What Is Kinship?
Today is the release day for The Witch’s Kin: Deepening Your Relationship With Nature, Spirits, and Humankind, by Asa West. What follows is an excerpt from the introduction to the book.
To order your copy, go here or use the order link at the end. And use code MAY2024 for 20% off your order!
What Is Kinship?
My beautiful city is broken. It’s Monday, and I’m tired and late for work. As I hurry to the bus stop, I pass drifts of garbage and mounds of dog poo. Recently, I found a bullet casing outside the gate to my building. I pass a vacant lot, once home to a gas station. It’s barren, except for the unhoused neighbors. They sometimes set up camp outside its gates, until the police sweep in, forcing them to move elsewhere.
Occasionally, some gardening crew from somewhere — the lot’s owner? the city? — arrives and mows down the weeds growing in the lot. I suppose that’s easier for them than remediating the gasoline-soaked soil.
Prickly lettuce, mallow, shepherd’s purse, and wild mustard intermingle with the neighborhood’s ornamental ginkgo and ficus trees.
The bus stop is surrounded by posh bars and high-end cafes selling $7 coffees. I wait for forty minutes, and when a bus finally does arrive, it passes without stopping — either behind schedule, or full, or both. Many of the city’s bus drivers have quit. None of us waiting at the stop know what to do.
Sometimes, Los Angeles feels like a swamp of problems, an irredeemable mess. Thanks to skyrocketing housing costs, tens of thousands of people are living on the streets. Sprawling tent cities now sit outside the front doors of ultra-luxury apartment buildings. No matter how dire the housing situation gets, an army of stubborn homeowners and lobbyists blocks any attempt to change things, claiming that the answer to homelessness is simply for everyone without housing to get a job. Never mind that it’s tough to get a job offer when you don’t have an address or access to a shower. Never mind that many unhoused people do have jobs, but can’t afford housing on minimum wage.
There’s over a billion dollars that could go to building homes and helping people in crisis, but instead, it’s poured into the police department’s budget. Our skies are filled with the constant roar of police helicopters. Dozens of civilians are shot by cops each year.
And then, there’s the cry of the land itself. Our native ecosystems are devastated by development and climate change, our river encased in concrete, and the land itself paved over. Many people think the Los Angeles Basin is naturally a desert, because they’ve never seen it in its natural state. Unfortunately, thanks to the ever increasing droughts and heat waves, that belief may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Few human residents, even those who have lived here all their lives, can recognize any of California’s native plants. Instead, they only know the imported tropical species that guzzle our imported water supply. Even fewer can name the Native peoples — the Tongva, Chumash, Fernandeño Tataviam, and others — who have stewarded this land for ten thousand years. Our beaches are too poisonous for fishing and our topsoil is scraped away. Our air is so polluted that even on seemingly clear nights, fewer than a dozen stars are visible.
But — there’s so much beauty in this place, beauty we could cultivate and celebrate, if we only cared. Los Angeles is built upon gentle hills and valleys filled with manzanitas, oak trees, sages, and firework-bright wildflowers. The California Floristic Province, a region stretching from Mexico to southern Oregon, is a biodiversity hotspot, home to thousands of plant species found nowhere else in the world. These plants serve as food and habitat to countless animals. Los Angeles and the mountains bordering it are home to bighorn sheep, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, and gray foxes. Look in the sky and you’ll see red tailed hawks, great horned owls, and too many songbird species to count. The true face of this land bears no resemblance to the stereotypes.
The people here, too, are beautiful — full of stories, hardships, and dreams. Los Angeles is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States, with a symphony of enclaves and communities: Jewish, Ethiopian, Mongolian, Bangladeshi, Korean, Armenian, Filipino, and more. Almost half of our population is Latino, and the city is deeply infused with Latino culture. Artists and writers are everywhere.
Also, Los Angeles is full of literal magic. Botanicas provide supplies to all our curanderas and brujas, and there are two other psychics within four blocks of my home, where I read cards for clients at my kitchen table. We have a robust Pagan community, full of witches and druids and devotional polytheists. Just as with the land itself, when you take a moment to look past what you think you know about Los Angeles’s humans, you find a city as beautifully vibrant as a Matisse painting.
Now why, you may ask, am I beginning a book on witchcraft with a love letter to a metropolis?
