Day Seven
Prompt: Have you explored other magical traditions alongside witchcraft? Do these influence your practices?
I'm having a hard time starting this because "witchcraft" can mean a lot of things and, when people aren't being specific, tends to include adjacent practices under it due to shared community (ie folk practitioners tend to share spaces with both witches and pagans). I personally use witchcraft as an umbrella term, but I guess a lot of people who just use "witchcraft" mean modern traditional witchcraft?
I'll just say that I don't really practice one specific tradition. I do magic as part of my reconstructionist pagan practice, but I also do some regional folk magic, spirit work and more "traditional" witchcraft when the other things don't meet my needs. I have explored other traditions though, and I'll try to hit all of the major ones.
I have mentioned this before, but I was Wiccan as a teenager. I never had an altar or celebrated sabbats or anything, mostly due to living with my grandma and not wanting to explain what I was doing, but I read A Lot about it. A lot of it felt off to me, but I didn't really know you could be a pagan and/or a witch without being a Wiccan just because of the nature of pagan/witch publishing and online communities at the time.
A few years ago (3-6 years? I have no sense of time), I tried to learn more about modern traditional witchcraft, but a lot of it felt like Wicca with different language. The books I mostly remember reading (or, bare minimum, skimming) were The Crooked Path and Weave the Liminal. I'll probably discuss this more in depth at some point, but it obviously wasn't what I was expecting.
I've always looked into seidr, ever since I started learning about Norse paganism, but have yet to try it out. This is something I'm still actively exploring and really look forward to eventually trying out. I'm mostly just having trouble figuring out how to get started. Seidr is incredibly interesting though.
I've also been looking more into the occult for years, but haven't been able to try out any of the stuff I've read about because of space concerns. I also feel like I haven't had the time to put in an adequate amount of research.
I've also looked into Hungarian folk magic, but this was purely academic for me.