When Charlie Kirk was shot dead on the campus of Utah Valley University last week, the reaction was ravenous and strange. There was feverish speculation about the killer, rumours of cock-ups by the FBI, archeology of Kirk’s most offensive clips, smug celebration from people who should know better than to praise gun violence. But the oddest thing amid all this raving was a sheepish editor’s note from the feminist news website Jezebel. It had taken down an article from 8 September headlined: “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.” The editor wrote: “The piece was intended as satire.”
Of course, nobody thought those Etsy witches — with whom I’ve had my own brushes in the past — had succeeded in bringing about Kirk’s assassination. The mini-scandal was more a question of taste and timing: the article had been circulated around X in the hours after the shooting with jokey comments (“can she do my ex next?”). But it was far from the first time that a political figure had been on the receiving end of a hex.
In 1968, the feminist group W.I.T.C.H. — the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — convened on Wall Street to form a circle and bring about the collapse of the stock market. Later, it would hex the inauguration of Richard Nixon (was Watergate the result of the eye of a newt?). Decades on, Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Stanford predator Brock Turner would be on the receiving end of viral “collective castings”. Binding spells would seek to stay their hands from committing harm; castration spells would invite impotence.
All this is, depending on how you look at it, either very fortunate or very unlucky for Emma Quilty. Later this week, the self-described “witchy anthropologist” will publish Witch Power, a guide to “hexing the patriarchy with feminist magic”. In it, she visits various covens and gatherings to “collect data” on modern witchcraft, which consists of bands of kooksters convening at hippyish events or online to cast spells, hawk essential oils and hex enemies. We meet some of the original bands of Sixties/Seventies witches — harmless women in hemp — but Quilty’s main focus is the Millennial and Gen Z cohort for whom being a witch seems to connect directly with identity politics.
Quilty, for her part, can be found writhing in a tent in someone’s garden, weeping in a New Orleans graveyard or sitting in a Voodoo Queen’s grotty living room. At the same time, she goes through a personal crisis: a breakup with her boyfriend. The details often feel like furious diary entries: “Even the way he turned the overhead light off was aggressive.” The book is a big old middle finger to a presumably recent ex who represents everything the witches are not: he is square, buttoned-up and miserable. They are groovy, kinky and dreamy. Unfortunately they are also, for the most part, insufferable.
For Quilty, being a witch is not about cackling or wearing dangly sleeves. It turns out the price of admission is just being a bit punk: “To live in defiance of society’s expectations and rules, that is what it means to be a witch.” Written by and for someone truly drunk on the witch’s brew, the book gives a portrait of feminism in a moment of utter identity crisis. To Quilty, the witchcraft scene is disappointingly “white and middle class”; she spends much of the book tutting at covens which engage in “biological essentialism” by focusing on rituals around menstruation or female fertility. Women-only gatherings are admonished for “excluding trans women” (ew, girls, don’t talk about your periods — you’ll make the men feel left out!). There are obligatory trigger warnings, the inevitable popping-up of our old friend Edward Said, groanworthy nods to BDSM and kink. In one amusing aside, a “Blak fat queer feminist witch” called Raphael Lavallee organises a workshop titled “A Sacred Round on Stolen Ground: Decolonising your Magical Practice”. In a deflated postscript, we learn that “unfortunately the workshop ended up not running”. Could it possibly be that there hadn’t been enough appetite for wafting burnt sage about and exorcising unconscious bias? No, that can’t be it.
Modern witchcraft seems like a big interpretative dance group, in the sense that I imagine participants trying their absolute hardest never to laugh, especially during the seemingly endless orgies. Witch camps at times seem like swingers’ weekends by another name. At one “hands-on” workshop, we witness “a circle of people masturbating together”; little wonder, you’d think, that Quilty’s killjoy boyfriend is less than delighted when she returns from this “fieldwork” to breathlessly update him on her discoveries. In the event he grunts and grumbles, presumably just as impressed by all this panting and self-discovery as I am. He is such a consistent irritant that I half wonder whether Quilty’s reinvention as a witch is less a revolt against the patriarchy than a revolt against him.
Now you might think it’s a little risky to be critical of a witch; a hex may indeed be in the post. Thankfully, Quilty gives absolutely no indication that she thinks these spells ever actually work. In fact, we learn that speculating about this is reductive and misses the point: “It ignores the political power and potential of mass group spells.” So there you have it: for those Right-wing men fearing the wrath of the covens of Portland, stand down. Even the witches themselves don’t think magic really works.
At a time when the witch has hobbled her way back into the spotlight, it is very useful indeed to have Quilty’s field notes. Like so many feminist subcultures today, I sense that witchcraft has lost its way, mired in the relentless compulsion to include and flatter both men and sex positivity at the cost of its own intellectual coherence. It turns out that because this movement is founded on a very minimal amount of historical evidence, the rest is filled in by guesswork from fickle adherents with their own moral crusades, and the modern waves are hopelessly inflected by whichever cultural context they happen to spring up in.
What we know about the women originally accused of witchcraft is that they genuinely did offend patriarchal norms by being haggish or prickly or interfering with emerging schools of science to administer herbal remedies and bring about, among other things, abortions. The women burned by the Witchfinder General would hardly have self-identified as witches; the label is a woman-hating fantasy that targeted midwives, folk healers or simply the common-or-garden crone. But modern “witchcraft” disregards this, turning away from the tragedies of misrepresentation suffered by these women and choosing, in a real sense, to believe their accusers.
Because such an interpretation is based on magical thinking and liberal interpretation, it follows that successive iterations are entirely warped by the politics of the day: the witches of the Sixties were obsessed with sexual availability, those of the Seventies were compelled by questions of bodily autonomy, and today they seem to be transfixed by the question of gender. The witchy women Quilty admires may claim to be radical, skulking on society’s margins, taking their lives in their hands by defying gendered expectations. Who’d have thought, then, that they also happen to be captured by the dogma of mainstream progressivism? As ever, it’s funny how in the most radical places, people tend to be the most cowed.
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