Because in all likelihood, this description fits your home as well, even if you don’t live in a city. Chances are, your community is a mixture of intractable problems and deep beauty. But if you learn to recognize the human and nonhuman beings around you in all their complexity, and approach them on their own terms — instead of forcing them to conform to your expectations — then you can form bonds of kinship with them.
Ask ten people what the word “kinship” means, and you might get ten different answers. Some may give you the literal meaning, stemming from the Old English word cynn, meaning “family.” They’ll tell you that your kin are simply the people in your family or clan, your biological relatives, your ancestral lines. In this understanding, my closest friends aren’t kin to me, even though I love them; conversely, my white supremacist cousins are my kin no matter how noxious their beliefs are. When my husband and I were just dating, we weren’t kin, but the moment our wedding ceremony was complete, we were. This definition of kin certainly makes sense, but you’ve probably already noticed that it feels incomplete.
Other people might describe kinship by telling you about the people with whom they share a deep affinity, a chemical connection. The friend who shares your offbeat sense of humor, the lover who can finish your sentences, the members of your tight-knit spiritual community, the covenmates who accept you without judgment — these kinds of bonds are what people often mean when they talk about kindred spirits and chosen families. Many witches, Pagans, and other animists will extend this idea further, describing close relationships with plants, animals, spirits, ancestors, and deities. But even though this definition is much more expansive than the literal one, it still doesn’t quite do justice to the concept of kinship. The problem is that it limits our ideas of kinship to the beings we already like, the ones we find palatable. But real kinship challenges us to extend our love much further than that.
A few years ago I switched jobs, from the relatively safe bubble of academia to the chaotic world of public libraries. As a public librarian, I was now face to face with people whom I previously hadn’t encountered very often. Struggles such as addiction and psychosis were daily realities for many of our patrons, and I quickly discovered that the people who need the most compassion aren’t always the nicest people on the surface. I’d spent years studying the practices of lovingkindness and radical love — interrelated concepts, stemming from Buddhism and social justice movements, that encourage us to see all beings as deeply connected to us — but I realized I’d never had to put those ideas to use as much as I did now. I struggled to serve my library’s community without growing cynical or burning out. The mystic in me, the part of myself I’ve always thought of as my “witch fire,” seemed to shrink from a bright flame to a barely smoldering cinder.
Around the same time, I read two books that made a deep impression on me. The first was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which fundamentally changed the way I approach working with plants, animals, and spirits. I’d read plenty of books on environmentalism urging us to love the earth, but Kimmerer asserts, unequivocally, that the earth loves us back — even those of us who are descended from colonizers, or who don’t live up to the ideals of sustainability. This attitude was a far cry from all the warnings I’d heard in the witch and Pagan community about angry land wights, hostile nature spirits, and resentful genii locorum. I began to notice a guilty streak running through modern witchcraft, especially among non-Indigenous witches living on Indigenous land. I began to realize how deep and pervasive this guilt is, how much it influences our supposed best practices for working with the spirits around us, and how it continues the colonial project of alienating human beings from the land that nourishes us.
The second book I read was Gregory Boyle’s Barking to the Choir: the Power of Radical Kinship. Boyle is a Catholic priest and the co-founder of Homeboy Industries, which helps former gang members build new lives. What inspired me about Boyle’s work was his steadfast refusal to distance himself from the people he works with, and his definition of kinship as “not serving the other, but being one with the other.” All too often, when helping people in need, we develop an us-and-them mentality: we are the noble souls working to get them into housing or onto medication or off of drugs; we are the smart people who have our lives together; and they are the messes who need cleaning up. Boyle rejects this mentality, describing how his work is based on building community with gang members, learning about the poverty and violence that funnels them into gang life, and constantly working to understand both the unimaginable burdens they carry and the commonalities they share with him. “It would seem,” he writes, “that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe of what folks have to carry rather than in judgment of how they carry it.”
Here was another area in which I noticed a gap in modern witchcraft. Most of us who practice European-style witchcraft — British Traditional Craft, Wicca, folk magic, and other traditions — situate ourselves more or less in the hedge-rider tradition, with one foot in civilization and one foot in the wildwood. This path is rich in beauty and wisdom, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. However, it can be very tempting, when the human world feels unkind or unappealing, for the witch to retreat further and further into the world of spirit. Most of us don’t go off the grid and live as hermits in caves, but we might focus our attention on ecstatic ritual and spirit communion, while letting our more difficult human relationships atrophy.
