New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic

By Cory Thomas Hutcheson

Explore Nearly 500 Samples of Folk Magic, Stories, Artifacts, Rituals, and Beliefs

One of the most comprehensive collections of witchcraft and folk magic ever written, New World Witchery shows you how to integrate folk traditions into your life and deepen your understanding of magic. Folklore expert Cory Thomas Hutcheson guides you to the crossroads of folk magic, where you'll learn about different practices and try them for yourself.

This treasure trove of witchery features an enormous collection of stories, artifacts, rituals, and traditions. Explore chapters on magical heritage, divination, familiars, magical protection, and spirit communication. Discover the secrets of flying, gathering and creating magical supplies, living by the moon, working contemporary folk magic, and more. This book also provides brief profiles of significant folk magicians, healers, and seers, so you can both meet the practitioners and experience their craft. With New World Witchery, you'll create a unique roadmap to the folk magic all around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
• Release date: Apr 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780738762227

Cory Thomas Hutcheson

Cory Thomas Hutcheson (Central Pennsylvania) is the cohost of the popular podcast New World Witchery. He has a doctorate in American Studies with specializations in folklore, religion, and ethnicity from Penn State. He is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies and American Myths, Legends, & Tall Tales, and he has written for popular occult publications, including Witches & Pagans.

Book preview

The Crossroads—

An Introduction and

Guide to This Book

It is probably useless to attempt to convince you, the reader, that a witch is something you do not already understand. Whatever image pops into your head when that word passes by in conversation—whether whispered reverently or barked in anger—that will be the definitive image for you. Perhaps your image has shifted, but most likely that shift occurred gradually, over time, and there is still a very good chance that if someone showed you a picture of Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz you would at least get a flicker of the word witch in your brain. Similarly, seeing a Waterhouse painting of a faery woman drawing a circle in the sand around a burning pot emitting fumes is likely to conjure—forgive the pun—the word witch to mind. For many, a witch may also be an ornery older woman who lives alone in a house that is a bit overgrown, or maybe a word that people around you use to talk about spiteful ghosts that linger in the shadows. Those suffering from hag riding syndrome may perceive a witch as a presence, heavy and ominous, that holds them down in bed at night.

In fairy tales, popular culture, and literature, we conceive of witches everywhere and give them numerous forms. In our everyday lives, we may not think much about witches, or we may think about them a great deal in a romantic or symbolic way. We all know, though, what a witch is, don’t we? Yet for all the images we can summon when we hear the word witch, we must also admit that if one fits, they all do, which hints at how hard it is to capture a witch in one place and hold her still, on film or in one’s cellar where the good wine is kept. Why then can we instantly understand the word witch when we hear it spoken?

The simple reason is that witches are creatures of story, and we all love a good story. Those can be fairy tales, yes, but they can also be true stories told about our neighbors, our friends, women we have known and loved, or women we have feared and reviled. Witches excite our collective imagination, a point that will be even more cogent when we consider just how creative the magic of witchery can be. We understand witches, even if we all conceive of them a little differently. Through all the trappings and trivia and tinsel that we use to cobble together something resembling a witch when we make our pictures and films and sculptures, we understand the underlying characteristic of the witch: she has magic, and she uses it.¹

I have always been a little bit obsessed with witches. More specifically, I have always been a little bit obsessed with what witches do: magic. For me, the defining characteristic of witches is that they cast spells, they bottle potions, they transform those who wrong or offend them into various denizens of swamp and field. When I was in elementary school, I spent an inordinate amount of time scouring our small-town school library for anything remotely magical. At first, I was interested in the sword and sorcery I had seen in films and television shows, but very quickly I found there were people who used magic not for zapping lightning bolts from their fingers, but for ever-so-slightly nudging Fate in their favor. Sometimes, that nudge wound up causing problems for other people, and sometimes it was simply a twist of luck for the better. What I noticed with many of the spells I found was that they would be gathered alongside things like nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and descriptions of holidays and festivals from around the world. The magic was part of something called folklore, and, reader, I was hooked.

