In her book Waking The Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power, witch-ambassador Pam Grossman compares her feelings about witches going mainstream to the time when her favorite indie band blew up: “I was happy for them, because it meant that they were being appreciated and compensated, and that mattered to me. But I was also afraid that their music would become watered down.” Grossman’s mixed feelings resonate with my own apprehensions about this moment. As a psychic practitioner from a family of spiritual nonconformists, I embody this archetype publicly: the magic woman whose knowledge is feared, desired and also scorned. A body on fire.
As I watch the witch ascend into the mainstream—everywhere from women’s coworking space The Wing calling itself a “coven” to witch-inspired looks at Fashion Week—I’m forced to reckon with the suppressed witch legacy of my own family. While my family background is now increasingly considered “cool” or “different,” as a child I knew instinctively to distance myself from “The New Age” and ideas that would sound the alarm bells of the Reality Police. I kept my visions to myself. In school, I honed a comedic routine making fun of my psychic mom to classmates, while quietly accepting my own intuitive experiences, and letting them guide me. I never thought I’d be performing psychic readings, until suddenly I was, unable to hide anymore. But my own resistance remains strong. There are many days I torture myself: “Do I really have to stand up for this… represent this?” When I’m feeling particularly misunderstood, threatened or unsupported, I fight the urge to take it all back. As a sonic medicine, I’ve started to employ “Too Late to Turn Back Now” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, a jam which caught my attention in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. I spin in my room and let the music gently soothe me onwards.
While Grossman sees the witch’s rise as evidence of a paradigmatic sea-change, I am more skeptical, though not entirely unhopeful. What I’ve noticed in my own life and in the lives of other psychic practitioners with whom I organize is that so far this witch trend has not translated into meaningful public support or acts of institutional inclusion. The “What do you do?” question remains dicey for the working witches I know. Whether you get challenged on your worldview, or asked for a free reading, it’s a lot of labor and stress. There is a palpable hunger for psychic knowledge and insight, but at the same time a deep accusation stands in the room with me when I announce this possibility out loud. How can you tell me that magic is real? Everybody knows that magic is fake, failed, dead. Gone.
Grossman’s book however isn’t just a book about mystics like me, but a broader-based argument about why witches matter: to feminism, to spirituality, and to women’s history most importantly. As I was named and called myself a witch, I had to look at my own lineage and address how I got to this moment. Why was the knowledge that had been passed down to me through my family so culturally out of bounds, seen as devilish even? Grossman discusses in her book how the devil was hardly mentioned in Christian theology until the church began producing satanist propaganda as “a strategic response to the sudden influx of Greek and Arabic texts about ceremonial magic that were being translated during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” These magical discourses threatened the power of the church’s own discourses, a cultural contest that culminated in Pope John XXII declaring magic an act of heresy in 1326.
In short, over the next several hundred years, magic that was not church-state sanctioned became the devil’s territory, and the devil in particular came to be theorized by powerful state-allied theologians as living in women’s bodies, minds and imaginations. It was women more so than men who were punished for heretical beliefs as “witches.” Contextualizing the witch trials in Europe, Grossman remarks, “Many have written about the hardships of daily life in these regions at the time, such as a high infant mortality rate, challenging weather conditions, illness and economic strife. These struggles left people vulnerable and looking for a scapegoat — or a goat-footed demon lord and his witch mistresses in this case.” While we may be tempted today to cast these victims as magical practitioners akin to the contemporary witches now in vogue, this myth masks important historical contexts.
More so than Grossman, Italian activist and scholar Silvia Federici has worked to put the history of the witch into an economic context. In her book Caliban and the Witch, and more recently in Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, Federici links up “witch” persecution to capitalism’s rise in early modern Europe. What her evidence reveals is that “witches” were mostly poor women, but also men, whose church and state-sanctioned terrorization served as effective measures of social control during a time of economic transition. Federici explains how capitalism came to control women’s bodies, and details the coincidence of the witch trials, the codification of a new sexual division of labor, and the rise of wage work more generally.
Federici narrates how, as the land became increasingly privatized through the enclosure movement, people lost a relationship that was crucial to their independence and interdependence. People were forced to look outside of their own communities to sustain themselves. Social relations transformed in this erasure of “the commons,” pitting neighbors against each other, and importantly men against women. Federici found only one man in her archival research that stood up for his wife during one of the many witch round-ups.
Another important piece of the witch-and-state puzzle can be found in Kristen J. Sollée’s Witches, Sluts, Feminists. Quoting the often-criticized historian Anne Barstow on the witch trials, Sollée excerpts Barstow’s findings that women were not considered independent legal entities prior to the witch trials, their public testimony not admissible until they were tried as witches. Thus, Barstow makes the case that women entered full legal status as witches. This legal history affects American women, as our legal system has its roots in the English common law. These particular historical and legal legacies of persecution are why Pam Grossman chooses to address the witch as “she,” although the witch transcends “she.”
Finally, we must address a vast trauma and dispossession in the history of the witch: the stories and histories of BIPOC, and what was lost spiritually and materially through colonization and the institution of slavery—that which remains to be legally acknowledged and repaired. This must be foregrounded in witch work. As an organizer, I continually go back and forth on my use of the word “witch” in my calls to action and support. “Witch” can feel at times too centered in a European context, and thus not an appropriate umbrella term for a larger socio-political movement. As Grossman also qualifies in her book, “Now all of this is in reference to the Western witch with its distinctly European context. But nearly every culture has its version of witches, let alone many flavors of magical people including sorcerers, soothsayers, oracles, healers and shamans.”
In my reading practice, I’ve noticed that so much of my work as a witch is just about holding space for people’s own acts of magic and paranormal experience. People sometimes confess to me that they talk to their dead. I say, “I talk to the dead too.” We smile at each other. My clients want to know if they can trust their intuition and how to work with it more consciously. They want to understand better what they’re experiencing, whether it’s astral projection or recurring visions. They are looking for permission to redraw the reality maps we’ve been given, and I say, “Let’s get out our crayons.”
When people I know really don’t get “the whole witch thing,” there is a more universal point that I wish to hammer home: What has it meant for you to grow up in a culture where divine power is conceptualized predominantly as male authority? What human power structures are upheld through this visioning of the spiritual hierarchy? “In God We Trust” is printed on our money; God remains significant in so many of our public agreements, although I’m told the separation of church and state happened. It’s so obvious, and yet it doesn’t actually seem like a big deal to us. We’re so used to it. We think it doesn’t really mean anything anymore.
But what would it feel like to walk around in a space where female, trans, and non-binary identified divinities were represented everywhere? What would your life be like if when somebody said “God” aloud (if we agree that that’s even the word), “they/them” or “she/her” came to mind first? What would that world look like?
The truth is that people continue to be fearful of giving expression to cosmologies that don’t fit in with mainstream institutionalized belief. What is a witch to do? “Wake up!” witches say. Take your power back. Learn to read energy and make powerful use of your seeing and knowing. Dedicate your power to a greater purpose and let this keep you in check. Lay your cards on the table with the other witches you know and see what matches up—what is the work you have to do together? It is too late to turn back now. As Grossman says, “Whether as transformative spiritual figures, rabble-rousing cultural symbols, or bewitchingly complex characters in stories and histories that we read and watch and reimagine, I know this: witches are the future.”
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Grace Kredell is currently a Master’s Candidate in Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a magical practitioner with an intuitive astrology practice. In her free time, she makes video art, writes poetry and organizes community happenings. She and her familiar (cat) Blinky are both blind in one eye. You can find her work at gracekredell.com or catch her on Instagram @athenapronoia
