My Little Goddess: The Occult Education of Princess Twilight Sparkle

The original 1986 My Little Pony animated television series is widely regarded as a kind of extended advertising campaign for a line of toys distributed by Hasbro. My Little Pony emerged during the heyday of such products including the Care Bears and Transformers, and the producers often paid little attention to the quality of the cartoons they used to promote the toys. But in 2010 the series was revived with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic created by Lauren Faust. This program focused on storytelling and was pointedly concerned with teaching lessons in social-emotional well-being. The reimagined reboot with a traditional (as opposed to CGI) animation style and its own line of Hasbro toys has drawn scholarly interest, but mostly to its adult male fandom, popularly called the bronies. In fact, while the show was successful with its young female target demographic, its adult fans became the focus of journalism, opinion pieces, and scholarship around the show. The bronies were theoretically transgressive in their pony love, but the emphasis on brony fan culture has caused a male-dominated group to overshadow a cultural product self-consciously centered around women and girls. 1  Despite its widespread influence on a generation of fans, the content of the show, as opposed to the fandom, has received little critical analysis.  

Occultism offers a significant key to understanding the plot and themes of the ponies' world. The series' subtitle “friendship is magic” may suggest that friendship is awesome, but in the context of the show it often means that it is literally a matter of spells, potions, and esoteric books. The show’s association with real-world occultism in the form of pony-inspired tulpas (created by a subset of bronies and adult female fans or “pegasisters”) 2  shows the degree to which it has successfully tapped into an occult spirituality that also appeals to adult fans. The protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, descends according to the hermetic paradigm of the Emerald Tablet 3  from the palace of Princess Celestia to Ponyville in order to learn, grow, and ultimately metamorphose into the show's version of the divine feminine—a princess with both secular and spiritual power. At the end of the third season, she achieves an incomplete transcendence—becoming a kind of demigoddess—and the audience learns the degree to which her friendships are, like Aleister Crowley’s goetic demons, actually external manifestations of her own consciousness in need of harmonizing. The show celebrates the ponies' individuality, but, after Twilight Sparkle's initiation, it troubles personal identity by requiring the ponies to surrender a significant aspect of their ego-based power.

I undertake a close reading of the occult aspects of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic advisedly. Danger comes from two directions. First, postmodern conspiracy theory is riddled with over-analyses of popular culture that attempt to prove the existence of a plot among cultural elites to convert children to devil worship. 4  Twilight Sparkle and her friends can hardly be blamed for Western secularization, but it is reasonable to read the non-superficial occult themes in the show as a reflection of a broader cultural search for what Charles Taylor calls “third ways of knowing” that are neither wholly faith-based nor wholly materialist. 5  In any case, these third ways, while not exclusively Judeo-Christian, are by no means evil. Second, an overzealous proselytizer for the ponies might attempt to transform the show into a religious text by imbuing it with meanings that aren't there. The animated series manifests a particular version of the occult journey and the divine feminine that is not always perfectly consistent but follows coherent themes. The fact that it draws upon esoteric concepts provides a lens with which to interrogate its values and meanings and recognize that, intentionally or not, it is saying something about twenty-first-century spirituality to the millions of children who have watched it and continue to watch it. At its peak in 2014, the show had an audience of around 12 million and it continues to be streamed on Netflix where it ranks in the top 0.2% in terms of audience demand. 6  I watch it with my seven-year-old today. 

The Many Faces of the Cutie Mark

The show's creator, Faust, had previously worked on the Powerpuff Girls before taking on Hasbro's project. Hasbro executives had seen the success of the Transformers movies and hoped to replicate it with a program directed specifically toward a female audience. As a child, Faust was disappointed with cartoons for girls which she described as a series of low-stakes tea parties in which the characters “defeated villains either by sharing with them or crying which miraculously inspired the villain to turn nice.” 7  On The Hub—later Discovery Family—her new show quickly rose to the top. Faust said that she channeled her inner eight-year-old while developing the show, incorporating some of the characterizations she'd given her own ponies as a child. She was focused on creating a character-driven program for girls and was surprised and delighted to find that Hasbro was on board with her vision. Faust worked in Los Angeles while most of the artistic team was in Vancouver and they churned out episodes at a quick pace, twice as fast as Faust was accustomed to.