Coming to the Crossroads—Finding New World Witchery

The combination of folklore and magic has been my passion and my focus for nearly two and a half decades. I began collecting spells and tidbits of folk magic on index cards, in journals, on sticky notes and scraps tucked into books of folktales. My search for magic led me to pick up spells like a magpie, trying them out, seeing what worked, and putting down what didn’t. It led me to the strange sections of libraries and odd monsters in the shadows of old stories. It led me to try to learn new languages, dozens of them, just to understand some of the spells I found in their original words. (I am by no means a polyglot, but I have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with picking up phrase books and using language-learning software or taking classes in half a dozen languages in college, and thus knowing just enough to be dangerous when I try to ask where the bathroom is in a number of countries.) I have pursued advanced degrees, eventually taking a doctorate with a focus on folklore studies, specifically because of my interest in folk magic. With my long-time magical partner, I have created and hosted a long-running podcast about folk magic in North America, a project that has afforded me the opportunity to interview dozens of magical practitioners and scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds. That same project connects me with thousands of listeners, many of whom also are eager to share their experiences of magic or to ask questions that prompt me to look more deeply at certain parts of North American folklore and magical work than I might have otherwise. In this regard, I have been incredibly lucky and privileged to pursue this passion. I have also worked very hard to pull all these disparate strands together for myself and others, and to identify what I would call New World Witchery. ²

Why the New World part? Well, one thing I found very early and often in my studies was how closely magic linked to location. There is a strong sense that the place of magic shapes the form of magic. Huge amounts of magical lore from Europe have found their way into print through brilliant (sometimes nefariously brilliant) authors. In my collecting days, before I started the podcast or pursued my degrees, I moved overseas to live in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, in order to teach English. While there, I experienced a lot of enchantment, and all of it seemed extremely particular to the Slavic people who lived there. Stories abounded of alchemists living in tiny rowhouses near the palace, a king with a love of the occult and esoteric, saints’ bodies with magical healing properties, or even a clock charting the movement of the spheres in the heavens on the public square (a clock still operating today and which inspired the clock on Cinderella’s castle in Disney World). The enchantment permeated everything, and all the places I walked and wandered seemed touched by that Slavic magic.

When I returned to the United States, I experienced a brief moment of dejection, because I thought that the magic was still over there. I began looking for other sources, and studied with the Outer Court of a Gardnerian coven while also looking into other forms of British Traditional Witchcraft such as the Robert Cochrane–derived 1734 tradition. I began listening to Trad Crafter and mage extraordinaire Peter Paddon and his Crooked Path podcast, then devouring his books as well.³ All of those sources, though, emphasized distinctly British and European roots, even as they focused on connecting with local spirits and a magical landscape around you. The magic still felt like it was coming from somewhere else.

It wasn’t until I was reading some books of folktales from the southern United States that I noticed something: there was magic here, too. Stories like those of Brer Rabbit or Sop Paw (about a group of witches who turn into cats to harangue a weary traveler) all contained little bits of magic—spells or ingredients or simple rituals. I read a story about a pair of greasy witches in the Smoky Mountains and immediately noticed parallels with some Irish folktales I had read previously, and realized that both stories contained information on magical flying ointments in coded ways, but also offered a distinct flavor of magic depending on where they were told. That got me thinking about something I should have seen so much earlier (but we can’t always see what is right in front of us, can we?).

Magic is everywhere. Which means, magic is here.

I had been living with magic all along. Not only that, the magic around me was robust, alive, growing, and active. It stretched out across North America in all directions, leading me to encounter magical paths and traditions that I had been bumping into for years, but putting aside because they weren’t the same kind of over there magic I thought I was looking for. I had been treating the journey into folk magic like a road I could walk backward in time, finding some original source for it. Instead, I found a crossroads, a place where vast varieties of folk magic intersected and grew. Those who read much folklore know that a crossroads is one of the most powerful places for witchcraft and sorcery—it is a place to meet ghosts or devils and work spells and gather strange magical ingredients. North America crossed cultures—sometimes in horrifying and brutal ways—bringing together influences from West Africa, a plethora of Native Nations, sundry European cultures, and numerous other lands. Systems of magic developed in response to the peoples and their places, with Pennsylvania German-speakers creating healing systems like bracherei (also called Pow-wow), Scots-Irish and German settlers in the Appalachians generating folk magical conjure practices, African and African American enslaved and free peoples brilliantly crafting methods like Rootwork and Hoodoo as a way of coping with or combatting the oppressive systems around them. The more I looked, the more I saw that what I had before me was something like a buried treasure, only it wasn’t even buried!

