6 Ways to Celebrate Your Queerness in your Magick

Want to make your magick more powerful? Connect it more deeply to yourself and who you are.

Regardless of your tradition or magickal methods, the more you can personalize the work you do and make it resonate with your deepest self, the more potent it will be.

If you're an LGBTQIAP2S+ person, one way you can personalize your magick is to celebrate your queer identity in your practice. Here are six practical ways you can do that:

1. Create, Find, or Buy Meaningful Magickal Tools
Work with magickal tools with which you feel a connection. When selecting or creating a tool, pay attention to where the materials came from and what they mean to you. For example, I have an athame with a wooden handle stained in rainbow colors, which I love because it feels like it resonates with both my name ("Enfys" means "rainbow" in Welsh) and my queer identity by evoking a subtle pride flag. I also have a soy candle made of layered rainbow wax that I use for any working related to my queer identity.

When it comes to divination tools, you might consider using ones that are specifically queer-inclusive or queer-centered. There are several queer-inclusive and queer-centered divination card decks on the market, including Vox Arcana Tarot, Seaborn Kipper, Queer Tarot, Fifth Spirit Tarot, The Numinous Tarot, This Might Hurt Tarot, Shrine of the Black Medusa Tarot, Fat Folks Tarot, and many more.

2. Do Magick in the Queer Community
One of the most potent ways to incorporate your queerness into your magick is to practice with a community of fellow queer people. Whether or not your spells or rituals are specifically about your queer identities, there's a particular power in feeling that extra level of comfort when you are surrounded by magickal practitioners who face similar struggles and celebrate similar joys.

Consider coming together with some like-minded queer folks to celebrate queer rites of passage —#3 on this list—or creating a magickal study group to read some of the queer magick books suggested in #6. You could also create a group to learn about queer magickal ancestors together (#4 on this list), and create rituals to honor those you study. There are tons of possibilities!

3. Celebrate Queer Rites of Passage
Queer folks often work without a script when it comes to big life changes related to our identities. How do you celebrate coming out? Honor chosen family? Ritualize a name and/or pronoun change? Magickally prepare for your first dose of HRT or gender-affirmation surgery? There's no mainstream cultural narrative around how we should commemorate these types of rites of passage.

In my new book, Queer Rites: A Magickal Grimoire to Honor Your Milestones with Pride, I offer 20 ritual templates you can use for these types of events. The book contains rituals anyone at any magickal skill level can perform, with a minimum of materials and setup. Most of the rituals are solo-practitioner-friendly and don't require a group (though most of them have adaptations to do the ritual with a group if you prefer).

If you're going through or about to go through a queer rite of passage, check it out! You may find something really valuable in there that can help you emotionally and spiritually integrate your rite of passage.

4. Honor Queer Ancestors and Queer Deities
The concept of ancestor veneration can be fraught for queer people, as many of us struggle for acceptance in, or are simply disconnected from, our families of origin. But ancestors are more than just people related to you. You can consider as an ancestor any dead person with whom you have some affinity: for example, LGBTQ+ people who have passed beyond the veil. (Side note: For an awesome book on ancestor veneration that broadens the scope beyond family of origin, check out Ancestral Whispers by Ben Stimpson.)

Consider creating a queer ancestor altar and including photos of queer activists and other notable queer people who have lived before you. If you are interested in learning about some notable queer ancestors, check out the White Rose Witching website, which features queer ancestor spotlights, with a focus on queer People of Color.

Similarly, there are a lot of deities and spirits that transcend the cisgender, heteronormative biases of mainstream culture. For example, Loki is canonically a shapeshifter who shifts between masculine and feminine forms—even becoming pregnant and giving birth. Many asexual magickal practitioners find Athena to be a particularly resonant deity for their sexual identity. And many deities are said to have had sexual experiences with beings of the same gender: Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, and Hermes, for example. Deities and spirits whose sexual or gender identities mirror our own can be valuable guides as we navigate our day-to-day experiences and personal evolution over time.

By honoring our queer forerunners and queer deities, we gain important spiritual allies and more deeply embed our identities in our magick.

5. Work with Authentic Modalities
A modality in magick is a flavor of energy. For example, cardinal, fixed, and mutable are different modalities, or ways that energy manifests.

While many magickal practitioners work with a masculine-and-feminine energy binary, this may not resonate with all queer magickal practitioners. Nonbinary folks like myself, for example, can find this energy binary limiting, based on outdated patriarchal gender roles, and simply not reflective of our life experience. Instead, if we work with gender symbolism in energy work, we may invoke the divine masculine, divine feminine, and the divine androgyne, or the divine both-and-neither. We may also opt to not work with gender symbolism at all, and instead focus on other energy patterns like the elements and elementals, the Hermetic Qabala, the runes, and so on.

6. Read Queer Magick Books
I like to say my last name of Book "isn't just a name, it's a lifestyle." I confess that I adore reading, and I particularly love reading books on queer magickal practice. Reading about queer magick has not only jumpstarted my methods in making my magick more resonant with my personal identity, but it's also taught me myriad new ways to conceptualize how magick works and how to use it to deepen my understanding of myself and improve my life.

We are in a veritable Renaissance of books on queer magick, with several new ones coming out every year. Here are some of my favorites:

• Outside the Charmed Circle: Exploring Gender & Sexuality in Magical Practice by Misha Magdalene
• Sacred Gender: Create Trans and Nonbinary Spiritual Connections by Ariana Serpentine
• Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries ed. Lee Harrington & Tai Fenix Kulystin
• Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World by Tomás Prower
• Queering Your Craft: Witchcraft From the Margins by Cassandra Snow
• The Satyr's Kiss: Queer Men, Sex Magic & Modern Witchcraft by Storm Faerywolf
• Queer Qabala: Nonbinary, Genderfluid, Omnisexual Mysticism & Magick by Enfys J. Book

There are a ton of others—many released in the last year—on my TBR stack, too. Search your local pagan bookstore and you're likely to find a treasure trove of books on the subject. These books expand on the ideas I briefly touched on in this article, and can really enhance your magickal workings and help you get more in tune with your own identity and how it relates to your magickal practice.

These are just six ways you can celebrate your queerness in your magick. By more deeply connecting your magick to your identity, you can make your magick more meaningful and powerful, even using it to honor your queer rites of passage and provide you with helpful queer spiritual guides.