I was listening to the podcast (a great one, by the way) Occultish Behavior: The Unholy Hour with Ivy Corvus and Justin Bennett, Episode 4: The Monetization of Magic where Ivy and Justin share their thoughts on paid endorsements, paywalls, charging for online courses, and so much more. They explore a spectrum of opinions, which I think so many of us can resonate with. These are observations I myself have been grappling with, so it was really fruitful to hear their perspectives.
Tangentially related are other recent thought pieces I’ve been enjoying: Thorn Mooney’s “Reflections on Community” and Kelly-Ann Maddox speaking on “Buying the Witchcraft Aesthetic.”
As a collective we cycle back to this subject for conversation every few years. A year ago that #Occultea tag had lots of pagan and witchy content creators addressing social media witchcraft, grifters, aesthetics, consumerism, and gatekeeping. Consumerism in spirituality comes up frequently in the tarot community, which I’ve previously chimed in on here (Tarot Tube and Classism) two years ago, touching on many of the topics Ivy and Justin cover in this podcast episode, specific to tarot social media spaces, rather than the broader witchy/pagan space.
When we monetize the teaching of sacred knowledge, we complicate and maybe even risk committing sacrilege. But if we don’t meet humans where they are and provide monetary compensation, they’re not going to share their work.
For many holding sincere religious beliefs around how they’ve divinely received the sacred knowledge, trying to put a dollar and cents price tag on the value of that knowledge is intuitively icky. And yet if we don’t value that knowledge — and we demonstrate value by paying for it — then these sacred cultural traditions risk going extinct.
It seems like the majority agree that people should be adequately compensated for their work, but also we judge that at some point it’s just greedy, gross, and profane. We don’t want you to starve, but if you get too popular and start selling your stuff for too much, we’ll knock you off your high horse.
It’s funny how an oft-repeated tenet in the artist/creator community is “charge what you’re worth,” except when you do, you get vilified. If you charge a “grotesque” amount of money for your work, you’re perceived as having an inflated ego, and you’ll get accusingly asked, “What makes you think your work is worth so much.” Which also is a silly question to ask, because if the creator is doing business right, then the clear answer is the marketplace. The marketplace has accepted that their work is worth that much. It’s not ego. It’s capitalism. Okay maybe it’s both.
We all agree that some sort of balanced approach is best, but we disagree on what “balanced approach” means. Where do you draw the line and why do you draw the line there? Is charging $30 for an online course on planetary ritual magic okay? What about charging $300? $3,000? You say it depends on the content of that course, but how do we even apply an objective standard for review?
As an author and educational content creator of topics in mysticism, I struggle a lot with what a “balanced approach” means to me. I want to produce diligently researched, comprehensive, substantive educational videos on YouTube, but it’s a lot of work. It’s time-consuming, and at this point in my life, time is very precious. So if I’m going to invest my time and energy into making free educational videos to increase equitable accessibility to sacred knowledge, then I want to be compensated for that work, but how? Do I want money? Initially I think, no, I don’t need money for it. I just need something in exchange to feel like it’s fair, to feel like my investment sacrifice of time was worth it. But what?
I’ve taken a hiatus on creating educational videos for my YouTube channel, because I can’t sort out a “balanced approach.” The beautiful comments people leave– the appreciation, the positive engagement, meaningful feedback, acknowledgement, feeling seen, supported, etc.– that’s rewarding. But it’s so human of me to let the minority of negative comments (I think in psychology they call it the negativity bias?) hold more weight than the positive ones. That tiny droplet of hate and jealousy poisons the well.
Also, because I’m trying to operate outside a pure capitalistic system, and want to model a gift economy, the negativity can often feel to me as betrayal. Like, wow, I’m giving to you freely and in return you’re spitting in my face. A big reason content creators turn to money and capitalism is because at least they’re laughing contently to the bank. “Go ahead and hate all you want, I just made six figures.” But also, to be clear, no one is getting wealthy making pagan/witchy/tarot content on the internet. So getting bent out of shape over a content creator endorsing some product or turning on AdSense to literally earn pennies is a bit ridiculous.
