Light workers might have their place in the world, but it’s not within witchcraft. There’s little overlap between light workers and witches, except for an emphasis on psychic abilities and healing. Witchcraft is about death, whether to harness an animal spirit or the power of personal transformation. Witches are not light workers. We are death walkers, wandering in the shadows where healing and true magick are found.

Earlier this year, I wrote a few articles about what it means to be a witch, including “You Call Yourself a Witch? Then Own It?”

In that piece, I talked about how calling oneself a witch required accepting the responsibility that came with it, including the history of oppression, violence and marginalization. This grew out of an earlier blog that I wrote about “What Makes Witchcraft…Witchcraft?”  In that I said anyone can call themselves a witch if they work with natural energies to achieve a desired outcome.

What I’m about to say may seem to contradict that a bit, but I see it as more of a clarification. At any rate, this witch claims her right to change her mind. Witches love complexity, and I think defining witchcraft is much more complex than what I wrote in that article. It was the summer, maybe the humidity got to me? So, let’s talk about what witchcraft isn’t. Time to get really real.

Witches are not light workers. No. We are not. Many of us are psychopompes or death doulas. We guide souls to the other side. We receive messages from the departed. This is the darkest of work for we are reaching into the blackness of the unknown.

I shared the graphic above on my personal social media and on Keeping Her Keys. Many of you responded, “YES!” But there were others who said that there has to be a balance of light and dark. Balance is a tricky thing, beautiful creatures. I led a three month course last winter exploring this slippery topic. Like balancing both sides of a scale, balance in our lives is a lot harder than it looks. More importantly, this elusive concept of balance is very, very personal. My balance is about 3/4 dark and 1/4 light. That’s my formula for personal balance of the light and darkness. I’m a firm believer that too much lightness is unbearable.

I am NOT Your Light Worker

I’ve often been called a light worker, especially in more spiritual and less witchy circles. My reaction is always the same, “I am NOT your light worker.” That’s the last thing I would ever want to be. Usually, I don’t bother to say this out loud, particularly if I am at a public event. I do teach spiritual concepts such as consciousness, and occasionally talk about ascension. Both of these can be interpreted as New Age ideas. Of course, they aren’t at all. The human curiosity about the nature of consciousness is probably as old as consciousness itself. As for ascension, the idea is not without it’s place in Hekatean Witchcraft given her role as Anima Mundi.

However, are these constructs part of witchcraft? If we’re talking about micro level witchery, spells and such, then no. On the other hand, witchcraft today is very much about personal development. To me, this includes exploring the nature of consciousness and what lies beyond. To unpack this a bit more, a lot of common contemporary witchcraft practices, like trance work and journeying, require altered states of consciousness. I’ll stick to calling myself a spiritual teacher when I focus on things like ascension, but that’s just what I am doing in that moment. In my heart, I am a witch. No matter what I am doing, I am a witch.

What is a Light Worker?

What exactly is a light worker? The internet is full of definitions that are short on substance and long on vague positivity, such as:  “a lightworker is a special person with almost psychic ability to intuit what other people are thinking, feeling, or need in order to heal.” 

Who doesn’t want to be a special person? If you click on that definition, you’ll also find a list of 20 signs that you are a light worker. In researching the idea of whether or not witches could be light workers, I found probably 100 similar lists. They usually include things about psychic abilities, being a “sensitive”, developing higher consciousness and cosmic connections. Angels and aliens seem to hang out with light workers often according to these articles. I have an ongoing interpersonal conflict with angels that shows no sign of being resolved.

The light without the dark becomes a self incendiary void. It burns away who we are, rendering us zombies willing to believe anything. It’s the realm of toxic positivity culture that gives rise to gurus, like that dreadful Doreen Virtue. There’s nothing wrong with borrowing some of the ideas from the New Age crowd, especially since most of them are co-opted from earlier traditions. Witchcraft has always been an amalgam of what’s available, whether it’s dead mice or chakras. Light worker? No thanks.

For the love of Hekate, never ever send me white light. Send me healing, send me good vibes.  How do you know if white light is actually what I need? Maybe I need the velvet embrace of the dark to heal. Light workers seem to make a whole lot of assumptions about what works. Witchcraft that’s effective is specific and critical. I haven’t experienced a lot of either in the light working crowd.

Can Witches Be Light Workers?

So here is where it becomes clear that witchcraft and light working are disparate. Witchcraft, at least the European kind that many of us practice, is a sort of hodge-podge of whatever an individual practitioner has access to. Inherently eclectic. It makes sense that we would use techniques, like that “ball of  white light” some seem to perpetually surround themselves in, from the light working crowd. Perhaps if you’re always having to do the white light thing, you actually need the superior protection of the dark.

However, fundamentally, witchcraft is concerned with death. Witchcraft is of the dark. We use the spirits of plants and animals in spells. These spirits are released when the organism dies. That dandelion tea you’re sipping? Dead thing. As is that sage bundle on your altar.

Read my article about the use of white ceremonial sage that complements this one well because light working to me, implies a whole lot of cultural appropriation rather than adapting customs from other groups out of reverence. As witches, we need to do the latter. My own witchery which is so deeply shamanic and connected to the Mi’kmaq people who traditionally inhabited my land is reverent, not exploiting. Witches should know the difference. A lot of what I’ve experienced with light workers is that they don’t.

Animal magick, my lovely bones, require death to visit the embodied creature from which they came. For all the crystal lovers out there, they are dead things, too. They were once flowing rivers of molten material or even actual living creatures. When we do stone witchery, we release it’s spirit. That’s death walking. Even when we burn that purple candle all the way out, we are creating a death of sorts. Words spoken, sigils made. All to bring about the demise of what no longer serves.

Witchcraft is about transformation of the correspondences we use in spells, through our words, and becomes realized through our actions. All magick requires something to die in order for something else to be born. Even the witch’s approach to healing is opposite of the light workers.

Crossing that veil is not the work of the light, either. We walk between worlds, inhabiting the spaces where magick grows and spirits abound.

I’ve never been able to relate to magick that has a color, like white or grey, but that’s a blog for another time.

I am a Death Walker

I’m not saying that we witches don’t shine a light into the dark, nor that we don’t ever engage in lighter forms of energy work. I’m saying that even Reiki properly done is heavy, dark work. Witchcraft is inherently walking with death and the dark, not light.

Join my Facebook group, The Witches’ Realm,where we discuss death walking witchery all the time, including ancestral healing and reading the bones.

Connect with Keeping Her Keys on Facebook.

Learn True Magick, seven steps to unleash your inner witch.