I had grown up with magic. It was in the things I did every day, from picking up lucky pennies to eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day for luck. It was in the prayers to St. Anthony I learned from my Catholic mother as a way to find lost things, or in the way my friends dangled a wedding ring over a pregnant woman’s belly to guess the sex of her baby. It was in the stories of crossing water to keep ghosts from following you home, or in the haint blue paint on so many porches that kept specters (and wasps) away. All of that experience, all of that study, leads me to the text you hold in your hands. The purpose of this book is not to make you an expert in any particular magical tradition or tell you it’s okay to take anything you like from the traditions here. I simply cannot do that. Instead, this book should help you to see that everyone has magic in their folk communities (which are many and varied, and you likely belong to several without even knowing it), and you can seek that magic out for yourself. Seeing parallel magics in other traditions can help you to understand, identify, and create your own map to a folk magical landscape you already inhabit. If that happens for you, I will consider this book a success.

At the crossroads, my journey began. This book, then, is also a crossroads. In the pages that follow, I lay out a series of points that comprise North American witchcraft based on the practice of folk magic, or as I term it, New World Witchery. I will explore different aspects of magical practice based on extensive research, including contemporary interviews and literature, to offer an interested reader an outline of what a New World Witch’s practice might be like. This practice-based approach will guide anyone interested in this subject through the specific spells, magical objects, and rituals found in North America, while also giving those actions some context. I intend to give a reader a closely guided tour of New World Witchery, and I hope that my reader—you—will see what I see: a landscape that is and always has been enchanted (and haunted) by magic.

Un-Grim-ing the Grimoire: How to Read This Book

I have divided this book, somewhat ostentatiously, into a series of Rites corresponding to the practices and activities of North American folk magic. Each section, with the exception of this initial introduction and the final Rite, will contain one or more chapters that reveal the practice of New World Witchery in specific settings, times, or traditions. You will encounter nineteenth-century magical treasure hunters and see how their practice relates to the rural farming practice of planting by the signs. You will see witches engaged in life-or-death battles with those who hunt them in the mid-Atlantic region, the Appalachian Mountains, and the El Norte region of the American Southwest. Each of these sections is a meditation and a compendium of practices, with a handful of spells highlighted to enhance the narrative, rather than chaining them together in recipe-book format. There are nearly five hundred bits of folklore gathered from all over North America and peppered throughout this tome. In some ways, I am hoping that picking up this book will be like unearthing a box buried at the crossroads for you and finding it stuffed full of folkloric odds and ends—a veritable treasure trove of witchery, if you will. Each little piece will tell you something about magic, and let you put together your own picture of folkloric witchcraft here and now. Through seeing the stories, beliefs, rituals, language, and artifacts that exist here, I am hoping you will come to appreciate just what a rich treasure we have as a magical legacy in North America.

That being said, I also believe that witchcraft is best understood not only as a practice, but through practice, and so I have included a series of potential folk magical experiments along the way for you, the reader, to try if you wish. I am immensely fond of what folk magical author Aidan Wachter calls dirt sorcery, the sort of practical, messy, active magic I see in all forms of folk magic, and so in a nod to him I have named my own experimental sections Dirt Under the Nails. ⁴ I also include a section at the end of each chapter entitled The Work that focuses on more reflective experiments in witchery. Those works are designed to help you observe and integrate the folk magic all around you into your life, or discover where witchcraft is tucked away in the world you already inhabit.

signs

Additionally, I see value in both history and folklore, especially intertwined together. In particular, I want to make sure that I put a human face on what can feel like somewhat abstract magical concepts, and I want to honor those witches and magical workers who have laid all the groundwork for me to build upon now. To that end, I have also included a series of occasional sections titled Singing Bones (after a folkloric motif of bones that reveal a secret). These sections will be short biographies or sketches of the lives of particular folk magicians, healers, seers, and witches that resurrect them—even if only for a moment—in the minds of those who read about them. Some are very much historical, others less so, and still others largely the creations of folkloric fictions, but in gathering this little coven (I have selected thirteen, because I cannot help myself), I hope to offer you some insight into the people who have made magic in North America for so many years. My selection process was entirely biased and unscientific, and there are literally dozens of other figures I could have chosen, but in the end I hope that you, the reader, will meet these baker’s dozen and seek out the many I have omitted.

