job (projective,) then we can focus on ingredients that reach out. Maybe your spell wants to cast out and bring in, and you can use a balance.
This can also work for deciding the type of spell you’re doing. Think of how candles and wands are typically “masculine” and cups/chalices are “feminine.” To me, that sounds a lot like typical candle spells are projective and jar spells are receptive.
Traditional, binary ideas of gender have a shrinking place in modern day witchcraft. That said, if we can take the gendering that’s already been done and rework it to something more inclusive and more useful, then we can all benefit. What’s nice is that the past few decades of aggressively gendering everything means half the work of deciding which-herb-is-which is already done for us; all we have to do is change our vocabulary.
