The Specter of Purity Culture in Pagan and Occult Spaces

(everything stated in this blog is based upon my own research, personal practice, and opinion)

Let’s talk about the ghost in the ritual circle. No, not the one your medium-friend swears is Aunt Edna again. I mean the shadowy, bone thin specter of purity culture, yes, that one, that haunts even the most liberated groves, covens, and witchy Discords like an astral Karen demanding to speak to the High Priestess’s manager.

You’d think, after centuries of Christianity using purity culture to monitor bodies, muzzle pleasure, and weaponize shame, that the moment someone lights a candle to Lilith, they’d be immune to that nonsense. And yet. Purity culture is like glitter: it gets everywhere, sticks to everything, and no amount of moon water will get it out of your sacred salt bowl.

Once it’s in your cauldron, it starts pretending it belongs there, whispering sweet nothings about being “high vibrational,” “ethically clean,” and “aligned with love and light,” while subtly policing trauma survivors, kinksters, hexers, sex workers, neurodivergent folks, and anyone too real for a 24/7 Instagram filter.

Let’s unpack how this insidious, invasive nonsense keeps shape-shifting its way into our supposedly radical, subversive, soul-widening spaces, and what we can do to salt the damn earth behind it.

What Is Purity Culture, and Why Is It in My Magick Circle?

At its core, purity culture is the belief that one’s moral, spiritual, or social worth is directly tied to being “pure”. This is usually in terms of sexual behavior, emotional control, spiritual “cleanliness,” or ideological conformity. It’s about drawing lines between good and bad, clean and dirty, sacred and profane, and then enforcing those lines with shame, exclusion, and the occasional smug social media takedown.

In Christianity, this looks like virginity pledges, purity rings, “modest is hottest” T-shirts, and Bible study leaders who couldn’t say “masturbation” without spontaneously combusting.

In modern neo-pagan, witchy, and occulty spaces? It looks like “no hexing ever,” “good vibes only,” “if you’re vibrating low, you’ll attract demons,” “you shouldn’t be angry,” “don’t bring your trauma into the circle,” and “you can’t be spiritual if you’re not sober, vegan, and celibate (or poly, but only the Instagram kind).”

Same judgment. New packaging. This time it comes with crystals.

How Purity Culture Sneaks Into Paganism and Occultism

Despite the moonlit nudity, chaos deities, and insistence that “witchcraft is resistance,” our communities are not immune. In fact, many of us are so busy trying to be “better than the mainstream” that we end up importing the very crap we claim to be fleeing, just with more eyeliner and goddess statues. Let’s take a walk through some of the usual suspects.

“High Vibes Only” Culture

Ah, the pastel plague. You’ve seen it. Manifestation coaches who smile with the force of ten thousand suppressed traumas and chirp, “Only high vibes in this space, babe!” while deleting your comment about systemic injustice because it “lowers the frequency.”

This is purity culture in activewear. It says only certain emotions are allowed. Joy? Gratitude? Radiance? Great! Anger? Grief? Fear? Ugh, you’re attracting bad energy.

This kind of spiritual cheerleading creates spaces where people can’t be honest about their struggles. You start faking bliss so you don’t get exiled by the positivity police. It’s emotional fascism in a flower crown.

The Hex Shame Spiral

“Oh my goddess, you hexed someone? Don’t you know that breaks the Rede, offends the spirits, poisons your aura, and will rebound on you threefold times infinity?”

This is one of purity culture’s most bizarre mutations: the belief that being magically assertive, defensive, reactive, or retaliatory, is inherently impure. You’d think we were conjuring Satan on a Ouija board made of baby teeth (that’s not until next Saturday, byob).

Never mind that the gods many of us worship are literal war deities, tricksters, underworld rulers, and chaos dragons. Apparently it’s okay to invoke Hekate or Kali as long as you don’t actually do anything messy…

Purity culture frames protection magick, baneful workings, and righteous anger as “negative” or “low vibration,” and reinforces a false binary: you’re either a benevolent magickal Care Bear or a morally corrupt warlock.

Which is wild, considering half the grimoires in history are about cursing someone who stole your goat.

“Spiritual Hygiene” as Gatekeeping

Spiritual hygiene is real. Energetic cleansing is useful. But… when people start treating trauma survivors, neurodivergent folks, or people dealing with grief or mental illness like they’re contagious, we’ve left the realm of wellness and entered the realm of spiritual eugenics.

We’ve all seen it. Someone says, “I’m going through a hard time,” and suddenly the group chat goes quiet. Or someone struggling with addiction is told they’re “spiritually unsafe.” Or a sex worker is banned from ritual because their energy is “disruptive.”

This isn’t cleansing. It’s quarantining. It’s creating spiritual in-groups and out-groups based on behavior, neurotype, class, race, and trauma performance. It’s purity politics in sandlewood scented robes.

The Sacred Slut Double Standard

Paganism and occultism should be the last place on Earth where sexuality gets policed. Alas, purity culture shows up even here, just sneakier.

Sex is okay if it’s sacred. If it’s ritualized. If it’s “divine union” between “balanced masculine and feminine energies” (and missionary, only on Sunday, oh wait…). But, if you’re nonbinary, kinky, queer in a way that’s not aesthetic enough, or just someone who likes casual sex without attaching a pantheon to it? Oh, well now… suddenly you’re “misusing energy.” You’re “disrespecting the goddess.” You’re “impure.”