I should also note that each chapter after this one concludes with a short list of two to five reading suggestions that expand on the chapter’s themes. Some of the suggestions are collections of folklore, some more experience-oriented, and some are denser scholarly tomes. In all cases, they are simply there as additional roads that you might explore (and roads into texts that I have found immensely helpful in my own studies). In this case, I am hoping that these reading lists will be like finding new treasure maps among the doubloons in my already overstuffed chest of folkloric goodies, pointing you to the next trove waiting for you to find it.

The book is not necessarily one you need to read straight through and cover-to-cover. Once you’ve passed through the first Rite of Naming, you should be able to go to other sections and chapters as you see fit and as your interest dictates. In the SECOND RITE: INITIATION, I will explore the concepts of initiation and magical heritage, including the ways in which magical knowledge gets transmitted from one generation to the next. The THIRD RITE: CASTING THE SPELL delves into the various types of spells we find in North America, including spells of healing and spells of harm. The FOURTH RITE: SECOND SIGHT turns to the unseen, calling upon powers of divination for insight and treasure. The FIFTH RITE: FLIGHT is the witch’s flight, and I turn to that subject with an eye to understanding just why and how flight can be understood in historical and contemporary witchcraft. In the SIXTH RITE: CHEWING THE ROOT, I unpack the witch’s tool kit, examining the Bible on her bookshelf and peeking through her spice cabinet, as well as the bottle full of pins and other nefarious ingredients buried by her doorstep.

The SEVENTH RITE: THE FAMILIAR examines the relationship between a witch and her allies, including animal companions and various devils. In the EIGHTH RITE: HALLOWING THE GROUND, I look at countermagic, magical protection of self and home, and the places of North American enchantment. The NINTH RITE: CALLING THE MOON explores the times when witches do the work they do. The TENTH RITE: WORKING THE CHARM looks at that bookshelf again, to the types of magical texts and written charms that might be present in a witch’s life, as well as the earlier Colonial concept of the Devil’s Book and what that might mean for a contemporary practicing witch. In the ELEVENTH RITE: NECROMANCY, I look to the relationship between witches and the dead, including what happens when a dead witch won’t stay dead. In the TWELFTH RITE: INVISIBILITY and CODA-THE THIRTEENTH RITE (because of course I had to end up with thirteen sections, and am utterly incorrigible), I look to two sides of the same coin: witchcraft in the public eye. The incredible and powerful response that popular culture has to witchcraft has shaped North American identity for centuries, and has become especially acute in the past one hundred years or so. Yet at the same time, that attention has allowed for renewed attacks on witchcraft and witches in various forms and for a surprising number of reasons. Seeing the witch as a glamorous figure may do her some good, but it also singles her out as a target, too, as the final chapters illustrate.

My hope is that you can return to this chapter as you might a crossroads guidepost, full of various arrow signs giving you all sorts of potential directions to go. I have only just begun to explore the ways witches engage with the world around them here. The problems they face, they face with practical—if not necessarily logical—approaches, using magic as a specialized tool for overcoming barriers, including poverty or injustice (as well as exacting personal vendettas sometimes). They understand the world to be a wonderful one—not necessarily a good one, but a world inhabited by the uncanny and awe-inspiring. Witches engage with that wonder, form bonds with it and with the world it shows them. Witches go beyond wonder and belief, transforming their ideas into concrete reality through spells and charms, knotted cords, bones and skins from animals, and handfuls of gathered plants. They acquire their power and knowledge through struggle and effort, often developing it over a lifetime and passing it on to others sometime before they die. They do magic, cast spells, deal with curses, provide blessings, bewitch guns and cattle, find missing animals, brew love potions, get blamed when things go wrong (sometimes because they did, indeed, have something to do with it), transform into animals, suffer for their work, and often pay very high prices for the magic they do.

The life of a New World Witch, then, is one of action. Witches do work. Witches solve problems. Witches learn and grow. Witches make things. Witches talk to things that others don’t or won’t talk to. Witches see the world differently, and it changes them. Then, they change the world.

