Pointy Hats, Awkward Teens & Other Cringy Witchcraft Stereotypes That Must Die.

It’s hard to blame the public for their many & varied witchcraft stereotypes.

After all, most of their information comes from Hollywood & European fairytales.

But the cringy, Los Angeles central-casting version of a witch keeps many practitioners from telling the truth when people ask them what their plans are for the full moon.

There are other factors, of course:  workplace discrimination, domestic disputes, familial religious affiliation, and even the simple matter of personal privacy all make people reluctant to come out of the broom closet.

But also:

Your neighbor who has a successful business as an interior designer?  The super-chic, sophisticated lady who dresses like Audrey Hepburn and speaks 3 languages?

Yeah, she doesn’t want you to associate her with geeky teenagers who treat every moon ritual like a cosplay event.

So she hides her tarot cards when you come over and pretends she’s Catholic.

Here’s why.

The socially awkward & emotionally frail.

Let me just start out by saying that there’s nothing wrong with being socially awkward.

I’d much rather deal with someone who struggles to make conversation than a charismatic sociopath.

But like every other geeky convention out there, public events around witchcraft tend to bring out the most, um . . . zoological members of any given subculture.  

This is why you don’t find your aforementioned, super-chic, Audrey-Hepburn-lookalike neighbor there.

Because she doesn’t really play with that crowd.

But trust me, she’s out there.  I know her.  We had mugwort tea last week.

Gothy  . . . stuff.

Wear what you want to.  Your wardrobe is a matter of personal taste.

My personal opinion is that the whole goth aesthetic is just about the most unfortunate movement ever to infect the streets of NYC.

I’d sooner die than show up to cocktail party in an 18th-century corset and black lipstick.

(Also, the idea of sleeping in a coffin sounds terrifying.  Omg people really do this?!)

Either way, it has absolutely nothing to do with witchcraft.

Cat ladies.

I mean, I have to admit it: I have an affection for 65-year-old divorcees with 4 stray felines, wild hair & zero f*%ks to give.

But despite what the neighborhood kids say. most of them don’t practice witchcraft.

The mentally ill.

Mental illness is a medical issue, not a spiritual practice.

Practitioners of witchcraft are no more delusional about the world than any other grioup of people with beliefs that do not conform to a conventional understanding of physics.

That includes Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists & anyone else who thinks that maybe, just maybe, the universe is not as quantifiable as it appears.

Broke/hearbroken/generally desperate people.

Most of us have fallen into one of the above categories at some point—and by us, I mean humanity in general. 

No judgement.  

It’s fair to say that some people are attracted to magic because they think it wil help them sucker in an unrequited love or get rich.

But experiencedpractitioners stay because at some point, they figure out that magic is not a way to circumvent the universe and get what you want.

It’s a lesson about how getting what you want is almost never the same thing as having what you need.