To fill that gap, Duncan launched an online school of witchcraft in 2019. adults than ever now say they think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. According to the Pew Research Center, more U.S. “Whenever there’s a sense of a kind of mass tension and distrust in institutional power, people lean more into alternative modes of power, of which witchcraft is certainly one,” she says.įiona Duncan, a former K-12 teacher and college professor who has practiced witchcraft for three decades, sees it as a product of a growing discontent with religion. Pam Grossman, author of Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power, attributes the surge to major social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Derrick Land, an insurance-fraud investigator in Texas by day, expected about 500 attendees at his inaugural Austin Witchfest on March 5, 2020, just before events were canceled in the wake of the pandemic. Interest in witchcraft has been trending for a few years now. She tells me that participation in her workshops, like one on home remedies for illness, has more than doubled. Herbalist Jess Turner, founder of Olamina Botanicals in Brooklyn, reported her highest-ever sales numbers of plant-based tonics, salves, and formulas in the first quarter of 2021. Practitioners, who tend to be small-scale and hyper-local, can’t keep up with the demand for goods, services, and information. A search on Amazon for “witchcraft books” released within the past 90 days yields more than 2,000 results. On TikTok, #witchtok returns 20.5 billion views. There are now nearly eight million #witchesofinstagram posts. As the pandemic raged on, I was open to trying new practices that might help me cope. It was more about slowing down and noticing the natural world, especially the shifts that happen over the course of a day, a month, or a season. But the way Rousseau presented witchcraft didn’t seem to require engaging with anything paranormal-or even a belief in a higher power. The tagline on Rousseau’s elegant website appealed to me: “Earth-based wisdom, embodied practice, & everyday magic.” I have zero experience with the occult, unless you count having my fortune read at a local fair as a teenager growing up in Ohio. I’d discarded the Catholicism of my youth long ago, and while I’d read books on Buddhism and gleaned some helpful practices from yoga classes and mindfulness apps like Headspace, I didn’t have anything solid enough to stand up to the uncertainty of a long-term global pandemic. Spirituality-or my lack thereof-was heavy on my mind. Meanwhile, Canada’s infection rates were starting to climb again in a deadly second wave. But that trip, along with all of my travel-writing assignments for the year, was a casualty of COVID-19. When I registered for the program in the fall of 2020, I was supposed to have been bikepacking across the outback of South Australia. But the course has also encouraged me to reconsider my relationship with nature, both in how I regard and move through it. As a recreational mountain athlete, what I’m learning overlaps surprisingly with many of the ways I already relate to the outdoors. I’m currently enrolled in her 12-month online course “The Witches Year,” an introduction for anyone curious about incorporating elements of witchcraft into their daily lives. That’s the way my teacher, Natalie Rousseau, a 45-year-old hedge witch-a woman who practices outside the confines of Wicca or other pagan religions-from Pemberton, British Columbia, describes it. I’m talking about real-life, modern-day witches: people who study nature, its cycles, and the way it influences our lives in order to generate positive changes in ourselves and in the world. Not the kind of unfortunate soul that Christian zealots executed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not the pointy-hat-wearing, spell-casting witch from fairy tales and movies. Except that I was doing it as a ritual, as a fledgling witch. In many ways, my walk was no different than any walk I’d taken on a chilly day in the mountains. And I walked in silence, because I was alone, and because I wanted to move in step with the stillness of my environment. I noticed the iridescent quality of the waning light. I breathed in the icy air, wiggling my ungloved fingers in my pockets to keep them warm. I observed the snow, light and fluffy from a fresh storm cycle. On December 30, 2020, the date of the Cold Moon, I took a late afternoon walk through the cedar forest at the edge of my neighborhood in Nelson, British Columbia.
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