Some spaces still treat vanilla polyamory as enlightened, but BDSM as “low vibe.” They’ll call Aphrodite a sacred whore while side-eyeing actual sex workers. It’s not liberation, it’s cosplay with a side of moral panic.

Trauma Olympics and the “Healed Person” Fetish

Here’s a curveball: purity culture also sneaks in through the healing-industrial complex. In this version, you’re not allowed to participate until you’ve healed all your wounds, transcended your pain, and fully “integrated your shadow.”

Which sounds noble until you realize the bar for being “healed enough” to deserve community is constantly shifting, and always conveniently just past wherever you are.

If you’re too depressed, too angry, too messy, you become a liability. A problem. A contaminant. Communities will act supportive right up until your pain gets inconvenient, then exile you under the guise of “toxic”.

Why Purity Culture Is So Damn Persistent

Simple: it sells control.

In a chaotic, unjust, terrifying world, purity culture offers a seductive promise: If you’re good enough, clean enough, pure enough, you’ll be safe. Bad things won’t happen. Karma will protect you. The universe will reward your virtue. It’s a metaphysical insurance policy. Too bad it’s a scam.

When shit inevitably hits the fan, when the spell backfires, the illness returns, or the world burns anyway, the only explanation left is that you weren’t pure enough. So you try harder. Buy more crystals. Do more detoxes. Judge yourself. Judge others.

This is how control systems work. They turn your spiritual practice into a never-ending quest for unattainable perfection, and when you fail (which you must), they blame you.

How It Hurts Communities (Not Just Individuals)

Let’s get real: this isn’t just a you problem. This is a we problem. When purity culture worms its way into our circles, we all lose.

 Marginalized People Get Excluded

People with visible trauma, people in survival mode, neurodivergent folks, fat folks, Black and Brown folks, poor folks, sex workers, trans folks, disabled folks, anyone who doesn’t match the aesthetic of spiritual “purity…get pushed to the margins. Or shoved out completely.

 Community Becomes Performative

Everyone’s pretending to be zen, balanced, “high vibe,” and perfectly aligned. No one’s honest. No one’s messy. No one’s real. You’re not building a community; you’re LARPing a cult.

 Healing Becomes Hierarchical

We start ranking people by how “evolved” they are. Who’s integrated their shadow the most. Who’s “done the work.” Instead of compassion, we get competition. Instead of healing, we get hustling.

 Accountability Gets Lost

When people are obsessed with appearing pure, they can’t admit wrongdoing. Purity culture creates fragile egos, not strong relationships. Conflict becomes catastrophe. Repair becomes impossible. Power hoards itself under the guise of virtue.

So What Do We Do About It?

First: exorcise the ghost.

Second: burn the manual.

Third: build something better.

Embrace the Mess

Real spiritual growth isn’t clean. It’s not manicured. It’s not “on brand.” It’s crying into the void, screaming in ritual, bleeding on the altar, laughing at death, and throwing a tarot deck at the wall because it gave you The Tower again.

Your messy, complex, rage-filled, horny, grieving, contradictory self is the exact self the gods want.

 Create Imperfect, Brave Spaces

Don’t aim for safe spaces, aim for brave ones. Spaces where people can show up whole. Where conflict is possible, repair is encouraged, and performance isn’t mandatory.

Let people cry. Let people vent. Let people be angry. Let people be too loud. Let them bring their whole damn haunted house of a soul.

 Dismantle Hierarchies of Purity

Interrogate every unwritten rule about who gets seen as holy. Who gets to lead? Who gets invited? Who gets centered? If the answers are always the thin, white, cis, neurotypical, spiritually sanitized ones, it’s time to flip the ritual table. Holiness isn’t cleanliness. It’s depth. Power. Complexity. Sacred doesn’t mean sanitized.

 Normalize Shadow Work as Lifelong

Shadow work isn’t a one-and-done. It’s not a box you check before joining the group. It’s a lifelong process. Make room for that. Don’t treat people like spiritual bedbugs for still being in their process.

And… for the love of all that is sacred, stop acting like integration means perfection. Sometimes it just means notpunching someone while heavy planetary energy is abound. That’s progress.

 Practice Sacred Disobedience

Say the unspeakable. Break the taboos. Do the “low vibe” thing. Cast the protective hex. Invoke the angry god. Talk about trauma. Have the hard conversation. Laugh in the temple. Cry in the circle.

You are not here to be pure. You are here to be powerful.

Your Dirt Is Sacred

Purity culture is a lie. A trap. A prison cell lined with rose quartz and scented like lavender oil.

But you, my dear heretic, are not pure, and that’s exactly what makes you sacred. You’re messy. You’re complicated. You’re traumatized, turned on, exhausted, enraged, and still showing up with candles in your pockets and an invocation on your lips.

You are divine in your rage. Holy in your grief. Sacred in your chaos. Your very existence is a rebellion against every system that told you to sit down, shut up, and scrub yourself clean.

Go light that black candle. Bless your filth. Anoint your scars. Feed the gods the parts of you purity culture tried to starve.

Let the circle be messy.

Let the work be real.

Let your magic be dirty, because that’s where the power lives.