Witchcraft is a concept that has been prevalent throughout history and continues to captivate the minds of many. It is often associated with magic, sorcery, and the supernatural. There are various characteristics that define witchcraft and set it apart from other mystical practices. One of the main characteristics of witchcraft is its focus on the manipulation of natural forces and energies. Witches are believed to possess the power to harness these forces and use them for their own purposes. This can include casting spells, creating potions, and performing rituals to achieve specific outcomes.

10 TRAITS OF WITCHES

Many, many more people are witches than the ones who happen to already consciously, publicly, deliberately identify themselves as witches.

Let me make this super-clear: to be a witch – one doesn’t need to be a Wiccan, or even a Pagan. At all.

Myself, I’m some sort of strange hybrid Buddhist-Christian-Existentialist internet folk magic witch – so, go figure.

A witch is a person (of any gender or belief) who lives by her own internal validation and creative inspiration rather than seeking approval from the powers-that-be.

Queen Elizabeth I, Jesus of Nazareth, Cleopatra, Yeshe Tsogyel, Joan of Arc, and John Lennon were all great witches with giant powers of fascination, who wielded great influence through the use of symbol and pageantry. I could name a lot more, but maybe you’re starting to get the idea.

Being a witch is an inherent quality of one’s being, like being deeply compassionate or having a green thumb. Even though witchiness is in-born, it still calls for deliberate cultivation to reach its fullest potential. It’s a particular flavor of spiritual and emotional incarnation, it’s not necessarily a collection of conscious beliefs.

That being said – coming to awareness of one’s own witchiness is a wonderful thing.

Once you have accepted and know that you’re a witch, a vast field of play opens up.

When you’ve accepted that you’re a witch, you can start deliberately cultivating your power, you can make sense of the world and your life through a whole new lens, and you can begin seeking out connections with other witches.

So here are some common traits I notice in witches – see if you can recognize them in yourself – and if you do, you might want to begin calling yourself a witch.

Calling yourself a witch at this moment in history has giant, positive political and historical ramifications – because our way of being has been persecuted for millenia. I could say a lot more about this, but I think you’ll get it if you ponder it for just a moment.

So, onto the Traits of a Witch.

1. You don’t give a fuck.

The most amazing and notable quality of witches is that they’re in touch with a level of intuitive and imaginative power which gives them an inner authority.

They’re being moved by their own genius and not by any external dogma or force. They may use a wide variety of traditional or institutional tools, but they’re not dependent on traditional or institutional authority for their power.

They’ve woken up the magic within their own hearts and it’s alive and throbbing.

Witches are often offensive to – well, just about every body. Witches tend to offend both the sensibilities of conventional, non-magically oriented types of people and also of people involved with magic who have rigid ideas about what magic should look like.

Just about everyone gets alarmed in the presence of an actual live-wire witch.

Among these we can count my controlling, holier-than-thou ceremonial magickian ex-boyfriends.

(Hi, gentlemen! Don’t you worry ’bout me, my magic is rolling along just great even though I don’t ever do the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram! Mwah! Hope you’re still enjoying living with your mom! Yes, Bali is great this time of year, and I don’t at all wish you were here! xoxoxoxo, Carolyn)

So if you find yourself still very committed to magical practice and to spiritual development and you have next-to-zero interest in fulfilling anyone else’s expectations of what your magic or spirituality should look like, then you may just be a witch.

2. Seriously, you do not give a fuck.

In your life you’ve probably had plenty of experiences of people freaking out at you about your signature strange way of being in the world, and while this is sometimes sad or challenging, ultimately you don’t care.

You’ve got work to accomplish – art to make, people to heal, houses to build, rituals to craft, stories to write – and you just don’t have time to be constantly soothing people who expect you to adhere to some standard other than your own genius and inner authority.

This may mean that eventually you go into stealth mode so as not to continually create alarm, but you don’t go stealth because you’re hiding or avoidant. You do it because you’ve got things to accomplish and only a limited amount of time here in the third dimension.

3. You make people nervous.

No matter how toned-down you allow you are in your dress or demeanor, you still make people nervous just by your very presence. There are things that can be done to mitigate this, but it’s probably unavoidable.

For folks who are looking to external authorities to tell them what’s good and beautiful and okay, the presence of you, an inherently wild someone who is wholly reliant on her inner authority, is disturbing.

Your presence is disturbing because others can sense there’s something about you that’s unpredictable and uncontrollable. You’re not being ruled by the conventional programs, so you’re not immediately legible to people who still allow themselves to be ruled.

4. Folks tell your eyes are “beautiful” – what they mean is that they’re penetrating.

Most people don’t have the words to describe your eyes. They just notice that there’s something compelling and different about them. That something is that your eyes see.

You can look at someone and see what programs they’re running, see where they’re blocking themselves, see what they’re attached too, see how they mishandle their own sexual energy and power, see their potential for liberation. It’s just evident to you when you look at someone because you’ve done that liberatory work on yourself already.