For the two years that she worked on the show, she developed the story premises with Rob Renzetti and then sent them on to Hasbro and the Hub for notes. Most of Hasbro's input was about the play sets Hasbro planned to develop out of the show, and the company had minimal feedback on storytelling. The intensity of the production schedule, coupled with the need to keep the show accessible and not too frightening for young viewers, meant that plot-driven adventure-style episodes were de-emphasized in favor of more ensemble comedy, but the show drew on both styles of storytelling. 8  The fact that the show started in an epic magical adventure style and then took a turn to comedy made it seem as though Faust was forced to change course, but the epic-style stories' recurrence at the start of each season demonstrates that this was, in fact, part of a plan. She said, “girls like stories with real conflict; girls are smart enough to understand complex plots; girls aren't as easily frightened as everyone thinks.” 9  Faust felt the production schedule was too intense and clashed with Hasbro over the schedule as well as creative control. She quit, although she told New York Magazine that she felt as though the show had been taken away from her. Faust left after the season two premiere and Megan McCarthy, one of Faust's team, became the co-executive producer and eventually the head of storytelling for all of Hasbro's brands. 10  

Faust has never given any indication that esoteric theming was part of her plan, but the occultism in My Little Pony is part of the general aesthetic of the show and also serves as a central plot point. Unicorns possess the in-born power of telekinesis and the unicorn Twilight Sparkle is a scholar-magician who spends much of her time studying and practicing transmutation, teleportation, and various other magical feats. The medieval-style kingdom of Equestria is ruled over by a goddess-like sorcerer queen, Princess Celestia, from her palace in Canterlot. She is at least a thousand years old, despite her youthful appearance and flowing rainbow mane, and serves as Twilight Sparkle's mentor. She communicates with her student through Twilight Sparkle's familiar, a dragon named Spike who coughs up Celestia's missives in a puff of green fire. Characters are routinely banished and returned, cursed and healed, and experience visions of past, present, and future by way of magic. But, unlike Harry Potter and other occult-themed children's media which tend to focus on plot, My Little Pony is self-consciously concerned with teaching social-emotional lessons about friendship such that the stories often take on the broad allegorical dimensions of a morality play. While we can read messages about growing up into Harry Potter, as with any coming-of-age story, My Little Pony insistently telegraphs the presence of its allegory by routinely labeling its characters with their virtues or vices. Character is clearly a primary concern for the show such that its various plots can sometimes feel sketched or rushed as the story is subjugated to these lessons. In this way, the show's magic calls out to be read through the lens of ethical and emotional self-exploration. Interestingly, so do modern and postmodern occultism.

The strange affinity between occultism's concern with self-actualization and My Little Pony's social-emotional allegory makes occult theory an ideal tool to look below the surface at what the show is attempting to communicate to its audience. In his introduction to Samuel MacGregor Mathers' Ars Goetia or Lesser Key of Solomon, Aleister Crowley wrote that “the spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain. Their seals therefore represent . . . methods of stimulating or regulating those particular spots through the eye.” 11  Like the practitioners of chaos magic who followed him, Crowley's seeming materialism was more about merging the inner life of the mind with occult supernaturalism. Genesis P-Orridge's Thee Temple of Psychick Youth held that 

A great deal ov energy is wasted on arguing over thee validity ov much that falls under thee general heading ov 'Occult,' whether things are real or imagined. Much ov thee evidence to date is confusing, partial or fabricated to meet a given need. It is better by far to accept 'occult' experiences as they occur, to recognize and interpret them personally without trying to fit them into a pre-defined system. 12  

Magic is subjective and necessarily situated inside the practitioner's emotional state. Accepting the personal and emotional in occultism is key to creating or discovering magic's distinct reality. Similarly, in the second episode of the series Twilight Sparkle says of her friends Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity, 

I felt it the moment I realized how happy I was to hear you, to see you, how much I cared about you. The spark ignited inside me when I realized that you all are my friends . . . when those Elements are ignited by the spark that resides in the heart of us all, it creates the sixth element of magic!

Twilight Sparkle discovers that the key to magic involves realizing that emotion and magic are one and the same. 