I don’t even like or want to turn on AdSense for my videos. However, when you don’t turn on AdSense, the algorithm works against you and you get nil exposure for that video you just worked so damn hard to put together. If your response to that is “so what?” Yeah, that’s right. So what? So what am I even making these educational videos for? They’re not easy. I’m all but creating a university-level curriculum, doing the research and writing all the content for that curriculum, and then having to figure out how to edit and produce it in a semi-entertaining way all by myself with my minimal tech know-how — for what? If not for money and not exposure, then for what? Who posts videos they put a lot of effort into creating only for those videos to not be seen? Again, not that I’m a proponent of capitalism, but at least with capitalism, when you monetize the Thing, you can count your return on investment.
But back to the monetization of sacred knowledge. There’s an element of collective hypocrisy here as well, especially when it comes to the treatment of authors. We’re not generally opposed to the idea of a published book on mysticism, religion, traditional or modern witchcraft, or shamanism, and surely on some level we understand that these books are being sold, but if the author of said book promotes it a little too enthusiastically for your sensibilities, well that author will get accused of contributing to the blight – they’re part of the capitalism problem.
People say they want high-quality, high-effort books on these topics. For that high-quality, high-effort book to get published, the author needs to show to publishers that they are willing to do the song and dance once the book is published, that way both can enjoy good sales. So to get published and stay published, authors do the obligatory song and dance, but then get dinged by their community for being too self-promotional.
But if authors aren’t self-promotional, they won’t be able to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, and you won’t get those high-quality, high-effort books you say you want. As AI-generated books become more prevalent, for the human author to stay relevant, the person is going to be the brand, and what gets you to buy that human’s book over an AI-generated book is going to be the person (aka the brand). Branding requires marketing and PR savvy. But then too savvy branding incites people to say “Ew, you’re too self-promotional.”
The whole situation top down is vicious.
Our community says they support fair compensation of spiritual workers and our spiritual teachers, but then also criticize those same teachers who appear to profit too much from their teachings of sacred knowledge.
When I price my online course offerings, I don’t operate through the “charge what you believe you’re worth” lens. I try really hard to put myself in the consumer’s shoes, what the average of their current circumstances might be, and then set the price at what’s just enough for me to feel like I can convert this money into an experience that I might not otherwise spend money on and thus there’s been fair compensation. But this isn’t my livelihood and I’m not approaching compensation and valuation as if it’s my livelihood. For those whose livelihood is teaching sacred knowledge, or for marginalized practitioners using spiritual work for survival, the lens through which they price their offerings is necessarily different. And one should not be judged in comparison to the other.
It’s also unfairly biased and judgmental, how we decide whether an online course or spiritual service offering is worth its price point. If you believe in starseeds and intergalactic soul contract twin flames, then you’re probably okay with paying for a Pleiadian crystal child awakening code, but if you don’t, then you think it’s snake oil. Which is an opinion you’re entitled to, though maybe it’s bad form to take to the internets to publicly call out and rant about that content creator offering the crystal child awakening codes.
How accepting you are of the price tag is in direct proportion to your degree of faith. If you really, really believe in it, then $300 for a course on astral projection and channeling ascended masters is a bargain. If you only sort of believe or are just curious, then you’ll decry even $30 a scam. And so if you’re getting judgey about how somebody’s spiritual mystical Thing is scammy, at what point are you kinda being unfairly closed-minded about other people’s religious beliefs?
But also, we need consumer protection, so I get it.
Then there are sociopolitical factors to consider. For centuries, and certainly in contemporary times, practitioners of spiritual (read: witchy) work tend to be the marginalized, the neurodivergent, those at the fringes of society. Monetizing mysticism is how the disenfranchised and those who are otherwise social castaways can attain some semblance of economic power. It’s not so much capitalism as it is survival in a society ruled by capitalistic principles.
