Shapeshifting and the Other/worldy: The Occult as Somatic Work: Shapeshifting, Decoloniality, and the Return to the Body

Opening up

On a breezy April day in 2022 whose edging warmth gave a glimpse into what the Montréal winter would finally soften into, I met one of my interlocutors on a picnic bench in Little Italy. In the small park, we were framed by a basketball court, a splash pad, and the community centre that I would eventually host group interviews in, discussing in groups of 12-15 what makes the occult “queer” and coded as a racial object. Like most of my interviewees for my doctoral project, AJ (participant alias) and I fell into an easy camaraderie in the preamble to the official questions. The distance between researcher and subject was made less stiff by recognition of our mutual queerness and interest in talking about zodiac signs, card-pulling, and the moon. As I asked them about their relationship to the occult, AJ dwelled for some time on intimacy in their practice of tarot: 

AJ’s reflection on tarot as relational, the care it demands, and the kinds of embodied feeling for which it “creates space” point to a constellation I started to work out in my doctoral project, and have recently begun to expand in a new direction in conversation with somatic justice. On top of theorizing (and troubling) the occult’s putative “queerness,” my aim has been to understand its racial territorialization. Unexpectedly, I found that practitioners turned to the body as a site of intervention, describing the ways they sought out new capacities to connect with themselves and with others through embodied attunement. AJ describes “creat[ing] space” as a goal of their practice, which allows someone to “wor[k] through something difficult.” Their comparison with tattooing spotlights the occult as an embodied practice, and one that has the potential to support ethical relationality: what is important isn’t what the cards “say,” but the fact that something was allowed to “come up” in that process. 

I am interested in what it would offer us to consider the contemporary revival of alternative spiritual forms like the occult as a kind of somatic work, one that dovetails with current decolonial methodologies that “return” to the body as a way to recover ways of knowing and relating that are reparative in our current social crisis.¹ Thinking with “shapeshifting,” I look at the occult as part of a broader movement to develop the capacity for “reconnection” with the body and the earth, which require embodied shifts in how we are oriented by, and take on as habits, structures of domination and dispossession.  

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The Occult Revival

Esoteric and occult practices have been reinvigorated in the last decade, as tarot guides and books on spiritual activism migrate to the front of bookstores, thousands of users post manifestation techniques on “WitchTok,” and astrology apps like Co-Star amass millions of subscribers without spending a dollar on marketing. While new age, psychic healing, and esoteric knowledges have always been part of the cultural makeup of the West²  this contemporary iteration claims to promote something new in its emphasis on cultivating intensely relational, self-reflexive, even anti-colonial modes of doing and being in the face of compounding social catastrophe.³ Key to this contemporary occult iteration is how it is taken up with particular fervor by queer people on the Left looking to summon resources to instate new—or rather, to revive old—grammars for survival.⁴

While the majority of commentary on the “queer” occult is happening outside of academia, some scholars are beginning to take note of how contemporary esotericism and witchcraft seek explicitly to re-story the world in a different image, taking these knowledge traditions as indices of colonial repression to launch critiques at the ongoing fallout of imperial modernity.⁵ I have found in my own work that practitioners turn to occult modes as one way to disorient themselves from the structuring modes of Western enlightenment rationality, seeking what Kyla Wazana-Tompkins ⁶ calls “otherwise” methods that repair, or at least reveal, the epistemic violence of imperialism. What remains overlooked in this phenomenon is that this gesture is deeply embodied, and I think connected to other movements that center embodied knowing as a form of “epistemic justice” in the wake of imperial regimes of erasure.⁷ While decolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldùa have long shown that colonization takes place at an embodied level, there is a renewed interest in reconnection to the body as an antidote to legacies of dispossession that make colonization possible. Influenced by canonical theories like Lorena Cabnals’s “body-land” (terro-cuerpo), decolonizing the body has come into new focus across medicine, geography, movement studies, and beyond.⁸ Looking at the occult’s overlap with somatic work, which I begin to sketch out here, has the potential not only to make interventions into this current discourse on embodiment, decolonization, and the “renewed interest in the mystical,”⁹ but to provide much-needed insight into how decolonial embodiment actually functions as a form of shape-shifting, or a re-orientation of the body which affects the ways it moves, feels, and relates to other bodies in space. 