The show begins with a conflict between two supernatural siblings. Princess Celestia's younger sister, Luna, with her power over the moon, was banished when she grew jealous of her sister's power over the sun. Twilight Sparkle discovers in one of her dusty old esoteric books that Luna is due to make a dramatic return. She prefers the solitude of her library but Celestia sends her down to Ponyville to prepare for the sun celebration happening the next day at sunrise. In Ponyville, she meets her five friends whose personalities happen to align with the Elements of Harmony, a set of gemstones with multifaceted power. The gemstones correspond to the virtues of honesty, kindness, generosity, laughter and loyalty, which Celestia later reframes in more sophisticated terms as integrity, compassion, charity, optimism, and devotion. A sixth element, corresponding to Twilight Sparkle herself, comprises leadership, friendship, and magic. This emphasis on virtue suggests a modern revaluing of early modern alchemy, popularized in the mid-nineteenth century. In his Remarks upon Alchemy and Alchemists published in 1857, Ethan Allen Hitchock drew on hermeticism to put the practitioner at the center of alchemical transmutation. 13  He wrote that the philosopher's mercury, the central ingredient for most alchemical elixirs, is “a perfectly pure conscience, or a conscience purified under a sense of the presence of God.” 14  Perfecting one's alchemy requires enhancing one's virtues and perfecting one's morality.

In order to free Equestria from Nightmare Moon, the dark alter ego of Luna, the six friends journey into the Everfree Forest where the Elements are housed somewhat haphazardly in the ruined castle of the pony sisters. When they find the gems, looking more like rocks, the five leave Twilight Sparkle to conjure over them but must rush back in to save her when Nightmare Moon attacks. Nightmare Moon crushes the elements but Twilight Sparkle somehow realizes that her friends are the essence of the elements and the rocks reform as gems, allowing the six to blast Nightmare Moon with rainbow energy, transforming her back into Luna. The magical resuscitation of Luna can be read as a reintegration of the shadow self or conquest of the dweller on the threshold. This happens so early in Twilight Sparkle's journey that the shadow self, despite the high drama it raises, is minimized as a step in Twilight Sparkle's progress. Unlike Harry Potter's confrontation with Voldemort or Luke Skywalker's with Darth Vader, the dark alter ego is not the main challenge. These ponies have bigger fish to fry, namely Twilight Sparkle's transcendence. Incidentally, Luna's return also forms the three faces of the goddess which map neatly onto the three faces of Diana: Celestia is Diana, Luna is the moon goddess also named Luna, and Twilight Sparkle (eventually referred to as the princess of magic) is the magical goddess Hekate. A fourth princess, Cadence, throws off the triple-face but she rules over in the Crystal Kingdom, apart from Equestria where Celestia, Luna, and Twilight Sparkle reside. From the outset, Twilight Sparkle is a liminal figure several times over. She sits between Luna and Celestia mediating their reunion, unknowingly waits to transform from ordinary unicorn to ascended princess, and lives between the goddess's palace, Canterlot, and the regular world of Ponyville. Like the soul in the Emerald Tablet, Twilight Sparkle comes down from Celestia's palace to develop, grow, and ascend once more.

Twilight Sparkle's ability to successfully harmonize the conscious and subconscious self and attune to the deep inner will or occult will requires frequent recourse to the Elements of Harmony for the first several seasons. The ponies next need the Elements when a dragon chimera named Discord has broken free after having been petrified in the distant past by Celestia and Luna. Discord transforms Equestria into a surrealist dystopia with rabbits running on long horse-like legs in the style of Dali's Last Temptation of St. Anthony, buildings floating upside-down in mid-air, ears of corn spontaneously popping, and cotton candy clouds raining down chocolate milk. Twilight Sparkle is the last to fall victim to Discord when she can't marshal the Elements' help because her friends have all become grey-colored bullies, drained of their pigment by the chimera's colorful machinations. The solution to Twilight Sparkle's problem is fairly obvious since she's more or less discovered it before, but she takes awhile to come around to it. She erred when she chose to rely on the Elements as the solution to her problem when it was really her friends she needed. After casting a memory spell on each them, bringing them back to themselves, together the ponies vanquish Discord turning him to stone once more. 

