By KIRA L. SCHLECHTER

Having grown up not far from Pittsburgh, I’m always interested in the heavy music that arises from the Steel City. And there’ve been a lot of them in recent years, from Lady Beast to Code Orange to Legendry. 

Before them, though, was the melodic metal band Icarus Witch, founded in 2003 by bassist Jason Myers. These days, Jason is joined by singer Andrew D’Cagna, guitarist Quinn Lukas, and drummer Noah Skiba.

Since the band is between albums at the moment, we decided to have a chat with Jason about a very different subject, one as equally close to his heart as his music.

He’s been a practicing witch since the mid-1980s. He’s a second-degree priest with the Cabot Kent Hermetic Temple in Salem, MA (where he lived for a time) and is a regular contributor to their newsletter. His 30-year-old handcrafted athame (a ceremonial black-handled blade) was accepted into the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft & Magick in Ohio. And he is also a psychic tarot reader.

The band’s latest album, 2023’s “No Devil Lived On,” is on their long-time label, Cleopatra Records. One track particularly relevant to our chat is “Rise of the Witches,” a song he described in an interview with metal-rules.com as bridging two marginalized communities – today’s pagans and the world of underground metal, the latter of which he said “has long been about empowering marginalized people to stand together against hypocrites and bullies.” 

The track also features backing vocals by 21 fellow witches. He called its message of standing up against religious oppression “even more important now than when it came out.”

For as long as he’s been practicing the craft, Myers has also been working on a book that he says is about “the intersection between plant-based living and nature-based spirituality.”

“I peck away at it a little at a time,” he said. “And then I’ll go through spurts where I’m writing voraciously. I even hooked up with – talk about niche – a group online of people that are vegan witches and authors.

“They’ve shared manuscripts with me and we share ideas. It’s a slow process. Like I can write a song in a weekend and be happy with it and produce it in a couple days. The book? I never know when I’m finished! And that’s the problem with authors: when does perfect stand in the way of done, right?” he added. 

An outline does exist, he said, but he kind of likes the fact that the book, unlike Icarus Witch, isn’t structured and progresses at his pace.

“But at the same time, I realize that I could die someday and never have finished it,” he said with a laugh. “I probably need to just finish a draft of it, get it out, and then worry about how perfected it is the next time around.”

So here’s our Hags Half dive into Jason’s relationship with witchcraft. As he said when initially queried on the idea, “I’m always up for having that discussion.” He spoke in a phone interview from his 125-year-old Witch Cottage in Bethel Park, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh:

HH: How did you get to this point – had you had a relationship with any sort of religion in the past and which one? Was there a turning point you reached where you realized it wasn’t working for you anymore? 

JM: I was raised Lutheran, which is sort of like Catholicism lite. That was my parents’ tradition. I took those courses up until First Communion, and in that religion, once you have your first communion, you’re considered an adult in the eyes of the church. At the same time, while I was learning about their mythology, their beliefs, I was also becoming interested in witchcraft and paganism and various nature-based spiritualities. I was naturally being more attracted to the ones that were based in nature.

And when it came time for me to have my communion, they handed me a box of envelopes to pay tithes or what have you. So I said, if I’m an adult now – granted I was 13, I believe – I can choose to no longer participate in this church, right? And they were like, well, yeah, that’s true, and I said, OK, well, thanks for everything and I’m going to choose my own path. And I never went back. I don’t bear any ill will towards that church – there were a lot of nice people there – I just didn’t resonate with their mythos. 

By this time, I was already exploring in the forest. There was a pasture of cows that adjoined my property while I was growing up and I used to go over and take apples from the apple tree and feed them and pet them and stuff. All of these things I was experiencing made me feel more alive and more in tune with my surroundings than anything I was hearing or reading in these parables in this old building. It was sort of a natural transition at that point.  

HH: How did you actually discover witchcraft – what drew you to it and maybe also who? 

JM: I think it probably started with exploring books. I would go to my local bookstore and they had a little tiny New Age section. There were a couple of books on witchcraft, and one of them was “Big Blue,” Raymond Buckland’s “Complete Book of Witchcraft,” and a couple other ones on astrology. I was also into gothic things early on, horror movies and things like that, and music with occult themes.

But once I started reading about the true nature-based spirituality and about what witchcraft really was, I found that even more fascinating than the stuff that Hollywood was portraying. I was developing a voracious appetite for wanting to read more and learn more about traditions, and would go to my local library and take out books, trying to feed my hunger for knowledge about what witchcraft was. 

