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Witches of Every Faith and None

Witchcraft is a practice, and a practice can be taken up by anyone. A great many witches are pagans. A great many are not. This page is about the others: the witches who keep no gods, the witches who keep the God of Abraham, and the folk magic that has always lived quietly inside other religions. It ends with the traditions that are not ours to take.

Secular witches

Some witches believe in no gods at all. For them witchcraft is a discipline of attention: a way of shaping the mind, marking time and making meaning with candles and herbs and words. Some understand magic as psychology, some as art, some as a conversation with the deep parts of the self, and some say frankly that they do not know how it works and do not need to. They keep the moon because it is beautiful, light candles because it focuses them, and write their spells down because writing down what you want is the first step toward getting it.

Is that still witchcraft? We think so. The Hearth takes no position on whether the gods exist, and several of our own members would call themselves agnostic on a good day. What we ask of a secular witch in our circle is what we ask of everyone: when the circle calls on the Goddess, others there mean it, and a circle is not a theatre. Stand with them as you would stand at a friend's wedding in a church that is not yours, respectfully, even if you do not share the vows.

The honest difficulty for a secular witch lies with the rites of worship rather than with the craft. Drawing down the moon, pouring an offering for Thor, keeping a vigil for Brighid: these are acts of devotion, and whether to go through them without meaning them is something only the person doing it can judge. Many secular witches simply leave those parts out, and we think that is the honest choice.

Christian witches, and the cunning folk before them

For most of history, the people who charmed warts, read the cards, blessed the cattle and found the lost ring went to church on Sunday. The cunning folk of England used the psalms as charms. Irish country people walked sunwise round holy wells and tied rags to the thorn trees beside them. Grandmothers all over Catholic Europe knew which saint to pray to for which trouble, and lit candles to them with an attention any witch would recognise. They would not have called themselves witches, and many of them would have been frightened to hear the word. But their charms are the ones we still use.

Today a growing number of people call themselves Christian witches outright. They pray and read scripture, and they also work candle magic, herbalism and divination, often drawing on the folk practice of their own families. Opinion about this is sharply divided in both communities. Many churches teach that it is forbidden; many pagans think it a contradiction in terms. We think it is between them and their God. Our covenant welcomes "every faith that can sit beside ours in peace," and that includes theirs. Some of the most devoted people at our own Imbolc are Catholics who have kept Brigid's feast all their lives and see no reason to stop because a group of witches is keeping it too.

Folk magic carried in families

Every family that crossed an ocean seems to have brought something in its luggage. In many Italian-American households it is the cure for the malocchio, the evil eye: drops of olive oil let fall into a bowl of water while a prayer is said under the breath, and the shapes they make read for the eye's presence. In a good many families the words of that prayer can only be passed on at Christmas Eve. It is a red horn on a chain, salt pushed into a child's pocket on the way out of the door, rosemary on the shelf for the dead, and candles for the saints and, in some families, for older powers too. In Irish homes it is the Brigid's cross over the door and the holy water beside it. In Pennsylvania German country it is Braucherei, powwowing, healing by charm and prayer. Jewish tradition has its amulets to protect mothers and newborns, and a long, learned literature of protective magic that reaches back to the incantation bowls of ancient Babylonia.

Some people who practise these things now call themselves witches, and some have woven them into a pagan practice. Raven Grimassi's Stregheria, for instance, is a modern Italian witchcraft tradition, built in the late twentieth century from Italian folk magic, Charles Leland's 1899 book Aradia, and what Grimassi said was his own family's teaching, and it is taught openly. Other people feel strongly that the family charms belong to the families, and should be learned at the kitchen table or not at all. Both views deserve respect. If you have a grandmother who knows things, ask her while you can, and write down what she says.

We have noticed that many people who come to the Hearth believing they are discovering something new find, after a year or so, that they are recovering something old: a great-aunt's way with burns, a grandfather who would not cut a hawthorn, a mother who always turned the coins in her purse at the new moon. Whatever your faith, the folk practice of your own people is a good place to begin, because it was offered to you.

Borrowing well: practices that are not ours

Some of the world's living religions include practices that look, from the outside, like witchcraft: offerings to spirits, divination, healing, trance and possession, the making of charms. Haitian Vodou, Santería or Lukumí, Candomblé, the African American tradition of Hoodoo or rootwork, Mexican curanderismo, the ceremonial life of the Indigenous nations of the Americas, and many more. Their practitioners do not usually call themselves witches, and many would object to the word. These are not flavours of witchcraft. They are religions and cultures in their own right, often formed under slavery, conquest and persecution, and many of them are initiatory and closed: you learn them by being brought in by a community, not by buying a book.

Our covenant says that we "do not borrow the sacred practices of living cultures that have not offered them." In practice, that means a few plain things.

• Learn from within, or not at all. If you feel genuinely called to one of these traditions, seek out its own people and its own teachers, on their terms. Read its own writers before you read outsiders writing about it.
• Do not buy the sacred as a kit. Spell kits sold under the names of the orishas or the lwa, "voodoo dolls" and the like are mostly made by people with no connection to the traditions they borrow from. If you must buy, buy from practitioners.
• Do not smudge. Burning bundles of white sage, sweetgrass or cedar in ceremony is a sacred practice of particular Indigenous nations, and wild white sage is being overharvested to meet the demand. The old European ways of cleansing are every bit as good, and they are ours: the Scottish custom of saining a house with juniper smoke, rosemary and bay on the fire, garden sage, salt water, and a good besom. See Herbs of the Hearth.
• When in doubt, ask, and listen to the answer. The line between open and closed practice is argued over, and reasonable people draw it in different places. If someone from a tradition tells you a practice is not for outsiders, believe them, even if a website told you otherwise.

None of this is about purity. The Craft has always borrowed, and Wicca itself is a magpie. It is about manners, and about remembering that a practice which is a pastime for us may be the very thing someone's ancestors were punished, imprisoned or killed for keeping. Witches, of all people, ought to understand that.

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