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The Skeptical Witch Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWYaJlQZ7zGSfJv-INEgo1A\nwww.obscureclouds.com\n\xa0\nS3E6 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\nMark: Welcome back to the Wonder: Science-based Paganism. I'm your host Mark.\nYucca: and I'm Yucca.\nMark: And today we have a really exciting episode. We are interviewing Sarah, the skeptical witch who has the skeptical, which channel on YouTube. And it's just a super interesting, fascinating person for us to introduce to our listeners.\nSo welcome, Sarah.\nSarah: It's really great to be here. Thank you guys for having me on.\xa0\nYucca: And thank you for joining us. So we were trying to narrow down all of the things we could talk about before we started too, before we pressed record, because it sounds like we could spend about five hours just going over everything, but why don't we start, Sarah? Will you, will you introduce yourself?\nLet us know a little bit about you, about your channel and about who you are and what you're doing.\nSarah: Yeah, sure. So I'm yeah, Sarah, the skeptical, which on YouTube I also have a blog of scare clouds and that was kind of like my, my beginning of like kind of putting my, my practices with like witchcraft and paganism online. It started with that blog and both that, and my channel kind of came out of a synthesis of my own spiritual practice and kind of what my academic interests are.\nSo, I first came to like witchcraft and paganism through academia actually through like a school project that I was doing.\nand kind of fell into it that way and started to craft my own practice. Out of that, out of what I was learning out of the kind of communities that I was engaging with.\nAnd I was a student in anthropology for my undergrad and my masters. And within that, I started to engage with like various peg in witchcraft community is, and a lot of, a lot of, kind of like what I was experiencing. There was a very, I guess, Wu or like, You know, SU superstitious or like magical these kinds of things that we, that we might say about it.\nAnd didn't really necessarily find that there had to be that kind of connection there. So I kind of began to craft my own kind of like skeptical witchcraft practice and a more like naturalistic kind of paganism or like non-theistic paganism as well. And that just kind of grew into to what I put online now.\nAnd I just kind of documented my journey through that and try to combine my, what I'm learning with my, my own practice and Yeah.\xa0\nYucca: And was there something that really drew you to the pagan stuff when you were doing your master's and undergrad?\nSarah: Yeah, I think well, first of all, the kind of the nature aspect of it was what really, really drew me in. I didn't start studying paganism intentionally. I kind of went into studying alternative, like spirituality with a focus on like new age practices. And from there kind of discussed. Paganism and Neo paganism and these things.\nAnd I found that to be really, really fascinating and, and just something about it really clicked with me. So in a kind of an anthropological sense in doing ethnography you'll, you'll often, you know, join in with various community rituals and things. So it was joining in all these rituals. I was talking to all these people.\nI was learning all about the religion and that, yeah. It just, I felt like the nature part, especially really just clicked with me as well as the kind of like self-improvement aspect of it and the kind of like inner exploration and transformation and things like this. So that was what really drew me in and kind of, got me hooked, I guess.\xa0\nMark: you know, it's interesting as you say this, because it seems as though naturalistic paganism is something that just gets invented over and over and over. You know, so many of us have kind of created our own and then discovered that there were other people out there who are also doing it. So it's it's kind of wonderful that way.\nIt apparently there is, there's something out there to