Last summer, I had the honor of being one of the keynote speakers for Romancing the Gothic Conference 2023 – The Supernatural and Witchcraft in belief, practice and depiction. Below is the full transcript of the talk, including slides. Video recording coming soon…
Thank you for joining us today, and thank you, Sam [Hirst], for organizing this fantastic conference. This lecture, “Which Witch Are You? : Finding Your Magical Self Through Storytelling and Pop Culture,” will explore how witches in popular culture influence real-world practicing witches like myself, both inviting us to celebrate the counter-culture joy of the craft and to engage with the problematics of making an othered archetype more mainstream. So we’ll be looking at the delights, the horrors, and the delightful horrors of all things witchy in popular culture.
It would be easy to say that witches are having a moment. You would just have to point to the influx of witchy romance novels and magical paranormal shows or look at the broader conversation surrounding “witch-hunts” (heavy on the air quotes) in our current political landscape.
But I’m going to let you in on a little not-so-secret secret: Witches might be having a moment, true, but we’ve always been here. And we’ve had other moments. In fact, we owe much of pop culture’s current resurgence in all things witchy to streaming. Thanks to online media, a whole new generation has been exposed to iconic shows like Charmed and Bewitched and films like Practical Magic and The Craft. Now, whimsigoth, a style made iconic by shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among others, is taking over TikTok and Instagram. We have WitchTok, Witches of Instagram, and more mainstream publications, like Cosmopolitan magazine, writing about astrology, witchcraft, and natural spirituality.
So the images I have on this slide are, starting in the upper left-hand corner: a photo of The Hoodwitch, a big name for Witches of Instagram. Next to it is a poster for the iconic show Charmed and Sephora’s controversial witch kit that got pulled from the market for a variety of issues, including cultural appropriation. In the second row, there is an image of Donald Trump calling attacks against him “witch hunts,” which completely turns the phrase inside-out. Then we have an article about whimsigoth fashion on social media, and a selection of witchy romance novels.
And yet, as mainstream as witchy business has become, there are those of us who have always been immersed in natural spirituality and, quite frankly, often eschew the more commodified representations of our practices. There are those of us, in other words, that always felt a little witchy. To quote a meme that’s often passed around witchy social media, “Some of you did not spend your childhoods making potions out of random leaves, berries, and twigs tossed into a tub of water and stirred with a stick you found…and it shows.”
Seriously though? Half the joy of witchy pop culture is the memes.
Anyway, some of us, like myself, grew up in what I call “hippy woo-woo homes,” where mysticism and everyday magic were normalized. We have roots in conjure folk practices and healing folk practices as well as influences in the modern new age movement. Others are leaving behind mainstream religion and exploring their spirituality in other ways. So we have witchy folk—some of whom gladly take on the term witch, others who have that term applied to them to mark their difference—who have embraced the path as something that has been passed down to us through the generations or found the path through their own search for connection and meaning. Both paths are valid.
All this by way of saying that it’s important to remember here, when we talk about pop culture witches, that there are, in fact, real-world witches. These are lived experiences. Some choose the name witch voluntarily. Others, including conjure folk practitioners and healers, have had the term applied to them. Still others take back the term, choosing to transform the negative connotations into a celebration of hidden or suppressed histories (I am one of these witches).
As a mestiza, a woman of mixed Indigenous, European, and Latine heritage, it’s impossible for the history of colonization in my blood not to shape my spiritual practice. Embracing the term bruja, or witch, is my way of acknowledging how my family history of curanderismo, or folk healing practice, was seen as a transgressive practice, an evil art by the Spanish church at various times throughout history. So I offer up two definitions of witch, though they are by no means the only definitions, just the ones I feel are most suited to this presentation.
The first is from Kristen J. Sollee’s Witches, Sluts, Feminists, which says, "The Witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression." For the purposes of this lecture, I use the term “female” in a gender-inclusive way, as witchy business is often considered anti-patriarchal, queer, and more centered on traditionally feminine attributes, attributes which, regardless of our gender, we can all embody.
The second definition is from my own blog, Enchantment Learning & Living, and specifically defines the term bruja, or witch, as “an archetype that reclaims the once negative term witch and finds power in her otherness. Brujeria is about taking our power back and honoring our divine right to joy, pleasure, hope, and happiness.” I include this definition here to emphasize the importance of acknowledging that witches of color are often working through layers of reconnecting to our heritage, working through histories of colonization, and reclaiming our right to joy. It’s a narrative that reads a little differently than the white witchcraft that’s most often centered in popular culture.