Too often, I’ve seen witches claim that they refuse to deal with “unenlightened” people. I’ve seen witches join online public shaming campaigns when they have no idea what crime the target supposedly committed. I’ve seen organizers of public rituals and classes preemptively ban anyone with a mental health diagnosis, instead of questioning their own assumptions about “crazy” people. I’ve seen witches claim to speak for trees and plants, when the messages they relay sound suspiciously like their own egos. I’ve seen witches name rare herbs and crystals as their loyal allies, ignoring the fact that those herbs were poached from fragile ecosystems and those crystals were mined by child laborers. And, of course, I’ve seen witches engage in countless acts of bigotry, cultural appropriation, and other forms of oppression. I’ve committed my fair share of these mistakes, too. Kinship is based, first and foremost, on knowledge about those around us, but we seem to have an unquenchable thirst for ignorance.
This nexus of experiences helped me solidify my own definition of kinship. Kinship, to me, means striving to truly understand the many beings around us — human, plant, animal, and spirit — and building community with all of them. Not just the ones we feel an immediate affinity with. Not just the ones who are nice to us. All of them. Because they’re part of our communities already, whether we like it or not.
Kinship doesn’t mean we can’t draw healthy boundaries or protect ourselves from harm. Rather, it means making a radical commitment to interrogate our preconceived notions of what we don’t understand. It means setting aside easy explanations and listening to the stories our community members are trying to tell us — whether that story is a plant who’s wilting, a god who’s calling us, or a human being lashing out from a place of unbearable pain. Kinship is giving your human and nonhuman neighbors the humble offering of your unclouded attention, and recognizing that both romanticizing and demonizing are simply ways of reducing complex beings to caricatures.
Kinship means acknowledging that you are just as imperfect and divinely crafted as every single other being around you, and using that knowledge to bridge the gap between yourself and others. In the sacred ecology of kinship, no one is left stranded on the margins, ever.
So, how do we nurture kinship as witches?
Some religious traditions have the benefit of scripture to guide them. In Buddhism, as I mentioned, we find the concept of lovingkindness, or metta. The Jewish concept of chesed can also be translated as lovingkindness, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks describes it as “the love that is loyalty, and the loyalty that is love.” Both Christian and Jewish texts exhort their adherents, over and over again, to welcome strangers and take care of those in need. Granted, these concepts are usually easier in theory than in practice, but the ideas are unmistakably there, available as guiding lights to anyone who’s willing to learn from them.
Witches don’t have one agreed-upon set of sacred texts, but that doesn’t mean we can’t draw on our cultures’ vast reservoirs of myth and lore to deepen our understanding of kinship. Take, for example, the Charge of the Goddess. In the Charge, the Goddess states: “My law is love unto all beings … I am the mother of all things and My love is poured upon the earth.” If the idea of a mother goddess as the creatrix of all things resonates with you, then the Charge presents you with what might be an uncomfortable reality: no matter how small and seemingly insignificant a being is, and no matter what atrocities a person commits, the Goddess loves them just as much as she loves the rest of creation. What does that mean when we have to eat other living things to survive (even if we’re strict vegans)? What does it mean for those of us justifiably furious at our abusers and oppressors? If you agree with the Charge’s declaration that all things in the universe aren’t just theoretically worthy of love, but are loved by the Goddess no matter what, then wrestling with that truth can break open new ways of seeing every being’s inherent worth. Again, it doesn’t mean you have to excuse or invite harm. But sometimes, it can push you to look for what lies beneath the surface of a being you don’t understand, from the humble bacterium to the most ferocious tyrant. And that newfound understanding can lead to incredible breakthroughs.
Throughout this book, I’ll explore other ways that kinship is woven into many of the practices of modern witchcraft. The first part of this book explores kinship with the physical world of plants, animals, and fungi, with particular emphasis on the languages they use to communicate, and ways we can work with them, learn from them, and serve them. The second part explores our relationship with deities and the spirit world. We’ll look at questions of gnosis and authority, along with practices for building authentic relationships with the many guises of Spirit. Finally, the third part combines neuroscience with praxis from Reclaiming Witchcraft and secular Buddhism to deepen — and repair! — relationships with the other humans in our lives. I should note that this book assumes you’re at least somewhat familiar with the basic practices of witchcraft. If you’re reading this as a complete beginner, I would suggest picking up a copy of Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, Marian Green’s A Witch Alone, or Gemma Gary’s Traditional Witchcraft. All of those books have been formative for me in my own practice, and are excellent introductions to the spiritual path of the witch.
