On Witchcraft

Over the past several years in various corners of the internet, I’ve noticed a resurgence of witches as both a feminist symbol and topic for discussion. Unlike other crazed pop culture phases (vampires and werewolves come to mind) witches on their own have not faced the same sort of immediate rise and ubiquitous presence in the social consciousness. Instead, they’ve filtered in slowly and steadily, in corners of Tik Tok or Tumblr or artists pages and Studio Ghibli appreciation posts. They’ve found their way to me via screen caps and personal discussion, such as the following:

 But this fascination makes sense; throughout history, representation of women has unfortunately been reduced to mothers, ice queens, femme fatales, and martyrs. The idea of women existing on their own terms with their own source of power is exhilarating and liberating for a lot of women and queer femmes. It’s a way for us to imagine ourselves with our own power structure, our own magic that is entirely devoid and separate from traditional society, and from men. It maybe even frightens them a bit.

As a child, I was never someone drawn to witchy vibes or the occult, at least not in the way the shown in the screenshot above. I didn’t try to raise the dead. I hadn’t heard of tarot cards. The closest I got to astrology was strangers mistaking my reading about “astronomy” for reading the future in the stars.

I simply never found witches relatable. And maybe that was because I was going through my “not like other girls” phase, and witches were always marketed as the vindictive, jealous, villainous example of womanhood. They weren’t supposed to be relatable. Instead, I was supposed to want to be a princess, or a faerie, or some ideal independent woman, but I had to do it the right way, and make sure that I still ultimately followed expectations, settled down, and conformed to society’s expectations of my role as caretaker or eye candy. It wouldn’t dawn on me until I was older that maybe this was because witches had somehow escaped certain aspects of the male gaze—they were unapologetic in their power, in their identity, in their pursuit of their goals. They were independent, but too much so, and they weren’t doing it the right way.

The past year has given me time to think about the family that I grew up with, in part because I haven’t seen some of them in almost two years, and in part because of the slew of Marvel movies that continue to remind me of why I should have daddy issues. (Don’t get me wrong, I love the MCU—but it is very much a trend)

I grew up without a father. I was raised by two women: my mother, and my grandmother. And I never thought anything of it. My family was small, sure. It was unique among my small-town friends, but it was in no way broken. I remember several instances of my mother probing me, worrying, and asking if I ever felt like I wanted a father figure, or apologizing for our abnormal household. But that family wasn’t abnormal to me—it was my normal, and it was always, always enough. I stand by the claim that a “broken” family is always better than one that is breaking, that is fighting, that is tumultuous and painful for a child to grow up around. I would rather be raised by people who were fully present and committed than a forced nuclear family on the verge of divorce.

So I find the insistence that a hero needs to find their missing parent, needs to figure out where they came from, to be extremely disconnected from my own reality. I wasn’t shaped by absence; I was shaped by the very present, very real women around me.

And now that I’m older and facing down another autumn, I’ve been thinking more about witches. About power. Where we draw from it, and what we do with it. About how it manifests in a matriarchal family.

I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience.

About the power of my grandmother to drive by herself, in a white-out blizzard, over 300 miles on the midnight of my catastrophic and dangerously premature birth. About my mother’s ability to survive—first that, and then cancer, thirteen years later. About her ability to work two jobs and still be such a present source of love and attention in my life.  

I’ve been thinking about fear.

Fear of abnormality. Of happiness in, or despite, difference. I’ve been thinking about struggle, and how society expects women to overcome fierce challenges for their success to mean anything. I’ve been thinking about the distrust of anything that comes easy, whether it be through support, or through love, or through magic.

I’ve been thinking about spaces.

About how we make them, and where we feel most at home. About how there is a bond in shared sensibility, in shared values, that transcends interests and personality and family bonds. About the multitude of lived experiences in the people around me, and about when we have the courage to be vulnerable. I’ve been thinking about the women who raised me, who are strong not because of their hardship but in spite of it—because there is strength in caring and in kindness, and that is the most courageous way to live.

And I’ve been wondering if witches can be a symbol for me. I wonder if it’s too pretentious: the metaphysical recursive logic of drawing power from symbols of people like you who are powerful, in their own way.

But mostly, I’ve been thinking about subtle magic. Of power drawn from memories.

The scent of cinnamon and cloves.

The beauty of quilted patterns.

The healing power of chicken soup.

The ancient trunk in the corner, and the wreaths of dried flowers, and homemade woven baskets.

And maybe I’ve been thinking too much about witches. About their ability to be both masculine and feminine but untethered from archetypes or expectations, to have the ability to cherry pick and choose what attributes, what performances, and what endeavors they want to embody. About what we look like in a vacuum, raised somewhere away from it all in a structure of our choosing. About whether or not my strange little family would have been tried for witchcraft, if we had dared to be happy four centuries too early.