And while it would be easy to turn this lecture into a celebration of witchcraft, the community isn’t without its dark side. No community is.
I would love to say that all witches are good. But we do, indeed, have our bad witches, the gingerbread-house-living, children-eating, poison-apple-making dark magic practitioners. Only in real life, we call them spiritual gatekeepers (or those who keep others out of the community by saying they’re not pure of blood or enlightened enough), spiritual bypasses (or those who perform feel-good rituals while bypassing serious mental health issues), and, of course, old-fashioned white supremacists…and basically the typical baddies you find in most communities.
These issues—the difference between good witches and bad witches—remind me of the question Glenda the Good Witch poses to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
This is a question worth asking of ourselves. The answer is not as simple as stating you are a Glittery Glenda or a green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West. The heart of the question for real witches is in knowing if you are a transgressive free spirit committed to honoring the wild spirit in others…or if you are a witch who, intentionally or unintentionally, upholds white supremacy, spiritual gatekeeping, spiritual bypassing, cultural appropriation…I could go on, but you get the idea.
Good witches honor their heritage, cultural traditions, and sometimes, the need to cultivate new ones when we are disconnected from our pasts for various reasons stemming from generational trauma to lost histories due to cultural assimilation. Good witches also respect the heritages of others without inappropriately taking from them. Bad witches indulge in cultural appropriation and reinforce the very social norms that they are trying to escape.
I could complicate this analogy further. I mean, how "good" is Glenda if she's celebrating the fact that Dorothy dropped a house on another witch? If we've learned anything from Wicked, it's that the villain's story is never clean-cut, a theme reinforced by the story arc of Regina, the Evil Queen in Once Upon a Time's reimagining of Snow White. As they often say in that series, evil isn't born, it's made.
See? Explorations of witchcraft in popular culture are never simple. But they do give us jumping-off points for exploring our own light and dark sides. Our magical sides, too. In fact, The Wizard of Oz lays the groundwork for the idea that witches could, in fact, be cool, pretty, and benevolent, thanks to Glenda the Good Witch, giving us permission, in turn, to be both powerful AND good, even if we don't want to wear a glittery bubble-gum pink ballgown (confession: I do).
We also have the Dorothys, or basic witches like myself, who are everyday folk looking for a little more magic in our lives. For the purposes of this lecture, I want to focus on these basic pop culture witches as figures that can help us heal. They show us that you don’t have to have “pure blood” to be a witch or know what you’re doing. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, you just have to take that first step on the yellow brick road, and, with luck, community, and maybe a little song and dance, you’ll discover that you’ve had the power in you all along.
This is an especially important concept for those of us with complicated relationships to our heritage. As we search for our sense of self and empowerment, pop culture witches serve as a reminder that we are magic and can conjure our own path.
You could say I’ve found myself in stories. Now I’m going to give you some very personal examples of how pop culture witches can help us reclaim our sense of self as magical beings so we can see just how powerful seemingly “fun” or “frivolous” stories can be.
The first series I want to discuss is Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mysteries, featuring the natural witch Lily Ivory. She is currently a vintage clothing shop owner in San Francisco, using her magical abilities to solve paranormal crimes in her adopted city. She grew up in a small town in Texas and, because of her abilities, was chased out at an early age. As a result, she never finished her witchy education with her grandmother Graciela or the curandera her grandmother sent her to when they realized the town was no longer safe for the young witch.
Although Blackwell didn’t intend for her protagonist to be Latina or Indigenous, it’s impossible not to read Lily Ivory as mestizaje-coded. She reads as having a mixed background with cultural lines that aren’t always easy to untangle, especially in her use of the Spanish language and certain conjure folk practices. Even when I teach the first book in this series in my Witchcraft and Pop Culture class, my students, who are largely Latine, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Mestizaje, also read her as Latina or mestiza. What’s more, they love it! They are always pleasantly surprised to see themselves represented in stories that artfully explore complicated mixed-raced legacies and conjure folk practices—and that are fun and joyful! It's a big departure from the many trauma porn narratives we’re used to seeing ourselves in.
