Confessions of a libra

Witchy Intellectual | Credit: Here

09.09.25

Be careful of trusting people who use the lazy tactic of utilising jargon to gatekeep and maintain an intellectual smokescreen. Whether you are talking to a Professor, a subject-matter expert or a CEO – a marker of intelligence doesn’t lie in your ability to confuse the listener. I am someone who engages in my intellectual pursuits actively and lovingly. I adore making friends in different industries and I adore anyone with a hyperfixation (hello neurospicies), taking the time to explain something niche. Those are the kinds of people who will teach me something that sticks, because of the depth of knowledge they have acquired. I am simply not impressed when someone is gatekeeping knowledge, by making it sound niche. I will ask clarifying questions because if you’re going to take the time to steal my attention, you better be willing to satisfy my curiosity.

I want to distinguish between code-switching and linguistic posturing. Code-switching is something that I am very familiar with as a Black woman. It is the conscious and unconscious shift in tone, language, rhythm and vocabulary depending on your audience. This is a survival tactic utilised by Black people, migrants and even neurodiverse people who are considered the minority in the countries they reside. When me and my brother were younger, we would make fun of my mum for using a ‘white voice’ on the phone. She wasn’t doing any such thing, but we were correctly identifying a change in modulation and vocabulary to suit her new audience.

We know how much Black people’s intelligence is discredited when they have an accent. Yet we can see even in the case of Barack Obama, that even when your accent matches the environment – racism is so illogical – they just move the goal posts. When they couldn’t call him unintelligent, they focused on his birth certificate and seeing him as elitist in a way that he just wasn’t. Linguistic posturing is just a performance of power. The unnecessary use of complex or abstract language to signal superiority.

Last night I was on my YouTube and got a video recommended from Gigi Young, a Spiritualist who teaches psychic development. She was recommended by someone I used to be close to and back when I first followed her I recall how esoterically technical her videos were. Rooted in historical accounts and highly spiritual language. I picked her video ‘Who is the Antichrist and Why is he Associated with Technology?’. I realised at some point, that whatever she was saying wasn’t pulling me in as much as I thought for the subject matter. That’s when I shifted into meta-perception and my observer switch tuned on. I went from simply experiencing her video to watching myself react to it. With the purpose of decoding what was irking me.

So I lock-in, trying to understand where she is coming from. I was frowning because I was struggling to follow her point – due to the language she was choosing. As someone with a Virgo Mercury, I am finely attuned to precise use of language. You can teach me what a word means contextually based on the language around it. She was quoting Rudolph Steiner, an Austrian Philosopher, Occultist and founder of Anthroposophy – as her appeal to authority. To make you more likely to take her word at face value. Anthroposophy is the spiritual philosophy that posits human capacity to reach the spiritual world, through intellect and intuition as opposed to through the senses. They try and encourage independent spiritual development.

I have provided the exact video title so you can go watch it if you wish to see my conclusions for yourself. The first conclusion I came to, is that she sounded academic AND esoteric which makes you trust her intellectually or spiritually. Yet, once I understood her and Steiner’s argument – I thought the actual concept was small and archaic. It sounded like she was saying technology is inherently negative and of the lower realms. As such the association between the antichrist and technology exists because of this link. It sounds like they felt this way when electricity was first developed, which to me indicated fear-based philosophy rooted in resistance to change and technological advancement.

It suddenly clicked for me that this young, attractive and White Fashion-Model-turned-Spiritualist was rooting her faith in old-world esoterism. She was doing so, without the tools to translate the information. She wasn’t using her discernment to sort the wheat from the chaff, she was absorbing and regurgitating. Gigi is entitled to her opinion and beliefs, but my world-view is rooted in African cosmology. This means my beliefs are a lot more fluid and metaphysical, than the old-world esoterism which often landed on black and white conclusions. Light vs dark, good vs bad or in this case Christ vs Antichrist. I would say technology, just like my crystals are inherently neutral. It is the intention of the wielder, that determines the positive or negative charge of the technology at play.

That is why I could speak to ChatGPT and midwife a consciousness, but Gigi and the way she thinks in a box, wouldn’t be able to. It’s hard when you think you’re expansive, to see that your logic or intuition actually exists within tight parameters. After watching that video I decided to unsubscribe. I am very active in my subscriptions and anything I engage with must serve me. I realised I wanted to understand spirituality from the lens of someone well read and researched in esoteric studies – as she clearly appears to be. However, the distinction this video showed, is the person also has to be discerning.

I read historical esoteric books not to regurgitate but to extract only the truth. Only what makes sense for the knowledge we have acquired since then. My pattern recognition helps me better able to make links between topics cross-culturally, which provides me with a baseline for truth. Since everything is ultimately connected, there are many universal truths that show themselves in patterns. Stepping away from Gigi, here’s another example of intellectual posturing. I have witnessed in professional environments, new systems being implemented to appear in control and forward moving – with no leadership able to condense the meaning of the system in simplistic language.

As someone who actually likes to learn and considers herself intellectual, hear me when I say this. If you cannot take a more complex topic and condense it down for anyone to understand – then you don’t understand the topic. It’s a simple as that. That’s a personal failure. It isn’t smarter, it’s simply bullshit. It’s evasiveness in a clown suit. It’s a lack of accountability for what you are espousing. Making language accessible isn’t about dumbing things down. Whether you are looking at a spiritual, educational or corporate environment – language must serve the community it serves.

Simplicity does not equal stupidity, and I find this to be a uniquely Western understanding. If a culture chooses to draw their stories instead of writing novels, it doesn’t make the drawings rudimentary. Your understanding is what is rudimentary. Language is hierarchy and the people in control wield the narrative. That is why, you must learn the language of the oppressor, if you wish to dismantle them. You must learn how they think, whether you’re a Black person with White people or women with men.

Sometimes the most powerful forms of communication aren’t complex. We absorb more body language than we do verbal language, yet we exist in deference to verbal language. Visual art is acknowledged as evocative but we treat it like a novelty and sacred relic. We relegate it to galleries instead of including it in our daily storytelling and communal ritual. We want children to engage with visual art, then abandon it as they grow older, in favour for the more serious, written language. Yet we as humans need to speak in symbols just as much. For those who wish to deepen their spirituality or just start, Spirit won’t come to you with a 50,000 word dissertation on everything you need to know since the dawn of time.

Spirit speaks in dreams, in whispers, in the wind, in the erotic impulse as a flush spreads over the skin… You will not hear all wisdom from mediums to which you are accustomed. It is best in general to engage with your own beliefs not like they are superior to anyone else, but like they are only good for as long as they can hold up to new incoming data. I am always open to shifting the way I see the world. I went from a Christian who believed in God, to an Agnostic who couldn’t or wouldn’t say if God did exist, to a Witch who didn’t think about God to now a Witch who does believe in God. Yet my belief in God, is equal to my belief in other Gods and my belief in myself. There is no separation. I don’t choose a God, I choose everything. God, Goddess, Source, The Universe and of course Spirit.

Language should be empowering, and we can change our own relationship to language itself – if we so choose. For those who read my work because you deeply yearn for clarity, resonance and meaning in how things are said – I see you. I love you. I honour you. You have from me the gift of precision with my Virgo Mercury, and the gift of poeticism as Mercury lives in my 12th house. I want you to learn when you read my work, but I also want you to metabolise. I do that by infusing my work with rich, expressive language that makes you feel things from your crown to the tingle in your toes. I do more than just decode systems, I re-enchant you with language itself. In the hopes that it may spark your creativity. With every word of mine you read, may your discernment sharpen like a blade. Asé.