At its core, capitalism is a system where individuals are driven to leverage their assets in a way that those assets become in demand (aka marketing and promotion), and then to supply the demand at the highest price the market is willing to pay. So is it not just a tad disingenuous to say, “Hold on, if your asset is psychic and spiritual in nature or it’s ritual healing, and even though people are lining up to pay for it, you’re a bad person if you price yourself according to the same basic economic principles everyone else does.”
On the other hand, when we commodify the sacred, we invite false prophets and frauds. If there’s no money to be made here, you’re gonna have less snake oil offerings. Although… you don’t see many people making that argument and believing that doctors, lawyers, and accountants shouldn’t be making boatloads of money because that incentivizes scammers and frauds. When a doctor charges exorbitant fees, we assume, hey, they must be really good, we don’t immediately accuse them of not being a sincere healer — if you really cared about healing the sick, you’d do this for free.
Plus, I’m not talking about the false prophets and frauds selling snake oil for thousands of dollars. Nor am I talking about the saintly idealistic ones doing everything for free. This isn’t about the outliers. Even when we talk only about the center of the bell curve of spiritual practitioners who genuinely mean well and are competent at what they do, and the people who agree that spiritual practitioners need to make a living too, does charging a steep price tag on spiritual offerings signal that a practitioner is “not spiritual enough”?
Also, while philosophically we’re supportive of the marginalized receiving fair market exchange for their spiritual services, the notion of someone who is already in a privileged position capitalizing on adopted religious beliefs feels onerous to us. So then there’s also the difficult question of: Can someone monetize the magical tradition of a culture they aren’t themselves part of? Are there scenarios in which that could be ethical, and if yes, what are those guardrails?
Not to mention paywalls can feel like gatekeeping access, and then when it’s a paywall that’s the condition of access, it gets perceived as inequitable. Paywalls, intentionally or not, send the message “If you can’t afford to pay, then you don’t deserve access to this sacred knowledge.”
But then if we as a society are not willing to pay for sacred knowledge, then that religious tradition will erode. You won’t have incredible practitioners and scholars investing effort to memorialize, document, and advance the tradition. And yet we worry — for good reason — about ulterior and not-so-spiritual motives when practitioners and scholars condition sharing and teaching of their sacred knowledge on payment exchange.
There’s an additional layer of complexity for practitioners of color and sharing culture-specific spiritual traditions. In my own case of earnestly wanting to share my cultural traditions freely to the public, the majority of negativity I receive is, well, if I’m not going to say it’s racist outright, then I’ll just describe it as racially-charged, or tone deaf to the lived experiences of minorities.
It’s very hard, as a human, a POC, to not then react with, “Maybe this really should not be freely shared to the public in such an unfettered way.” After all, those not from my culture who genuinely appreciate what I offer are always the ones willing to pay for it, whereas those not from my culture who just want to take for free from me, who expect me to be giving to them freely, are the first to get defensive and resort to racially-charged negativity. So now I am left feeling like the approach I’ve been adopting is all wrong, because this approach is just rewarding bad behavior.
I don’t know that a perfectly “balanced approach” is possible. The debates around monetizing mysticism won’t get resolved by me, or you, or really ever. “Pay to play” (or perhaps more precisely, “pay to pray”) moral concerns in religion is as old as religion itself.
Maybe it’s more about figuring out how to live with the ambiguity. We grumble about it, air out our grievances, and then settle down, until the next time the controversy is trending again.
R E L A T E D R E A D S:
- Social Media Witchcraft: Grifters, Aesthetics, Consumerism, Gatekeeping | #Occultea
- Are Personal Branding Pressures on Authors Resulting in Bad Books?
- Should We Read the Works of Questionable Authors? On Julius Evola.
- To the New Pagan Author…
- Tarot Tube and Classism
- Tarot Deck Collecting and Consumerism: My Thoughts
benebell wen 
Though I don’t like applying categories to human beings, I’ve come to consider myself an art witch. Artist is how I try to pay my bills. Witchcraft is how I make my art. As both an artist and a witch, I’ve been struggling with all the overlapping points you make in this essay. I have no idea how to reconcile it all, even just enough to organize my Patreon.