I was more fascinated about the fact that there really was an active religion in the world at that time – it wasn’t just something relegated to lore and the Middle Ages. It was developing in conjunction with this New Age movement and this Age of Aquarius and all these things that were springing forth from that natural revival – the Starhawk movement out west mixed with British traditional witchcraft. I wanted it all – I was in this world of absorbing everything and trying to piece together my own path.

HH: Did your vegetarianism/veganism come as a result of that too?

JM: It all kind of coalesced. Like I said, hanging out with those cows next to my house, I would look in their eyes and think, wait, I can’t eat you, you’re my friend, you’re just as much of a being on this planet, you have just as much of a right as I do to be here. 

The fact that nature-based spirituality at its core was built around a reverence for nature and a feeling that we’re all part of this ecosystem, all part of this planet together, made sense. I just took it to the next logical conclusion. If I’m really going to put my money where my mouth is – if I say that I’m walking this path for nature – then I feel like I have to carry that through to my behaviors, to my diet, to what I wear and how I live my life. I stopped eating (animals) and using (them) and (spoke) out on their behalf because that was my way of being religious – that was my way of protecting my little corner of the world. 

HH: Much has been said in recent years about the upsurge in popularity of, or interest in, witchcraft among women and it’s understandable – I believe there’s a longing to express and glorify female divinity, which of course is not a part of patriarchal religious practices. 

So my question here is twofold: 

How does being a witch put you in touch with or align you with your feminine energy?

JM: To the core. I think that was part of the allure of it as well – it felt more balanced. It didn’t seem like it should be a novelty that the goddess was on equal footing with the god – some branches even held (her) in higher regard. To me, that just made more sense. We come from women; the earth is a feminine Gaia energy. Women are the source of all creation. So to me, it made far more sense that god, or how you conceptualize a god, would be a woman, would have that female energy as much or more than the male energy. 

HH: Since it is all about balance, how do you think your masculine energy may have changed or altered since you started practicing and in what ways?

JM: I think in a more healthy way. I feel like a lot of the men that I know that follow the craft have a healthier sense of masculinity. I tap into the masculine energy daily, but I look at it more as like the pure essence of, say, a god like Cernunnos (the horned god of nature, animals, and fertility) – some form of energy that embodies the strength, the purity, and the ability to provide that stability, the vegetation – all these attributes that go towards a lot of those specifically Celtic god energy forms. 

That’s a valuable thing to bring into your daily life, whether you’re a man or a woman. It’s a way to embody that strength. Even if you want to go into, say, the pantheon of Odin or warlike energies that are more protective and the battle energy – I think a lot of that stuff is good to have as part of your balance. 

But (by) the same token, I think that the warrior energy that comes from feminine deities is just as strong. I think pagans acknowledge that. Pagans acknowledge that women are essential to the warrior energy and essential to getting shit done (laughs), to making things happen. 

That is one thing that I felt at a younger age and still to this day – that so many of the world religions are out of balance because of the patriarchal slant. Any time that the masculine energy gets too far out of balance – where they’re not in touch with their feminine energy – that’s when they have internal problems that they’re afraid to address, whether they’re psychological problems or just dealing with their own emotions. 

If you embody the full spectrum and don’t get bogged down in the dynastics of gender and feeling like you can only appeal to one side or the other, you’ll be a more well-balanced person and you’ll live a better life.      

HH: Maybe with that in mind, too, obviously druids were roughly the masculine equivalent of witches in those times (that’s simplifying it, I know, and perhaps a bit of apples and oranges, too), so how much of your practice or mindset is druidical, if any?  

JM: Quite a bit, actually. There’s always been a current of Druidism in my blood for sure. You have this sort of stereotypical tree-hugging hippie, but I don’t shy away from that – I’m a tree-hugging hippie! But I do it out of a reverence for them. I realize that these trees embody a vast wealth of knowledge. 

I have a tree out back that I commune with almost daily and that tree has been around probably as long as my house, which is 125 years. I think about how much that tree has witnessed, how this tree has grown 80 feet into the sky and has seen the world change, has seen populations come and go, has seen this neighborhood change. 

There’s a calm but profound energy that we can gain from plant life if we attune ourselves to it. And that was their (Druids’) specialty; they had this extreme reverence for trees and for the different kinds of wood and the different kinds of energy that came from the plants. 