[contents]

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1. I have been saying she and her quite a lot, and this is not by accident. A great many witches in the stories we tell are women—perhaps one of the very few places where the primary characters are women more often than men without emphasizing a motherly or purely sexual role. I will most certainly be sharing a number of stories in which men play a part, even as witches, but in general I use the feminine pronouns not to cast aspersions at feminine gender or sexuality; witches do come from all genders, and in the cases where the witch in question is not identified in strictly feminine terms I will use the most appropriate pronoun I can find. Since, however, so rarely are feminine pronouns the preferred pronoun in writing, I have chosen to lean into the trope a bit and follow the lead of the stories I share by defaulting to she and her in most cases.

2. I will note here that while I use the term New World, I am really referring to North America. This was sort of an early flub on my part in equating the two terms. The New World (from a European perspective) actually includes North America, South America, and even Oceania (especially Australia and New Zealand) as well. I am not an expert on most of the magical traditions of South America or Oceania, however, so I will leave it to a better-equipped writer to discuss those lands and their magic (and eagerly encourage them to point out my shortcomings here as a part of their work).

3. Sadly, we lost Peter in 2014. I was lucky enough to interact with him several times both online and in person, and he was infinitely kind, astoundingly wise, and full of magic. He is dearly missed.

4. Wachter, Six Ways, 155–57.

FIRST RITE:

NAMING

Or, Defining Witchcraft and a Sampler

of the Magical Practices Found Herein

[O]rdinary people had more sympathy for ideas originating in the occult sciences. Many of the almanacs that every household used contained bits and pieces of astrology. Some people practiced magic to defend themselves from witchcraft, and some consulted fortune-tellers […] No war broke out between magic and religion, in part because the clergy also were attracted to occult ideas; it was they who wrote most of the almanacs, and in their response to the ‘wonder’ they relied on older lore as much as any layman. *

* Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 7.

CHAPTER TWO

Are You a Good Witch?—

Defining and Categorizing

New World Witchery

What do you do when a witch comes knocking? Do you let her in, or offer her a cup of tea? In many tales from Appalachia and New England, that would be an invitation to disaster. At the same time, denying a witch a request could be just as risky, and you might wake up the next day to find your hogs all mysteriously ill—or dead. Worse, a member of your household may report being attacked in the night by unseen forces, or begin developing inexplicable illnesses that grow worse and worse for weeks to come. Then what do you do? In folklore, once all the mundane explanations were cast aside (a process that happens rather quickly in some cases, although it may take months of visits to city doctors first), you turn—of course—to witchcraft. Or rather, someone who knows about it, and maybe knows a bit of how to use it.

Such is the case in the Franklin County, Virginia, story of Mont and Duck Moore, a married couple that specialized in treating magical afflictions. The twist, of course, is that they also caused those afflictions. Duck, the wife, was thought to have a strong and powerful magical ability and would curse livestock or crops in nearby farms. Husband Mont would then show up and offer to remove said curses—for a fee. Mont knew all about countercharms and witch doctoring, and between the two of them, they had quite the successful magical racketeering operation, at least until they died (within a few days of one another). After that, their little cabin became the locus of fearsome haunting legends.⁵

Tales such as those of Mont and Duck show the very complicated nature of witchcraft and witches in North America. The practice of New World Witchery is not a one-size-fits-all approach, nor can it be simplified down into categories of good and evil witchcraft, as even the most nefarious curses often have connections to larger social issues in a community (for more on that, see CHAPTER SIX and CHAPTER NINE on curses and witch flight, respectively). At no point is someone going to show up, Wizard of Oz–style, and ask Are you a good witch, or a bad one? Figuring out just what we mean when we talk about witchcraft and magic is complicated, and in North America no one witch will tick every box of witchcraft perfectly by someone else’s definition. Yet we see over and over again in folklore—both historical and contemporary—that magic underlies virtually all that witches do, for better or worse, and so it is from those roots that I intend to follow witchcraft where it grows.