As for me, I found this series when I was a baby witch, away from the Land of Enchantment for the first time, coming to terms with the fact that not everyone grew up in mystically inclined households and grappling with very real cultural differences in a big white city. Blackwell’s series first drew me in because of the glitter on the cover, but it kept me reading because it was perhaps the first time I’d read a mestizaje narrative that grappled with the difficulty of finding a way forward with a fractured heritage and limited cultural education. What’s more, as the series develops, we see Lily finding a wonderful found family, a home, and love—an absolutely magical story for anyone wanting to feel like they, too, can conjure those things.
My second example is a more recent one. Isabel Canas’s The Hacienda is a magnificent gothic romance set in turn-of-the-century Mexico and deftly explores the complexity of our violent colonial history where nothing is romanticized. This gothic romance centers on a mestizo priest who is also a brujo. It is unclear in the story if this man is a curandero, or healer, and a brujo in the eyes of the church only, that is, if his witchy identity is different from this folk healer practice. And that is the beauty of it. Those labels and identities become mixed, so much so that we often can't separate them. There are parts of his cultural history that are lost to him, parts that he must keep hidden, and parts that he intuitively knows. Not going to lie: I felt SEEN.
These stories tell us that we aren’t alone in trying to heal from a tangled past or find ourselves in the present. They remind us that despite the history of trauma in our blood, we can conjure a future full of healing and hope.
We learn to take what we can of our past or heritage—what is nourishing and life-giving—and let go of what is toxic or oppressive. There are things in our backgrounds, family pain, generational trauma, and ancestral hauntings—yes, I said ancestral hauntings, I’ve got to get a little woo-woo, or else what am I doing here? What it all boils down to is that we can’t always go back. Some things are lost to us. Some things are too risky to return to. This is an important reality for many of us and worth emphasizing in a cultural moment that focuses mostly on reclaiming the past and reclaiming our heritage as a form of empowerment. That’s not something many of us can safely do. This leaves us with a burning question:
Where do we go from here?
The answer is simple. We turn to pop culture witches to show us a different way of being. I’m making some sweeping generalizations here—and there’s a lot I’m leaving out—but I want to walk you through the journey of magical selfhood through some of the most iconic witchy archetypes in pop culture.
For many of us, the journey into the wild woods of witchcraft can be terrifying. That’s where we get the archetype of the scary witches like Baba Yaga, La Huesera, or the Bone Woman, and the witch in the hut in the middle of the forest. But there’s a duality to these figures. Baba Yaga is both the malevolent child-eater and the benevolent savior.
La Loba, sometimes known as La Huesera, is a benevolent life-giver, collecting the bones of endangered animals to give them new life. She is also a terrifying figure at home in the world of wounded or dying things. Although not technically considered a witch in folklore, La Huesera is definitely treated as such in my novella, Weep, Woman, Weep. Like the more helpful incarnation of Baba Yaga, La Loba or La Huesera in my book is who you go to when you need the kind of help only a witch who means business can give.
The images here are a still of Emma Caufield as the witch in Hansel and Gretel from the TV show Once Upon a Time, a 19th-century Russian illustration of Baba Yaga, and fan art of the Bone Woman by steeringfornorhart.
This terror of the unknown, the fear of leaving the safety of traditional communities, however stifling they are, is best exemplified in 2016 film The Witch, about the horrors of Puritan America. We are as afraid as Thomasin of the menacing figures hidden in the woods and yet, by the end of the film, are eager for her to align with Black Phillip. After all, living deliciously in the woods sounds a lot better than living with a repressed, hypocritical, borderline incestuous family. We want her to go be the witch of the wood!
These scary witches, in other words, represent duality—the darkness and the light of the craft, our hope and fear of the unknown.
And speaking of The Craft…we see these same themes playing out in iconic films. In The Craft (1996), we get the transgressive counter-culture gothiness of a group of teen girls reclaiming their power through the craft AND we get a cautionary tale, reminding us not to recreate oppressive structures once we’re the ones with power. Empowerment is terrifying—and it comes with a certain amount of responsibility, namely ensuring you aren't getting your empowerment at the expense of someone else’s autonomy.
The message is clear: Always magic responsibly.