I’m just now trying to catch up with that. I’m trying to learn more about my plants, whether they’re my house plants or the local flora, trying to get better at learning how to grow plants and grow food and be more in touch with that because I, like a lot of Americans, got out of touch with that – you want produce, you go to the store. 

(But) you lose part of that beautiful cycle (of acknowledging) where this stuff came from – it came from the earth. Somebody tilled it; somebody brought it to me. If you get back in touch with that part of the nature cycle, then the next logical step is to cultivate it yourself. I think all of that is very Druid.

HH: In regards to the practice itself – who taught you or how do you learn, do you have resources you go to? 

JM: For the better part of my youth, I taught myself primarily. I would go through books and I would go to various pagan gatherings. When I lived in Florida in the ‘90s, I got real interested in the pagan gathering scene – I would go to larger gatherings of different covens and different tribes and take classes. Any time a local pagan bookstore would have a class, I’d sign up for it, or take training one-on-one at people’s houses. (I) just was a sponge for it for wherever I could find it. 

And then more recently, I wanted to step that up and get more of a formal training, so I studied with Laurie Cabot, the leader of the Cabot Hermetic Temple tradition, based in Salem, Massachusetts. The Covid lockdown era was when I really started pursuing that. I was really attracted to her books – I met her once in the early ‘90s, the first time I went to Salem – and really liked her writing style and her view on nature. It was a good mix of traditional European witchcraft and ecology, but through the lens of the New England craft. 

I took my first degree with Laurie and it felt very natural. I really felt empowered by it and it helped me really focus. The problem with solitaire work is there’s no one to hold you accountable sometimes. You’ll miss a couple full moon rituals or go, oh, was last week the Sabbat? But when you’re part of course work, you’re part of a group where it’s a little more organized. I felt like I needed that organization to hold my feet to the fire – like, oh, it’s coming up, prepare for it, did you do your homework, did you study, did you read these books, report on it, are you ready for the test? I liked that; I liked being tested and I liked being examined. So I then applied for the second degree and was accepted into that and went through all that coursework and that was even better.

The science of witchcraft is one of her unique aspects of it. I grew up in a scientific household; my father was a chemist and a science teacher. And man can’t live on woo alone – I can’t look at everything from a wishful perspective. I need some proof that this is really happening and working. I loved the fact that she was dialed into the metaphysics of it – the coursework was so rewarding because I was seeing the results.

So then I became a priest in her temple and that’s been the focus of my path for the past few years, the Cabot tradition.

(Cabot still teaches, by the way – she’s in her 90s – via her online courses.)

HH: Would you say you believe in or worship the goddess/horned god, or would you say it’s more abstract (thanks to my partner Isabell for a great question!)?

JM: That’s a good question – that’s a tough question! It’s evolving – that’s probably the best answer I have. It’s real – the god and the goddess are real to me, they’re more than just ideas. I almost feel like they’re a battery that collectively people throughout the ages are putting their power into and when you need to, you can tap into that resource, that battery, and pull the necessary energy out. It’s like a psychic construct. 

I feel like the deity are ancestors as well and that a lot of them were real – they originated as real historical individuals and became canonized, for lack of a better term, and became mythologically enhanced.

When I envision them, when I call deity into a circle, they’re very distinct, they’re very real. I can see them. I see attributes. I feel their energy. I study them. I know who to call upon for various things that I’m working on in my path at any given time.

HH: And lastly, aside from lyrical content of course, how would you say the practice has informed or shaped you as a musician? 

JM: As I mentioned earlier, a lot of these developments came together at the same time. Me being drawn to music on a deeper level in terms of wanting to not just listen to it but learn it, play it, all of those lightbulbs going on happened around the same time – the spiritual awakening, the musical yearning, waking up to veganism and the environment around me.

I almost feel like a lot of the credit for any musical ability or inspiration comes from my spirituality as well. If I’m in a space where I’m not feeling particularly spiritual, I won’t play my instrument, it’ll just sit on the wall. But when I’m feeling in tune with the spirituality in myself and the world, then it flows through me. 

I feel like a conduit or a radio. The radio waves are there, whether or not you turn on your radio – that information is in the air all around us. But if you have the right reception and the right tool and you turn it on, now you can manifest it, you can hear it.

I feel like my music is sort of the same way, where all that energy is constantly around me. It’s there to be plucked out of the ethers. But if I’m not in tune spiritually, it’ll just rot on the vine. So it’s important for me to maintain a healthy physical and spiritual and mental and emotional balance in order for me to progress musically – to be inspired and to produce music that will hopefully inspire other people.