5. You can always tell when someone is full of it.

See the above. Your penetrating vision is a kind of psychic perception. You can see how people deceive themselves because you’ve unravelled many of your own self-deceptions.

You can hear when someone is bullshitting because you can perceive that the whole of their being is not in full resonance with their words.

6. You’ve been actually persecuted at least once in your life.

Because you make people nervous and you don’t give a fuck and you probably did not start out in stealth mode, it’s very likely that if you’re a witch you’ve attracted actual persecution at some point. This could be persecution in the form of cruel harassment and teasing in childhood, or persecution in the legal and professional realms as an adult.

Often it’s persecution in the form of malicious gossip from former friends who couldn’t keep up with your magical growth and then felt envious. Kindness and compassion in the form of brahmavihara cultivation are great antidotes to energetic persecution, and so are traditional protection spells and an ongoing practice of developing your communication and relating skills.

7. You encounter tons of synchronicity, and it doesn’t always lead to peachy places.

Witches are basically tantric bodhisattvas; they have a soul-commitment to liberate themselves and all beings as fast as possible, ideally in one lifetime, using alchemical transmutation.

This means that they’re on the karmic fast-track and life very often comes super-fast and hard to them. This means that following even gorgeous synchronicities can sometimes lead bad witches to apparently dark places – and that the visit to the dark and dirty places is totally part of the trip.

In other words, life is not a “love’n’light” New Age bowl of cherries for witches – it can, at times, be a tour of the hell realms.

8. Your disapproval visibly hexes people.

One reason that you make people nervous is that you have so much personal power that if you dislike, insult, or disapprove of them – they’ll feel it, hard. Their day will be ruined, and maybe their whole confidence.

When people get hexed by a cross word or look from you, they lose connection with their own best direction. They look dazed because they’re up in their heads, spinning scared thoughts around.

Folks are so affected by your disapproval for the very reason that they can sense your perception is penetrating. This is the “evil eye” that’s been so feared in so many cultures across history.

Of course you would resent and fear someone who had the power to crush your confidence with a glance because you know they see you clearly.

So as a witch, it’s a good idea to continually cultivate awareness of and to transmute your own resentments and fears so that you’re not walking around spattering everyone with mean ju-ju just because you don’t feel good that day.

9. You’ve experienced your raw magnetism in action.

You know you’re hot stuff. You’ve had abundant experiences of your own magical ability to magnetize amazing romantic partners and friends and other beautiful things.

There’s times when people just come up to you and tell you how fascinating you are or how deeply moved they felt by your work.

You’re magnetic and you’ve got reams of proof, so just accept it already.

10. Your experience of the fourth dimension is more vivid than most people’s experience of the third dimension.

“The fourth dimension” is a short-hand term for the world of spirit and emotion and desire and vibration and feeling and intuition and imagination. It’s all the unseen stuff that can have the power to dramatically affect the seen.

On the whole, witches have a much easier time navigating fourth dimensional realities than they do with third dimensional realities.

The third dimension is hard, literally. It includes matter: table legs that you can stub your toes on, cars that can crash if you steer them the wrong way, water that leaks through roofs, bills that have to be paid.

A major challenge for witches is integrating their fourth dimensional prowess with third dimensional day-to-day reality. The third dimension is more difficult for us than it is for others for the simple fact that large amounts of our minds and hearts are usually occupied by the fourth dimension.

We witches have less processing power to devote to third dimensional issues, and so we have to make it a deliberate part of our spiritual practice to deal with material reality – hence, practical magic.

IN CONCLUSION

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Witches

Many of the women persecuted as witches in the 16th-century “witch craze” were over 50 and exhibited signs of menopause. Helen Foster suggests that the stigma of the wicked witch still affects older women and how they deal with menopause.

Words by Helen Foster East Midlands Oral History Archive artwork by Asma Istwani average reading time 6 minutes 14 September 2023

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W omen are often judged harshly by society. In the past, if they didn’t conform to expected behaviours and attitudes, they might all too easily be married off or run the risk of being labelled hysterics and locked up – or worse.

As they enter middle age and menopause, many women feel increasingly marginalised and unseen, but even if increased invisibility means less scrutiny, as Pippa acknowledges, it takes a conscious effort to free yourself from the constraints of other people’s expectations.

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This can include casting spells, creating potions, and performing rituals to achieve specific outcomes. Another characteristic of witchcraft is the belief in the existence of a spiritual realm and the ability to communicate with entities from that realm. Witches are often seen as intermediaries between the earthly and spiritual realms and can call upon spirits, ancestors, or deities for guidance and assistance.

Wicked witches

Throughout history there are stories of older women portrayed as witches with evil intentions to cause harm to others. During the witch trials in 16th-century England, descriptions of the accused recorded features such as fragile bones, wrinkled skin and thinning hair, all physical changes that can be attributed to menopause. In ‘The Discoverie of Witchcraft’ (1584) Reginald Scot, witness to one trial, gives an account of the accused women as “commonly old, lame, bleare-eyed, pale, fowle and full of wrinkles”.