I should also mention that if you’re hoping for an atmospheric book filled with intricate spells and rituals, this book will probably disappoint you. The mysticism I explore here is a quiet, ordinary kind, rooted as much in the mundane world as it is in the occult. The practices I recommend probably won’t lead to quick catharsis or sudden epiphanies, but I can say from experience that their effects are transformative if you make them part of your daily life.
Finally, you’ll find that my ideas of kinship, and the practices that draw on those ideas, are incompatible with systems of oppression like capitalism, colonization, patriarchy, and white supremacy. These systems perpetuate illusions of hierarchy and entitlement in order to assign infinite value to some and zero value to others. It’s simply not possible to support clearcutting a forest, paying someone starvation wages, polluting the environment, or brutalizing another living being if you see them as kin. We all fall short sometimes, of course. We get angry, we take our loved ones for granted, we make assumptions, we choose not to listen. I know I do. But you’ll find that the work of cultivating kinship and the work of dismantling oppression are one and the same.
There’s a chant by musician and composer Suzanne Sterling that I use in my daily practice, and lead in classes and group rituals whenever I can. The lyrics are simple, but powerful:
All comes from love, all goes back to love.
Love is the law, love is the law, love is the law, love is the law.
I see you, I know you, I am you.
I see you, I know you, I am you. To see clearly, to understand, and to recognize commonality: that’s the essence of kinship, whether that kinship is with an herb, a god, a loved one, or an adversary. There’s no deeper magic than finding oneness with the infinite life all around you.
The Witch’s Kin
Deepening Your Relationship With Nature,
Spirits, and Humankind
by Asa West
Release date: 1 May, 2024
“Kinship, to me, means striving to truly understand the many beings around us — human, plant, animal, and spirit — and building community with all of them.
Not just the ones we feel an immediate affinity with. Not just the ones who are nice to us. All of them. Because they’re part of our communities already, whether we like it or not.”
From Asa West, the author of the wildly-popular Five Principles of Green Witchcraft, comes her exciting second release with RITONA: The Witch’s Kin: Deepening Your Relationship With Nature, Spirit, and Humankind.
In this book, Asa West offers a profoundly radical — yet deeply intuitive — framework for relating to all the others around us. Drawing from the deep wells of animist, scientific, and magical traditions, as well as her own deeply kind insights into human and other-than-human relations, The Witch’s Kin offers practical advice for being in the world with others.
About Asa West:
Asa West is a witch, writer, and artist in Los Angeles, California. Her work stems from Reclaiming Witchcraft, British Traditional Witchcraft, and her Jewish heritage, and she's fascinated by the intersections of nature and civilization. She's also the author of the zine Five Principles of Green Witchcraft.
Specifications:
Hardback: 6.14 inches x 9.21 inches (Royal), 150 black&white pages on 50lb cream paper, matte dust jacket on grey digital cloth.
Paperback: 6.14 inches x 9.21 inches (Royal), 150 black&white pages on 50lb cream paper, perfectbound with matte finish cover.
Digital Editions: EPUB, PDF
Ordering Information:
Hardcover editions retail for US 27.50 and perfectbound editions for 20.00 US. A combined Digital edition (EPUB and PDF) can be purchased for US 12.00
In addition to single editions, RITONA has created two book packages to complement the publication of The Witch’s Kin. These packages allow readers to purchase multiple related books together at a significant discount.
The Hardcover package includes hardcover editions of the following titles:
The Witch’s Kin, by Asa West
True To The Earth, by Kadmus
The White Deer, by Melinda Reidinger
The Magic and Witchcraft package includes perfectbound editions of the following titles:
The Witch’s Kin, by Asa West
Reclaiming Ourselves, by Emma Kathryn
Being Pagan, by Rhyd Wildermuth
Circling The Star, by Anthony Rella
Five Principles of Green Witchcraft, by Asa West
The cost of the Hardcover Package is $75 US, a savings of 17.50 US from retail prices (normally 92.50 US).
The cost of the Magic and Witchcraft (paperback) Package is $55 US, a savings of 17.50 US (normally 72.50 US).
To Order Print Editions
Select your option, and then click “add to cart.” When you have made your selection, you can then either go directly to checkout or continue browsing .