In their first confrontation with Discord, the ponies battle the inverse of their cardinal virtues which manifest in the form of their cutie marks. Cutie marks, despite—or perhaps because of—their commercial baggage, became an important feature of the show's plot insofar as they represent identity. These are the symbols located on the ponies' left flank that are the hallmark of the Hasbro toy line. In the world of Friendship is Magic, the marks are something earned over time and regarded with sacred import. Whole episodes are devoted to a crew of three pre-adolescent “Cutie Mark Crusaders” who fret over how to discover and actualize their marks. And the marks figure centrally in most of the two-episode epic-style plots framing each season: turning against the ponies, becoming jumbled, or getting stolen. Confusion or loss of the marks represents an identity crisis and the extension of the marks into the Elements of Harmony symbolizes their potential as a source of power. This is a long-running theme of occult practice. Discovering one's own true purpose and will is central to Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law. His famous maxim to “do what thou wilt” did not mean to do anything you want at any time, although it's often interpreted that way. Rather, Crowley or the entity he channeled, Aiwass, meant that we need to be in touch with our inner Godhead and follow the direction it provides. 15  

Discord emphasizes the degree to which will and identity exist in constant tension with hidden inner forces. Austin Osman Spare, regarded as a forebear of the chaotes, wrote that the magician should “make thy desire subconscious; the organic is creative impulse to will. Beware of thy desire. Let it be something that implies nothing but itself.” 16  Similarly, Peter Carroll instructed chaos magicians to “gain full access to the dream plane and . . . assume control of it” by recording all details of their dreams in order to precipitate a lucid dreaming state. 17  For both Spare and Carroll, the subconscious is a source of occult power but it threatens to run away with us and so we must train ourselves to navigate it. Discord and Luna are the characters most closely associated with the subconscious. Luna, the cthonic goddess, rules the night and is able to enter and navigate the other characters' dreams. Discord's Equestria is, significantly, surrealist in character and Discord's rule, with its references to Dali and Lewis Carroll, is coded as the reign of the subconscious. Helena Blavatsky warned in Isis Unveiled that a passive consciousness was subject to the control of elementals and demons. Only through the development of the occult will could these forces by marshaled and put to good use. 18  When Twilight Sparkle lost control of her friends, she lost control of herself, and risked being subsumed by the subconscious. Memory, which sits at the core of identity and personality, is the spell required to bring every pony back from the brink so that they can collectively petrify their foe. Both Luna and Discord pose threats to Equestria—plunging the world into eternal night or surrealist chaos—but, following the ethos of chaos magic (by which subconscious chaos must be harnessed and directed to the practitioner's ends), Luna and Discord must be converted and subsumed into the ponies' world of friendship. After Discord is vanquished and turned to stone once more, Celestia restores him and instructs the ponies to befriend him since he may be of use to them.

The finale of season three is a musical episode in which Twilight Sparkle gets her wings and becomes an alicorn—pegasus unicorn—and a princess at last. The wings arrive after her friends' identities become confused. This time, instead of becoming inverted their cutie marks are mixed up so that they are all doing jobs they're wholly unsuited to. Twilight Sparkle is able to remedy the problem in twenty-two minutes or less by reuniting her friends with their corresponding Elements. This is, essentially, a repeat of the earlier memory spell but now in response to magic gone awry rather than the subconscious run amok. In becoming a princess, Twilight Sparkle fully actualizes her occult will. Magic and leadership, the defining qualities of her personality, reach their highest expression yet. 

But Twilight Sparkle's trial is not complete. Dark vines have been growing out of the Everfree Forest. These aggressive plants kidnap Celestia and Luna and overrun Ponyville and Canterlot. Twilight Sparkle comes to discover that Discord had planted the vines over a millennium ago but they never sprouted until the Tree of Harmony lost its ability to repel them. Everfree Forest is the seat of the deepest magic in Equestria. Not only is it home to the sisters' original castle but it is also the place where Zecora resides, a zebra represented as a tribal African stereotype. Zecora surfaces almost exclusively in an occult context and speaks in rhyme, the language of spells. In this episode she is forced to flee the forest because of the vines. She gives Twilight Sparkle a potion—a cipher for a hallucinogen—which only a princess can drink, and Twilight Sparkle has a vision of the distant past leading the friends to seek out the Tree of Harmony, also located in the Everfree Forest. The Tree is the source from which Celestia and Luna originally took the Elements of Harmony and stood as the forest's protector. The friends attempt to go without Twilight Sparkle, but when they arrive and find the tree overgrown with black vines they are impotent to solve the problem. Luckily, Twilight Sparkle returns. Instead of using the Elements to restore the tree, they give the Elements back to the tree. The tree had been the original source of the Elements and only by returning them and surrendering their individual egos can the ponies allow the tree to resume its original function of keeping the forest under control. Channeling classical hermeticism, Hitchcock describes how the alchemist's will gives way to a kind of divine God-consciousness which then directs his activities with “an unreasoning, though not unreasonable obedience to an experienced imperious sense of duty, leaving the result to God.” 19  Ego must be surrendered to a higher cause or power. For the ponies of Equestria, the vines subside and all is well. 

