What is Witchcraft?
Witchcraft is the craft of the witch, in the same way that carpentry is the craft of the carpenter. It is something you do, with your hands and your voice and your attention, and you get better at it by doing it.
A working definition
If you asked everyone at the Hearth to define witchcraft you would get a dozen answers, but they would rhyme. Witchcraft is the practice of shaping the world, and yourself, through intention made real in action. The action may be lighting a candle, binding a knot, brewing a tea, speaking a charm, walking a labyrinth, or standing in silence under a particular moon. The intention is what makes it witchcraft rather than housekeeping. The relationship, with the land, the seasons, the ancestors and whatever gods or spirits a witch keeps, is what makes it a path rather than a hobby.
Witchcraft is not a religion in itself, though for many of us it is inseparable from one. A kitchen witch who keeps no gods, a Wiccan priestess, a hedge-rider working with the spirits of a particular hill, and a Catholic grandmother who knows which saint to light a candle to for a lost ring are all, in their own ways, doing witchcraft. Some of them would be horrified to hear it.
Where it comes from
The honest answer is: from everywhere and from no single place. Every culture has had people who were consulted about charms, cures, luck and the finding of lost things. In Britain and Ireland they were called cunning folk, wise women, charmers, fairy doctors. Their charms survive in folklore collections, in court records, and in the habits of people who still turn their money over at the new moon without quite knowing why.
The modern witchcraft revival of the twentieth century gathered up those folk practices and wove them together with ceremonial magic, with the ideas of romantic writers who imagined a surviving pagan religion, and with the personal genius of people like Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Robert Cochrane and Alex Sanders. The result is a living tradition that is younger than it once claimed to be and far older than its critics allow. We are not practising an unbroken ancient religion. We are doing something better: we are practising a craft that has always been rebuilt by each generation from what the last one left behind.
What witches actually do
- Keep the seasons. We mark the solstices, equinoxes and the four fire festivals between them. See the Wheel of the Year.
- Watch the moon. Many of us gather, or work alone, at the full moon and sometimes the dark. See Esbats.
- Work magic. Spells for healing, protection, clarity, courage, prosperity, grief, letting go. Mostly small. Mostly for ourselves and those who ask. See Practice.
- Divine. Tarot, runes, scrying, the reading of birds and weather and the fall of a cord.
- Tend relationships. With ancestors, with the spirits of the places we live, with gods if we keep them, and with each other.
- Study. Herbs, stars, folklore, history, the long argument about what any of it means.
What witchcraft is not
It is not Satanism, which is a separate thing with its own adherents who would be the first to tell you so. It is not a costume, though we do like a good hat. It is not a shortcut around effort, grief or responsibility. A spell for a job does not replace the application; it steadies the hand that writes it. It is not something you are born into, though some are, and it is not something you need permission for, though company helps. We say more in Common Misconceptions.
I have been asked a hundred times whether witchcraft "works." It works the way a garden works. You cannot command a tomato. You can make a place where tomatoes are likely.
A Hearthkeeper, at Kitchen Table
Next: What is Wicca?