In early modern Europe, women were considered more susceptible to demonic temptations than men, due to the inherent feebleness of their sex. According to ‘Malleus maleficarum’ (‘Hammer of Witches’), the notorious 15th-century treatise on witchcraft, women were weaker in their faith and stronger in their carnal drives, with a “temperament towards flux” and “loose tongues”. Dutchman Johann Weyer’s account of women he saw in the witch trials in the 1560s calls them “pathetic, melancholic, hallucinating old women, whose age and sex made them a prey to diabolical fancies”.

witchcraft

Witchcraft is the name for the magic practiced by witches. Witchcraft is similar to sorcery. But according to some legends, sorcery can be learned, while witches are born with their magical powers.

People have believed in witches and witchcraft since ancient times. Witches were once greatly feared. Today witches are mostly thought of as characters in stories or as fun symbols of Halloween.

About Witches

Witches are common figures in old legends and folktales, especially fairy tales. They also appear in many modern books, TV shows, and movies.

Depending on the story, witches may be good or bad, young or old, and ugly or beautiful. Witches also may be male or female. However, the word “witch” usually refers to a woman. Men who practice magic may be called warlocks, wizards, or sorcerers.

About Witchcraft

Stories say that witchcraft can solve many problems. Many people once believed that witchcraft could heal sick loved ones, bring wealth, or help crops to grow. They also thought that witches could protect them from natural disasters or evil spirits. Some people have used witchcraft to try to predict the future. Others have used it to try to harm their enemies.

The practice of witchcraft often requires special words or objects. Witches may read or recite spells to bring about a magical effect. They may mix together mysterious ingredients to create magical potions or powders. They may give people amulets, or charms, to wear. Amulets are said to bring good luck or to protect against evil.

Witchcraft in History

Peoples in the ancient world commonly believed in witchcraft. The ancient Greeks and Romans accepted the use of good witchcraft. They punished those who practiced witchcraft to harm others.

As Christianity became a major religion, many church leaders decided that witchcraft was linked to the devil. Europeans came to believe that witches used demonic powers to fly through the air, change shape, and control animals. They feared that witches kidnapped children to eat them or mix them into potions. When people suffered bad luck, they often blamed witches.

From the 1300s to the 1700s leaders in Europe carried out witch-hunts. Tens of thousands of people were put on trial for witchcraft. Many thousands were put to death. The fear of witches spread to the North American colonies as well. Leaders in Salem, Massachusetts, held a series of witch trials in 1692.

Witchcraft Today

Most people in the modern world no longer believe in witchcraft. But a belief in witches and witchcraft is still present in some cultures—for example, the Mapuche people of Chile, the Navajo of the southwestern United States, and the Zande of central Africa.

Many indigenous, or native, peoples continue to believe in the powers of shamans or healers (also called medicine men). Shamans are religious figures that cure illnesses and deal with the spirit world. Healers use traditional medicines and magical rituals to heal the sick. However, these practices are not considered to be witchcraft.

The followers of a newer religion called Wicca identify themselves as witches. Wicca developed in Europe and North America in the 1900s. Wiccans worship nature and honor all living things. They call some of their practices magic or witchcraft.

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Witchcraft is also associated with the belief in the power of intention and the law of attraction. Witches believe that by focusing their thoughts and intentions on a desired outcome, they can manifest it into reality. This involves the use of rituals, affirmations, and visualization techniques to align their energy with their desired outcomes. An important characteristic of witchcraft is its connection to nature and the natural world. Witches often have a deep reverence for the earth, plants, animals, and the cycles of the seasons. They believe in the interconnectedness of all living things and seek to live in harmony with nature. Furthermore, witchcraft is often seen as a personal and experiential practice. It is not bound by any specific religious or dogmatic beliefs and can be adapted and practiced in different ways by individuals. This allows for a diverse range of practices and traditions within the realm of witchcraft. Lastly, witchcraft is often met with stigma and persecution. Throughout history, witches have been portrayed as evil, dangerous, or in league with the devil. This has led to widespread discrimination and persecution of those associated with witchcraft, particularly women. However, in recent years there has been a growing acceptance and recognition of witchcraft as a legitimate spiritual practice. Overall, witchcraft encompasses a wide range of beliefs and practices that center around the manipulation of natural forces, communication with the spiritual realm, the power of intention, a connection to nature, personal autonomy, and the unfortunate history of persecution and discrimination. Despite its controversial nature, witchcraft continues to be a fascinating and intriguing subject that sparks curiosity and interest in many..

Reviews for "The Role of Symbols and Spells in Witchcraft: Key Characteristics and Uses"

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Witchcraft in Folklore: Unique Characteristics of Myths and Legends