The act of surrendering the elements is the conclusion of a far more involved two-episode sequence in contrast to the fairly breezy single episode in which Twilight Sparkle ascended to become a princess. This marks the surrender as the more significant feature of her new maturity. Celestia says, “We know how difficult it must have been for you to give up the Elements. It took great courage to relinquish them.” Three times Twilight Sparkle has used the Elements to bring her friends together, raising her to the status of princess. With this new status, Twilight Sparkle and her relationships no longer require the Elements and, in fact, must surrender them for their own good. The forest represents occult power but it becomes overgrown because of the subconscious trickster, Discord. Discord starts the trouble in the distant past, showing how magical power begins in the subconscious, but he's necessary to the resolution because the pony mage, like the chaos magician, must be vigilant in her engagements with the subconscious and never turn away from it. When Twilight Sparkle separates from the others at their urging because she is now too important to be risked, it is Discord who coaches her back into the forest to rejoin her friends. The way the subconscious both causes and solves the over-inflation of occult will is further pointed to by Zecora's potion: the hallucinogen revealing the secrets hidden from consciousness. At the moment of transcendence, a princess must strike a new balance between the conscious and subconscious self by balancing her assertion of personal will with self sacrifice. 

The theme of sacrifice resurfaces at the two-part conclusion to season four; a conclusion that marks the end of a narrative arc spanning the previous seasons more or less from the beginning. 20  A thief, Lord Tirek, capable of sapping ponies' magical power, has emerged from Tartarus, 21  where Celestia had imprisoned him, and Celestia sends Discord to locate and recapture him. Discord betrays the ponies and sides with Tirek only to be betrayed, in turn, by Tirek. Celestia, Luna, and Cadence pass their magic to Twilight Sparkle to prevent having it stolen, but Tirek captures Twilight Sparkle's friends, and, after an epic battle, Twilight Sparkle gives up her magic in order to rescue them. Even though Discord has betrayed her, she also insists on rescuing him, and Discord gives her what she needs to unlock a still greater inner power connected to the Tree of Harmony. Significantly, Discord's key must pair with keys discovered by the other ponies, all of which are found through a special expression of their distinctive virtues. This undoes Tirek and restores the princesses and the friends to their former power. Discord, the trickster of the subconscious, is unreliable and causes a great deal of trouble with both the Everfree Forest and Tirek but self sacrifice allows the hero to harmonize the personal will with the subconscious in order to achieve transcendence. By sacrificing magical power in the name of love, Twilight Sparkle is able to have both magic and love.

The idea that Twilight Sparkle's love is necessarily directed outward is perhaps too facile given the allegorical dimensions of the storytelling. The show is noted for the complexity of its characters, but when the plot turns from ensemble comedy to magical adventure, these multi-dimensional characters tend to flatten out into the embodiment of single characteristics, except for Twilight Sparkle. They also become passive, essential to solving the problem but wholly dependent on the protagonist to discover and implement the solution. 22  When Twilight Sparkle first transforms into an alicorn during an astral journey through which she receives her wings from Celestia, she returns to her friends and the camera pans to each of them as Celestia praises her: “Since you've come to Ponyville you've displayed the charity [camera on Rarity], compassion [Fluttershy], devotion [Rainbow Dash], integrity [Applejack], optimism [Pinkie Pie], and of course the leadership of a true princess.” Celestia acknowledges Twilight Sparkle for having these characteristics, not her friends. This is the clearest the show ever gets to telling the audience these characters are not as individual as they seem but rather parts of a whole embodied by the protagonist. Compare this with Thee Temple of Psychick Youth's theory of personality. P-Orridge and company argued that we each have many personalities operating inside of us and these personalities contradict each other. Judging these varying personalities to be dangerous—especially the ones closest to our subconscious drives—we weed them out and sanitize ourselves down to a single self when we should be connecting with and discovering ways to further express them. Only by allowing the many to express themselves can the one attain the fullest possible self-expression. In this way, Twilight Sparkle's friends are like Crowley's goetic demons, each representing an aspect of the self.