This terror of transgression and the unknown is all part of the process, the first step in moving beyond mainstream religion or even conventional norms—it's scary! Even if you are a basic witch like me. And for some of us, we’re always walking the fine line of being terrified of our own agency and autonomy and empowered by it. We’re also always negotiating being viewed as the child-eating demon or the benevolent fairy godmother.
It’s once we get past the terrors of this archetype, things get really interesting.
Thanks to the silver screen, we enter an era in which witches aren’t just terrifying. They’re sexy…and kind of fun! And while there are issues with inappropriately sexualizing othered bodies, the sexy witch, to my mind, is a bold transgressive figure, especially when that witch is Veronica Lake. In I Married a Witch (1942), she’s seductive, she’s fun, and she’s…harmless.
I won’t bother going into the plot of this film since it is nonsensical and quickly unravels. Do we care? No! All we care about is Veronica Lake as a sexy witch running circles around the basic bitch politician love interest. She dazzles! She delights! She makes us feel playful and magical. More: She gives us permission to be empowered by our sexuality.
Veronica Lake also ushers in an era of witches who aren’t terrifying creatures of the wild wood or green-skinned monsters. Witches, we learn, look just like ordinary people. Only very, very sexy ordinary people.
These are just some examples of the legacy of the sexy witch in popular culture, like Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle (1958), the polyamorous coven in The Witches of Eastwick (1987), cursed family in the soapy The Witches of East End (2013), and witches in paranormal and urban fantasy books—they get to be sexy AND badass in Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking and Yasmine Galenorn’s Witchling.
Significantly here, with the exception of Bell, Book and Candle, these narratives show that witches are allowed to be empowered sexual beings, magical beings, and human beings. So, too, are we.
And yeah, I know we can’t always be at our sexy witchy best 100% of the time, and the idea of sexiness is so fraught for many of us, which brings us to the most dynamic and relatable witch of pop culture: The Basic Witch. This figure goes all the way back to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the iconic every girl (I use this term gender inclusively).
As Glenda tells Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, “You've always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.” This is now a common Basic Witch trope in witchy narratives--the average person realizing they are magic--and, I think, it's so popular because sometimes we need to remember our profound capacity for magic-making.
This figure gets reborn with Samantha in Bewitched. The witch is not just evil or sexy. She’s now the girl next door. Her casserole will put a spell on you!
By the 90s, we can’t escape the meta parts of witch media. Charmed was made possible by The Craft, both of which were made possible by The Witches of Eastwick, all of which were made possible by Bewitched. Lastly, all of them look at modern witches as everyday women.
So much of what we think of when we think of modern witches, however, are rooted in two iconic texts: The original Charmed series and the film Practical Magic. When Charmed first aired in 1998 it did a radical thing by making witches normal (white) women struggling to pay the rent, get a job that makes them happy, figure out how to date when you have powers, and learning how to have a relationship with your adult siblings that isn’t rooted in childhood spats. They explored issues of childbirth, breastfeeding in public, and working parenthood. So relatable! While the show wasn't without its problems, primarily with representation, it made the witch a fun, flirty, SAFE figure in mainstream media.
The sisters in Practical Magic took that one step further by opening up the magical sisterhood to anyone who is magically inclined, not just natural witches. And thus, a new era of witches supporting witches was born. Just make sure you’re on their phone tree. In addition to Charmed and Practical Magic, I have a few other examples here like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, witchy romances, and a few witchy cozy mysteries that all emphasize being basic (sexy) witches to illustrate how common this archetype becomes in media.
There are some legitimate issues associated with being a basic witch, however, most of which were already outlined in my Wicked Witch spiel at the start of this lecture—cultural appropriation, spiritual gatekeeping, and so much more, especially when the Basic Witch is so often a skinny white het-cis able-bodied young woman.
These issues beg the question: Who is safe being othered?
In recent romance novel discourse, an important question arose: Should you write a witchy story set in a small town today that doesn’t meaningfully address the suppression of conjure folk practices, violence against people with historically marginalized identities, or America’s violent history? That is, is it offensive to leave those histories out of our feel-good cozy witch stories?
My hot take? It’s complicated. We do need to expand the narrative beyond white feminism, I mean white witches, I mean white feminism. But many creators writing these stories, to my mind, aren’t being malicious—they aren’t Wicked Witches silencing othered voices. I think they’re writing love letters to stories like Practical Magic, Charmed, and other whimsigoth narratives that defined a generation. While many of these texts were transgressive and transformative for their time, they are also dated now, which illustrates how these proverbial love letters to these texts might also feel dated even though they were more recently written.