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Some great and thoughtful comments. I appreciate that you think hard about these matters. I will say that I bought “Holistic Tarot,” and “I Ching, The Oracle” and was amazed at what a value they are. Please keep struggling with this and doing what you do.
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Thank you so much for supporting my books! ❤ I'm truly honored that you found value in them. I wonder about the phrasing "please keep struggling with this" however. Why do creators in spiritual and scholarly spaces need to wrestle with internal conflict for society to authenticate them? Why is demonstration of struggle the price of credibility and validity? That said, this comment opens up an important reflective moment, so thank you again for engaging! ❤
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First, about your YouTube situation, ignore those people. I pay for YouTube Premium and never see ads. It’s to be expected that people will turn on monetization if they can on video platforms.
Second, about the free vs. paid thing as a whole. I grew up Neopagan, and I put a primer up online (Soul’s Inner Statues) for free about basic polytheistic practices a few years ago. I have a lot of misgivings about the free/paid spectrum because I’ve noticed that a lot of people want payment for things that I would consider to be basic topics that someone would have learned from their parents if they’d been raised in paganism (meant in a broad sense for prose clarity) and/or the broader mysticism arena, and there are also a lot of people who have learned to market courses and content to people who are insecure in their basic practice due to not having exposure to the “community” when they were kids. I think that exploiting those insecurities is unethical. Maybe part of the appeal to such courses is that people have somehow found a way to make it seem like they’re teaching secrets or spicy worldview innovations and not the fundamentals of pagan adulting.
When it comes to more specialized services and training, I think that providers should be compensated, although that then blossoms into the late-stage-capitalism situation that you’re treating in this post. IMO, one of the big issues here is that people with the most charisma and content clout are not always the best people for a specific type of spiritual service, so finding someone to offer such things is still very much a word-of-mouth-testimony-to-someone’s-efficacy situation, which also puts newer and less networked people in a sticky and vulnerable situation.
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So many good points here! ❤
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Such a touching post.
I completely understand what you’re saying because I’ve found myself in a similar situation in my own way.
I’ve always enjoyed sharing my knowledge with those who asked for it, but never took the initiative to offer it unsolicited. I’ve taught TaiJiQuan to people who saw me practicing in the park, and I’ve written philosophical essays for friends who were interested in those topics, never asking for anything in return, because I’ve always felt those activities and the time spent were beneficial for me as well, contributing to my personal growth.
And yet, I’ve been criticized, on one side by people who offered the same kind of support but charged for it, and on the other by those who took advantage of my willingness to help, abusing my volunteer spirit and original intentions.
What I’ve always tried to do is keep everything small, because in doing so, people whose approach didn’t align with mine naturally drifted away.
All I can say to you is: THANK YOU for everything you do. I see tremendous value in your posts, your videos, and your books. I’ve bought your books, and I will definitely sign up for one of your courses, hoping in some way to support your work.
I wish you all the best, including financial success. I hope your knowledge continues to be recognized and allows you to make a living from it. But I also hope you’re able to keep everything small, because I truly believe that’s the key to preserving quality.
I hope you never fall into the trap of capitalism, where production and profit come at the expense of authenticity and quality.
Thank you again for everything, and I sincerely wish you the very best.
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I love one of the points covered in the podcast episode I referenced, which is that authenticity can risk receiving social backlash when your authentic voice doesn’t align with what’s currently the accepted opinion, and quality is often left unappreciated, so then practitioners do what any human would do – they do what they need to do to protect themselves, and that often means no more showing their authentic, deeply personal selves on the internet, and not being able to offer high-quality, high-effort content for free anymore. It’s not just about the “trap of capitalism.” It’s how we as a collective audience/mob treat our most valued practitioners quite unfairly, and then when they guard themselves in defense, get angry at them for not taking our blows.