Defining Witches and Witchcraft in America

We still need to have a clear sense of who the witch is, though, especially in North America, or this book is not going to be of much use to you. In the most scholarly of modes, I might turn to a definition put forth by historian Ronald Hutton in his 2017 work The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present. Building upon a series of historical accounts and folding in a selected number of anthropological comparisons, Hutton arrives at this definition: an alleged worker of […] destructive magic. ⁶ This definition will rub right up against anyone whose definition includes only the types of witches found in contemporary Neopagan religions, where the emphasis is often on the non-destructive nature of magic among practitioners of religious Witchcraft. Many adherents of this latter definition would point to the Wiccan Rede, a poetically rendered ethical code first fully articulated in the 1970s by Neopagan poet Lady Gwen Thompson, although it is likely derived from concepts and language from Aleister Crowley and Doreen Valiente.⁷ The Rede emphasizes the idea that Witches should harm none in their practice of religious magic, although it does include a caveat excusing acts of self-defense in some forms. These versions may seem to be at odds, but I believe I know why. They are, as the proverbial expression goes, putting the cart before the horse (or the broom before the flying ointment, possibly?). Both visions of the witch start with a fully fleshed-out figure, a witch, and apply their own definitions to her. Hutton’s vision, thankfully, also focuses clearly on her actions, although in his particular case he is unpacking a particular form of witch and must, by necessity, discard variations that don’t completely fit that form based on their practices. The more contemporary vision is a bit more centered on the belief structure, although it, too, emphasizes that a witch should be a creature of action and do what [she] will so long as she obeys the other moral dictum of the Rede.

I will point out that both of these definitions can be right in a certain context, and both can be wrong. Many magical practitioners reject the term witch either because of its negative or its religious connotations. Others embrace it while rejecting the moral codification connected to others who use it, as many Neopagan Wiccans do. In my own efforts to secure a definition, however, I will take a slightly different approach. Instead of looking at people labeled by outsiders for their wicked doings as definitive witches, as Hutton does, or assuming that the self-defined witch of Neopaganism is the only suitable definition, I want to embrace both insider and outsider perspectives. To do that, I have chosen to identify witches through what they do: witchcraft.

But what is witchcraft, then? When we look at stories of witches in North America—whether derived from European, African/African American, Native, or other sources—we see witches doing magical things in one way or another. Fortune-telling by cards and other means seems to appear nearly universally. Zora Neale Hurston recorded tales of African American conjure women and men rifling playing cards and seeing the future.⁸ Some of the accounts of Salem’s tumultuous sorceries involved sensational tales of divination by Venus glass, or through the use of a special cake baked from urine and fed to a dog, or even some evidence that accused persons, such as Dorcas Hoar, owned divination manuals and had practiced fortune-telling for years before the trial outbreak. Other tools, like the dowsing rod or the use of geomantic shells or coins, appear in other areas, and every cultural group in American history has had some means of divination or augury. Even in contemporary times, the Ouija board has become a popular trope of adolescent divinatory rites and remains a popular game among American youth.⁹

Witches also made use of prayers and psalms, sometimes in holy and sometimes in profane ways. Tales of Appalachian witch initiation rites discuss the use of prayers that reverse one’s baptism. In many European-derived traditions, the recitation in reverse of whatever charm had been used to blight someone would remove that curse. In tales where witches work with spirits, they may make contact with faery creatures (see Emma Wilby’s 2006 book Cunning Folk & Familiar Spirits for a truly excellent rundown of that subject), or they may keep a wee bug in a bottle to talk to (as in one Appalachian story).¹⁰ While we get a sense of their spiritual worldview—which is heavily populated and constantly interacting with the mundane world—we seldom get a sense that witches are denominational. They might act in non-Christian or even anti-Christian ways, up to and including signing pacts with the Devil, but just as often they make use of Christian prayers and charms, and may even be very religious—if a bit unorthodox. Having a rich spiritual life certainly seems to be found in most tales of folkloric witches, but there’s very little definition around that spiritual worldview. Instead, witchcraft in North America seems to be—from the perspective of history and folklore—less about gods and goddesses and much more about muttering under one’s breath in a time of need, or knowing not to burn sassafras wood. It’s a practice and a way of acting that is shaped by spiritual understanding, but not completely defined by it. Instead, it is informed by the immediate regional world of the witch, including her environment, her neighbors, and her cultural background. There’s much more to say on what New World Witches do, based on folklore and history, and that is what this book is truly about.

What Is New World Witchery ?

You may be imagining that I’m about to lay out a complete definition of New World Witchery, one that locks down the complex web of various meanings into one single, unified explanation of North American magical practice. Or you may be thinking nothing of the sort, and instead be waiting to pounce on any proposed definition I give and point out its glaring (and inevitable) flaws. I think, then, that I am bound to disappoint all expectations, because attempting to cage New World Witchery in one place, form, or time will never work—it seems that so long as there is still a New World with practicing witches in it, that definition is going to have to remain somewhat flexible and fluid.

