There is a conversation that happens, with some regularity, in witchcraft spaces.
Someone, usually a beginner, usually someone who has been building the courage to ask this question for a while, admits that the intention behind a working they want to do is not entirely pure. They want their ex back. They want a specific job, not just any job. They want the person who hurt them to face some kind of consequence. They want something for themselves, unambiguously and without apology, that they have been told they are not supposed to want in magical spaces.
And the response they receive, from guides, from communities, from the accumulated weight of received witchcraft wisdom, is often some version of this: be careful. Check your intentions. Make sure you are coming from a place of love. Consider whether this is really what your highest self wants. Think about the threefold law. Think about karma. Think about whether you have the right.
I understand where this comes from. I do not think the people who say it are wrong to care about ethical practice. But I think the framework underneath it is more harmful than it appears, and I think it is worth saying so clearly.
I do not believe there are wrong intentions in witchcraft.
Let me explain what I mean by that, and what I do not mean, because this is not an argument for recklessness.
Where the purity doctrine comes from
The idea that magical intention must be pure, selfless, or spiritually elevated to be valid has several sources, and none of them are as ancient or as universal as they are often presented.
Some of it comes from Wicca and the Wiccan Rede; the ethical framework of harm none, do what you will, which was formalised in the mid-twentieth century and which subsequent practitioners have sometimes applied far more rigidly than its originators intended. Some of it comes from the New Age emphasis on love and light as the only acceptable spiritual energies: a framework that is, at its extreme end, a spiritual bypassing of the full range of human experience. Some of it comes from the long Christian shadow over Western culture, in which certain desires are sinful and certain emotions are shameful, and the appropriate response to both is suppression rather than acknowledgement.
None of these are bad in their roots. Wicca’s ethical framework is a genuine attempt to encode respect for others into practice. The emphasis on love is a genuine attempt to orient practice toward connection rather than harm. The concern for others’ wellbeing is a genuine moral instinct.
But filtered through communities and internet culture and the particular anxieties of people who are new to a practice and already uncertain whether they are doing it right, these frameworks have produced something I find genuinely concerning: a witchcraft culture in which people feel they must perform spiritual purity before they are allowed to ask for what they actually want.
What purity culture actually does
Here is what I have observed over years of teaching and talking with people about their practice.
When someone is told that their intention is not pure enough, or learns, through the ambient culture of witchcraft spaces, that certain intentions are suspect, they do not stop having that intention. They have it and feel ashamed of it. They want the thing they want and add a layer of self-judgment on top of the wanting. They bring their real, impure, entirely human desire to their practice and then undermine the whole working by second-guessing whether they deserve to ask for it.
This is not more ethical than simply working with the intention as it is. It is less effective and, in a quiet way, more unkind, to the practitioner and to the practice.
Witchcraft at its best is a practice of radical honesty with yourself. Of looking clearly at what you actually want, what you actually feel, what is actually driving you, and working with that material consciously rather than pretending it is not there. Purity culture runs directly counter to this. It asks you to edit your inner life before bringing it into practice, to present only the acceptable version of your desires and suppress the rest.
The suppressed desires do not go away. They go underground. And underground, unacknowledged and unworked with, they tend to cause significantly more damage than they would have if you had simply been honest about them in the first place.
The intentions people are most ashamed of
Let me be specific, because I think specificity is more useful than generality here.
The wanting your ex back working. This is perhaps the most frequently shamed intention in witchcraft spaces, and I find the shaming of it genuinely puzzling. You loved someone. You lost them. You want them back. That is one of the most human experiences there is. The question whether working magic toward that end is wise (whether it will serve you, whether the relationship was good for you, whether your energy is better directed elsewhere) is worth examining honestly. But it is a pragmatic question, not a moral one. The desire itself is not wrong.
The working aimed at consequences for someone who harmed you. This is where I expect the most pushback, so let me be careful. I am not arguing for workings designed to cause harm to another person; that is a line I hold, not for cosmic karmic reasons, but for the very practical reason that directing sustained negative energy toward another person tends to keep you entangled with them, which is usually the opposite of what you actually need. But the desire for accountability, for justice, for the person who hurt you to face some consequence for their actions? That is not a dark intention. That is a deeply human one, and pretending otherwise does not make you more evolved. It makes you less honest.
The wanting something specifically for yourself. This one runs deepest, I think; the shame around desire that is unambiguously self-directed, that does not dress itself up in the language of the greater good. I want this job. I want this relationship. I want more money, more time, more ease, more recognition. I want things for myself because I am a person and people want things.
There is nothing wrong with wanting things for yourself. A practice that cannot accommodate ordinary human desire is not a practice for ordinary human beings. And ordinary human beings are exactly who witchcraft is for.
What I mean by working with intention honestly
None of this means walking into every working without reflection. Reflection is valuable, not to determine whether your intention is pure enough, but to understand it clearly.
Before any significant working, I think it is worth asking yourself a handful of honest questions. Not is this spiritually acceptable, but is this actually what I want, underneath the surface layer of the wanting? Not am I allowed to ask for this but if I get this, what do I think it will give me, and is that true? Not, is this intention pure, but is it honest?
Those are different questions, and they are better ones. They are the questions of a practice rooted in self-knowledge rather than self-policing. They will tell you more useful things about your working (and about yourself) than any assessment of whether your intentions meet the standard of spiritual purity.
The intention that is honest (even if it is messy, even if it is self-interested, even if it is tangled up with hurt or fear or grief or plain ordinary desire) is always more powerful than the intention that has been sanitised into something you think you are supposed to want.
Bring the real thing. Work with the real thing. Trust that the real thing is enough.
A closing thought
The witchcraft tradition that I most admire, and that the historical record most supports, is one that was built by ordinary people, with ordinary desires, asking for ordinary things. Health for their children. Safety for their households. Justice when they had been wronged. Love, when they wanted it. Prosperity, when they needed it.
None of them were asking for permission to want those things. None of them were checking whether their intentions were spiritually elevated enough. They were simply people, bringing their real lives to their practice and asking it to help them.
That is what practice is for.
Your desires are not the problem. They are the material.