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When I started my divination blog almost eight years ago, I decided I would not attempt to monetize it. As you note, I didn’t need the money and it was essentially a brain-dump of (at that time) almost 50 years of study and practice that I produced mainly for my own satisfaction. Besides, I love to think and write about this stuff. But when it came to offering services, I took the pulse of the professional community and set my target at the low end, again not wanting to gouge for something that comes naturally to me. I found few takers, however, because I was up against the $5 and $10 Etsy and YouTube purveyors of nonsense passing for legitimate divination. I guess “fair” is whatever we’re willing to take for our effort. If I ask for nothing in particular I don’t expect to receive anything in return, and if I do it’s a pleasant surprise. But as a student of human nature I’m cynical about that happening very often.
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It’s truly extraordinary and an incredible contribution what you offer so generously on your site!
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In the past I was feeling very desperate for some sort of connection to the other world. Also had some difficult times and I wanted to know ahead of time. Again very desperate. I paid for classes and they were horrible. Looking back probably the classes where put out by people with limited experience and looking to make a buck. Then there were large companies hosting oracle reading courses. For months a fb page was up talking about how wonderful it is and you will be a shinning psychic super star. If you are meant to be there you will be…. then they announce the cost over $1000. I can get why people have strong feelings
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For sure those who are the most infuriated by the scammers and exploiters in our community are the sincere practitioners just trying to eke out a living doing what they love. In the podcast they half-jokingly talk about how great it’d be if there was a site where practitioners took those expensive classes and then did reviews for the public, letting us know whether they were worth it or not!
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I loved this post! You really hit the nail on the head here – It’s impossible to get to the root of the “right answers” to these questions. I struggle so much thinking about this. I truly do believe that someone who does readings or offers classes deserves payment of some sorts, and we ALL have bills to pay.
But there is that icky feeling building up when I see how some readers/teachers online use their fame to offer services that are insanely expensive. A while back I saw someone offering a sort of spiritual/witchy apprenticeship in her newsletter. I was curious how much it would cost since I’ve had a reading by her and it was very expensive (about $300 or so for 50 minutes, and no, honestly it wasn’t worth it!) so I followed the link to check it out. There I discovered she didn’t actually even disclose the full price, just that it was “a 5 figure investment” and to APPLY for this apprenticeship you needed to fill out a form and pay $50 that were not refundable even if you weren’t accepted to be her apprentice. I must admit that I was pretty shocked. It felt shocking that someone would charge so much and well, that someone else would be willing to pay so much! And the reason this person can charge so much is because a very high status popular magazine hyped her up a couple of years ago. I’ve had plenty of readings and classes by people in the spiritual/witchy/tarot community, and the best ones have by far been by people who have what I would call humane prices.
I very often feel that the people who have a background in PR are the ones making the big bucks, instead of the ones who truly are knowledgeable, skilled, gifted readers/healers/teachers. Just my random thoughts! It’s an interesting subject for sure.
Ania // Roots of Aurora
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I resonate with everything you said, and also at the same time, wonder why we kinda collectively accept it as okay, just par for the course, when a doctor charges us $1,000 for an hour of their time where they don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know and then prescribe us pills that don’t actually help cure, but only temporarily mask the symptoms. See, what bothers me is that unspoken inherent presumption the public has about how our offerings just aren’t worth the big price tags, and when a practitioner charges hefty price tags, the immediate and automatic assumption is they’re not spiritual enough. At the same time, maybe they’re not. Shrug. Maybe by charging high prices for their time, the practitioner is signaling to us, “This is a business transaction. I’m an entrepreneur, not a high priestess.”
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Ooh I feel you on this. It doesn’t really make sense that offering one service is fully acceptable, but a similar service is “bad” (life coaching compared to card readings for example?)…
I know that in the US if someone mentions tarot or astrology people around them can be a bit scared because Christianity has connected those subjects to “the devil” and such. Here in Sweden people are 0% scared of “evil things” (lol) but rather they view tarot and astrology as 100% scam and fake. When the subject comes up people have no shame yelling out how “awful it is to scam desperate people just to become rich”. I always have to bite my tongue in those situations. I can’t bother discussing it because people are so set in seeing anything of that nature as fake and charging for it is considered selling snake oil. It also makes me giggle because I know for a fact that offering tarot readings definitely isn’t the path towards becoming a millionaire! Quite the contrary… I know most card readers struggle to be able to continue their small business without having to take on a regular part-time job.