This interpretation is further supported by Twilight Sparkle's cutie mark: five smaller white stars surround a large six-pointed pink star. The grouping mirrors Twilight Sparkle and her five friends, signaling that the friends are integrated into Twilight Sparkle's identity from the outset. The symbol functions twice over insofar as the central pink star represents Twilight Sparkle herself, a reasonable conclusion given that she is the protagonist of her own life (not to mention the show). The central star has six points just as there are six ponies in Twilight Sparkle's circle including Twilight Sparkle. Both the star grouping and the pink star itself reveal Twilight Sparkle's friends to be a part of her. It strains logic to try and imagine the “mane six” as the same character, but there is significant ambiguity about the line between the protagonist and her friends. The show's allegorical explorations of identity and love are neither external nor internal but both. The same negotiation a pony has with the other must take place within the self. In this way, the show blurs the boundary between friendship and self-love, suggesting that they are indistinguishable. 23  

The Pony Goddess Paradigm

Love and friendship are key to Twilight Sparkle's ascension. In rising to the level of princess she is becoming a goddess and the incarnation of the divine feminine. Love is also an important theme in Wicca and witchcraft, which are pointedly concerned with the goddess. For the neopagan practitioner and theorist Starhawk, “All began in love; all seeks to return to love. Love is the law, the teacher of wisdom, and the great revealer of mysteries.” 24  Love is essential to Twilight Sparkle's metamorphosis which requires that she achieve the ideal balance of love and will through personal sacrifice, giving love precedence. In this way, Twilight Sparkle's story aligns with myths of magical and divine women. In these tales, it is a common trope that the female ego surges up and asserts itself, makes a sacrifice, and achieves balance. 

In Greek mythology, Psyche errs when she looks upon her lover, Eros, and is banished from his palace. She undergoes a series of trials, is reunited with the god, and they are married. 25  After emanating from the originating God, the gnostic goddess Sophia accidentally produces a dark demiurge who creates the Earth and rules over it like a tyrant and she must remedy this mistake by sending forth a daughter, Eve, to help humanity overcome him. 26  Similarly, rejecting the suitor her father has chosen for her, the Welsh druid Rhiannon seeks out her own king to marry. After the birth of their first child, a demon steals the newborn away. Rhiannon's midwives, who had fallen asleep rather than guard the child, blame Rhiannon and accuse her of eating her own baby. The king intervenes to keep his wife from the executioner's ax, and she is forced to carry travelers back and forth to the castle on her back as penance. But then a neighboring lord wounds the demon and recovers the child and Rhiannon is redeemed. 27  The act of self-assertion empowers each of these divine women, but it also creates an imbalance that must be remedied through personal sacrifice. Twilight Sparkle and her friends must assert their individuality, but also find a way to harmonize their will with the call to love. The sacrifice leads to a complete recovery and realization of status, power, and ability. 28   

A key difference between these historical examples of feminine divinity and My Little Pony is that they situate the feminine in relation to the masculine. Starhawk places the goddess at the core of creation and the goddess gives birth to the god. 29  Psyche must go to great lengths to achieve union with the male god. And Rhiannon escapes masculine control when she chooses her own husband but then must negotiate feminine betrayal by her midwives. In contrast, there is very little masculine presence in Equestria for the divine feminine to either complement or oppose. Twilight Sparkle is only ever surrounded by female ponies, and so it's far more difficult to read a gendered message into her exploits. Male ponies exist but they don't have much to say or do in the central plot with the possible exception of Twilight Sparkle's brother, Shining Armor, who marries Princess Cadence and leaves almost as soon as he's introduced. Weddings and romantic relationships are rare plot points and never the focus of the action. 30  Luna and Celestia are unmarried and Twilight Sparkle and her friends have no discernible romantic attachments and very few romantic inclinations. 31  Ponies, rainbows, and princesses suggest a stereotypically feminine-coded world, which is its own kind of transgressive achievement, but, without the presence of the masculine, the feminine no longer functions as a distinct political category and comes to encompass stereotypically masculine attributes as well (the competitive Rainbow Dash, physically strong Apple Jack, boisterous Pinkie Pie, and assertive Twilight Sparkle). 