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Shapeshifting and Somatic Justice

Power works on the body—the body is made into a shape, which has a given orientation, a field of possibility, a capacity for movement. Bodies do not precede contact with other objects but are moulded through particular histories which they then perform: as Sara Ahmed puts it, “[b]odies take shape as norms that are repeated over time and with force.”¹⁰ Anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism demand more than changed behaviour and education: rather, what is called for is a psychic and material re-patterning of the body, an expansion of capacities of being with each other, and orientation toward worlds beyond this one.¹¹ One key finding of my research with practitioners of the occult is how embodiment was central to describing shifts in attention, processing intense emotions, and consequently becoming good allies in movement building. For the body to show up in this way is compelling given that a major critique of new age wellness and alternative spiritual movements has been the inability to translate “inner enlightenment” to material political action.¹² In other words, much of new age spirituality has, despite generally espousing collective progress and social liberalism, focused on self growth to the detriment of material change.¹³ By contrast, my fieldwork shows that practitioners understood their uses of magic, witchcraft, crystal healing, and related currents as important or effective because of the ways they promoted forms of embodied knowing. The body was something to learn to be (inside), not to transcend. 

Decolonial theory and critical race studies construct whiteness as a powerful arbiter of disconnecting people from their bodies.¹⁴ As one of my white interviewees stated: “I feel like the whole institution of whiteness is just for forgetting that . . . we all have an origin from somewhere.” The people I interviewed named whiteness a kind of unhoming that works by severing connection with ancestral lifeways, whether through Indigenous forced dispossession, recent immigration, arriving to Canada as a settler, or arriving at Turtle Island through the Middle Passage. Disconnection is seen as both an effect of repressive technologies, as well as the process by which they are enforced.

While everyone is starting in different shapes, so to speak, depending on the ways they are racialized or emplaced within settler colonial structures, my interlocutors spoke about their shared commitment to becoming oriented differently within settler colonialism. If whiteness is what Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology calls a  “bad habit” that compels certain kinds of maneuvers and not others,¹⁵ these gestures can to some extent be contested in order to do something else. Occult, esoteric, or otherwise “alternative” spiritual healing modalities have become politically viable in this moment as a means to construct forms of embodiment that would allow for reparative sociality. Read in the context of decolonization, this shapeshifting comprises unlearning inherited lenses of sense perception that sustain colonial logics. Writing on feminist esoterism, Nathan Snaza argues: “Solidarity is nothing if not a shift in how one attends to . . . the ways that one’s daily habits either facilitate the ongoingness of a colonial homogenizing world—its tending or endurance—or instead processually enact otherwise modes of being.”¹⁶

Focusing on this embodied shift brings into relief a compelling link between contemporary occultisms and the emerging field of “embodied social justice.” While primarily a non-academic field, embodied social justice draws from somatics, trauma studies, and Black feminist theory to construct the body as a site and instrument of social oppression and power.¹⁷  In somatic experiencing modalities, reconnecting with the body is the goal. The very foundation of somatic therapy is that something must be done in order to be in touch with the body, and this facilitation is vital to shapeshifting: to “creating different stories.” In more politicized forms of somatic work, these stories represent not only individual experiences of trauma, but how systems of oppression have taken root in us in different ways.¹⁸ In embodied social justice, processing feelings more expansively is both the means and ends of healing from trauma, which is always already collectively entrenched.   

Those who take the body as the grounds for collective healing emphasize that for reconnection to occur, the capacity for it must first be developed. Some scholars have called this capacity somatic “bandwidth” and privilege this measure as a marker of one’s efficacy in social transformation.¹⁹  The queer occult is one pathway to developing this capacity, and putting the occult in conversation with somatics allow us to notice and understand their resonance through themes of return, un/learning, shapeshifting, and worlding, all of which bring into relief the current significance and co-constitution of embodiment, anti-colonial politics, and healing. 