These writers, in short, are writing stories with the understanding that witches are fictional characters—not real people with lived experiences. That is, their stories are pure fantasy that, like any fantasy, can (un)intentionally reinforce the status quo. The more we understand that witches are real and not mythological beings, the more magical—and powerful—we can make witchy stories. Still, I totally get wanting to read a low-stakes story about magical stuff that feels like an escape from real-world traumas, which is what I think a lot of these romantasy and cozy paranormal mysteries are trying to do.
Still, I’m forever grateful for stories like Celestine Martin’s Witchful Thinking, which celebrates BIPOC joy and whimsy within a cozy paranormal small-town setting. It goes a long way to normalizing BIPOC magic and reminds us that we deserve to be centered in enchanting stories with HEAs where the stakes are not surviving genocide or dismantling systemic oppression but in finding love and learning to be brave.
I’ve included a few other examples of books that explore witchcraft through the lens of intersectional identities: A Spell for Trouble (a black witchy mermaid cozy mystery series), Cemetery Boys (a trans-Latinx story), Labyrinth Lost (a series about brujas), and Black Witch Magic (a BIPOC interracial romance).
Even shows like The Witches of East End, a soapy paranormal drama, do an important thing by elevating domestic life and reminding us that our day-in, day-out is nothing short of a magical, maybe even telenovela-worthy, narrative. This is an image of the kitchen in The Witches of East End. It is FABULOUS. I've paired it with a meme that says, “girls only want one thing and it's the Practical Magic house.” These stories remind us just how gorgeous witchy houses are and, in turn, that we should treat our homes as sacred sanctuaries. They are so magical, in fact, they have a fandom separate from the texts that birthed them. But, I digress…
Yes, it’s a problem when witches are seen through a lens of white feminism. But guess what? Many of these texts are also celebratory—if in a coded way—for people with historically marginalized identities.
At the time, Bewitched (1964) was a radical and subversive look at interracial relationships via the story of a witch married to a mortal. That said, white witches as stand-ins for other races is incredibly dated now, and borderline offensive, but at the time the original series aired? Revolutionary. And who can forget the iconic line in Practical Magic, “Good news, Sally just came out!” So many witchy stories are queer-coded though I'd like to see more queer witchy stories that are text and not subtext, like the series The Bastard Son and The Devil Himself.
But most significantly…these figures give us permission to conjure a way forward when we are unable to make a home in our ancestral or familial past. What’s more, they show us that our basic lives are basically magical, thanks to gorgeous settings, iconic styles, and a general belief that the best magic is in finding your people, the ones who will help you be your best magical self.
Which leads us to my final, and most important of questions: Which witch are you? Are you a good witch or a bad witch—and how would you define those terms? Are you a wicked witch or a sexy witch or basic witch? Or does it depend on the day? Do you freely take on the term of witch or has the term been applied to you? Or do you prefer another word for your magical self? Mermaids, too, are having a moment.
Pop culture is so in love with witches, in fact, that we even have Buzzfeed quizzes to help us figure out the kind of witch we are and helpful social media-friendly infographics explaining “definitively” (heave on the air quotes) what types of witches exist in the world.
Regardless of your answer, if you showed up today, one thing is likely clear: You are a witch. As they say in Practical Magic, “there’s a little witch in all of us.” Pop culture witches help us find that spark within ourselves and nourish it.
As for me, I’ve started thinking of myself as a story witch. A story witch is a fantastical being who knows that stories are some of the deepest forms of magic, and the narratives we tell about ourselves are spells. We find ourselves in stories as we are drawn to the books, shows, and movies that help us work through the plot twists in our lives. We use them to nourish and heal—and to craft enchanting stories of our own. See what I mean? Magic!
Under my story witch image here are books I’ve written about magical living and story magic. I can safely say that everything I’ve written is a spell, a conjuring to help me reimagine my life as something abundant and joyful.
Thank you so much for coming to my lecture. As I wrap things up, I leave you with this final spell: I encourage each and every one of you to explore your witchy side, even if it makes you a little nervous. It’s worth the journey, I promise you. I mean…who doesn’t want to live deliciously?
Thank you, again.
Here is the short list of works I consulted for this presentation.
Any questions?
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