This may be why researchers Kyra Hunting and Rebecca Haines found that adult male brony fans were not inclined to read a feminist message into the show unless they were already amenable to feminist politics. 32  Similarly, Justin Mullis argues that “Contrary to popular belief, bronies do not represent a significant shift in young men’s understanding of gender politics, what it means to be masculine, how they view women’s entertainment, or even women themselves.” 33  With no male to define itself against, the female becomes an allegorical “everypony,” comprising both the feminine and the masculine. Some chaotes developed a similar tradition of attempting to transcend gender. In Thee Psychick Bible, P-Orridge writes, “Dualistic societies... threaten the continued existence of our species and the pragmatic beauty of infinite diversity of expression . . .  the experimental creation of a third form of gender-neutral living being is concerned with nothing less than strategies dedicated to the survival of the species.” 34  In this way, gender is like all other aspects of the self that must be fully actualized as a complex and diverse set of attributes that transcend categories. Audiences, regardless of gender identity, are invited to internalize the path of the goddess. And with her many friend-identities, Twilight Sparkle acknowledges that the goddess encompasses many attributes unconstrained by gender.

 The question lingers: why does My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic reflect occult philosophy so well? An important part of the project of modern occultism is to create a practical method for charting a metaphysics of consciousness. My Little Pony is similarly focused on helping children (and adults) to navigate their internal lives. Its lessons require some interpretation, given the show's allegorical bent. The characters, after all, don't just have feelings, they often represent feelings. Insofar as they also represent virtues and, sometimes, vices, the show attempts to chart a still deeper course into symbolic explorations of personal morality and the perils of growing up. Occultism is not just one possible frame for the show but rather a frame that closely matches the show's approach. 

The show demonstrates the degree to which the lessons of modern occultism going back more than two centuries continue to hold up as a reflection of what contemporary culture understands to be personal growth and development. While the show is naturally more circumspect about the spiritual nature of this growth, this pony-based cartoon for little girls shares a great deal with occult theory, practice, and mythology. The ascendance of modern occultism's theories of spiritual growth to the height of popular cultural stardom show not only the prescience of occultism's writers and thinkers but also the degree to which the Western world has embraced the deeper underpinnings of third-ways of knowing in a secularized culture. The notion that magic is a means to explore and understand identity is self-evident among Twilight Sparkle and her friends. Meaning is not passed down by tradition, as in organized religion, nor is it invented, as in secular atheism, but rather discovered through sometimes complex internal and external negotiations. Is it a coincidence that Crowley painted “every man and woman is a star” on the side of a Pennsylvania mountain and Twilight Sparkle's cutie mark happens to be a star? Probably. But the consonance between Twilight Sparkle's journey and modern occultism is not. 

Footnotes

• 1

   See Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “Of Ponies and Men: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the Brony Fandom,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 17.1 (2014): 21–37; Bethan Jones, “My Little Pony, Tolerance Is Magic: Gender Policing and Brony Anti-Fandom,” Journal of Popular Television 3.1 (2015): 119–25; Anne Gilbert, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Bronies,” Transformative Works and Cultures 20 (2015): n.p.; Bill Ellis, “What Bronies See When They Brohoof: Queering Animation on the Dark and Evil Internet,” Journal of American Folklore 128.509 (2015): 298–314; Patrick Edwards and Marsha Redden, “Brony Study (Research Project),” www.bronystudy.com. 

• 2

   See the MLP forum's thread regarding tulpas at https://mlpforums.com/topic/27625-would-anybody-like-to-explain-this-tulpa-thing.

• 3

   The text likely dates to late antiquity and has been translated into many languages. Helena Blavatsky's translation reads, “Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you” https://sacred-texts.com/alc/emerald.htm. 

• 4

   Fifty years ago, John Todd claimed to be a former member of a secret witch cult and argued that everything from rock music to Star Wars movies communicated demonic messages. More recently, youtubers and podcasters find occult symbolism in everything from Conan the Barbarian, Harry Potter, and Twin Peaks to the Paris Olympics. See, for example, Isaac Weishaupt's podcast Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture. 

• 5

   Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 2017).

• 6

   Alex Abad-Santos, "The inescapable unicorn trend, explained,” Vox, 7 May 2017.

• 7

   Lauren Faust, "My Little NON-Homophobic, NON-Racist, NON-Smart-Shaming Pony: A Rebuttal,” Ms. Magazine, 24 December 2010. 

• 8

   Lauren Faust, "Exclusive Season 1 Retrospective Interview with Lauren Faust,” Equestria Daily, 15 September 2011. https://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/09/exclusive-season-1-retrospective.html.

• 9

   Faust, “Exclusive Season 1 Retrospective.”

• 10

   Lisa Miller, "How My Little Pony Became a Cult for Grown Men and Preteen Girls Alike, " New York, 6 November 2014. 