Ania // Roots of Aurora
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This is just one anon’s opinion, but the most successful spiritual markets usually cater using (1) personalized services (ie readings, spellwork, etc.) or (2) classes (clients work with spiritual instructor, obtains experience from spiritual instructor’s POV, etc.). I believe it has something to do with selling experiences, or results, something along like those lines. But I haven’t figured out the formula yet either. Great post, thanks for sharing!
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I meant it as a worthy struggle, and something I wrestle with myself. That’s how I see it.
And, I forgot to log in but didn’t intend for the comment to be anonymous.
Cheers!
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If I might say something, is that I never faced so rich content and so freely given in the whole wild web about self educational spiritual work. Speaking from the consumer point, when working hard everyday you naturally want to make means something of it and you Benebell do that you make it means. Your work has a meaning. Thank you for your work! It doesn’t matter jealous competitors, because the work you do are educational and fills spiritual emptiness for those who seek ways based on history and real understandings, So that one can open his or hers own channel for spiritual growth, and not just some new age ~abra-gadabra, boo~.
I have you deck and books and I enjoying it, Thank you!
Strength and Blessings to you!
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Thank you so much! It means a lot to me to be appreciated like this! ❤
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Hi Benebell, I’m a huge fan of yours — thank you so much for all the work you’ve done in this space and for all the knowledge that you’re spreading! I’ve got your tarot and I Ching books and have purchased your courses and other items over the years; they are absolute gems and I can see the incredible amount of effort you put into each project. Your contributions are prolific and awe-inspiring (I can’t even imagine producing a fraction of what you’re able to, during my lifetime).
This is the first time I’m commenting here, ever, so I just wanted to get that out of the way first!
RE your post, this resonates so much. I think, if anything, you’re striking a pretty great balance already — you offer so much free content and knowledge that others would easily charge for; and your paid offerings are set at prices that I find very fair. Hopefully, you’re making “enough” from these offerings to keep yourself happy.
The current general consensus is that it is not wrong, per se, to charge for spiritual services. I submit then that if this is indeed the general consensus, then there is no wrong number or right number — there are only the numbers that work for you.
Maybe we can take morality out of the question altogether — because if it was involved, anything other than FREE could already be considered blasphemous, couldn’t it? There simply isn’t an agreed-upon threshold out there, and there never will be.
In that case, we might view this question purely from a supply and demand perspective. What’s a price that works best for me, as a practitioner? What’s a price that would help me achieve the income I want, or need? Or, what’s a price that would attract just the right amount of customers for me? And that’s that. There’s no right or wrong. Marketing and popularity contests might prevent price “fairness” and all that, but I guess marketing is indeed part of the equation, if we’re going to go on this capitalist hamster wheel.
People who take advantage will take advantage in any industry, any situation. There are scam doctors and scientists out there, too — so why should only the spiritual community be worried about the snake oil salespeople, like you say? If you put a price on anything, it becomes vulnerable to the usual corruptive forces. This is a problem that is not specific to the spiritual realm. In fact, I would go even further to say that the modern medical industry (in the private sectors/the US) faces much more serious ethical issues, if anything. That industry literally deals with life and death, and yet there can be obscene price tags placed on the most fundamental of services.
RE paywalls and gatekeeping, I think if a practitioner’s foremost goal is to spread ideas, culture and knowledge, inevitably those paywalls will come down, one way or another. The urge to spread those ideas will be greater than the urge to make money. And if that’s not the most urgent goal, even if it is a main goal, then that’s when some form of “paywall” or “gatekeeping” comes in. This applies to paid content, courses, books. I would add, though, that selling books is hardly viewed as a corrupt act — and one can argue that books (of the paid variety) are the OG gatekeepers of general knowledge! Same with courses — people are used to paying for all sorts of academic and educational courses, without any grudges — so why not spiritual ones as well?
Meanwhile, someone who’s freely disseminating ideas can still “capitalize” in other ways (via the expertise and trust that they build as a provider of such content), so it’s not necessarily a fully sacrificial or altruistic act either.
