I'm a Witch

whatever that means

At my Halloween birthday party, aka the Sower of Discord

I don’t mean that metaphorically.

It’s also not like I wave a wand about and impossible things happen. But a witch I am, a living, breathing, real-world modern witch.

I think most people misunderstand what that means, and form an idea of witchcraft based on stereotypes and fiction tropes. The witch is elusive and changeable; she refuses to be boxed in and defies easy definitions. My own interpretations have morphed enormously, from fairy-tale villain to cool teen witch to cryptic crone to mystic hippie and everything in between, because she’s all that and more.

I was born in a city in central Brazil - Brasília; you might have heard of it – which is a mystical hotbed. Local legend says that an Italian priest dreamed of Brasília long before it existed, a modern-looking city on a large plateau by the edge of a lake. It’s a young city, only 64 years old, but it’s always attracted folks from all walks of life and all over the country, including but not limited to hippies, UFO enthusiasts, alternative religious cults, artisans, intellectuals, rebels, rockers and so on.

My mom, a young single mom, was one of those hippies when I was little, so whenever we had free time we’d go to nature. We often went on trips to towns like São Thomé das Letras and Pirenópolis, famously spiritual places surrounded by woods and waterfalls, where people would go to commune with nature, meditate and sell crystals. I spent all day in the water, ran along hiking trails, played with animals, talked to the forest and water spirits that were supposed to dwell there. For a kid who grew up in apartments, it was paradise.

But even back in our urban apartment life, there was magic. I played witch with my friends; we created wands out of twigs, mixed random potions in the kitchen and wrote spells in our makeshift Book of Shadows.

Then my inner little green witch grew into a teen witch, the ones known to test boundaries and their own powers. My friends and I – all interested in the occult in our own ways – rented age-inappropriate horror movies, collected W.I.T.C.H. magazines (remember those?!), dabbled in spirit summoning and tried to talk to ghosts, which we believed was working but probably wasn’t. After watching The Craft we performed non-specific rituals with candles and crystals and played “light as a feather, stiff as a board” at sleepovers. We were always unsuccessful, obviously.

As I forged this awareness of higher and otherworldly matters, in a parallel thread I also developed notions of religion. Those didn’t cross; in fact, there was always friction between the two.

My mom’s never been very religious, so I didn’t grow up attending church every week or learning about the Bible at Sunday school. I never had to say prayers, prepare for my first communion or whatever else the kids with religious parents had to do. I wasn’t even baptized. My closest contact with religion was the fanatical brand of Evangelicalism that my grandmother and uncles practised.

As a kid, very little of what Evangelicals believed stuck with me. What I most remember is my grandmother listening to gospel radio 24/7 – literally around the clock, even as she slept –and watching gospel programs on TV anytime they were on, those typical megachurch spectacles where some quack pastor performs “miracles” and “healing” in front of a congregation of thousands. I remember her taking me to church sometimes and I sat there through the worship service, bored and a bit unsettled, thinking that none of that felt holy at all.

Something like this.

I wasn’t allowed to watch movies or TV shows about witchcraft, magic or the supernatural at my grandmother’s house. I couldn’t bring my Harry Potter books to her house or even talk about them (and this was the late ‘90s-early ‘00s, when Harry Potter was all everyone talked about.) My grandmother refused to go to my Halloween-themed tenth birthday party and got into a huge fight with my mom over it. They didn’t speak for weeks. (She went in the end, but she was clearly not happy about it.) She said that God hated these things because they were the Devil’s tools to tempt and corrupt children or something.

I believed in God because everyone talked about him as a constant of the real world, like the sun and the trees and my house, but I didn’t quite get the concept of a Christian God. Why is he a man and why does he hate everything? Why aren’t you allowed to do anything outside the church? During the services, there was always a part where the pastor asked if the congregation could feel God’s presence and everyone shouted back that they could. It puzzled me: why was everyone feeling this but not me? Was it even true? Were they all delusional? It made no sense.

