Gardnerian Wicca Explained: Female and Male magic in the Circle
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Based on a podcast with Josh and LadyE and host Philipp Kobald
Josh opens with a Santa joke. Of course he does. When you’ve spent years navigating a mystery religion that refuses to hand out answer keys, you learn that truth often arrives disguised as the ridiculous — the offhand comment about love potions, the silence that follows when someone admits they’ve been talking to spirits and something finally talked back.
This is the terrain Josh and LadyE navigate in their return to the Spiritual Conversation podcast — a space where Wicca isn’t packaged as aesthetic or escape, but as something far more unruly: a fertility religion that demands you get your hands dirty. Host Philipp Kobald, himself on a year-long pilgrimage through more than a hundred episodes of spiritual seeking, puts it plainly: “There will be a point where I must choose to simply believe. And it’s liberating and it’s interesting and it’s challenging.”
That admission lands like a stone in still water. Here is a modern, secular man — Austrian meditation teacher with more than three decades of practice, former materialist — confronting the edge of his own rationalism and finding not certainty, but a strange relief in the leap.
The Godhead in Small Shoes
What separates Gardnerian Wicca from the spiritual marketplace is its stubborn insistence on fertility — not as metaphor, but as root. Josh explains: “For human beings, there’s really only one place where we can touch the Godhead and say, Hey, we’ve apprehended it. And that’s when our little children are running around, and we’ve brought new life.”
This is not the Instagram version of witchcraft, all sage bundles and manifesting abundance. This is older, hungrier, more intimate. The fertility religion framework demands you get your hands dirty, literally. Grow food. Hunt deer. Feel the particular weight of death that feeds life. LadyE notes that without physical immersion — without putting your feet in the grass or in the dirt — you’re not creating the bond. You’re just sitting outside.
The modern seeker, scrolling through feeds of algorithmic spiritual content, might find this requirement almost offensive in its bodily demands. You mean I have to do something? Kill something? Plant something? Wait for seasons?
Yes. And more than that: you have to be wrong. You have to cultivate, as Josh puts it, “that introspection and be able to admit that you’re wrong.” The mystery religion offers no Bible, no final codex. There is only the search, the trial and error, the occasional object thrown by an unseen hand to confirm you’re not merely talking to yourself.
The Hierarchy of Humility
What emerges is a structure that mirrors the best and worst of human learning. There are degrees, yes, but nobody pulls rank unless there’s “severe conflict.” You cannot give yourself a title. You might remain first-degree forever if the spiritual growth isn’t there — and perhaps that’s exactly where you belong, solving discrete problems for others without climbing toward priesthood.
This is the unspoken tension Kobald keeps circling: the difference between wanting magic and wanting growth. The seeker who arrives seeking love potions (and they do arrive) encounters not dismissal but philosophy. “We bore our seekers to death with philosophy,” Josh admits, with the dry humor of someone who’s watched many would-be witches discover they wanted special effects, not transformation.
Commanding Shadows
The episode’s most electric exchange concerns power itself. When Josh mentions “bringing them under control,” Kobald pounces — not aggressively, but with the hunger of someone who’s interviewed ninety percent of guests who insist spirits choose you, that humans are merely vessels for higher frequencies.
The distinction matters. High magic, LadyE explains, “is very much about you command the spirit.” But within their Gardnerian practice, the approach is merciful, gracious, working for the good of all. The contradiction isn’t resolved so much as inhabited. Yes, you can command. No, you shouldn’t. The spirits have been around millennia; you’re an ant. But you also have agency, boundaries, the right to close the laptop on toxic influences.
This is spiritual maturity rendered as practical ethics: knowing when to wield honey and when to simply hang up the phone. The modern seeker, exhausted by both religious authoritarianism and relativistic “you do you” spirituality, might find something bracing in this negotiated sovereignty. You are small. You are also responsible. The spirits are real. They also require your effort before they’ll pay attention to your requests.
The Dirt Under the Nails
What remains, after the jokes about Viagra and Airbnb hauntings, is a portrait of spiritual practice as ancestral repair. Josh’s son killing his first deer. The code word passed from dead medium to living son. The crayon inventor digging holes in his Philadelphia backyard until the “elves” gave him answers.
These are not stories about believing six impossible things before breakfast. They’re about the slow, physical, often embarrassing work of staying in contact with what refuses to be digitized. The fertility religion persists, Josh suggests, because it answers a hunger for authenticity that social media only intensifies by its absence. Every scroll is pushed content. Every ritual, ideally, is co-created.
Kobald, nearing his hundredth episode, has earned his final observation: “The more conversations I have, the more I can feel the honesty in the words… It’s very loving, it’s very intimate.” The article you just read was inspired by an episode of Spiritual Conversation, produced by HolisticCircle and hosted by Philipp Kobald. The full conversation with Josh and LadyE is available on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.
Perhaps that’s the only proof available to modern seekers — not scientific verification, not doctrinal certainty, but the texture of honesty in someone’s voice when they describe putting their feet in the dirt and finally, finally, feeling something answer back.
About the Guest
Josh is a Gardnerian Wiccan practitioner who co-hosts with his wife LadyE, both of whom discuss their mystery religion practice emphasizing fertility, ancestral connection, and structured spiritual growth through the HolisticCircle podcast.
👥 *Links to our guest:* Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/tanglewood/ Blog: https://phergoph.wordpress.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@phergoph
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