Jaya Saxena - Basic Witches: How to Summon Success, Banish Drama, and Raise Hell with Your Coven

Copyright 2017 by Jaya Saxena and Jess Zimmerman

All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2016961079

ISBN9781594749773

Ebook ISBN9781594749780

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Andie Reid

Cover and interior illustrations by Camille Chew

Production management by John J. McGurk

Quirk Books

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W itches are everywhere these days. Fashion trends feature flowy black clothes and dark lipstick, magazines and websites run special witch-themed issues, and hipster covens are forming in Brooklyn.

Whats so appealing about the witch? Partly, nostalgia. Women now in their twenties and thirties fondly remember growing up watching The Craft and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, reading Harry Potter, playing light as a feather, stiff as a board at slumber parties, or saving their allowance for a collectible light-up Hermione wand.

But the witch isnt kitsch. The modern witchy zeitgeist doesnt only glance backward into childhood; it looks forward to the future of powerful, defiant women. Witchcraft appeals to the weird, the outcast, and the unconventional; it has long been a spiritual practice belonging to those on societys fringes. And cultural images of witches, gleaned from history and movies and books and TV, resonate particularly with women who reject the strictures of expected female behavior, women who are trying to connect with something stronger and scarier.

In the original Old English, witch was a word that could apply to women and men alike. In fact, wiccafrom which we get the word witchcan be directly translated as male witch or sorcerer. But in the fifteenth century, witch-hunting guides like the Malleus Maleficarum argued that women were more inclined to witchcraft because they were inherently weak (physically, mentally, and spiritually) and susceptible to the devils machinations.

This theory may sound ridiculous, but ideas like this have influenced notions of witchcraftand, broadly, of womenfor centuries. Witch quickly became a charge levied almost exclusively at womenparticularly women who lived alone, outside the confines of the community. The witch was not beautiful, or she was (suspiciously) too beautiful; at any rate, she didnt look the way others thought she should. She refused men when they didnt appeal to her, pursued them when they did, and satisfied herself with that (wink, wink) broomstick she always rode. She had cats instead of children. Other women came to her for care and comfort, but also turned on her when associating with her threatened their social standing. The witch was intimidating, after all. Too strange. Too unruly. Too much.

But in mainstream modern U.S. culture, weve largely defanged the witch. Our cultural image is sometimes evil but sometimes silly, as if to suggest that the best way to counter things we dont understand is to laugh at them. Witches have green skin and warts and ride around on brooms yelling at children, and then they get houses dropped on them. Personally, our favorite pop-culture witches retain that old defiant, unruly nature; theyre smart, strange, fearlessly ugly, sexy on their own terms. But for the most part, our culture no longer fears those traits in witches. Now, it mocks them.

Modern-day self-identified witches (and pagans and Wiccans, different groups that share some common beliefs) are trying to rescue the witch from haters and scoffers alike. They have resurrected old religions and traditions, and sometimes combined them, to create new communities. Witches of all stripes, from the religious to the spiritual to the secular, gather in covens or practice alone. Defying cultural stereotypes about witchcraft as dangerous or ridiculous, they find power in a goddess or nature or themselves.

This book isnt for them, though. Theyre all set. This book is for you.

Who Are You?

Youre not necessarily a practicing witch. You might not believe in magic or mysticism or spirituality at all. But youre intrigued by the power, or the sisterhood, or the devil-may-literally-care attitude of the witches youve seen in pop culture and history. You dont think women should be considered frightening or ridiculous just because they dont toe the line.

You probably identify as a woman, but maybe you dontmaybe youre outside the gender binary, or maybe youre a man whos committed to justice for all. We are going to talk mainly about women in this book, because a lot of historical and cultural crap surrounding witches has been directed at women specifically. But were also going to talk a lot about how societal notions of masculine and femininewho can be which, and what theyre worthare total bullshit.

You might be into spiritualism and the occult. Maybe you dont believe tarot cards truly predict the future, but you still give yourself readings when you feel lost because the symbolism helps you tap into your hopes and fears. Maybe youve gotten together with friends to put a hex on your ex, not because you believed anything would happen but because it was fun and made you feel better. Maybe youve bought spells out of the backs of magazines just to see if they work, or maybe you dressed like the girls from The Craft because, hey, its a good look.

Or maybe youre not into the myth and ritual at all. Maybe youre literal and pragmatic and you know for a fact that magic is not real. Maybe you dont think pretending otherwise is even helpful or fun. But you still appreciate the historical witchthe unruly woman, the woman who refuses to obey, the community healer with her cauldron of herbsand recognize yourself in her. For you, a witch is any woman who understands she has power even when the world insists she doesnt.

Whether you wear all black and light candles for luck or you have no truck whatsoever with spells and witchy outfits, if you want to dismantle the cultural conditioning that trains women to be weak and small, youre in the right place. Welcome to our kind of witchcraft.

What We Mean by Witchcraft

Though it was once effectively a death sentence, the charge of witchcraft has never been supported with much evidence. We know women were