Season Of The Witch: Why Women Love Witchcraft

As a practicing pagan, it actually took me a while to figure out why I was always drawn to witchy goodness.

When I was young, I was all about casting magical spells and witchcraft. Then again, I feel like most nerd girls had that moment in their lives where they wanted to be a witch/sorceress/fairy princess.

This is nothing unusual, especially if you are assigned female at birth like I am. It’s basically like a stepping stone in geekdom as a girl. In the 90s, being the “weird, witchy” girl was social suicide — not that it mattered in my case due to my perma-loner status.

Later on, I realized that Christianity was not for me. I became pagan, just like my dad. I swear I’m not trying to convert people or bash other religions, but I feel like we need to talk about the quickly-fading stigma that witches experience.

2022 is nothing like the 1990s.

Women of all ages are starting to tune into the world of witchcraft…or at least the aesthetic. This got me thinking about things. Why now? Why are witches becoming so venerated and “cool” these days?

Traditional religion is not typically empowering to women.

Think about how most traditional religions treat women — or how they typically ask women to behave. In most traditional religions, women are typically prized for submitting to men, having sex only when a man says it’s okay, and for childbearing.

Most religious doctrines I was exposed to (aside from paganism and Satanism) involved trying to get women to do exactly what men and a priest said. In many cases, it feels like a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” deal.

Welp, guess I’ll be damned then.

The best that girls can hope for in many churches is basically being told, “We’ll put you on a pedestal as long as you are locked in your cage.” In other words, you’ll be seen as sacred as long as you stay in line and act as a mother.

Eventually, religion can become so oppressive and hateful that it no longer feels right in any capacity. In other words, it’s easy to see why girls go, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to be shamed for just being me.”

For a lot of girls, seeing a witch is the first time that they see a woman in power in any religion.

In the vast majority of modern pagan religions, being a witch is not a bad thing. In fact, being a woman or even looking female is not a bad thing. This is a far cry from the pre-built shame that came with the story of Adam and Eve.

For a lot of us, myself included, there was a lot of appeal in that. Witches are feared. In pop culture, pissing off a witch could mean a curse or being turned into a frog. That’s pretty epic compared to, say, being told you're a slut or something.

Witches also tend to do something else that bucks the trend of typical mainstream society: they’re not pretty. It’s a woman who’s powerful, who does not ascribe to mainstream beauty standards for the pleasure of men.

When you put it that way, the notion of a witch flies in the face of patriarchal pop culture.

I don’t think I realized how revolutionary the archetype of “the witch” was in my childhood.

In the 90s, conformity and exclusion was still very much the name of the game. The same could be said about the 2000s, too. Witchcraft, at least in pop culture, was an act of rebellion. It was about taking back one’s power in gender.

Today, people are starting to see that paganism isn’t the boogeyman that media made it to be. We don’t eat babies. We don’t randomly sacrifice goats. We just kinda…light candles and pray in our own way.

It may sound bad for me to say this, but I do believe that a lot of the interest in witchcraft that we see deals with a rebellion against patriarchy in religious circles.

With that said, how witches practice and believe varies from person to person. Once you start really delving into your practice, you realize how much of the magic is really within you all along.

People are leaving evangelical churches in spades, and paganism became more popular. Coincidence?

Personally, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. When a religion fails its followers, people are going to stop believing. And yes, most will eventually leave and the cult’s reputation will start to drive away potential recruits.

That’s why cults tend to disintegrate within 1 to 2 generations. Even cults like the ones popular in Hollywood tend to get awful reputations as a result of the way they treat their followers.

Modern evangelical Christianity has a remarkably cruel way of treating women. I’m not the least bit surprised that evangelical churches are starting to lose traction in America.

Oh, and as far as paganism goes? My religion went from 134,000 practitioners to well over 2 million in recent years. That’s kind of wild, if you think about it.

You can’t treat half your parishioners like chattel and expect them to feel valued in the church.

Throughout the United States, two major trends are happening in the Christian evangelical/fundamentalist communities. First, there’s a mass exodus of people — primarily younger folk. Second, many evangelical and fundie churches are becoming even more extreme.

I don’t think I need to tell anyone this doesn’t bode well for Christianity. We’re at a point in society where it’s damn near impossible to ignore the hypocrisy, double-standards, and brainwashing going on. And people are losing faith because of it.

While I, myself, am pagan, I also know that this is not the religion for everyone. In fact, I also am aware that for many people, this interest in witchcraft is a passing phase.

However, the fact that so many are quitting Christianity in favor of more egalitarian religions still is worth looking at. Jesus’s teachings are actually pretty chill. He also hung out with female outcasts and promoted most of the things that America needs right now.

Unfortunately, most of his “followers” are not acting according to what Jesus taught. Maybe it’s time they take a good, hard look at how they treat their female parishioners, and rethink their fundamentalist, misogynistic behavior. Somehow, I don’t think Jesus would approve.