Of course, if we were to decide, collectively, that it is WRONG to get money for spiritual services, then that would be a whole different story.
But then what? Should all books on spirituality be free? Should churches not ask for donations? Should one be offering free readings and healings to anyone and everyone? Where do you draw THAT line?
And unless all of the basic human needs are somehow provided for, for (full-time) spiritual practitioners (which, of course, still comes down to a facet of money — to get shelter, food, etc), it is simply impossible to live in this world without dealing with money, period. So then: Should all of us in this space look for wealthy patrons to support us instead? Or do all of us need side hustles or other jobs, by default?
To me, the debate is really: Should money be involved, or should it not be? It’s not the wishy-washy “Yes it is — but where’s the line?”, because there is no such arbitrary line. One person’s upper limit is another’s starting point.
Money itself is neutral (at least, I try very hard to tell myself that). It is neither inherently bad nor good. Where you stand with money, how you want to make it or not make it, comes down to you.
Spirituality is also neutral, in that sense. Psychic or other spiritual abilities can be used for good or bad deeds — just like any ability gifted to humans. And how you leverage or don’t leverage your spirituality is highly personal. Some people will be much more comfortable to charge for their services, while some won’t be, at all, regardless of the amount — we don’t even need to get into the matter of “how much”.
Thank you for your thought-provoking posts, as always!
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Thank you so much for this thoughtful and generous comment! Your points definitely cut straight to the heart of the issues, and I found myself nodding emphatically to many of your points and through each paragraph, like what you pointed out re: morality and pricing. It’s an interesting point — if it’s not okay, then even charging $1 is not okay, so any charging whatsoever is not okay; and if it IS okay, then why the bickering and artificial constructs of what’s okay to charge and what’s not.
I agree that at the crux of it, the tension is probably less about how much is too much to be charging for spiritual services, and more about whether money even belongs here at all. And that’s a tough one I struggle with. There’s no easy answer.
Thank you again for sharing!
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<a href="http://demo6.learnuiuxacademy.in">Learn UI/UX Academy</a>I really appreciate the insightful tarot readings
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https://demo6.learnuiuxacademy.in
I really appreciate the insightful tarot readings
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There are many interesting points in this blog, although I admit I’m surprised by the default view that most practitioners offer a service with the same preparation, ethics, and professionalism you put into yours. From personal experience, I can say the opposite.
As a practicing queer poc, who has always practiced a traditional regional form that wasn’t aligned with the accepted and widespread narrative and has recently become a watered down trend — how many in the 70s to the early 2000s were screaming their lungs out that cursing was evil, the devil was evil and not witchcraft, that charging was evil and that poc were just an exotic mumbo jumbo? Opposed to now, where hexing is a meme. I’ve always had difficulty emerging in the “witch market,” despite credentials because my ethnicity, gender identity and culture wasn’t marketable enough.
Personally, I have nothing against charging for services. I’m a bit on the fence with teaching, but that’s because, in my culture, the passing of knowledge is held very highly and passed from practitioner to practitioner in official ceremonies. That, however, doesn’t have to do with how others do their things and is not the point.
When it comes to decide on the price, I would wager that a professional doctor is backed up by a certified specialist training and is not the same as a DIY witchy certificate at the end of a workshop — their prices, depending on their country, might even be decided by a board. An honest, competent practitioner would know what value they should assign to their own work as I’m very confident you do!
With the raising of social media, many a person approached it with the idea of making witchcraft/paganism/occult their career and source of income outside of any experience whether it traditional and established through lineages that can be checked and work as a passage of knowledge as well as a way to keep scammers out, or by personal study. Barely adult, they have no training whatsoever and offer nothing more than what can be easily found on a quick search on the Internet. Charging six figures for that. These should be the people that need to be addressed to and who should put a hand on their conscience – if they have one – rather than professional people like you who are backing up their services with years of experience and good reviews and a work ethos shared by very few other people out there in the witchy/tarot/occult community (assuming there is such a thing.)
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