I heard you like magic
Double, double toil and trouble
Am I a witch?
Don’t answer that.
As part of my routine every morning, I pick out some crystals from my collection and pull a tarot card for the day. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes at weekends, I’m too hungover. Sometimes I just need the littlest thing. A tiny slice of wisdom. A confirmation bias that can I cling to. Something to jolt me awake ever so slightly. Like someone clapping their hands and saying “right” before standing up and getting on with the task at hand. Carpe diem.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been doing this. *Looks back through Amazon orders for tarot deck* okay, January 2023 it is. Tarot cards have been used since the 15th century. They’re associated with magical sorcery and prophecy, a means of divination. But that wasn’t their origin. The deck was invented to be used in simple card games in Italy. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that French occultists started to make claims about the powerful spiritual nature of tarot.
I’ve plotted my birth chart. I’m a Libra sun, a Gemini moon and a Gemini rising. A very airy fairy. On 18th June, it was my Saturn return. The moment Saturn returned to the place it was positioned in the sky at the time I was born. This happens roughly every 28/29 years so we experience around 3 Saturn returns in our lifetimes. The first return is a “cosmic coming of age”, an entry into adulthood. Time to get authentic with ourselves, moving away from societal expectations.Committing to the lives we want to lead. As Saturn has now moved into retrograde and appears to be moving backwards in the sky, it will pass through the exact place it was when I was born again… again. So technically I’ll get 2 Saturn returns for this one. I wanted to sage my room to mark the occasion then forgot. I also don’t want my room to smell like sausages so maybe that was subconsciously stopping me.
So, does owning crystals, pulling tarot cards and believing in astrology make me a witch?
“Witches” and the presence of humans practising magic have existed for thousands of years. Since antiquity, witches have been through many trials, tribulations and iterations. They continue to fascinate us.
Witches have made it to TikTok. A recent trend, ‘Vampire, Mermaid, Witch or Fairy’ went viral, categorising women into one of the four types based on certain personality traits. A witch, supposedly, is someone not super social who tends to stay offline and loves nature. I can sort of relate to that I suppose. It’s all harmless fun, no? Many self-identifying witches would disagree. There’s been a wider backlash against ‘WitchTok’ with claims that witchcraft is being mocked and co-opted by the wellness sector. Lines have become blurry when it comes to manifestation, our interests in astrology and moon cycles, and ‘spiritual mentorship’. Is WitchTok just a breeding ground for fakes, phonies and money-grabbing frauds? Or is it opening up new lines of communication for people to learn more about witchcraft?
As a child, I loved watching Sabrina The Teenage Witch and the lesser-known but still great, The Worst Witch. I think it was the display of girls and women being powerful and in control that I was drawn to. The re-branding of witches becoming something aspirational. Of course, there was also the 60s TV show Bewitched, arguably the OG, which influenced the 2005 film of the same name. Nicole Kidman stars as Isabel, who adopts a nose twitch to cast spells just as Elizabeth Montgomery’s character Samantha did in the original series. My sisters were obsessed with the film and used to twitch their own noses too.
I was mesmerised by The Wizard of Oz. Eyeroll at the archetypal display of stereotypes for “good” witch vs. “bad” witch though. Thanks to Wicked The Musical, based on Gregory Maguire's novel that re-imagined the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from her perspective, these tropes have since been challenged. Wicked the hotly anticipated film adaptation will be released in November this year, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.
Witches look set to remain on our TV screens, perhaps even more popular than they ever have been. A sequel to the TV series WandaVision will be out in September. Wanda, the ‘Scarlet Witch’, played by Elizabeth Olsen and Kathryn Hahn who played Agatha Harkness will both reprise their roles for Agatha All Along, where a centuries-old witch breaks free from Wanda’s spell. Disney even bought out a sequel to the 1993 film Hocus Pocus some 29 years later and a third film is now currently in the works.
It’s not just fictitious depictions that are capturing our attention. We’re interested in the facts too. The first episode of Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials aired at the end of June. The misogyny of historical witch trials is highlighted in the documentary and while there were exceptions, it was almost always women who were accused of witchcraft. Suranne Jones spoke about the idea that women are reclaiming the word witch, standing up to patriarchal rules and expectations. This sort of aligns with how witches are more frequently depicted in modern media. But ‘witch’ can still be hurled with venom as an insult and the 2020 film The Witches received backlash for its portrayal of physical disfigurements in ‘evil’ characters.
It’s been 25 years since the hugely successful, blockbuster The Blair Witch Project hit our screens and became a pop-culture legend. There were multiple sequels and rumours are circulating of another revival. But with the original cast fighting for retrospective royalties, it seems unlikely. It successfully revived the “found footage” video style that went on to be replicated by other horror films. At the time, it took a lot of investment from the film’s makers to deliberately plant and spread the right level of misinformation. The film was marketed as being a real documentary. So create the magic, they needed a people to have a collective belief in what they were seeing. And that’s exactly what happened. With the evolving concept of “misinformation” online, people are a lot more wary and doubtful about everything.
Nothing kills magic more than the loss of ambiguity. Childhood wonderment remains preserved, at least I hope it does. Where imagination is still all-consuming and vivid. But for the rest of us, there is no wonder. Pondering. Uncertainty. Thanks to the internet being at the tip of our fingers, we will always know the answer or find out the closest truth. We’ll find our people in threads of conversations who’ve been thinking the same thing as us and realise we have no original thought. There are fewer rumours now. Less trial and error, less experimenting and seeing what happens. When I was 11, we’d all heard that rubbing the backs of those gooey little aliens together would get one of them pregnant and they’d have a baby alien. I believed in the magic of it vehemently. Unquestioningly.
I think I’ve always had a penchant for the mysterious, the seemingly unbelievable. A little bit of magic. It wasn’t just witches. I loved watching Mona the Vampire, The Mysti Show even old episodes of I Dream of Jeannie. I cherished my collection of Rainbow Magic fairy books. I was drawn to how girls and women could exist and simply be in their own right. Strong and capable. I can see now how sad it is that for female characters to present these traits and characteristics on screen, they must be otherworldly. Things are evolving, but it’s clear many depictions of witches have been forms of objectification and even fetishisation. So it’s a stretch as it is to allow fictional women to possess power, and it’s almost exclusively only white women and girls. “Black” magic and the representation of literally fictional women with any kind of power who aren’t white was clearly considered a step too far - Hollywood has failed black witches. Witches still have a very long journey of stories to be told.
So - am I a witch?
Does owning crystals, pulling tarot cards and believing in astrology make me a witch? Maybe, maybe not.
Can I do practical magic? Well, not that I know of.
Am I happy to align myself to a word that is being reclaimed as a challenge to patriarchal norms and ideals of women and do I embrace booky things? Fucking yes.