Is Your Magic Extractive?

Even spiritual psychic mediums and magic practitioners can be extractive. Animist occultist Mimi Young discusses how so.

In a worldview shaped by extraction, it’s easy to carry that same impulse into spiritual practice without noticing. Even magic, when unexamined, can become a form of entitlement. We take, control, demand. But witchcraft, at its root, is relational. It asks how we might participate rather than dictate. Spirits are not waiting around for a call like drivers on an app. Extraction slips in quietly. It shows up when spells are cast only to gain. There is no asking, no tending to the spirits of a place, no recognition of the dead, no thanks. The planetary bodies, plants, animal parts, deities, all become utilities, rather than beings with their own rhythms and motivations.

Or when a deity is summoned in crisis and forgotten soon after. There is no question of what they need, or if they even want to be involved. This isn’t to say asking for support is wrong. We all ask. But how do we ask, and what are we prepared to give? Relationship implies exchange. It is not just access. What do we offer to make their work and existence easier? 

Reciprocity in magic begins with stillness and humility. Before asking anything of a plant, pause and listen. When calling on an ancestor, begin with presence. Greet them first. Then ask what has been left undone. What is unspoken or that which is needed now.

Reciprocity means remembering you are part of the web. Not every spirit is yours to engage with. In my own work, whether in spirit mediumship, divination, or spell practice, I begin by seeking consent. I never assume entry. It is entitlement to assume I am owed anything.

After being invited beyond the entrance, I offer food. I offer drink, song, flowers, smoke. I ask what I can carry with them, not what I can extract from them. This is how the work becomes mutual. This is how it becomes real. The perspective shifts. You no longer center yourself. You begin to understand you are not the one in charge. Even in my spell services (there are currently 3 upcoming), I make offerings and devotions.

If you want a place to start, begin by asking this:

Who or what have I treated as a resource, rather than a relationship?

Let that answer guide you to greater degrees of decentering human supremacy and exceptionalism.

Reciprocal magic does not always promise speed (though it definitely can!). But what it does offer is something deeper, so you can see and sense with more clarity rather than constant need for self importance. Spiritual work is magic where spirits are not tools or put it another way, a magic that does not collapse the Unseen into service roles and instead as your collaborator or more accurately, us as theirs.

This is the kind of spellwork that expands your sense of the real. In this way, magic changes us because it is a collaboration both within human and across more-than-human species, seen and Unseen, living and more-than-living. 

I’ve compiled a (which I did hesitate on writing one, as it’s so easy to treat lists as checkboxes that ultimately yield performative actions instead of inspirited ones), nonetheless, it is helpful to have a starting place.

Signs of Extractive Spirituality

• Approaching spirits, deities, planets, or plant beings only when you need something

• Casting spells solely to gain without offering thanks, tending, or relational presence

• Treating spiritual allies as utilities or energetic tools rather than beings with agency

• Summoning deities in times of crisis and forgetting them afterward

• Asking for support without asking what you might offer in return

• Neglecting to ask for consent from spirits or spaces before entering or engaging

• Assuming access to all spirits or entities without relationship or permission

• Using animal parts, herbs, or ancestral names without offerings, humility, or context (including having regard for tradition)

• Collapsing the Unseen into a service role for your will or outcomes

• Failing to acknowledge what spirits, ancestors, or the land might need or carry

Reciprocity, on the other hand, can also be seen as nothing more than a checklist, which of course if one comes from a worldview of extraction, can distort reciprocity to transaction. For this reason, I also hesitated compiling a list, yet, much like signs of extractive spirituality, does offer some foundations when being self reflective.

The Spirit of Reciprocal Magic

• Greet.

• Begin in stillness, with humility. Before any asking anyone anything, listen first.

• Ask what has been left undone or unspoken

• Make offerings: food, drink, smoke, flowers, song, time

• Ask: What can I carry with you? instead of What can you give me?

• Recognize that not all spirits are yours to work with

• Carry the understanding that while it’s fine to ask, you’re also not owed anything.

• Let your practice be shaped by mutuality.

If non-extractive, relational magic interests you…

Crafting the Arcane, my 12 part series of functional and animist witchcraft (is there any other kind), invites you into a deeper current of magic, one rooted not in control, but in reciprocal relationship with the Unseen.

There’s also my upcoming spell services where we can ask spirits for aid, and I make spirit devotional offerings along with your petitions.

Following the spirits,

Mimi Young
Animist spirit medium and occultist