An Interview with Amanda Yates Garcia

“Witches are comfortable with ambiguity, and with complexity, and with holding simultaneous beliefs, and living in a mythopoetic space. I think that’s something that needs to be reintegrated into our culture, which is so binaristic, and claims naming rights to everything. It gets to name our gender, it gets to define the perimeters of what we get to be in this world.”

Magic:
Is anything that stands outside of what the modern mind thinks of as rational
Is contingent on the time and place it was created
Never really goes away

When I interviewed Amanda Yates Garcia, the Oracle of L.A. and the author of Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, it was sunflower season in New York City. I was preparing to fly to Cassadaga, Florida, known as the “Spiritualist capital of the world.” The sunflower is the symbol of Spiritualism, and sunflowers were everywhere: across the street from my apartment, bending over my bus stop, outside every bodega.

I read this as a sign. “Everything around us is constantly communicating, singing of its history, its composition, its desires and experiences,” Garcia says in Initiated. “The Universe is made of information. Signs appear when, out of the universal hum, we pay attention to that one voice: Spirit’s serenade just to us.”

The Universe was calling me on a mission. Initiated seemed to reiterate this, as an expansive exploration of alternative ways of seeing, knowing, thinking, and living. “Those signs mean something,” Garcia says. “But if we ignore our signs, their meaning collapses.”

Initiated is a feminist history of witchcraft, a work of critical theory, an activist manifesto, a personal mythology, and a memoir following Garcia through her upbringing as a generational witch, her journey into the underworld of poverty and sex work, and her return to her body, discovering her power through art and witchcraft.

“For many witches, their first initiation drags them into the underworld,” she says. Garcia’s own underworld was “a labyrinth of sex and power and patriarchy.” Her story tells of childhood neglect and abuse, sex work, mind-altering drugs, and toxic relationships. Her return, like her descent, happens through the medium of her body.

Now it’s Scorpio season, and Persephone is again descending into the underworld. On her podcast, Strange Magic, which she co-hosts with art witch Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, they describe this time of year as one of “potent transformation” and harvest—reaping the rewards of our work.

They also, in a previous episode, talk about “binding,” “A spell cast on another person or group with the intention of preventing them from doing harm.” In 2017, Garcia gained recognition when Fox...