Embodied Ancestral Inquiry (EAI), a workshop for practitioners of European descent to process their inheritance of white supremacy, argues that “At the core of whiteness lies the open wound of severance from land, spirit, and lifeways of reciprocity.” If systems of oppression rely on severing the connection we have to our bodies, to each other, and to the earth, they argue that we need resources toward rebuilding that capacity: it is not an intellectual, but rather an embodied exercise. Locating these seemingly disparate “methods” of spiritual activism and embodied justice alongside each other gives important insight into decolonization as a practice, and how the body forms a focal point of this labour. Training oneself to attend differently requires building the capacity to imagine something other than we already know, and there is much to gain from exploring the practices that are emerging (and those that have always been here) that take the body as the grounds of world building. EAI offers this framework: “When we shift our shapes into more relational ways of being, we shift the world around us in generative reciprocity. It’s this kind of deep, polyphasic consciousness that allows us to reshape our neural pathways and pass on something different to our descendants.”             Here, shapeshifting refers both to the body and what it “worlds” as a result of its movements. The somatic work invited here, like the occult practices I analyze in my fieldwork, considers the body as ground zero: not in the way that “inner work” translates “outwardly” to affect the world, but in the way that inner and outer are collapsed when we see the body as territory. When we beckon the occult out of its cultural pigeonhole and consider the ways it is mobilized as a form of embodied reconnection, we bring flesh into the realm of spirituality, and spirituality into the practice of somatics. 

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1. See Nathalie Lozano Neira, “Body-Land: Embodied Memory, Coloniality, and Resurgence Across Abya Yala and Turtle Island,” Genealogy 10, no. 1 (2026): 9; Carolyn Ureña and Saiba Varma, eds., Decolonizing Bodies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).
2. See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
3. Sydney Sheedy, “Queer Occultism, Sentimental Biopower, and Becoming ‘Bottoms’ as a Means to Divest from White Supremacy among Practitioners of Magic in Montréal,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2024): 177–194.
4. Sydney Sheedy, “Folk Survivals, Spurned Witches, and Thwarted Inheritance, or, What Makes the Occult Queer?,” Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies 50 (December 2022); Harris Kornstein, “Queer Enchantment: Contours, Cruising, Crystal Visions, and Other Queer Tactics for (Not) Being Seen” (Ph.d. Dissertation, New York University, 2021).
5. See Nathan Snaza, Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (Duke University Press, 2024); Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, eds., The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2025); Katie Howard and Shannon L. Mariotti, eds., The Witch: A Reader in Feminist Political Theory (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026).
6. Kyla Wazana-Tompkins, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, Sexual Cultures (NYU Press, 2024).
7. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Duke University Press, 2018).
8. See Carla Macal, “Body Mapping: A Decolonial Method towards Intergenerational Healing,” Social Science & Medicine 352 (July 2024); Sofia Zaragocin and Martina Angela Caretta, “Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 5 (2021): 1503–18; Ben Spatz, “Notes for Decolonizing Embodiment,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 33, no. 2 (2019): 9–22.
9. Michelle Tea, Modern Tarot (Harper Collins, 2017), 6, quoted in Snaza, Tendings, ix.
10. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), 91.
11. See Alexander Riccio, “Imagining A Better Utopia: Seizing Spaces of Revolutionary (Re)Production,” The Institute for Anarchist Studies, October 21, 2019, https://anarchiststudies.org/imagining-a-better-utopia-seizing-spaces-of-revolutionary-reproduction/.; Barbara Holifield, “Psyche within the Matrix of the Natural World: Weaving the Inner and Outer,” The Journal of Analytical Psychology67, no. 5 (2022): 1298.
12. See Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States, New Americanists (Duke University Press, 2001); Karlyn Crowley, Feminism’s New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism (State University of New York, 2011).
13. See Elissa Washuta, White Magic (Tin House, 2021).
14. See Jenny Stümer, “Imperial Whiteness: Fantasy, Colonialism and New Walls,” New Global Studies (Berlin, Germany) 13, no. 3 (2019): 301–20, 302.
15. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.
16. Snaza, Tendings, 41-42.
17. Sonya E. Pritzker, Living Toward Justice: A Time Capsule (NYU Press, 2025),; Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (North Atlantic Books, 2023).
18. Staci Haines, The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice (North Atlantic Books, 2019).
19. Rae Johnson, Embodied Social Justice, vol. 2 (Routledge, 2023).

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  Sydney J. Sheedy

  Sydney is a FRQ (Fonds de Recherche du Québec) postdoctoral fellow at Radboud University for 2025-2026. They completed their PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montréal, and are currently working on publishing a monograph about the occult as a site of queer knowledge production and divestment from empire. She has published in the European Journal of Cultural studies, and ARC: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies, and has upcoming chapters in volumes on Normative Esotericism; and Metaphysical Religion. Sydney’s postdoctoral project, called “Ancestor Work,” explores how the occult overlaps with somatic experiencing modalities, wherein reconnection with the body serves as an antidote to centuries of racialized disavowal. Sydney works across ethnography, critical race studies, gender studies, religious studies, and affect theory.