I’m grieving someone I never met, and I need to say that plainly, because the grief doesn’t care about that distinction.

Carolyn Elliott died on July 26th, and the cause has now been confirmed as suicide. It is a devastating, heavy reality to sit with. She was one of the most influential magicians of her generation, and she was formative in my own practice in a way I can’t fully untangle. I could draw a straight line, if I tried, from my work in high magic and the occult to her work at badwitch.es, especially the Promethea working.

Here is what she gave me, and what she gave so many of us: she stood in the high magic space and said, yes, I want power. Out loud. In a world that behaves as if wanting power is inherently evil, that sentence was a detonation. She was loudly, unapologetically into the occult and seeing her move like that was the eye-opener. It was the permission slip I didn’t know I needed: not just to be a witch, but to be a magician.

Existential Kink made me furious the first time I read it. I was so angry. And that’s how I knew it was working. It stripped me down psychologically and changed the way I move through the world, at exactly the time I needed that push. From the rubble of that stripping I was able to do things like cut ties with my abusive parents. I owe that line of my life, in part, to her.

She never knew me. We never spoke. But I listened to every podcast I could find and watched every video. She was a beacon on the horizon for the kind of practitioner I wanted to become. It is a strange and terrible thing to sit with the fact that the horizon moved, and that she is no longer here in body to teach, to disrupt, and to hold space. My heart breaks for her two young children.

But here is what I believe, and what I think anyone who actually did her work understands: she is an occult ancestor now. She will keep guiding people from beyond, because that simply seems to be what she does. The work doesn’t die with the worker. The shadow, the kink, the yes to power, it keeps moving through everyone she stripped down and rebuilt.

It moves through me. It will move through this practice for as long as I’m here.

If you have the means and want to support her children during this unimaginable time, there is a GoFundMe set up for them here: https://gofund.me/e5df6526e

~ Soror Calix