Through the process of attempting any kind of definition, however, I have managed to cobble together a set of characteristics that I feel reflect the identity of most witches within the North American magical context. Simply put, New World Witches are: practical (although not entirely logical), wondrous (in the sense that the world is full of strange, marvelous, and sometimes terrifying things), and traditional (as they pass their power or knowledge to others in service, teaching, or even curses!). What do I mean by using these words? Let me take just a moment to clarify using a few examples.

Witches Are Practical

In many historical and folkloric cases, witchcraft seemed to be less about a formal religion than about getting results. What I see repeated over and over again in witch tales is a deeply pragmatic approach to problems. I see this in the pay-the-bills fortune-telling of accused witches from Salem right into the twentieth century,¹¹ and in the words of one correspondent who wrote to me, saying: My mom said that if someone wants to touch/hold your baby and you don’t let them then there is a chance that person will leave casting ‘mal de ojo’ (evil eye) on your baby, causing them a lifetime of bad luck; conversely, she said that letting others hold your baby is good luck. ¹² Integrating the baby into the community is important, and the folk belief reflects that, even if in a roundabout way. Witchcraft doesn’t have to be logical, just effective.

Witches Are Wondrous

The New World Witch has friends everywhere, because the world is imbued with life and magic. That sometimes means she has enemies everywhere, too. Witches in the New World, like Mont and Duck, operate largely in an amoral (although not necessarily immoral) framework—they have deep relationships with spirits, landscapes, and people, and those relationships can be both positive and negative. In the New World, relationships with spiritual folk from other realms have almost always been suspect, even diabolical. A New World Witch is accountable to herself, and answers to her own sense of morality. Some stories demonstrate a witch paying a price exacted later by a Devil, but for the most part any suffering they find is at the hands of those who work countermagic against them—for example in tales where a hexed butter churn is used to reverse harm upon the witch who cast the curse in the first place. That give-and-take is part of the wonder that makes the world an enchanted—if sometimes terrifying—place.

Witches Are Traditional

New World folk magicians inherit methods and tools, share their secrets with apprentices (as happens in the tale of one Virginia witch who offers a young preacher’s son a chance to learn witchcraft),¹³ and initiate others into witchcraft. There is a deep materiality to witchcraft, and so the objects witches make are imbued with power, a power that passes to all who connect with them. One of the most readily apparent examples is the humble broom. Whether the broom is used for sealing a marriage (jumping the broom, a common form of matrimonial ritual in nineteenth-century African American culture) or sweeping luck around the room, it functions as both a mundane tool and a magical one (see CHAPTER TEN for more on brooms). I will note that traditional does not mean unchanging. Witches adapt and change and grow their practices all the time, whether that involves incorporating new technologies such as railroad spikes (new to witches in the 1800s) or iPads (for more contemporary practitioners). The important thing is that tradition—which has its roots in the Latin words trans and dare meaning to hand over, whence we also get the word traitor—gets shared. Traditional witches share their power, their knowledge, their magic, and pass it to those who can next use it best.

Throughout this book, I will be drawing upon the treasure trove of witchery in North America to help pack flesh onto the bones of the characteristics I’ve outlined. These ideas will form a sort of backbone to the remaining book, although I cannot claim that all the anatomical pieces of my Frankenstein monster of assembled traits will be completely logical. This book will unfold each of these points further, demonstrating that witchcraft is much easier to understand through action and practice than through definition. I will also note that while I am drawing on sources from history and folklore, I will not only be turning to the past. Witchcraft is alive and well today, so I’m inclined to pull from contemporary sources, too. Your mileage with those sources may vary.

I Put a Spell on You—What Witches Do

Whatever the case, we understand that witches do a lot of different things, even while we also understand that many of the things we see witches doing seem to be part of a spectrum of behaviors we identify as witchcraft or magic. In stories, witches do things like pass on secret magical artifacts or turn people into animals. In history, we find people called witches who told fortunes (like Dorcas Hoar in Salem, see CHAPTER SEVEN), healed their neighbors (as in the case of Grace Sherwood of Virginia, see CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO), or even seemed to have no direct connection to magic at all until their death (as in the case of Tennessee’s Bell Witch, see CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO). Trying to pin down every single talent we see in narratives about witchcraft would generate a list that grinds even the sharpest of pencils into a worn nub, while still leaving copious room at the bottom of the page for all that I’ve missed. Still, I can assemble a broadly inclusive set of practices that I have seen repeated in my research that might at least put a pin in key locations throughout the spectrum of witchy doings. So just what is a North American witch capable of ?