• 11

   Aleister Crowley, Introduction to The Lesser Key of Solomon: The Book of Evil Spirits by Samuel MacGregor Mathers (Chicago: De Laurence, Scott, and Co. 1916): 11-12. 

• 12

    “An Introduction to Thee Temple of Psychick Youth,” https://sacred-texts.com/eso/topy/topymani.htm. 

• 13

   Hitchock is perhaps best remembered for his role as an officer in military and chair of the war board during the American Civil War, but Hitchock also gathered one of the largest libraries of alchemical literature known at the time and made an important contribution to the psychological study of alchemy through symbolism. 

• 14

   Ethan Allen Hitchock, Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists, indicating a method of discovering the true nature of hermetic philosophy and showing that the search after the philosopher's stone had not for its object the discovery of an agent for the transmutation of metals being also an attempt to rescue from undeserved opprobrium the reputation of a class of extraordinary thinkers in past age. (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company in 1857): 44-45.

• 15

   Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (1904, Reprint: Adultbrain, 2024), 3-4. 

• 16

   Austin Osman Spare, “The Focus of Life” in The Writings of Austin Osman Spare (Greenbook Publications 2010), 19.

• 17

   Peter Carroll, Liber Null and Psychonaut: The Practice of Chaos Magic (Newburyport, MA: Wesser Books 2022), 15. 

• 18

   Helena Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled. (1877, Reprint: Theosophical University Online Press, 2003), 487-488.

• 19

   Hitchock, 128.

• 20

   The show continued for five more seasons but Twilight's full realization of her power occurs at the end of season four. The creators seemed to realize that they were at an inflection point because they revived the character Tirek who was the villain of the first episode of the original 1986 My Little Pony series. Today, Netflix only posts the series up through season four, a further acknowledgement that this was a significant turning point in the show's story if not its end. 

• 21

   Tartarus and Cerberus are two of the show's many direct references to Greek mythology which suggest that the three faces of the goddess completed by Twilight Sparkle was intentional. Of course, there is a fourth princess, Cadence, but she resides in the Crystal Empire, separated from the other three. 

• 22

   This is a feature of the first four seasons but becomes less true in later seasons with the introduction of characters like Starlight Glimmer and the students of Twilight Sparkle's friendship academy. 

• 23

   Spare exhorts his readers to “will unto self-love—the unexhausted, the procreative of ecstasy! Where there is life there is will unto pleasure—however paradoxical the manifestation.” Spare, “The Focus of Life,” 23. 

• 24

   Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1979), 41.

• 25

   Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Trans. William Adlington (1566, Reprint 1999 Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1666/1666-h/1666-h.htm. 

• 26

   Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage Books, 1979), 48-70. 

• 27

   Charlotte Guest, trans. The Mabinogion (New York: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927). 

• 28

   In her battle with Tirek, Twilight Sparkle appears to be called to a Christ-like mission to save the world by sacrificing herself but the story turns toward the divine feminine when she chooses to abandon her world-saving quest to save her friends. In this way, the show begs the question: if she cannot save her friends, how can she save anyone? 

• 29

   Starhawk, Spiral Dance, 41. 

• 30

   There are exceptions. Pinkie finds a partner in Grilled Cheese in later seasons, and Spike and Discord express ambiguous inter-species affection for Rarity and Fluttershy respectively. But these romances or quasi-romances are never the focus of the action.

• 31

  The Pie sisters are the exception that proves the rule. Pinkie Pie concludes the series married to Grilled Cheese and her sister, Maud, also finds a pony beau, Mudbriar. There is also interspecies affection between Spike and Rarity as well as Discord and Fluttershy but it is difficult to frame these relationships in mutually romantic terms.

• 32

   The brony subculture had a “strong tendency to negotiate the show in ways that complemented their preexisting ideological positions” rather than seeing any feminist intent in the show. Kyra Hunting and Rebecca C. Haines, “'I'm Just Here to Enjoy the Ponies': My Little Pony, Bronies, and the Limit of Feminist Intent,” Popular Communication (2022: 20, no. 2), 149. 

• 33

   Justin Mullis, “'All the Pretty Little Ponies': Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness” in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness, ed. Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao (Punctum Books, 2017), 104. 

• 34

  Genesis P-Orridge, Thee Psychick Bible (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2010), 447. P-Orridge underwent a series of plastic surgeries to blur their own gender throughout their lifetime.