Why women are witches
Last year I came out on LinkedIn as a witch.
To my 500+ professional LinkedIn contacts, and 800+ followers I said:
“I’m a witch. I work with ancient wisdom, with deep knowing and intuition. I have altars to two goddesses in my home – Athena and Hekate. (They chose me, not the other way around). I know things ahead of time sometimes that I shouldn’t know. I channel stories. My books feel like they come through me and not from me. This isn't woo-woo for me. It’s how I access the deepest truth in any story or situation.”
It wasn’t anywhere near my most popular post. A few people cheered, most stayed silent or scrolled on by.
Some may have read ‘woo-woo’ and noped out of there. Others possibly didn’t see it as a big deal.
Given how terrified I’d been about ‘coming out’, it was as big an anti-climax as you’d imagine. Which made me wonder what I’d been so worried about.
But it got me thinking. Why are there so many of us out here these days?
Everywhere I turn - whether to a colleague in a meeting room or to the ladies on TikTok and Threads - the witches are coming out of their closets, brooms in hand.
The question is why? And most importantly perhaps, why now?
I wanted to find out.
So, I put out a call on my Threads account for women interested in talking to me about their own journey to witchcraft.
And the witches answered, from Chinese glamour witches to Californian hedge witches, to eclectic Aussie experimenters, to European goddess worshippers.
I even interviewed someone from my own coven for this.
I am still very keen to talk to witches of colour and delve into the complex area of appropriation and cultural sensitivity in witchcraft, so this exploration is far from over, but here are some of my early findings from these fascinating conversations.
Witches be sick of the patriarchy. To a woman they are tired of feeling powerless and oppressed. They are definitely done with being ignored by the patriarchy. Witchcraft for many is a direct response to the trauma the system inflicts. But critically it is not an escape... it is a tool that many are using to hasten the patriarchy’s collapse and birth a new world.
Witches be done with priests. And by priests, I mean the spiritual intermediaries that insist than any relationship with the divine must come through them. Or that the divine is masculine and that the female form is sinful. The witches I’ve spoken to told me their witchcraft was a way to deprogram old patriarchal religious notions and reclaim their relationship to divine. And through that many are also reclaiming their relationship to their own bodies. Witchcraft returns what the Christian church called sinful, and gives it back to its life-giving, elemental and wild form and the witches are here for it.
Witches be carrying the rage (and legacy) of their grandmothers. Multiple women I’ve spoken to talked of feeling their grandmothers around them as living energies. One Californian witch told me it was about remembering and not discovery. Others spoke about their grandmothers having ‘skin in the game’. All spoke of the rage they carried around the heritage that which was denied and stolen. Witchcraft here can be understood as a healing act and reclaiming what should never have been taken from us.
Witches be done with the rape of Mother Earth. Every witch, whether they came from a religious background or not, whether they believed in the magic or see it mostly just as ritual, spoke to me of the way that witchcraft puts connects them with nature. From hedge witches who deal in herbs and plants, to those who use witchcraft to follow the cycles of nature — they spoke of witchcraft as enabling a magical, reverent relationship to the Earth, which most revere as the Mother Goddess. It’s no wonder that in a time of ecological collapse, the response of so many women has been to turn back to practices which honour the Earth as divine.
The last decade has seen the rise in toxic masculinity, ecological collapse and fascism. Given that, it’s no surprise perhaps that it has also heralded the RISE OF THE WITCH.
And in that my friends, there is hope.
If you are a woman of colour, of indigenous background or come from a closed tradition, I’d love to talk to you to add a deeper perspective to my exploration. I’d love to hear from you!
If this subject fascinates you as much as it does me, I can really recommend the BBC 4 Podcast WITCH, which dives into this subject.