1. Casting spells: This may seem obvious, but it really shouldn’t. Whether it’s the act of burning candles, rubbing someone with eggs, or even fixing a luck charm of some kind for someone else’s use, witches often work magic through specific spells (and as I’ve noted, those spells often involve things as well). Why spells? Because often magic is the one area in which a witch has power. In social structures where poverty and womanhood carried little or no weight, including legally, magic remained within the purview of the witch. Casting a spell is active, and while it may seem impossible or unbelievable to some, taking action that appears to meet practical needs is exactly why people do other strange things like secretly writing test answers on the bottom of one’s shoe or begging a deity to help heal a sick loved one. There are several examples, of course, where the active casting of spells has not been a main characteristic in a witch story (for example, in the Salem trials testimony focused mostly on demonic and spectral visitations that tormented victims, and so the accused witches were seen less as spellcasters than as nightwraiths). Given those few exceptions, however, we do see the active use of intentional magic (a definition I will return to later) in myriad tales, legends, and accounts of witchcraft.

2. Witch flight: The use of the word flight is also tricky and will require further exploration, but taking it to mean any form of travel through the air, whether in body or spirit, we do see a lot of witches participating in this kind of magic. That flight is part of a much bigger web of powers and prohibitions that I explore extensively in CHAPTER NINE, and the witch is sometimes punished for her flights. Just as often, she uses her flying as a way to punish others, too. Interestingly, lots of stories involve other non-witches gaining the power of flight by following the rituals of the witches they observe, only to find themselves in hot water when the effects wear off and they don’t know what to do (or how to get out of the wine cellar they’re suddenly trapped in). Again, not all witches in not all stories share this characteristic, but enough do in one way or another that I feel compelled to include it here.

3. Using magical objects: I mentioned earlier that witches in stories often express tradition by imbuing objects with power. The physical things of witchcraft are sometimes all we have left of a particular tradition, and I will discuss the nature of magical objects in the everyday world quite a lot as well. Creating or empowering talismans or charms, using cards or coins or bones to read a future, or tying up someone’s good luck (or reproductive functions) with a bit of cord all feature in multiple narratives of witchcraft, so it’s worth repeating: the stuff matters. Magical objects are often crafted, of course, in every sense of the word, but a number of witches also repurpose the objects around them or even purchase magical artifacts and tools for their use, none of which makes them any less of a witch.

4. Harming and cursing: If we are to listen to the stories and not simply dismiss them out of hand, a great number of witches are engaged in the practice of cursing, hexing, and magical theft. Crucially, they often have very good reasons for acting the way they do, including responding to a community’s failure to treat its members equitably or fairly, making witchcraft an informal method of justice. This is a complex topic, and one that I cover from a few different angles throughout the book (especially in CHAPTER SIX). You may not always agree with my interpretations, and I am by no means insisting that you must be creeping into children’s bedrooms to hex them while they sleep to be a real witch, but I also refuse to ignore such a key component of witch lore, either.

5. Healing and blessing: We have simply massive quantities of stories in which witches do their worst to those who earn their ire, but we also have more stories than you can shake a black cat at featuring a witch doing something helpful or kind for someone (even if it is done in a somewhat grudging way). Witches may execute justice on behalf of someone left out of the community, or offer a healing ointment, or even remove curses placed by other witches. One of the most common talents of those practicing magic is finding lost objects or even treasure, for example, which is a service rather than a curse. The New World Witch has complex motivations and her actions require a lot of context, it seems.

6. Suffering: If you think of the stereotypical folktale featuring a witch, she often winds up getting the bum end of the deal. She gets shoved into an oven, hung on an old tree, burned in the town square,

Reviews for New World Witchery

[Simply Witched · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the most comprehensive book of North American folklore out there. If you are a practicing folk magic on this continent, this needs to be part of your collection!

[Richard And Kristen Allen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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