A Case for the Modern Coven
On digital community, shared frequency, and the ancient technology of women who show up for each other.
The word "coven" has been doing a lot of work for a long time.
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A Case for the Modern Coven
The word "coven" has been doing a lot of work for a long time.
For centuries it carried the weight of fear - a word used to name and contain something that made the powerful nervous: women, gathered. Women with knowledge. Women who passed that knowledge between themselves in the dark, outside the sanctioned channels, outside the institutions that would dilute it or deny it or burn it entirely.
What they were actually doing, most of the time, was taking care of each other.
They were sharing what worked. They were protecting their territories - literal and psychic. They were showing up at strange hours with strange remedies for strange problems. They were saying I've seen this before, here's what helped me and you're not crazy and try this and I've got you.
We've had many names for this over the years. Circle. Sisterhood. Community. Network.
I call mine a Slack workspace. But a coven is a coven.
YKWIM?
Here's what I think gets misunderstood about digital community: that because it lives in a screen, it lives at a distance.
I've found the opposite to be true.
There is something about the asynchronous intimacy of a shared channel - the message that arrives at 11pm from someone three time zones away who just had their most meaningful session yet, or their most confusing one, or their hardest day - that creates a kind of closeness that geography never quite managed on its own. You don't have to be in the same room to be in the same frequency. You don't have to share a city to share a practice.
The technology we now use to build community isn't the enemy of depth. In the right hands, it's a container for it. A coven doesn't require a forest clearing. It requires people who are oriented toward the same light.
The women and practitioners in the Soma Lumin guide network are scattered across the country. East LA. Brooklyn. Cities in between and beyond. Different markets, different clientele, different energies they bring to the work.
And yet. we come together multiple times a week just to cheer each other on.
One of the structures I built into this community from the beginning was territory protection. Each guide holds their market. We don't compete with each other - not because there's some corporate policy that says so, but because competition was never the point.
The old covens understood this. A healer who undermined the healer in the next village wasn't serving the village. She was serving her own fear. Real practitioners - the ones who actually showed up for people, who built genuine trust with their communities - protected each other's ground because they understood that the work was bigger than any one of them.
When I hold someone's territory in the Soma Lumin network, I'm not just protecting a market. I'm saying: what you're building there matters. I see it. I've got you.
I want to say something about what it means to be known by people who practice the same strange and beautiful thing you practice.
There is a particular loneliness in doing work that most people in your life don't quite understand. The work of sitting across from strangers and witnessing their energy fields. The work of translating what you see into language that lands without projection. The work of holding space for someone who is, in that moment, seeing themselves clearly for perhaps the first time.
Most of us don't have that conversation at the dinner table.
But in a room - even a digital one - full of people who do this work? The shorthand is instant. The validation is real. The joy of someone else gets it is, I'd argue, its own form of healing.
I didn't set out to build a coven. I set out to build a camera.
But here's what I've learned: the technology was never the point. The technology is just the shared language. The thing that makes a coven a coven isn't the tools or the rituals or even the knowledge - it's the quality of care that moves between people who have chosen to show up for each other.
Every guide who joins the Soma Lumin network isn't just licensing software. They're stepping into a circle. They're saying: I want to do this work, and I don't want to do it alone.
To which the rest of the coven says: you don't have to.
Interested in joining the Soma Lumin guide network? Learn more here.