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I believed in magic too, because somehow it made more sense to me – the magic of things mysterious, improbable or impossible, things hidden just under the surface waiting to be discovered or never understood. I couldn’t describe it in so many words back then, but the feeling that there was something ineffable was unmistakable. And it never occurred to me that, maybe, when people felt God’s presence, they were glimpsing this ineffable, just calling it a different thing.

Because in my experience, when people talked about God, they didn’t talk about selflessness, charity, kindness, wonder or virtue. They talked about guilt, fear, repression. Their miracles were self-serving, their version of spirituality was materialistic and dishonest, and in this version there was no room for questions, diversity or tolerance. These were people who ran conversion “therapy” for queer kids, opposed bodily autonomy for women, forced girls to apologize to their abusers or covered up the abuses altogether.

This is what religion meant to me growing up, and it never resonated with me. At times, I even hated it. After all, this patriarchal, repressive dogma only ever told me I was wrong and inadequate, and that I would never be good enough. It’s no wonder I tried to resist it at every turn, until I finally swore off religion altogether somewhere in my teens, and declared myself an atheist.

All through my high school and college years, I was a staunch nonbeliever in God and, by extension, the supernatural. Which unintentionally included the connection I’d always had with magic and witchcraft. Ironically, it wasn’t suppressed by the religious harping I’d grown up around – that had only made it stronger, as my interest in witchcraft was one way of defying it (a time-honoured role for witches!)

But the things that matter to us have a way of coming back to us. Later, when I moved to London in my early twenties to get my master’s degree, I rediscovered witchcraft as modern Paganism. I moved halfway across the world seeking independence and new experiences, but I didn’t expect to find a gentle spiritual practice in the middle of that huge, chaotic place.

It started in academia. I studied Comparative Literature, and for my dissertation I analysed feminist retellings of myths and legends in modern literature. One of the books I analysed was The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the Arthurian legend from the perspective of Morgan le Fay, who happens to be my favourite fictional witch ever.

As with most great works of Arthuriana, one of the central themes in The Mists of Avalon is religion, specifically the conflict between the incoming Christianity – vying to become the dominant religion of the British Isles – and the native Celtic Druidry. You can see how that would appeal to me, right?

We know almost nothing about ancient Celtic religions nowadays, but it still greatly inspired English Neo-Paganism. It has multiple branches and forms of worship, but its followers generally treat it as a revival of a primitive religion that worshipped the Goddess – the Earth Mother who represented nature itself – and the Horned God¹.

As I dove deeper into this in my academic research, it became a personal interest. I spent time at Treadwell’s, a lovely bookshop across the street from my campus that gave me many of the books I still use as resources, and workshops I still attend to further my magical practice. In the summer before I started my dissertation I went on a trip around the southwest of England, passing through Glastonbury, Stonehenge and Cornwall, beautiful spiritual places with a strong connection to legend.

Over time, I became a student of modern witchcraft: how to set intentions for spells, the magical properties of plants, planets, stars and the moon, the Wheel of the Year, the meaning of each season and, at the centre of it all, how to forge a meaningful and harmonic connection with the world around me.

I don’t follow one particular Pagan religion and I don’t worship any particular deities, though I like to think of them as signifiers for human, natural and cosmic forces. I often call on Mercury, for example, when performing rituals for writing and creativity – and yes, my magical practice and creative practice often come hand in hand. I don’t have a coven and practice solitary, so at this point I would probably call myself a hedge witch.

But, like I said, the witch is changeable and elusive. She reinvents herself over and over again, she contains multitudes, she’s unpredictable and complicated and weird, she resists and rebels and never does what she’s told. She never is what she’s expected to be. In all her contradictions and complexity, she symbolises the kind of person I think I am, or at least that I want to be.

1. I originally wrote this in my master’s degree dissertation, Remaking the Myth: Feminist Retellings of Classic Stories.