You Didn't Decolonise Your Spirituality. You just Switched to a Different Kind of Extraction.
On the West's erasure of its own mystery traditions — it is not the liberation we think it is.
Look, if we are going to talk about decolonisation, let's stop preaching and begin in our own backyards. I have seen a lot of people critiquing Western occult practices lately — trying to debunk them, dismiss them, dismantle them — not realising what they are actually doing when they criticise what is, hilariously, their own lineage of mystery tradition and magic.
The irony would be funny if it weren't so costly. Because in the rush to signal spiritual sophistication — to be the person who has moved beyond the West, who bows to traditions older and more intact than their own — something real is being discarded. Something that belongs to them. They’re severing themselves at their roots.
What gets lost in this performance of decolonisation is the very thing it claims to honour: lineage. Rootedness. The responsibility to know where you actually come from — and what that place, for all its violence and contradiction, once knew.
The West Has it’s own Mystery Tradition. A Serious One.
The Western occult lineage is not a footnote. It is not a watered-down copy of something more authentic that exists elsewhere. It runs deep and it runs strange and it is breathtakingly rich.
We are talking about Hermeticism and its roots in Hellenistic Egypt. The Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who mapped the architecture of the soul with a precision that rivals anything in Vedantic literature. The Renaissance magi — Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno — who held that the cosmos was alive, ensouled, and radically participatory. The alchemical tradition, which was never merely about turning lead into gold but about the transformation of the self. The Kabbalah as it passed through Western hands. The Rosicrucians. The Grail mythos. William Blake, who built his own mythology because he refused to be enslaved by someone else's. Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The British rune traditions. The living animism threaded through Celtic practice.
These are not peripheral figures or quaint relics. These are the architects of a living cosmological tradition that understood the body, the soul, the stars, and the invisible world as one continuous fabric of meaning.
“The West has not been without mystery. It has been without memory.”
Take Astrology — A Perfect Case Study
Western astrology is perhaps the most telling example of what I mean — and the most misunderstood. People who dismiss it as a Western construct, or who privilege Vedic astrology as the more “authentic” system, are missing something important about its actual history.
The roots of Western astrology are Babylonian, reaching back to Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE. The Babylonians developed the zodiac, mapped the planets, and understood that celestial patterns corresponded to earthly events. When Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 331 BCE, that knowledge flooded into the Hellenistic world. In Alexandria — that extraordinary crucible where traditions collided and cross-pollinated — Babylonian astronomy merged with Greek philosophy and Egyptian cosmological knowledge. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, written in the 2nd century CE, became the foundational text of Western astrology for over a thousand years.
"Then came the Islamic Golden Age. When access to classical knowledge contracted in Europe, Arab and Persian scholars — Al-Kindi, Abu Ma'shar — preserved it, vastly expanded it, and eventually it passed into European hands through the great translation movements of the 11th and 12th centuries. Europe was not recovering its own — it was receiving a multi-civilisational inheritance it had never solely owned.
Western astrology is therefore already a synthesis — Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Arab, Persian, and European thought in living conversation with one another across millennia. It belongs to the Western occult lineage precisely because the West was never sealed off from the East. It was always in dialogue. That is very different from abandoning your own roots in favour of borrowing someone else’s wholesale.
The Logic Doesn’t Hold
Let us examine the reasoning that drives so many Westerners away from their own lineage. It goes something like this: Christianity colonised the West and suppressed indigenous wisdom. Therefore, Western spiritual frameworks are corrupt. Therefore, I will seek elsewhere.
There is truth in the first premise. Christianity — particularly in its institutionalised, empire-adjacent forms — did suppress, absorb, and in many cases erase older ways of knowing in Europe. The witch trials, the destruction of the sacred groves: the severing was real and it was violent.
But here is what this reasoning skips: the mystery traditions were never fully extinguished. They encoded themselves in alchemical manuscripts and cathedral architecture and fairy stories and the symbolism of Tarot. They survived because they knew how to hide. And they have been waiting — patiently in the root systems of the Earth — for someone to come looking.
To reject the entire Western spiritual inheritance because of what the Church did to it is like refusing to learn your mother tongue because your grandmother was punished for speaking it. The oppression was real. But the language did not die. And refusing it does not heal anything — it simply continues the severance.
The Irony That Nobody Wants to Name
When a person from the West dismisses their own ancestral lineages as “too Christian” or “too patriarchal” or simply “not spiritual enough,” and then adopts Eastern practices wholesale — they are not decolonising. They are re-enacting the very colonial logic they claim to oppose.
They are still going to the East for what they believe the West cannot provide. They are still positioning non-Western traditions as the site of authentic spiritual currency, and the West as spiritually bankrupt — a land in need of import. The East remains exotic, romantically other, a resource to be mined for meaning. Only now, this extraction comes packaged with good intentions and a gratitude practice.
True decolonisation would look different. It would mean going back — not to the Church, but behind and beneath it. It would mean learning what your own ancestors knew about the body, the earth, the dead, and the invisible world. It would mean doing the harder work of recovering what was suppressed in your own lineage, rather than substituting someone else’s intact tradition for your own broken one.
The Cost of Root Severance
Jung understood something here. He was deeply cautious about Westerners adopting Eastern spiritual practices— he believed that when we sever ourselves from the symbolic inheritance of our own culture, that material does not disappear, it just becomes shadow.
What I see, working with people in the somatic and esoteric fields, is precisely this: a spiritual hunger that is real, reaching toward frameworks from cultures whose roots are still intact, because their own roots feel poisoned or simply lost. And I understand the impulse completely. But borrowed roots do not nourish in the same way. There is something in the soil of your own lineage — something in what your particular ancestors knew, suffered, encoded, and survived — that is available to you in a way nothing else can replicate.
Coming Home to a Complex Inheritance
I say all of this as someone who has had to reckon with this complexity in my own life. My roots are Chinese, Scottish, and English — three lineages, each with their own occulted depths, each with their own history of suppression and survival. I did not arrive at the Western mystery traditions by default. I arrived there through years of deliberate lineage work: sitting with what had been lost, walking the lands of my ancestors, tracing what had been hidden, and choosing — consciously — to reclaim what was mine to reclaim. The Hermetics. The British rune traditions. The older threads of Celtic practice that predate the Church’s reach — particularly, in the work I do with herbal medicine prescription and medical astrology.
That reclamation did not diminish my relationship to my Chinese ancestry or to the Eastern lineages I have studied deeply. It deepened it. Because when you are rooted in your own ground, you can meet another tradition as an equal — with genuine curiosity and respect — rather than as a refugee looking for somewhere to belong.
“You do not have to cross the world to find your roots. Sometimes you only have to descend.”
The Western mystery traditions are not asking you to be Christian. They are not asking you to be anything other than what you are — a soul with a lineage, standing with the inheritance that has been quietly waiting for you to come home.
The room is there. The door has always been unlocked. What has been missing is not access — it is the willingness to stop looking elsewhere long enough to go in.
Continue the work
Medical astrology is one of the oldest and most sophisticated threads of the Western mystery tradition — a system that reads the body through the cosmos, and the cosmos through the body. If this essay has stirred something in you, this is where the lineage becomes practice.
Explore Medical Astrology at the Institute of Esoteric Medicine →
Sigourney Belle Weldon writes at the intersection of esoteric theology, embodied medicine, and the Western mystery traditions. This essay is part of The Soft Body Revolution.
