Many practitioners frame their witchcraft within the bounds of psychology—a creative way to alter their thought patterns to be more productive and healthier, to address and recover from past traumas, or to develop a stronger sense of self and personal value.

you probably don’t assume the English King Charles is doing the same when he’s holding a scepter and being declared ruler because of his special blood. A wand is a wand is a wand, but it’s only magic in the hands of the wrong person.

Why is it, after all, that some seemingly fantastical things get categorized as magic and others are called religion? Why do we say that a witch lighting a candle to make something happen is doing magic, but someone making a wish over their birthday candles isn’t?

Sometimes, in an extension of our own human creativity, we come to see our emotions, proclivities, passions, and challenges as spirits too. In making such abstractions a little more concrete, it becomes easier to manage and direct them, allowing witches to live more balanced, fruitful, and joyful lives.

The practice of manifestation does not by itself make someone a witch, given its presence in other systems and its relative absence in contemporary witch spaces in earlier decades. In many cases, witches themselves may even eschew the concept, given the ease with which such a perspective can be weaponized to justify suffering, poverty, and other

Witchcraft attracts many kinds of people, but it is especially appealing to artists, creatives, and those with the ability to find power, beauty, and utility in overlooked or unappreciated places.

The witch is an outsider figure and has served as a symbol for marginalized groups of many kinds.

It’s when they belong to outsiders that they become suspect and are likely to be relegated as magic—and therefore crazy, wrong, stupid, or impossible. The ritual cleansing of a person through the application of special water, or the transformation of wine into blood before a room of onlookers isn’t dismissed as magic because these particular

The witch consciously harnesses these symbols (and is likely to learn a multitude of symbol systems) for use in spellcasting, creatively combining them to direct their focus and personal energy or power.