FLP welcomes Anna Titov to explore the fascinating links between socio-political climates, and witchcraft...

Witchcraft can be interpreted as a practice that enables the creation of an “otherworld”, a liminal space that one can enter or embody in order to perform manipulative actions through the form of ritual that bring real change into the perceived world that one has real interactions with.

The current resurgence of this practice in contemporary forms and the popularity of such comes as no surprise when one views these measures as a response to socio-political climates, a call for attention and intentional action on an individual level to manifest change on a grander scale. The online platforms of social media are all one needs to examine in order to find the base of these communities, and the popularity of "Witchtok" and similar online spaces is greatly increasing alongside awareness one of the greatest dangers to human existence, the climate crisis.

Drawing on observations concerning phenomenology, corporeality and subjectivity, nature and spiritual attention, this lecture will explore the witches’ creation of an otherworld as a means of self-preservation based on their particular lived context, namely the current lived irreversibility of the Anthropocene and the effects this has on humanity’s relationship with nature beyond ourselves, a cherished relationship observed in all stems of modern Paganism.

We will discuss how these spaces are created, aspects of interaction between a perceived realm and one that is visited, how communication with nonhuman entities deepens our relationship with nature in an empathetic way, and how the history of women and witchcraft shows us that strengthening these ritualistic practices may indeed be the first step to halting the damage we are inflicting on our environment.

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Anna Titov is a writer and researcher in philosophy. She will be starting a doctoral research project at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (Pardubice) in 2022, focussing on notions of subjective physical experience in the wake of a waning natural world. She completed an MA in Continental Philosophy at Warwick in 2021, with a dissertation that looked at trans-anthropocentrism in Nietzsche's middle writings. Her areas of interest are Nietzsche, phenomenology, corporeality, eco-anxiety, and esoteric/occult spirituality.

You can follow more of Anna's work on Instagram at @aatitov

This is a recording of a live session hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program in October 2022. The reading list for the class can be found alongside this rental.

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